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Frances Wilson has written biographies of Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, D.H. Lawrence, and, most recently, Muriel Spark. I thought Electric Spark was excellent. In my review, I wrote: “Wilson has done far more than string the facts together. She has created a strange and vivid portrait of one of the most curious of twentieth century novelists.” In this interview, we covered questions like why Thomas De Quincey is more widely read, why D.H. Lawrence's best books aren't his novels, Frances's conversion to spookiness, what she thinks about a whole range of modern biographers, literature and parasocial relationships, Elizabeth Bowen, George Meredith, and plenty about Muriel Spark.Here are two brief extracts. There is a full transcript below.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?And.Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking to Frances Wilson. Frances is a biographer. Her latest book, Electric Spark, is a biography of the novelist Muriel Spark, but she has also written about Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, DH Lawrence and others. Frances, welcome.Frances Wilson: Thank you so much for having me on.Henry: Why don't more people read Thomas De Quincey's work?Frances: [laughs] Oh, God. We're going right into the deep end.[laughter]Frances: I think because there's too much of it. When I chose to write about Thomas De Quincey, I just followed one thread in his writing because Thomas De Quincey was an addict. One of the things he was addicted to was writing. He wrote far, far, far too much. He was a professional hack. He was a transcendental hack, if you like, because all of his writing he did while on opium, which made the sentences too long and too high and very, very hard to read.When I wrote about him, I just followed his interest in murder. He was fascinated by murder as a fine art. The title of one of his best essays is On Murder as One of the Fine Arts. I was also interested in his relationship with Wordsworth. I twinned those together, which meant cutting out about 97% of the rest of his work. I think people do read his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. I think that's a cult text. It was the memoir, if you want to call it a memoir, that kick-started the whole pharmaceutical memoir business on drugs.It was also the first addict's memoir and the first recovery memoir, and I'd say also the first misery memoir. He's very much at the root of English literary culture. We're all De Quincey-an without knowing it, is my argument.Henry: Oh, no, I fully agree. That's what surprises me, that they don't read him more often.Frances: I know it's a shame, isn't it? Of all the Romantic Circle, he's the one who's the most exciting to read. Also, Lamb is wonderfully exciting to read as well, but Lamb's a tiny little bit more grounded than De Quincey, who was literally not grounded. He's floating in an opium haze above you.[laughter]Henry: What I liked about your book was the way you emphasized the book addiction, not just the opium addiction. It is shocking the way he piled up chests full of books and notebooks, and couldn't get into the room because there were too many books in there. He was [crosstalk].Frances: Yes. He had this in common with Muriel Spark. He was a hoarder, but in a much more chaotic way than Spark, because, as you say, he piled up rooms with papers and books until he couldn't get into the room, and so just rented another room. He was someone who had no money at all. The no money he had went on paying rent for rooms, storing what we would be giving to Oxfam, or putting in the recycling bin. Then he'd forget that he was paying rent on all these rooms filled with his mountains of paper. The man was chaos.Henry: What is D.H. Lawrence's best book?Frances: Oh, my argument about Lawrence is that we've gone very badly wrong in our reading of him, in seeing him primarily as a novelist and only secondarily as an essayist and critic and short story writer, and poet. This is because of F.R. Leavis writing that celebration of him called D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, because novels are not the best of Lawrence. I think the best of his novels is absolutely, without doubt, Sons and Lovers. I think we should put the novels in the margins and put in the centre, the poems, travel writing.Absolutely at the centre of the centre should be his studies in classic American literature. His criticism was- We still haven't come to terms with it. It was so good. We haven't heard all of Lawrence's various voices yet. When Lawrence was writing, contemporaries didn't think of Lawrence as a novelist at all. It was anyone's guess what he was going to come out with next. Sometimes it was a novel [laughs] and it was usually a rant about-- sometimes it was a prophecy. Posterity has not treated Lawrence well in any way, but I think where we've been most savage to him is in marginalizing his best writing.Henry: The short fiction is truly extraordinary.Frances: Isn't it?Henry: I always thought Lawrence was someone I didn't want to read, and then I read the short fiction, and I was just obsessed.Frances: It's because in the short fiction, he doesn't have time to go wrong. I think brevity was his perfect length. Give him too much space, and you know he's going to get on his soapbox and start ranting, start mansplaining. He was a terrible mansplainer. Mansplaining his versions of what had gone wrong in the world. It is like a drunk at the end of a too-long dinner party, and you really want to just bundle him out. Give him only a tiny bit of space, and he comes out with the perfection that is his writing.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?Frances: I think that the way I approach biography is that there is a code to crack, but I'm not necessarily concerned with whether I crack it or not. I think it's just recognizing that there's a hell of a lot going on in the writing and that, in certain cases and not in every case at all, the best way of exploring the psyche of the writer and the complexity of the life is through the writing, which is a argument for psycho biography, which isn't something I necessarily would argue for, because it can be very, very crude.I think with the writers I choose, there is no option. Muriel Spark argued for this as well. She said in her own work as a biographer, which was really very, very strong. She was a biographer before she became a novelist. She thought hard about biography and absolutely in advance of anyone else who thought about biography, she said, "Of course, the only way we can approach the minds of writers is through their work, and the writer's life is encoded in the concerns of their work."When I was writing about Muriel Spark, I followed, as much as I could, to the letter, her own theories of biography, believing that that was part of the code that she left. She said very, very strong and very definitive things about what biography was about and how to write a biography. I tried to follow those rules.Henry: Can we play a little game where I say the names of some biographers and you tell me what you think of them?Frances: Oh my goodness. Okay.Henry: We're not trying to get you into trouble. We just want some quick opinions. A.N. Wilson.Frances: I think he's wonderful as a biographer. I think he's unzipped and he's enthusiastic and he's unpredictable and he's often off the rails. I think his Goethe biography-- Have you read the Goethe biography?Henry: Yes, I thought that was great.Frances: It's just great, isn't it? It's so exciting. I like the way that when he writes about someone, it's almost as if he's memorized the whole of their work.Henry: Yes.Frances: You don't imagine him sitting at a desk piled with books and having to score through his marginalia. It sits in his head, and he just pours it down on a page. I'm always excited by an A.N. Wilson biography. He is one of the few biographers who I would read regardless of who the subject was.Henry: Yes.Frances: I just want to read him.Henry: He does have good range.Frances: He absolutely does have good range.Henry: Selina Hastings.Frances: I was thinking about Selina Hastings this morning, funnily enough, because I had been talking to people over the weekend about her Sybil Bedford biography and why that hadn't lifted. She wrote a very excitingly good life of Nancy Mitford and then a very unexcitingly not good life of Sybil Bedford. I was interested in why the Sybil Bedford simply hadn't worked. I met people this weekend who were saying the same thing, that she was a very good biographer who had just failed [laughs] to give us anything about Sybil Bedford.I think what went wrong in that biography was that she just could not give us her opinions. It's as if she just withdrew from her subject as if she was writing a Wikipedia entry. There were no opinions at all. What the friends I was talking to said was that she just fell out with her subject during the book. That's what happened. She stopped being interested in her. She fell out with her and therefore couldn't be bothered. That's what went wrong.Henry: Interesting. I think her Evelyn Waugh biography is superb.Frances: Yes, I absolutely agree. She was on fire until this last one.Henry: That's one of the best books on Waugh, I think.Frances: Yes.Henry: Absolutely magical.Frances: I also remember, it's a very rare thing, of reading a review of it by Hilary Mantel saying that she had not read a biography that had been as good, ever, as Selina Hastings' on Evelyn Waugh. My goodness, that's high praise, isn't it?Henry: Yes, it is. It is. I'm always trying to push that book on people. Richard Holmes.Frances: He's my favourite. He's the reason that I'm a biographer at all. I think his Coleridge, especially the first volume of the two-volume Coleridge, is one of the great books. It left me breathless when I read it. It was devastating. I also think that his Johnson and Savage book is one of the great books. I love Footsteps as well, his account of the books he didn't write in Footsteps. I think he has a strange magic. When Muriel Spark talked about certain writers and critics having a sixth literary sense, which meant that they tuned into language and thought in a way that the rest of us don't, I think that Richard Holmes does have that. I think he absolutely has it in relation to Coleridge. I'm longing for his Tennyson to come out.Henry: Oh, I know. I know.Frances: Oh, I just can't wait. I'm holding off on reading Tennyson until I've got Holmes to help me read him. Yes, he is quite extraordinary.Henry: I would have given my finger to write the Johnson and Savage book.Frances: Yes, I know. I agree. How often do you return to it?Henry: Oh, all the time. All the time.Frances: Me too.Henry: Michael Holroyd.Frances: Oh, that's interesting, Michael Holroyd, because I think he's one of the great unreads. I think he's in this strange position of being known as a greatest living biographer, but nobody's read him on Augustus John. [laughs] I haven't read his biographies cover to cover because they're too long and it's not in my subject area, but I do look in them, and they're novelistic in their wit and complexity. His sentences are very, very, very entertaining, and there's a lot of freight in each paragraph. I hope that he keeps selling.I love his essays as well, and also, I think that he has been a wonderful ambassador for biography. He's very, very supportive of younger biographers, which not every biographer is, but I know he's been very supportive of younger biographers and is incredibly approachable.Henry: Let's do a few Muriel Spark questions. Why was the Book of Job so important to Muriel Spark?Frances: I think she liked it because it was rogue, because it was the only book of the Bible that wasn't based on any evidence, it wasn't based on any truth. It was a fictional book, and she liked fiction sitting in the middle of fact. That was one of her main things, as all Spark lovers know. She liked the fact that there was this work of pure imagination and extraordinarily powerful imagination sitting in the middle of the Old Testament, and also, she thought it was an absolutely magnificent poem.She saw herself primarily as a poet, and she responded to it as a poem, which, of course, it is. Also, she liked God in it. She described Him as the Incredible Hulk [laughs] and she liked His boastfulness. She enjoyed, as I do, difficult personalities, and she liked the fact that God had such an incredibly difficult personality. She liked the fact that God boasted and boasted and boasted, "I made this and I made that," to Job, but also I think she liked the fact that you hear God's voice.She was much more interested in voices than she was in faces. The fact that God's voice comes out of the burning bush, I think it was an image for her of early radio, this voice speaking, and she liked the fact that what the voice said was tricksy and touchy and impossibly arrogant. He gives Moses all these instructions to lead the Israelites, and Moses says, "But who shall I say sent me? Who are you?" He says, "I am who I am." [laughs] She thought that was completely wonderful. She quotes that all the time about herself. She says, "I know it's a bit large quoting God, but I am who I am." [laughs]Henry: That disembodied voice is very important to her fiction.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's the telephone in Memento Mori.Frances: Yes.Henry: Also, to some extent, tell me what you think of this, the narrator often acts like that.Frances: Like this disembodied voice?Henry: Yes, like you're supposed to feel like you're not quite sure who's telling you this or where you're being told it from. That's why it gets, like in The Ballad of Peckham Rye or something, very weird.Frances: Yes. I'm waiting for the PhD on Muriel Sparks' narrators. Maybe it's being done as we speak, but she's very, very interested in narrators and the difference between first-person and third-person. She was very keen on not having warm narrators, to put it mildly. She makes a strong argument throughout her work for the absence of the seductive narrative. Her narratives are, as we know, unbelievably seductive, but not because we are being flattered as readers and not because the narrator makes herself or himself pretty. The narrator says what they feel like saying, withholds most of what you would like them to say, plays with us, like in a Spark expression, describing her ideal narrator like a cat with a bird [laughs].Henry: I like that. Could she have been a novelist if she had not become a Catholic?Frances: No, she couldn't. The two things happened at the same time. I wonder, actually, whether she became a Catholic in order to become a novelist. It wasn't that becoming a novelist was an accidental effect of being a Catholic. The conversion was, I think, from being a biographer to a novelist rather than from being an Anglican to a Catholic. What happened is a tremendous interest. I think it's the most interesting moment in any life that I've ever written about is the moment of Sparks' conversion because it did break her life in two.She converted when she was in her mid-30s, and several things happened at once. She converted to Catholicism, she became a Catholic, she became a novelist, but she also had this breakdown. The breakdown was very much part of that conversion package. The breakdown was brought on, she says, by taking Dexys. There was slimming pills, amphetamines. She wanted to lose weight. She put on weight very easily, and her weight went up and down throughout her life.She wanted to take these diet pills, but I think she was also taking the pills because she needed to do all-nighters, because she never, ever, ever stopped working. She was addicted to writing, but also she was impoverished and she had to sell her work, and she worked all night. She was in a rush to get her writing done because she'd wasted so much of her life in her early 20s, in a bad marriage trapped in Africa. She needed to buy herself time. She was on these pills, which have terrible side effects, one of which is hallucinations.I think there were other reasons for her breakdown as well. She was very, very sensitive and I think psychologically fragile. Her mother lived in a state of mental fragility, too. She had a crash when she finished her book. She became depressed. Of course, a breakdown isn't the same as depression, but what happened to her in her breakdown was a paranoid attack rather than a breakdown. She didn't crack into nothing and then have to rebuild herself. She just became very paranoid. That paranoia was always there.Again, it's what's exciting about her writing. She was drawn to paranoia in other writers. She liked Cardinal Newman's paranoia. She liked Charlotte Brontë's paranoia, and she had paranoia. During her paranoid attack, she felt very, very interestingly, because nothing that happened in her life was not interesting, that T.S. Eliot was sending her coded messages. He was encoding these messages in his play, The Confidential Clerk, in the program notes to the play, but also in the blurbs he wrote for Faber and Faber, where he was an editor. These messages were very malign and they were encoded in anagrams.The word lived, for example, became devil. I wonder whether one of the things that happened during her breakdown wasn't that she discovered God, but that she met the devil. I don't think that that's unusual as a conversion experience. In fact, the only conversion experience she ever describes, you'll remember, is in The Girls of Slender Means, when she's describing Nicholas Farrington's conversion. That's the only conversion experience she ever describes. She says that his conversion is when he sees one of the girls leaving the burning building, holding a Schiaparelli dress. Suddenly, he's converted because he's seen a vision of evil.She says, "Conversion can be as a result of a recognition of evil, rather than a recognition of good." I think that what might have happened in this big cocktail of things that happened to her during her breakdown/conversion, is that a writer whom she had idolized, T.S. Eliot, who taught her everything that she needed to know about the impersonality of art. Her narrative coldness comes from Eliot, who thought that emotions had no place in art because they were messy, and art should be clean.I think a writer whom she had idolized, she suddenly felt was her enemy because she was converting from his church, because he was an Anglo-Catholic. He was a high Anglican, and she was leaving Anglo-Catholicism to go through the Rubicon, to cross the Rubicon into Catholicism. She felt very strongly that that is something he would not have approved of.Henry: She's also leaving poetry to become a prose writer.Frances: She was leaving his world of poetry. That's absolutely right.Henry: This is a very curious parallel because the same thing exactly happens to De Quincey with his worship of Wordsworth.Frances: You're right.Henry: They have the same obsessive mania. Then this, as you say, not quite a breakdown, but a kind of explosive mania in the break. De Quincey goes out and destroys that mossy hut or whatever it is in the orchard, doesn't he?Frances: Yes, that disgusting hut in the orchard. Yes, you're completely right. What fascinated me about De Quincey, and this was at the heart of the De Quincey book, was how he had been guided his whole life by Wordsworth. He discovered Wordsworth as a boy when he read We Are Seven, that very creepy poem about a little girl sitting on her sibling's grave, describing the sibling as still alive. For De Quincey, who had lost his very adored sister, he felt that Wordsworth had seen into his soul and that Wordsworth was his mentor and his lodestar.He worshipped Wordsworth as someone who understood him and stalked Wordsworth, pursued and stalked him. When he met him, what he discovered was a man without any redeeming qualities at all. He thought he was a dry monster, but it didn't stop him loving the work. In fact, he loved the work more and more. What threw De Quincey completely was that there was such a difference between Wordsworth, the man who had no genius, and Wordsworth, the poet who had nothing but.Eliot described it, the difference between the man who suffers and the mind which creates. What De Quincey was trying to deal with was the fact that he adulated the work, but was absolutely appalled by the man. Yes, you're right, this same experience happened to spark when she began to feel that T.S. Eliot, whom she had never met, was a malign person, but the work was still not only of immense importance to her, but the work had formed her.Henry: You see the Wasteland all over her own work and the shared Dante obsession.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's remarkably strong. She got to the point of thinking that T.S. Eliot was breaking into her house.Frances: Yes. As I said, she had this paranoid imagination, but also what fired her imagination and what repeated itself again and again in the imaginative scenarios that recur in her fiction and nonfiction is the idea of the intruder. It was the image of someone rifling around in cupboards, drawers, looking at manuscripts. This image, you first find it in a piece she wrote about finding herself completely coincidentally, staying the night during the war in the poet Louis MacNeice's house. She didn't know it was Louis MacNeice's house, but he was a poet who was very, very important to her.Spark's coming back from visiting her parents in Edinburgh in 1944. She gets talking to an au pair on the train. By the time they pull into Houston, there's an air raid, and the au pair says, "Come and spend the night at mine. My employers are away and they live nearby in St. John's Wood." Spark goes to this house and sees it's packed with books and papers, and she's fascinated by the quality of the material she finds there.She looks in all the books. She goes into the attic, and she looks at all the papers, and she asks the au pair whose house it is, and the au pair said, "Oh, he's a professor called Professor Louis MacNeice." Spark had just been reading Whitney. He's one of her favourite poets. She retells this story four times in four different forms, as non-fiction, as fiction, as a broadcast, as reflections, but the image that keeps coming back, what she can't get rid of, is the idea of herself as snooping around in this poet's study.She describes herself, in one of the versions, as trying to draw from his papers his power as a writer. She says she sniffs his pens, she puts her hands over his papers, telling herself, "I must become a writer. I must become a writer." Then she makes this weird anonymous phone call. She loved the phone because it was the most strange form of electrical device. She makes a weird anonymous phone call to an agent, saying, "I'm ringing from Louis MacNeice's house, would you like to see my manuscript?" She doesn't give her name, and the agent says yes.Now I don't believe this phone call took place. I think it's part of Sparks' imagination. This idea of someone snooping around in someone else's room was very, very powerful to her. Then she transposed it in her paranoid attack about T.S. Eliot. She transposed the image that Eliot was now in her house, but not going through her papers, but going through her food cupboards. [laughs] In her food cupboards, all she actually had was baked beans because she was a terrible cook. Part of her unwellness at that point was malnutrition. No, she thought that T.S. Eliot was spying on her. She was obsessed with spies. Spies, snoopers, blackmailers.Henry: T.S. Eliot is Stealing My Baked Beans would have been a very good title for a memoir.Frances: It actually would, wouldn't it?Henry: Yes, it'd be great.