Comics’ Books - S02, E05 - Transcript
GUEST: POPE LONERGAN
HOST: LUCY DANSER
LUCY DANSER: Hello and welcome to season two of Comics Books, the podcast where your host Lucy Danser, that’s me, talks to my favourite comedians and comic writers about the books they love.
[MUSIC]
LD: My guest today is a force unto himself. A comedian, writer, Quaker, recovering drug addict, curator of The Care Home Tour and Pope’s Addiction Clinic. He gigs up and down the UK, has had sold out shows at numerous festivals and has very recently signed a book deal with Penguin for a memoir due out in 2022. It’s Pope Lonergan.
POPE LONERGAN: Hello.
LD: Hello.
PL: You alright?
LD: Yeah how are you?
PL: Yeah good. As we were saying, I was on a care shift last night, a guy, he’s the same age as me but he had severe meningitis so he’s got sort of learning disabilities and stuff. But yeah I was looking after him and I sort of have to wear him out in preparation for going to bed so uh, he’s a robust, virile thirty year old and has the energy of a thirty year old and so I have to kind of facilitate a controlled rampage.
[LAUGHTER]
PL: And the thing is, a lot of the other people who work there, they’re a maternal presence, not to be too gendered about it but they’re kind of a maternal presence and they won’t give him as much leeway as I’ll give him. So I’m like the fun Uncle who, when I come in I just let him pelt around on his wheelchair and throw a couple of foam noodles about.
[LAUGHTER]
LD: It’s interesting because I’ve spoken to a lot of comedians who have sort of struggled to make a living during this time but you already had this job, this different life?
PL: Yes. Well I went full time as a comedian in the beginning of 2019 and I still had a bank contract so if there was a week that was a bit of a lean week financially I could use that, I could just grab a shift to supplement my income. A lot of people in comedy don’t like to admit that they have that safety net with, whether it’s temp work or agency work or whatever, because they feel that it somehow delegitimises them to say ‘sometimes I have to pick up a shift’.
LD: So I’m quite interested in your relationship with books because when we briefly spoke before you said ‘I didn’t have tons of education. Reading didn’t come from school for anything like that for me’. I mean normally on this podcast people come on and they say ‘oh I’m a comedian and I feel quite worried now that I’m not intellectual enough’ but I feel the opposite way with you today. As soon as I got your list of books through I thought ‘Oh no I’m on the...’
PL: That’s very kind of you thank you.
[LAUGHTER]
PL: I think it’s one of those things. Coming from a working class family, my Mum never had a collegiate education. She didn’t even finish school, like she went into nursing when she was actually too young to go into it. And so I don’t come from an intellectual, I don’t have an intellectual family or upbringing. Which isn’t to say, there’s different types of intelligence, it’s just not academically inclined. And I didn’t even do A Levels but I actually did, in the end, end up going to University but I took a really circuitous route to University.
LD: OK.
PL: But I’ve been like a voracious reader since I was very young. That thing of a working class autodidact, you kind of overcompensate because you haven’t got that elite education. Any education you have, I don’t feel like I had good schooling in senior school. I had one really good teacher but other than that I don’t think I had great teachers to be honest.
LD: When did you start reading then? Was it at school?
PL: Yeah they actually thought I was, so when I was in year one or year two, they actually thought I was dyslexic because I just couldn’t, I was just a slow learner, I couldn't grasp anything. And then I discovered Goosebump books.
LD: Ah the best.
PL: Yeah, I’m forever indebted to R L Stine in that I found something I loved and then didn’t wanna like, relinquish those books. And then Goosebumps lead to this, led to that, led to the other. And then I went in the complete opposite direction and I had a real kind of thirst for knowledge and a love of reading.
[MUSIC]
LD: We’ll start with Ulysses because that’s a real epic to kick off with.
PL: Any James Joyce work that is, it can be a lifetime project in and of itself just trying to unlock the key to these texts. And I always say you have to read around Joyce before you read Joyce. So you have to read about a million sort of companion guides. Especially with Finnegans Wake, which is to me the more interesting book in that our understanding of Finnegans Wake will never be finished I don’t think. But yeah the parts I really respond to in Ulysses especially is this idea that Joyce had of, I think it was Bakhtin who said about Rabela and his world, he said about ennobling the body’s lower stratum and and turning our base function into something tinged with poecy, something tinged with literary merit. So Joyce will talk about piss, shit, vomit, any kind of effluvient and obviously you had the big trial where they tried to get the book censored. That part of Joyce really appeals to me, where he can see a kind of divinity within our shitty, biologically degraded cells and a lot of that is in my comedy. Like I try and lean into that stuff and it actually is part of the ethos of the book I’m writing and the stuff to do with the care home.
