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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I would say it would be more that more people should read children's fiction because the rest of fiction performs other urgently necessary tasks, I think the right to elongate and experiment are jobs more of adult fiction. So I would argue rather that adults should occasionally read children's fiction for pleasure but also for the unabashed politics of idealism that they have”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Children's novels tend to teach the large uncompromising truths that we hope exist. Things like love will matter, kindness will matter, equality is possible. I think that we express them as truths to children when what they really are are hopes, but I suppose the best politics of children's fiction will be those that argue that, as Ursula Le Guin would say, all that we have made we have made by man and it can be undone by man, and that often the first way that we transform the world is through the art that she calls her art, the art of words. She would say it is the utopian of children's fiction that allows us to imagine something better. She might be right.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I think we should have more patience with childhood mischief because children whose mischief is quashed become difficult thwarted and sometimes quite vile adults.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have reviewed books about epitophs, but oh, I don't know, I need a few more years to decide a few decades, if I may. What will you have on yours?”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would I like to do most of the Paris has the best rooftops, I think, and they are quite easy to access. I have quite a few friends who have spent quite a lot of time. Most of them are dancers or acrobats on the rooftops of Paris.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That could be an argument that if you are someone whose work necessitates the dwelling entirely on detail because of course academic study of John Dunne which is slightly different from my book requires just burrowing into these very small details to understand about the conditions of production of the moment and that the flip side of that is the kind of totalities of the view that you get up high in the cold outside alone in the dark.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that I could claim that rooftop walking really feeds into my research on the grounds that most of my research is done in cold archives, in libraries around the world looking at manuscripts and hunting for traces of done in old books.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think it might be connected to fiction. It is very difficult when writing a story to hold the whole of it in one's head. If you complete a book that you feel you have achieved that feels like a great gift you have given yourself, it is very difficult to conceptualize a place that I have not seen from above. I like the idea of being able to understand the way a city works by seeing its movements from above. Also, cities are more beautiful seen from above. Things that look down at street level, grubby and deeply human and crisp rackers and old burger papers from up high show the sort of prehistoric elements of the way that people move in crowds.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, for the feeling of height, I come from a family of pilots, both my grandfathers, Spitfires in the Second World War, and my uncle Pinfly, and so about five years ago I started learning for the huge pleasure of being above the world and being given a vision of the sweep of it.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Philippe Peti, who was of course one of the great roof walkers of the world and the man who strung the wire between the Twin Towers in nineteen seventy seven, talks about vertigo as a beast that has to be tamed piece by piece that can never be overcome all at once, and Vertigo, he says, is not the fear that you will fall, it is the fear that you will jump. And that, of course, is the thing that when you are roof walking, you are taming. You are trying to unmoor your sense of danger and of not being able to trust yourself not to jump from your sense of beauty and the vision of a city that you get up high. But I roof walk for very practical reasons to see views that would otherwise be not really available to me in an increasingly privatised city of London.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, the vast majority of boys of his class and religion were homeschooled boys because it was very hard to go to school as a young Catholic and as the book discusses, going to school at the time would have introduced you to a kind of ruthless brutality that would have been difficult to recover from. Boys would beaten some of them to death. It was expected that you would fight your colleagues, your compatriots from the age of about 12. Boys routinely died at school. I think that he certainly has some of the idiosyncrasies of thought of someone who did not grow up with a huge cohort of friends, but also he became a great maker and keeper of bosom friends, his love for his friends is something, I believe, very truly and you know, sir, letters more than kisses mingle souls, he wrote to Henry Goodear, a man who I think we know he would have given up a great deal to help.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a fascination with the stars. I think that Dunn was compelled by the idea of heavens and compelled by the idea which he found deeply troubling, of scientific discoveries which were casting in doubt the great certainties of the previous generations. He had a complicated relationship with innovation. I think he went to Kepler to understand more about the ways that we moved around the sun and that the moons moved around us.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. Although, of course, I think it would be miss of me not to offer the caveat that often the OED has always found first uses in canonical authors in part because they're just the ones who survive fire. So of course he may have just been noting”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the reason the book is called super infinite, I do love impossibilitate. I think it speaks highly to his sense of that which did not look impossible, but in fact when you look at it closely is so. But most of all I love his talent for the super prefix that he added it to so many things a kind of insistence on things which lead outside language, so super infinite, super miraculous, super eternal, super dying. These are the linguistic habits of a man who longs for immensities.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One could if one wanted to listen to doctor Atomic, which is set Batter My Heart into an Arya, which is very beautiful the cage. You could listen to some semi contemporary adaptations, though none absolutely contemporary, the Campion version of the Break of Day. I wouldn't, personally. I would say maybe Samarla, someone who believed in both chaos and glory”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it does sometimes feel like we are that there is something a similarly explosive moment where we have newly explosive possibilities and newly explosive fields and their feels like something similarly extreme happening, although I would say from different causes.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it does look to us now like a time where a kind of febral intensity of thought became not just commonplace but contagious, and certainly, you know, you could wake up in the morning and you could see acts of great devotion and great violence before breakfast. You could see a man burned for his belief. You could see a woman hung for hers. You could see people willing to push large beliefs on themselves to the point of death. So certainly I think it was also exacerbated by plague, by the fact that every few years in Britain the plague would come galloping through major cities, and thousands of people would die overnight, so I think that closeness to death, to war, to pestilence, also to beauty, to an influx of money, to the fact that suddenly we had access to far greater knowledge because of”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're missing something, I'm missing it too. I admire Johnson's structural ingenuity and I admire his flair, and I really admire his capacity for gossip because it gave us a lot of the knowledge that we have of the time, but I have never managed to find him a poet who gets into your intestines.