[laughter]Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now. Anything can happen. This is one of the reasons Spark was attracted to Catholicism because anything can happen, because it legitimizes the supernatural. I felt so strongly that the supernatural experiences that Spark had were real, that what Spark was describing as the spookiness of our own life were things that actually happened.One of the things I found very, very unsettling about her was that everything that happened to her, she had written about first. She didn't describe her experiences in retrospect. She described them as in foresight. For example, her first single authored published book, because she wrote for a while in collaboration with her lover, Derek Stanford, but her first single authored book was a biography of Mary Shelley.Henry: Great book.Frances: An absolutely wonderful book, which really should be better than any of the other Mary Shelley biographies. She completely got to Mary Shelley. Everything she described in Mary Shelley's life would then happen to Spark. For example, she described Mary Shelley as having her love letters sold. Her lover sold Mary Shelley's love letters, and Mary Shelley was then blackmailed by the person who bought them. This happened to Spark. She described Mary Shelley's closest friends all becoming incredibly jealous of her literary talent. This happened to Spark. She described trusting people who betrayed her. This happened to Spark.Spark was the first person to write about Frankenstein seriously, to treat Frankenstein as a masterpiece rather than as a one-off weird novel that is actually just the screenplay for a Hammer Horror film. This was 1951, remember. Everything she described in Frankenstein as its power is a hybrid text, described the powerful hybrid text that she would later write about. What fascinated her in Frankenstein was the relationship between the creator and the monster, and which one was the monster. This is exactly the story of her own life. I think where she is. She was really interested in art monsters and in the fact that the only powerful writers out there, the only writers who make a dent, are monsters.If you're not a monster, you're just not competing. I think Spark has always spoken about as having a monster-like quality. She says at the end of one of her short stories, Bang-bang You're Dead, "Am I an intellectual woman, or am I a monster?" It's the question that is frequently asked of Spark. I think she worked so hard to monsterize herself. Again, she learnt this from Elliot. She learnt her coldness from Elliot. She learnt indifference from Elliot. There's a very good letter where she's writing to a friend, Shirley Hazzard, in New York.It's after she discovers that her lover, Derek Stanford, has sold her love letters, 70 love letters, which describe two very, very painfully raw, very tender love letters. She describes to Shirley Hazzard this terrible betrayal. She says, "But, I'm over it. I'm over it now. Now I'm just going to be indifferent." She's telling herself to just be indifferent about this. You watch her tutoring herself into the indifference that she needed in order to become the artist that she knew she was.Henry: Is this why she's attracted to mediocrities, because she can possess them and monsterize them, and they're good feeding for her artistic programme?Frances: Her attraction to mediocrities is completely baffling, and it makes writing her biography, a comedy, because the men she was surrounded by were so speck-like. Saw themselves as so important, but were, in fact, so speck-like that you have to laugh, and it was one after another after another. I'd never come across, in my life, so many men I'd never heard of. This was the literary world that she was surrounded by. It's odd, I don't know whether, at the time, she knew how mediocre these mediocrities were.She certainly recognised it in her novels where they're all put together into one corporate personality called the pisseur de copie in A Far Cry from Kensington, where every single literary mediocrity is in that critic who she describes as pissing and vomiting out copy. With Derek Stanford, who was obviously no one's ever heard of now, because he wrote nothing that was memorable, he was her partner from the end of the 40s until-- They ceased their sexual relationship when she started to be interested in becoming a Catholic in 1953, but she was devoted to him up until 1958. She seemed to be completely incapable of recognising that she had the genius and he had none.Her letters to him deferred to him, all the time, as having literary powers that she hadn't got, as having insights that she hadn't got, he's better read than she was. She was such an amazingly good critic. Why could she not see when she looked at his baggy, bad prose that it wasn't good enough? She rated him so highly. When she was co-authoring books with him, which was how she started her literary career, they would occasionally write alternative sentences. Some of her sentences are always absolutely-- they're sharp, lean, sparkling, and witty, and his are way too long and really baggy and they don't say anything. Obviously, you can see that she's irritated by it.She still doesn't say, "Look, I'm going now." It was only when she became a novelist that she said, "I want my mind to myself." She puts, "I want my mind to myself." She didn't want to be in a double act with him. Doubles were important to her. She didn't want to be in a double act with him anymore. He obviously had bought into her adulation of him and hadn't recognised that she had this terrifying power as a writer. It was now his turn to have the breakdown. Spark had the mental breakdown in 1950, '45. When her first novel came out in 1957, it was Stanford who had the breakdown because he couldn't take on board who she was as a novelist.What he didn't know about her as a novelist was her comic sense, how that would fuel the fiction, but also, he didn't recognize because he reviewed her books badly. He didn't recognise that the woman who had been so tender, vulnerable, and loving with him could be this novelist who had nothing to say about tenderness or love. In his reviews, he says, "Why are her characters so cold?" because he thought that she should be writing from the core of her as a human being rather than the core of her as an intellect.Henry: What are her best novels?Frances: Every one I read, I think this has to be the best.[laughter]This is particularly the case in the early novels, where I'm dazzled by The Comforters and think there cannot have been a better first novel of the 20th century or even the 21st century so far. The Comforters. Then read Robinson, her second novel, and think, "Oh God, no, that is her best novel. Then Memento Mori, I think, "Actually, that must be the best novel of the 20th century." [laughs] Then you move on to The Ballad of Peckham Rye, I think, "No, that's even better."The novels landed. It's one of the strange things about her; it took her so long to become a novelist. When she had become one, the novels just landed. Once in one year, two novels landed. In 1959, she had, it was The Bachelors and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, both just completely extraordinary. The novels had been the storing up, and then they just fell on the page. They're different, but samey. They're samey in as much as they're very, very, very clever. They're clever about Catholicism, and they have the same narrative wit. My God, do the plots work in different ways. She was wonderful at plots. She was a great plotter. She liked plots in both senses of the world.She liked the idea of plotting against someone, also laying a plot. She was, at the same time, absolutely horrified by being caught inside someone's plot. That's what The Comforters is about, a young writer called Caroline Rose, who has a breakdown, it's a dramatisation of Sparks' own breakdown, who has a breakdown, and believes that she is caught inside someone else's story. She is a typewriter repeating all of her thoughts. Typewriter and a chorus repeating all of her thoughts.What people say about The Comforters is that Caroline Rose thought she is a heroine of a novel who finds herself trapped in a novel. Actually, if you read what Caroline Rose says in the novel, she doesn't think she's trapped in a novel; she thinks she's trapped in a biography. "There is a typewriter typing the story of our lives," she says to her boyfriend. "Of our lives." Muriel Sparks' first book was about being trapped in a biography, which is, of course, what she brought on herself when she decided to trap herself in a biography. [laughs]Henry: I think I would vote for Loitering with Intent, The Girls of Slender Means as my favourites. I can see that Memento Mori is a good book, but I don't love it, actually.Frances: Really? Interesting. Okay. I completely agree with you about-- I think Loitering with Intent is my overall favourite. Don't you find every time you read it, it's a different book? There are about 12 books I've discovered so far in that book. She loved books inside books, but every time I read it, I think, "Oh my God, it's changed shape again. It's a shape-shifting novel."Henry: We all now need the Frances Wilson essay about the 12 books inside Loitering with Intent.Frances: I know.[laughter]Henry: A few more general questions to close. Did Thomas De Quincey waste his talents?Frances: I wouldn't have said so. I think that's because every single day of his life, he was on opium.Henry: I think the argument is a combination of too much opium and also too much magazine work and not enough "real serious" philosophy, big poems, whatever.Frances: I think the best of his work went into Blackwood's, so the magazine work. When he was taken on by Blackwood's, the razor-sharp Edinburgh magazine, then the best of his work took place. I think that had he only written the murder essays, that would have been enough for me, On Murder as a Fine Art.That was enough. I don't need any more of De Quincey. I think Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is also enough in as much as it's the great memoir of addiction. We don't need any more memoirs of addiction, just read that. It's not just a memoir of being addicted to opium. It's about being addicted to what's what. It's about being a super fan and addicted to writing. He was addicted to everything. If he was in AA now, they'd say, apparently, there are 12 addictions, he had all of them. [laughs]Henry: Yes. People talk a lot about parasocial relationships online, where you read someone online or you follow them, and you have this strange idea in your head that you know them in some way, even though they're just this disembodied online person. You sometimes see people say, "Oh, we should understand this more." I think, "Well, read the history of literature, parasocial relationships everywhere."Frances: That's completely true. I hadn't heard that term before. The history of literature, a parasocial relationship. That's your next book.Henry: There we go. I think what I want from De Quincey is more about Shakespeare, because I think the Macbeth essay is superb.Frances: Absolutely brilliant. On Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.Henry: Yes, and then you think, "Wait, where's the rest of this book? There should be an essay about every play."Frances: That's an absolutely brilliant example of microhistory, isn't it? Just taking a moment in a play, just the knocking at the gate, the morning after the murders, and blowing that moment up, so it becomes the whole play. Oh, my God, it's good. You're right.Henry: It's so good. What is, I think, "important about it", is that in the 20th century, critics started saying or scholars started saying a lot, "We can't just look at the words on the page. We've got to think about the dramaturgy. We've got to really, really think about how it plays out." De Quincey was an absolute master of that. It's really brilliant.Frances: Yes.Henry: What's your favourite modern novel or novelist?Frances: Oh, Hilary Mantel, without doubt, I think. I think we were lucky enough to live alongside a great, great, great novelist. I think the Wolf Hall trilogy is absolutely the greatest piece of narrative fiction that's come out of the 21st century. I also love her. I love her work as an essayist. I love her. She's spooky like Spark. She was inspired.Henry: Yes, she is. Yes.Frances: She learnt a lot of her cunning from Spark, I think. She's written a very spooky memoir. In fact, the only women novelists who acknowledge Spark as their influencer are Ali Smith and Hilary Mantel, although you can see Spark in William Boyd all the time. I think we're pretty lucky to live alongside William Boyd as well. Looking for real, real greatness, I think there's no one to compare with Mantel. Do you agree?Henry: I don't like the third volume of the trilogy.Frances: Okay. Right.Henry: Yes, in general, I do agree. Yes. I think some people don't like historical fiction for a variety of reasons. It may take some time for her to get it. I think she's acknowledged as being really good. I don't know that she's yet acknowledged at the level that you're saying.Frances: Yes.Henry: I think that will take a little bit longer. Maybe as and when there's a biography that will help with that, which I'm sure there will be a biography.Frances: I think they need to wait. I do think it's important to wait for a reputation to settle before starting the biography. Her biography will be very interesting because she married the same man twice. Her growth as a novelist was so extraordinary. Spark, she spent time in Africa. She had this terrible, terrible illness. She knew something. I think what I love about Mantel is, as with Spark, she knew something. She knew something, and she didn't quite know what it was that she knew. She had to write because of this knowledge. When you read her, you know that she's on a different level of understanding.Henry: You specialise in slightly neglected figures of English literature. Who else among the canonical writers deserves a bit more attention?Frances: Oh, that's interesting. I love minor characters. I think Spark was very witty about describing herself as a minor novelist or a writer of minor novels when she was evidently major. She always saw the comedy in being a minor. All the minor writers interest me. Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green. No, they have heard Elizabeth Bowen has been treated well by Hermione Lee and Henry Green has been treated well by Jeremy Treglown.Why are they not up there yet? They're so much better than most of their contemporaries. I am mystified and fascinated by why it is that the most powerful writers tend to be kicked into the long grass. It's dazzling. When you read a Henry Green novel, you think, "But this is what it's all about. He's understood everything about what the novel can do. Why has no one heard of him?"Henry: I think Elizabeth Bowen's problem is that she's so concise, dense, and well-structured, and everything really plays its part in the pattern of the whole that it's not breezy reading.Frances: No, it's absolutely not.Henry: I think that probably holds her back in some way, even though when I have pushed it on people, most of the time they've said, "Gosh, she's a genius."Frances: Yes.Henry: It's not an easy genius. Whereas Dickens, the pages sort of fly along, something like that.Frances: Yes. One of the really interesting things about Spark is that she really, really is easy reading. At the same time, there's so much freight in those books. There's so much intellectual weight and so many games being played. There's so many books inside the books. Yet you can just read them for the pleasure. You can just read them for the plot. You can read one in an afternoon and think that you've been lost inside a book for 10 years. You don't get that from Elizabeth Bowen. That's true. The novels, you feel the weight, don't you?Henry: Yes.Frances: She's Jamesian. She's more Jamesian, I think, than Spark is.Henry: Something like A World of Love, it requires quite a lot of you.Frances: Yes, it does. Yes, it's not bedtime reading.Henry: No, exactly.Frances: Sitting up in a library.Henry: Yes. Now, you mentioned James. You're a Henry James expert.Frances: I did my PhD on Henry James.Henry: Yes. Will you ever write about him?Frances: I have, actually. Just a little plug. I've just done a selection of James's short stories, three volumes, which are coming out, I think, later this year for Riverrun with a separate introduction for each volume. I think that's all the writing I'm going to do on James. When I was an academic, I did some academic essays on him for collections and things. No, I've never felt, ever, ready to write on James because he's too complicated. I can only take tiny, tiny bits of James and home in on them.Henry: He's a great one for trying to crack the code.Frances: He really is. In fact, I was struck all the way through writing Electric Spark by James's understanding of the comedy of biography, which is described in the figure in the carpet. Remember that wonderful story where there's a writer called Verica who explains to a young critic that none of the critics have understood what his work's about. Everything that's written about him, it's fine, but it's absolutely missed his main point, his beautiful point. He said that in order to understand what the work's about, you have to look for The Figure in the Carpet. It's The Figure in the CarpetIt's the string on which my pearls are strung. A couple of critics become completely obsessed with looking for this Figure in the Carpet. Of course, Spark loved James's short stories. You feel James's short stories playing inside her own short stories. I think that one of the games she left for her biographers was the idea of The Figure in the Carpet. Go on, find it then. Find it. [laughs] The string on which my pearls are strung.Henry: Why did you leave academia? We should say that you did this before it became the thing that everyone's doing.Frances: Is everyone leaving now?Henry: A lot of people are leaving now.Frances: Oh, I didn't know. I was ahead of the curve. I left 20 years ago because I wasn't able to write the books I wanted to write. I left when I'd written two books as an academic. My first was Literary Seductions, and my second was a biography of a blackmailing courtesan called Harriet Wilson, and the book was called The Courtesan's Revenge. My department was sniffy about the books because they were published by Faber and not by OUP, and suggested that somehow I was lowering the tone of the department.This is what things were like 20 years ago. Then I got a contract to write The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, my third book, again with Faber. I didn't want to write the book with my head of department in the back of my mind saying, "Make this into an academic tome and put footnotes in." I decided then that I would leave, and I left very suddenly. Now, I said I'm leaving sort of now, and I've got books to write, and felt completely liberated. Then for The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, I decided not to have footnotes. It's the only book I've ever written without footnotes, simply as a celebration of no longer being in academia.Then the things I loved about being in academia, I loved teaching, and I loved being immersed in literature, but I really couldn't be around colleagues and couldn't be around the ridiculous rules of what was seen as okay. In fact, the university I left, then asked me to come back on a 0.5 basis when they realised that it was now fashionable to have someone who was a trade author. They asked me to come back, which I did not want to do. I wanted to spend days where I didn't see people rather than days where I had to talk to colleagues all the time. I think that academia is very unhappy. The department I was in was incredibly unhappy.Since then, I took up a job very briefly in another English department where I taught creative writing part-time. That was also incredibly unhappy. I don't know whether other French departments or engineering departments are happier places than English departments, but English departments are the most unhappy places I think I've ever seen.[laughter]Henry: What do you admire about the work of George Meredith?Frances: Oh, I love George Meredith. [laughs] Yes. I think Modern Love, his first novel, Modern Love, in a strange sonnet form, where it's not 14 lines, but 16 lines. By the time you get to the bottom two lines, the novel, the sonnet has become hysterical. Modern Love hasn't been properly recognised. It's an account of the breakdown of his marriage. His wife, who was the daughter of the romantic, minor novelist, Thomas Love Peacock. His wife had an affair with the artist who painted the famous Death of Chatterton. Meredith was the model for Chatterton, the dead poet in his purple silks, with his hand falling on the ground. There's a lot of mythology around Meredith.I think, as with Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, he's difficult. He's difficult. The other week, I tried to reread Diana of the Crossways, which was a really important novel, and I still love it. I really recognise that it's not an easy read. He doesn't try, in any way, to seduce his readers. They absolutely have to crawl inside each book to sit inside his mind and see the world as he's seeing it.Henry: Can you tell us what you will do next?Frances: At the moment, I'm testing some ideas out. I feel, at the end of every biography, you need a writer. You need to cleanse your palate. Otherwise, there's a danger of writing the same book again. I need this time, I think, to write about, to move century and move genders. I want to go back, I think, to the 19th century. I want to write about a male writer for a moment, and possibly not a novelist as well, because after being immersed in Muriel Sparks' novels, no other novel is going to seem good enough. I'm testing 19th-century men who didn't write novels, and it will probably be a minor character.Henry: Whatever it is, I look forward to reading it. Frances Wilson, thank you very much.Frances: Thank you so much, Henry. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