LD: That’s so interesting because I read ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ by Joyce at school and I had a great teacher and he loved James Joyce. And he was very enthusiastic but what he did, I would say, was focus more, particularly as we were a group of fifteen year old girls or whatever but you know, but he focused more on the beautiful aspects of the literature and for me it was all, I think I love what you just explained. I read to learn and to experience. I don’t necessarily read for the beauty of words themselves.
PL: Yes, yeah yeah.
LD: I don’t read loads of poetry, it’s not, it’s not that I don't enjoy it, it's just not what I read for first and foremost. So I think, I mean maybe I would have enjoyed James Joyce more if you’d taught me?
PL: Yeah I think as well it’s just a difference in the book so A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man it’s a kind of higher register so it’s a high falutin’ story and it’s about the beauty and the sanctity of art and the artist. So there isn’t so much of the/
LD: Poo.
PL: Yeah there isn’t enough poo. There’s not enough fucking poo in it. Bung in a bit more poo mate.
[LAUGHTER]
PL: So yeah whereas Ulysses, I mean this is just one tiny, this is again why with Ulysses, this is one tiny component of Ulysses. It’s a story of everything in a way and Finnegan’s Wake even more so. And another part I really love about Ulysses is the idea of confession is a really important motif with Ulysses and the sort of sexual undercurrents in the practice of confession. Like the seductive intent, the sexual inquisition of hearing someone else's sins and this idea of, not necessarily the sexual component, but this idea of forging a sense of intimacy through confessions, through complete transparency, through full disclosure. I mean that’s kind of my comedy, that’s what I do on stage, I’m a confessor.
LD: Yeah.
PL: And I remember when I went over to Finland and there was a girl over there that I knew and I kind of hung out with her. I met her over here and I hung out with her over there and what I realised is in Finnish culture they don’t do small talk. So when I first met up with her and I was a bit nervous, we didn’t really know each other that well, I was going on and on and on and on. And she just turned to me, I won’t do the accent, I can’t do it, but she turned to me and went “You can just, what is it, you can shut up, you don’t have to do this preamble, just shut up”.
[LAUGHTER]
PL: And it was really liberating and kind of relaxing! I was free of the need to do the, yeah the kind of small talk at the beginning, because then when we sat down at this caf in a pine forest by the lake we just got right into the core of our being. We got right into her Dad’s mental health problems, my addiction and all this stuff.
LD: Yeah.
PL: We just went right in there and I thought that’s a really good way of doing that.
LD: Whew. Oh my God.
PL: Yeah I loved that part of Finnish culture. I don’t know if necessarily that kind of rapid intimacy is part of the Finnish culture but it was, that’s what happened when I was over there and I really liked that and that’s a big part of what Ulysses is about. About this idea of the confession and the rituals of confession within the catholic church. And there’s like a, I’ve got it up here one sec, a quote where it say Joyce described the Catholic Church as ‘a great spermacetically oiled ball whose sexual contact through the confessional is more attractive to the Irish maid, wife, abbess and widow than any contact with the Irish male’. And there’s an episode of the Sopranos where Carmela Soprano is with her Priest and it’s almost like a tease, he’s being like a little flirt, a little Catholic flirt.
[LAUGHTER]
LD: A little Catholic flirt.
PL: But that’s what the Catholic church is to me. They’re all about chastity and there’s sex being a dirty thing and being a sin but by the negation of that sex it makes the whole religion imbued with sexuality and constant focus on it and it’s like a maddening horniness within the Catholic church.
LD: So is it a book that you read or is it a book that you study?
PL: It’s a book that you study.
LD: Yeah.
PL: 100%
LD: It’s not like to take it on holiday for a little chill.
PL: No you just can’t. it’s like, Stewart Lee emailed me recently and he encouraged me to read Jerusalem by Alan Moore because he knew that I love James Joyce. And he said in the same way as Joyce it’s, yeah, it’s a book that you have to devote a lot of time to and I totally get why a lot of people just, they think ‘Why the fuck should I give over so much time to one man and his work?’ But uh, it is rewarding.
[MUSIC]
LD: So I think your next book was probably a bit more of a chill one. Which was Limmy’s ‘Surprisingly Down to Earth and Very Funny’.
PL: Yeah. I mean I love Limmy. I think he’s just a, I don’t really know anyone who’s carving their own, their own idiosyncratic unique career within comedy. He’s just brilliant. And he’s got a sensibility. It’s such a formed, concrete sensibility of like, you could see something written down or, you know, ‘oh that’s a Limmy’, or ‘that’s come from Limmy’s world’. And the reason I loved the book is it’s like a Limmy monologue, like it’s written how he would speak. There’s no stylistics, there’s no focus on, like what we said earlier, the beauty of words or trying to construct, it’s said in really colloquial english. And I relate to the way he portrays frenetic standstill and depression because it’s not actually a funny book for a lot of it. There’s funny bits in it but the talks about how he got to a point where he was an alcoholic and his alcoholism manifested itself in the same way as my drug addiction in that it wasn’t very hedonistic and like being a party boy and smashing windows and that. It was like, for me, like sitting in a flat that smelled of mince waiting for drugs to be delivered and then when drugs were delivered, putting a bit of cloth on my knees, emptying out sixty dihydrocodeine tablets, necking all of them, mixing some diamorphine and nesquik, swigging that throughout the day and then just, and then maybe I’d bowl over to my Mum and Dad’s house to get like a boiled egg.