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partly because he was more famous, partly because he wrote plays and the plays pleased first the Queen and then the King, partly because he wrote for The Boy Players and the Boy Players had a real glamour at the time, and Queen Elizabeth was borderline obsessed with them.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I absolutely agree, but then you can say that almost any poet of the period for whom the need to make money meant that they had to compose in all weight ways which absolutely were step by step in the fashion of the time and therefore held back their more radical and inventive impulses, so when they weren't being paid, they often wrote their best work.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“me in his letters like a man bent on some form of sincerity, for every letter where there is flattery and a kind of ornate rhetoric that seems to have at the heart of it when you burrow through only a joke. There are also letters that seem to express a man who wanted to be able to lay down truth in words, and therefore I do believe in his religion.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. It's certainly a position that was very popular in the 1980s, and John Kerry's completely spectacular book, John Dunn, Life Mind and Art, certainly gives truck that as a possible position. One of the reasons that that vision has really been shifted in the last 10 years or so has been the discovery of new letters and the dating of old letters to suggest that even after he had started to reach some form of real middle class wealth and solidity he still kept pushing, and a way that could have in fact been detrimental to him towards being ordained, that the king's favourite Buckingham was trying to put him off and was trying to offer him various forms of secretarial ship, may be going to Venice, may be going, to Ireland, and that he, in the face of these letters, was pushing back and insisting on the pursuit of God. And also he reads”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Politically, of course, it's complicated by the fact that he wrote it but not to be read. So he wrote a text that he explicitly told a friend when he went to Germany later in life neither burn it nor publish it, give it not to the fire but show it to no one, because he was aware that it was a text that could lead him to be put in very real peril, not necessarily of anything dramatic like court cases, but he would have probably lost his job. So for him, the politics of it, a profoundly opaque and probably informed by a lot of his own desire to justify, his own suicidal tendencies. There are those with”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“suicide, and so for Dunn to be pulled towards suicide was both for him to feel he was being pulled towards sin, but also to feel that it would be a shortcut, a leaping into infinity and into the presence of God, and so for him it was never going to be in any way straightforward or transparent”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think for Dunn suicide is one of the things that dogs his life. It was illegal during Dunn's lifetime to commit suicide. It was a crime in that most strange of ironies punishable by death. Suicides could be buried with a strake put through their hearts at the crossroads. In France there had been accounts of suicides dead bodies of suicides dragged through the streets as a kind of warning. And of course it was against religious doctrine. John Dunn's letters tell us about his very real and urgent keenings towards death. He was a man who felt the pull of, he says, his own sword, and he wrote the first full length treaties in the English language by Thanatos on suicide, which argues that in very specific limited circumstances suicide is not a sin, that Christ himself was the one great.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I'm going to say seventy percent of people found from if you read the letters that we have of the time, people are often in their private lives expressing very real comfort and hope from certain forms of religious doctrine. The amount of knowledge that people have what the Bible actually said, the amount of access people who have had to Bibles in English, were of course very limited. But I think a lot of people believe because it was offered as a way to put down your anxiety, your hopes, your chaos. It was a structure that gave people purpose and meaning. And then, of course, I think there will have been a lot of people who went to church. It was against the law not to go to church, but who went to church out of conformity, out of duty, out of not really caring that much. And I'm sure in every church service there were the passionate devotees and the people who were thinking about London.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think belief is such a difficult word because it will have meant different things. You will have had someone like Kit Marlowe who played very openly the idea of real atheism, the idea that we live in an empty universe. And of course some people believe that he was murdered for it. Other people believe that it was a brawl in a pub when he got knived in the eye for not paying a bill and we'll never know. I think, I mean, if you ask me to put a number on it.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt that it was a time when many people changed religions throughout their lives, and I think that his writing, the passion and fervor in his religious poetry, the focus and intelligence in his sermons, the breadth of dedication of thought and time it will have taken, I find it very easy to believe both in the reality of his Catholicism and in the reality of his Protestant conversion.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's a really good question. The one that we will never know the answer to is what precise shape did his inner religious life take? Because of course the central thing that most people who know a little bit about Dunn know is that he was born into a Catholic family at a time when to be Catholic was to be persecuted, and he died the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, and that necessitated both a conversion and a kind of emphaticness in his allegiance to the religion of the crown. So he didn't just cease to be a Catholic, he wrote two major tracts against Catholicism, Pseudomarty and Ignatius' conclave. And the question of how far he ever believed, how far his Christianity, his Catholicism was real, and how far his later religion was real and how far it was a necessity born of poverty or a kind of questing ambition is something that a huge number of people will never agree on. Personally, I am in...”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think probably in my teen years he became my favourite poet and a kind of a talismanic author I found him a place of refuge against that which seemed to me often ungenerous in so much of popular culture now offers a quite unexciting vision of what your mind and language might be capable of and I found him a brilliant antidote that a kind of bulwark against a kind of anti-intellectualism and then also of course I had boyfriends who would send it to me and I found that very romantic”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have parents who believed in the power of memorizing poetry and in the idea that even if you memorize poetry that you don't understand there will be a time in your life when it will come back for you. So I was paid to memorize poetry and my mother used to put it on the wall next to the sink where we would brush our teeth, and some of it was, a lot of it was TS Elliot's Possum's book of practical cats, but there was also some John Dunn poetry, and even though I didn't fully grasp it, I found it to be faintly alchemic. I loved it, I loved it strangeness and its difficulty, so I've loved him for a very long time now.”
2023-01-11 · Conversations with Tyler · Katherine Rundell on the Art of Words · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source