Send us a textWelcome to Celebrate Poe - Episode 321 - DeQuincy, Baudelaire, and Poe - Part Three)I hope you listened to the previous episode that deals with Thomas De Quincy and his 1821 autobiographical work "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.But before we go any further, I wan to try and clear something up. An opium-eater is not actually someone who eats opium, but rather a person who uses opium as a recreational drug or an opium addict. The term "opium-eater" was popularized by Thomas De Quincey in his work "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater”. In reality, De Quincey consumed opium in the form of laudanum, which is a tincture of opium dissolved in alcohol. This liquid preparation was widely used in the 19th century to treat various ailments and was easily available without a prescription. What could possibly go wrong?Thank you for experiencing Celebrate Poe.

Send us a textWelcome to Celebrate Poe  - Episode 320 -  DeQuincy, Baudelaire, and Poe - Part TwoWhen I started this podcast, my plans are to delve more into Charles Baudelaire, but I ran into something that I did not expect.  Oh sure, there was his great collection known as Flowers of Evil and his classic and highly influential translation of Poe's works.  And I began reading a book about the controversial topic of the use of opium by Baudelaire - but I soon found that much of Baudelaire's interests were centered around a writer known as Thomas De Quincey.  Baudelaire's intended to translate Thomas De Quincey's Confession of an English Opium Eater.  So  And in a strange way, I found that reading about Thomas De Quincey helped me understand Baudelaire much better, and gain insights into the personal and creative challenges that Baudelaire faced as someone addicted to an opium. Thank you for experiencing Celebrate Poe.

Drug policy feels very unsettled right now. The war on drugs was a failure. But so far, the war on the war on drugs hasn't entirely been a success, either.Take Oregon. In 2020, it became the first state in the nation to decriminalize hard drugs. It was a paradigm shift — treating drug-users as patients rather than criminals — and advocates hoped it would be a model for the nation. But then there was a surge in overdoses and public backlash over open-air drug use. And last month, Oregon's governor signed a law restoring criminal penalties for drug possession, ending that short-lived experiment.Other states and cities have also tipped toward backlash. And there are a lot of concerns about how cannabis legalization and commercialization is working out around the country. So what did the supporters of these measures fail to foresee? And where do we go from here?Keith Humphreys is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University who specializes in addiction and its treatment. He also served as a senior policy adviser in the Obama administration. I asked him to walk me through why Oregon's policy didn't work out; what policymakers sometimes misunderstand about addiction; the gap between “elite” drug cultures and how drugs are actually consumed by most people; and what better drug policies might look like.Mentioned:Oregon Health Authority dataBook Recommendations:Drugs and Drug Policy by Mark A.R. Kleiman, Jonathan P. Caulkins and Angela HawkenDopamine Nation by Anna LembkeConfessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De QuinceyThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Rerun: Theophile Gautier's account of ‘green jam' cannabis consumption at the drug-addled dinner parties of the ‘Club des Hachichins' - alongside literary figures Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac - was first published in Revue des Deux Mondes on 1st February, 1846. The Club, founded by psychiatrist Dr Jacques Joseph Moreau to establish the psychedelic effects of eating copious amounts of marijuana, met in Arab fancy dress; its members mashing their drugs up with with cinnamon cloves, nutmeg, pistachio, sugar, orange juice - and an aphrodisiac derived from Spanish Fly. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly explain how Napoleon inadvertently triggered the French trend for weed that endures to this day; consider the influence of Thomas de Quincey's ‘Confessions of an English Opium Eater' on this select group of Romantic literati; and review Charles Baudelaire's claim that he was merely a spectator and DID NOT INHALE… Further Reading: • ‘Spoonfuls of paradise' (extract from ‘Cannabis' by Jonathon Green, 2002): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/oct/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview34 • ‘The Hashish Club: How the Poets of Paris Turned on Europe' (High Times, 1979): https://hightimes.com/culture/the-hashish-club/ • ‘Jon Snow takes cannabis' (Channel 4, 2015): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyn0fDFqG3I ‘Why am I hearing a rerun?' Every Thursday is 'Throwback Thursday' on Today in History with the Retrospectors: running one repeat per week means we can keep up the quality of our independent podcast. Daily shows like this require a lot of work! But as ever we'll have something new for you tomorrow, so follow us wherever you get your podcasts: podfollow.com/Retrospectors Love the show? Join 

It's easy to lose touch with our true selves in a world that constantly bombards us with external noise and expectations. We often find ourselves seeking validation and approval from others, forgetting that the most important voice to listen to is our own. Revealing our identities and embracing our unique qualities can be a transformative experience. It's about recognizing that we don't need to add anything or strive to be something we're not. We already are 100% enough, just as we are.  So why do we hesitate? Why do we hold back from presenting our authentic selves to the world? Perhaps it's the fear of judgment or the belief that we're still lacking in some way. But the truth is, we don't need anything else. We have everything we need within us to shine brightly. Dr. Katja Brunkhorst is a Human Disco Ball, with the following facets of serious serial expertise: Writer | Coach | Yoga Teacher | Punk Rock Philosopher | Personal Branding Strategist | Founder of Bright Idea, the agency for authentic communication & creative consulting. Her zone of genius is short-form poetic profitable prose for women entrepreneurs who want to move the world with moving words. In this episode, Katja helps us explore the power of self-listening and the journey towards self-acceptance. Embark on a path of self-discovery, where you'll learn to trust yourself, honor your truth, and live authentically. "Trust yourself; listen to yourself from the beginning, because, otherwise, you'll just spend your whole professional career trying to get rid of unnecessary layers." - Katja Brunkhorst   SUPERPOWER Notes: 00:44 - That moment she discovers the power of listening: In my family, I very much remember not being listened to; the realization that people need to listen to each other for the world to thrive.  02:13 - How her experience of not being listened to made her hide her true self 05:39 - The empowering spirit that comes when you feel listened to even when you are silent 06:16 - How two people can connect deeply, not necessarily verbally: Making music with other people, through the sounds, I think you can communicate and hear each other on a deeper level. 08:18 - Attributing to the sound side of yoga in finding her new identity: To sing a mantra together, combining it with a certain intention, and sometimes as simple as just a certain hand movement. 11:37 - Experiencing the fear of not being listened to 14:02 - Discussing the case of a “not listening mom”: The trick is to try and let go of that good girl, people-pleasing, perfectionist side. 16:41 - How to start listening: Listen to yourself. 21:12 - Writing techniques to get you into the natural flow of doing it 23:35 - Another writing technique she recommends: Recollection in Tranquility 30:35 - A mantra you can use cutting through the fear of not being promoted or not being seen and appreciated for your good deeds 34:07 - One significant melodious message Katja shares: Follow the joy.   Key Takeaways: "The voice is the most personal part of us; there resides your personality." - Katja Brunkhorst "To be really able to listen, you have to have someone who is very safe and secure in themselves." - Katja Brunkhorst "Listen to yourself. In order to write well, and write copy or books or any sort of text that connects, you need to first connect with you again." - Katja Brunkhorst "My claim has always been revealing identities. I don't want you to add anything that you think you're still missing or think you're still not good enough."  - Katja Brunkhorst "This is a message from a Yoga philosophy, "You are exactly as you are; already 100% enough." - Katja Brunkhorst “You can just be you and literally present that to the world. You don't need anything else. This is going to make your life much, much easier and your success to come along much, much, much faster. Other than spending the rest of your life unlearning and stripping off and revealing." - Katja Brunkhorst Notes/Mentions: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_English_Opium-Eater   Connect with Katja Brunkhorst: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bright_idea_kat/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bright-idea-katja-brunkhorst/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wortdompteurin/?ref=hl   Connect with Raquel Ark: www.listeningalchemy.com Mobile: + 491732340722 contact@listeningalchemy.com  LinkedIn Podcast email: listeningsuperpower@gmail.com

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Thomas de Quincey & William S. Burroughs in Soho. The novelist Will Self joins Henry in London to explore the opium dreams and heroin nightmares of Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater and William S. Burrough's Junky. They walk from Oxford Street to Covent Garden, and along the way they also discuss The Diary of a Drug Fiend by Aleister Crowley and Will's own 2019 drugs memoir, Will. 2022 is the 200th anniversary of the book publication of Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Penguin Classics edition of Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quinceyhttps://www.penguin.co.uk/books/34581/confessions-of-an-english-opium-eater-by-thomas-de-quincey-ed--barry-milligan/9780140439014https://apple.co/3SDKmZI Naxos audiobook of Confessions of an English Opium Eater, read by Gunnar Cautheryhttps://naxosaudiobooks.com/confessions-of-an-english-opium-eater-unabridged/https://apple.co/3SgGjTB Penguin Modern Classics edition of Junky by William S. Burroughshttps://www.penguin.co.uk/books/57608/junky-by-william-s-burroughs-intro-oliver-harris/9780141189826https://apple.co/3UIuIOz W. F. Howes audiobook of Junky read by Mark Nelsonhttps://www.wfhowes.co.uk/title-details/9781471212291https://apple.co/3ReJ3zt Will Selfhttps://will-self.com/ Will by Will Selfhttps://www.penguin.co.uk/books/176727/will-by-self-will/9780141046402https://apple.co/3r89gVZ W. F. Howes audiobook of Will, read by Will Selfhttps://www.wfhowes.co.uk/title-details/9781528888219https://apple.co/3r8QZrh The Colony Room Club – in pictureshttps://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2020/sep/13/from-francis-bacon-to-tracey-emin-soho-historic-colony-room-club-in-pictures William S. Burroughs and the Moka Barhttps://www.openculture.com/2014/12/how-william-s-burroughs-shut-down-londons-first-espresso-bar-1972.html Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joining us on this episode is Professor Sir John Strang a leading clinical academic who has conducted extensive addiction research studies and has worked with governments to improve responses to problems of addiction and related complications. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is an autobiographical account written by Thomas De Quincey, about his laudanum addiction and its effect on his life. The Confessions was "the first major work De Quincey published and the one that won him fame almost overnight".

I recorded this episode when I was in between jobs, And feeling increasingly hopeless. I sound stoned as fuck because I was stoned as fuck. It was a yucky time but life's good now so that's neat --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/biggayeric1505gmailcom/message

Theophile Gautier's account of ‘green jam' cannabis consumption at the drug-addled dinner parties of the ‘Club des Hachichins' - alongside literary figures Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac - was first published in Revue des Deux Mondes on 1st February, 1846.The Club, founded by psychiatrist Dr Jacques Joseph Moreau to establish the psychedelic effects of eating copious amounts of marijuana, met in Arab fancy dress; its members mashing their drugs up with with cinnamon cloves, nutmeg, pistachio, sugar, orange juice - and an aphrodisiac derived from Spanish Fly.In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly explain how Napoleon inadvertently triggered the French trend for weed that endures to this day; consider the influence of Thomas de Quincey's ‘Confessions of an English Opium Eater' on this select group of Romantic literati; and review Charles Baudelaire's claim that he was merely a spectator and DID NOT INHALE…Further Reading:• ‘Spoonfuls of paradise' (extract from ‘Cannabis' by Jonathon Green, 2002): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/oct/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview34• ‘The Hashish Club: How the Poets of Paris Turned on Europe' (High Times, 1979): https://hightimes.com/culture/the-hashish-club/• ‘Jon Snow takes cannabis' (Channel 4, 2015): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyn0fDFqG3IFor bonus material and to support the show, visit Patreon.com/RetrospectorsWe'll be back tomorrow! Follow us wherever you get your podcasts: podfollow.com/RetrospectorsThe Retrospectors are Olly Mann, Rebecca Messina & Arion McNicoll, with Matt Hill.Theme Music: Pass The Peas. Announcer: Bob Ravelli. Graphic Design: Terry Saunders. Edit Producer: Emma Corsham.Copyright: Rethink Audio / Olly Mann 2021. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

"Raising Exemplary Children"Guest: Eric & Rachel FiteEric & Rachel have raised 4 children that are not only well mannered, but driven! Join us as we discuss their parenting strategy. www.pbandjaisy.comInstagram: @pbandjaisyinfo@pbandjaisy.comEric Fite:Rachel Fite: Bill Steddum - Facebook: @Bill.SteddumJaisy George - Instagram: @jaisyyySarah Padgett - Facebook: @sarahpsellshousesReferences/Shout Outs:"Positive Discipline" Series by: Dr. Jane Nelsen"Magic Years" by: Selma Fraiberg"Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less" By: Greg McKeown"Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" By: Thomas De QuinceyJill Clifton, Cardinal FinancialBen Yeatts, Designated TitleBoots & BBQ - Sept 25th @ Gilly's Dallas - Benefitting Easter Seals of North TexasProduction/Recording/Editing: Tom GeorgeOriginal Music Written and Composed By: Michael Padgett www.michaelpadgettmusic.com/Thank you so much for listening! Please make sure to subscribe! 

Once as common as aspirin, laudanum was immortalized in 19th century literature and still pops up in period dramas today. So what was it? Opium and alcohol, and it was used for *everything.* Today on DSH, we're talking about those uses—authorized and otherwise—and looking at Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater

Šie teksti, iespējams, liks maldīties starp ziņkāri, bailēm, mokām, dzeju, baudām, ētiskiem, ķīmiskiem un medicīniskiem apsvērumiem, starp vēlmi aizmirsties un nepielūdzamu bojājeju… Tās ir Šarla Bodlēra „Mākslīgās paradīzes”. Jau nosaukumā iekodēts kas tāds, kas vedina domāt par cilvēkam nepieejamas paradīzes butaforiju. Vai narkotiskās vielas spēj kļūt par iedvesmas avotu un instrumentu jaunu poētisku tēlu meklējumos? Par šī darba kontekstu un literāro nozīmi Kultūras Rondo runājam ar tulkotāju Gitu Grīnbergu un dzejnieku literatūrzinātnieku Kārli Vērdiņu. Bodlēra “Mākslīgās paradīzes” pirmizdevumu piedzīvoja 1860. gada maijā un tās veido divas daļas – „Poēma par hašišu” un „Opija ēdājs”, kurā pārstāstīts un komentēts angļu rakstnieka Tomasa de Kvinsija autobiogrāfiskais stāsts "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" (1821). Grāmata ir personīgā pieredzē balstīta poētiska un filozofiska apcere par psihotropo vielu lietošanu, to ietekmi uz apziņu, radošo procesu un izraisītajām atkarībām. Grāmatu papildina Kārļa Vērdiņa priekšvārds un Ginta Rudzīša ilustrācijas. To izdevis apgāds "Neputns".  

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey are connected by two things: William Wordsworth and opium. Sam met Wordsworth first and together they published The Lyrical Ballads in 1798, which kicked off the Romantic movement and attracted legions of fans. Among them was Thomas De Quincey. He famously tracked down his two idols and insinuated himself into their Lake District clique. Wordsworth was impressed by the much younger Tom, but Sam Coleridge was wary. Perhaps Sam recognised a little too much of himself in Tom. Later, Sam would go on to publish Kubla Khan and Tom would publish Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Both works are considered the earliest instances of drug literature. But while Tom wrote candidly about his experiences with addiction, Sam only ever alluded to drug use, using metaphors instead of specific references. He preferred to keep the matter of his laudanum dependence private, so he didn't exactly appreciate it when Tom, on the very first page of Confessions, publicly outed him as one of the biggest dope fiends of all.Please visit our website, hollywordpodcast.com to find show notes, including a list of sources used, and more information. 

On this episode Tom is having a chat with Gonzo, a weed dealer from Bristol. Gonzo tells us his story of how he entered the world of illegal weed dealing in the UK and why he is still doing it. We share his story because, as strong advocates of cannabis legalization, we believe it is important to understand the lives and views of people who are involved in the cannabis black market in Europe. On the next episode, Tom and Gonzo will discuss Gonzo’s customers as well as his views on legalizing cannabis in Europe. But first - enjoy the story of Gonzo. And please, do not try this at home! Books mentioned in the episode: “The Doors of Perception” by Aldous Huxley (the author of “Brave New World”) “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” by Thomas De Quincey Important note:Smells Like Business® is not promoting or advocating any illegal activities.  We strongly advise you to wait until cannabis cultivation becomes legal in your country.

In which our hero disappoints some impressionable young ladies.   Twitter: WeirdTalesPod Email: TheWeirdTalesPodcast@gmail.com   The audiobooks I've read: Slothantula: https://www.audible.com/pd/Slothantula-Genetic-Engineering-Gone-Wrong-Audiobook/B08D5B792H Confessions of an English Opium Eater: https://www.audible.com/pd/Confessions-of-an-English-Opium-Eater-Audiobook/B08CZV2TZ6 The Magna Carta: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Magna-Carta-Audiobook/B086PZT4T6 Kongo-dot-com: https://www.audible.com/pd/Kongocom-Four-Related-Stories-Audiobook/B08BZV8DB1    

Suspiria (1977) d. Dario Argento written by: Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi  Starring: Jessica Harper  Stefania Casini Flavio Bucci Udo Kier Joan Bennett This week on Total Movie Recall, we test our feminist bona fides and flex our rigorous academic muscles dissecting the precise and not-at-all haphazard imagery of Dario Argento's giallo horror film, Suspiria. Ryan fantasizes about disappearing into a Black Forest fairytale world where there are no problems and noted ballerina enthusiast Steve remains unimpressed with the technical rigors of this film. Cool colors, though. Suzy (Jessica Harper) travels to Germany to attend ballet school. When she arrives, late on a stormy night, no one lets her in, and she sees Pat (Eva Axén), another student, fleeing from the school. When Pat reaches her apartment, she is murdered. The next day, Suzy is admitted to her new school, but has a difficult time settling in. She hears noises, and often feels ill. As more people die, Suzy uncovers the terrifying secret history of the place. Things discussed in the show: The Three Mothers Red Dead Redemption 2 Suspiria (2018, Luca Guadagnino, Chloë Grace Moretz, Tilda Swinton, Doris Hick) Anthony Bourdain and Asia Argento The Crow (1994, Alex Proyas, Brandon Lee, Michael Wincott, Rochelle Davis) '80s & '90s sitcoms: Wings, Frasier, Step by Step, Family Matters, Dinosaurs and Cheers South Park The Simpsons Community (Dan Harmon, Joel McHale, Danny Pudi, Donald Glover, Gillian Jacobs, Alison Brie, Ken Jeong, Yvette Nicole Brown, Jim Rash, Chevy Chase) The Russo Brothers Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015, Joss Whedon, Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo) Igmar Bergman Chopping Mall (1986, Killbots, Jim Wynorski, Kelli Maroney, Tony O'Dell, Russell Todd) Dr. Killbot Always Sunny in Philadelphia / Pepe Silvia Zack Snyder: Sucker Punch, Dawn of the Dead, 300, Justice League, The Snyder Cut, Snow Steam Iron George Romero Return to Oz (1985, Walter Murch, Fairuza Balk, Nicol Williamson, Jean Marsh) John Milius The old snail mail DVD days of Netflix Letterboxd app Alamo Drafthouse DTLA's DVD library Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1935, Disney) The Suspiria soundtrack by Goblin Phantom of the Paradise (1974, Brian De Palma, Paul Williams, William Finley, Jessica Harper) Farrah Fawcett hair Psychedelic horror Mandy (2018, Panos Cosmatos, Casper Kelly, Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache) Color Out of Space (2019, Richard Stanley, Scarlett Amaris, H.P. Lovecraft, Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur) Rosemary's Baby (1968, Roman Polanski, Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon) Giallo films American Movie (1999, Coven, Chris Smith, Mark Borchardt, Mike Schank, Tom Schimmels) The Undershorts Film Festival Chicago The Lost Boys (1987, Joel Schumacher Thomas De Quincy, occult writer: Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Suspiria De Profundis Santa Muerte Inferno (1980, Leigh McCloskey, Irene Miracle, Eleonora Giorgi) Yazidi culture and the icon of the Peacock angel Supernatural - The French Mistake episode Next week: Naked Gun 33 1/3

Today on The Literary Life, Cindy Rollins and Angelina Stanford are joined by a special guest, Angelina's husband, Thomas Banks! This week's selection for our summer series is Joseph Addison's "The Adventures of a Shilling." This episode is packed with book references, so scroll down for links to the titles mentioned! The conversation today kicks off with an attempt at defining the "essay" form and giving a brief history on its development. Thomas shares a little background information on Joseph Addison and his writing, as well as several other essayists who came before and after Addison. Thomas also talks about why essays are a significant part of his reading life. The conversation also spins off into a discussion of the importance of how we spend our leisure time. Finally, our hosts chat about this week's essay, which gives highlights of England's history from the perspective of a silver coin. Addison's tale is full of humor and satire, as well as layers of social commentary and pathos. Don't forget to register for the Back to School online conference coming up on August 26-29, 2019 so you don't miss out on this awesome opportunity to "repair the ruins" of your own education. Summer of the Short Story: Ep 15: "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant Ep 16: "Why I Write" by George Orwell Ep 17: "The Celestial Omnibus" by E. M. Forster Ep 18: "Vulture on War" by Samuel Johnson When I Consider How My Light Is Spent by John Milton When I consider how my light is spent,    Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,    And that one talent which is death to hide Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present    My true account, lest He returning chide;    "Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?" I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need    Either man's work or His own gifts. Who best    Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed,    And post o'er land and ocean without rest;    They also serve who only stand and wait." Book List: (Amazon Affiliate Links) Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell Dove Descending by Thomas Howard Four Quartets by T. S. Elliot The Essays by Sir Frances Bacon The Essays: A Selection by Michel de Montaigne The Defendant by G. K. Chesterton The Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas de Quincy Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper Cato: A Tragedy by Joseph Addison Gulliver's Travels and The Battle of the Books by Jonathon Swift Support The Literary Life: Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support! Connect with Us: Find Angelina at  https://angelinastanford.com and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/ Find Cindy at https://cindyrollins.net and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/ Jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

North Americans are the world’s most compulsive and prolific users of legal opioids. In this lyrical update of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, writer Carlyn Zwarenstein recounts her search for relief and release – with its euphoric ups, hallucinatory lows and desperate pharmacy visits. Along the way she traces the long tradition of opium’s influence on culture and imagination, from De Quincey to Frida Kahlo. Part memoir, part critique of modern medicine, Zwarenstein’s short but powerful book offers a “measured” and “urgent” (The Globe & Mail) entry-point to a critical contemporary discussion. From the reviews: “…a sensuous and compelling meditation on using opioids to treat chronic pain. It’s also a delicate ode to the drug’s history. Zwarenstein, whose writing is thoughtful, honest, and elegant, opens her life to us as she guides us expertly through history, citing resources from literary biographies to online drug forums. With a little wink, she even includes a “pain playlist” with songs by Neil Young, Elliott Smith, and The Velvet Underground.

On the year of his death, we look at the life and work of one of the founders of British Romanticism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Sources: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6081 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poetical Works: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29090 Thomas DeQuincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2040 John Polidori, “Extract of a Letter from Geneva” (the introduction to The Vampyre): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6087 … Continue reading 1834 – The Death of Samuel Taylor Coleridge →

If you have a minute, please take our listener survey, your feedback will help us improve the podcast. Many Thanks. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/GGZCCM2 Maurice O'Brien is a documentary filmmaker who produces and directs as well as filming much of his own work. He has made some wonderful documentaries including Hey, Ronnie Reagan which was screened at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival this year. In 2017 he made Pitching Up for the Guardian, it is a charming short doc about how Gaelic football has been used to help integrate the diverse community of immigrants in Ballyhaunis, Co. Mayo. It immediately became one of the most viewed videos on the Guardian website. Moss has also just finished a one-off doc about the Abbey Theatre for RTE. Before returning to Ireland, he made many films for the BBC – including ‘Northern Soul: Keeping the Faith' about one of the UK's biggest underground music scenes; a film about the first literary depiction of recreational drug use ‘Confessions of an English Opium Eater', presented by Dr. John Cooper Clarke; and the climactic episode of the landmark series ‘The Story of Scottish Art'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you have a minute, please take our listener survey, your feedback will help us improve the podcast. Many Thanks. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/GGZCCM2 Maurice O’Brien is a documentary filmmaker who produces and directs as well as filming much of his own work. He has made some wonderful documentaries including Hey, Ronnie Reagan which was screened at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival this year. In 2017 he made Pitching Up for the Guardian, it is a charming short doc about how Gaelic football has been used to help integrate the diverse community of immigrants in Ballyhaunis, Co. Mayo. It immediately became one of the most viewed videos on the Guardian website. Moss has also just finished a one-off doc about the Abbey Theatre for RTE. Before returning to Ireland, he made many films for the BBC – including ‘Northern Soul: Keeping the Faith’ about one of the UK’s biggest underground music scenes; a film about the first literary depiction of recreational drug use ‘Confessions of an English Opium Eater’, presented by Dr. John Cooper Clarke; and the climactic episode of the landmark series ‘The Story of Scottish Art’.

Catharine Morris and Michael Caines take a look at the English essayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Find out more at the-tis.co.uk See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

podcast: http://beyondutopia.net/podcasts/britney-deconstructs.mp3 Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Courtney Love - the commodification of personal disaster is discussed from the point of view of a postmodern media confessional. This is a variant of the genre of the confession or confessional.Susan discusses how the tabloid / media spectator confessional differs from that of, say, St. Augustine, or Rousseau, or even Thomas DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The tabloid confessional creates a false catharsis within the viewer that drives a hunger for another catharsis. It engenders addiction.We can apply the ideas of Baudrillard or Lyotard quite nicely to this; also Richard Rorty.Please see eLearningQueen:  http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com

podcast: http://beyondutopia.net/podcasts/britney-deconstructs.mp3 Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Courtney Love - the commodification of personal disaster is discussed from the point of view of a postmodern media confessional. This is a variant of the genre of the confession or confessional.Susan discusses how the tabloid / media spectator confessional differs from that of, say, St. Augustine, or Rousseau, or even Thomas DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The tabloid confessional creates a false catharsis within the viewer that drives a hunger for another catharsis. It engenders addiction.We can apply the ideas of Baudrillard or Lyotard quite nicely to this; also Richard Rorty.Please see eLearningQueen:  http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com

The Trial of Elizabeth Cree Penny-dreadfuls, transvestitism, the English Opium Eater, Thomas de Quincey and Grand Guignol are touched on in this conversation about the underside of the Victorian Age.