[LAUGHTER]
PL: Just to eat, I had no food in my house. And then I’d like go to a Quaker meeting just to have company, but company that didn’t impose on me too much. Quaker meetings you sit in silence so it was just for a bit of peace throughout the day. And I remember one specific day of my drug abuse where I bought an out of date advent calendar, it was January so they were half price, I went into the park and sat down next to a war memorial and just ate an advent calendar one panel at a time.
[LAUGHING]
PL: While high as well obviously. And I remember thinking, ‘This is pretty much five years of my life, has just been doing this kind of shit’. And Limmy’s book is exactly the same. It’s just him staring at a poster and he can’t tell what the facial expression is conveying in the poster and it’s just him ruminating. Or I think it’s something like that. It’s like him ruminating over what he sees in a poster while just sitting spaced out in his flat. And yeah, it’s brilliant. I’ve never related to a book as much as I related to that book.
LD: Yeah I’ve got the blurb here and it’s just ‘Hello, I’m Brian Limond aka Limmy. You might know me from The Limmy Show. Or you might not. Don’t worry’.
PL: Yeah yeah! Exactly. That encapsulates the tone of the whole book. Yeah it’s great, I love it so much.
[MUSIC]
LD: You chose a couple of books that, I mean we talk about high culture, I mean I couldn't even get hold of these books because they’re not even in print anymore.
PL: Yeah.
LD: OK? So you’ve really gone quite a wanky way here.
PL: I apologise.
LD: I couldn’t even engage with your book choices.
PL: I only realised they weren’t in print after I’d sent them over. But then one of them, I mean the care home one, you don’t really need to have read it. It’s just kind of a non-fiction book about life in a care home pretty much.
LD: Yeah tell me about that one. Because that genuinely was the one I tried to order and I couldn’t. The only one that was was a single first edition 38 quid version or something.
PL: Yeah fuck that. I would have sent it over to you. But it, so Sally Tisdale who I really like, she worked in a care home anyway before she became a writer and she wrote this book in the 1980s. It’s in America and it shows how little we’ve moved on because everything in that book I identified with. This is why the care sector in this country, the social care sector which we’re now understanding off the back of the pandemic is failing and it’s been failing for the nine years I’ve been in it. It is fucking dire.
LD: So would you say it’s worse now than it was?
PL: Yes. Oh yeah yeah. It’s got progressively worse. There’s this incredible book called The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. So Verso Books. Economic socialist but a cultural libertarian and Verso have released books during the pandemic, one’s about mutual aid, one’s about the care manifesto, one’s about coronavirus and climate. And The Care Manifesto is a group of academics with different specialties who have created this manifesto for how we can create a more care forward approach to community organised into municipalism, basically dragging us away from Capitalist or neoliberal structures. And I talked to these academics for the book as well but in the book they said that 40% in costs to the National Health Care System can be saved by prioritising quality and need over profit. And examples they give are the care homes being brought back into the public sector in British Columbia, Canada and I’m probably mispronouncing this, the Buurtzorg, social care cooperatives in the Netherlands. And this works with the needs of the client and they're rated extremely highly by both users and employees. So its care home runs on a not for profit basis as opposed to the Thatcherite trend for handing them over to private equity. And they’re, every part of that book ticked the box for me.
[MUSIC + Sound of Lucy’s dog crying for attention]
LD: The other book that I couldn’t get hold of was ‘The Bathroom’ but what I did see when I couldn’t buy it on Amazon was an excellent review where someone said ‘not enough time spent in the bathroom’.
[LAUGHTER]
PL: That’s true ‘cos I read it thinking, I mean if I remember rightly he moves to the hotel, he gets bored of his own bathroom so he moves to a hotel to sit in their bathroom. But I remember thinking, ‘Ah that’s a cheat, I thought he was gonna stay in his bathroom’ and I’ve always wanted to make a TV series that’s just set with me on the toilet for the whole thing. I’ve always wanted to and I had this, I don’t know why, it must have come from a dream or something, I had a series where, it’s like three parts maybe, the whole thing’s set with me in a bathroom on the toilet and I’ll occasionally have to take a bath. But when I take a bath a dead princess comes up through the water and clings to my body and uses me as a buoy in the bath. And me and the princess have an exchange across the line between life and death in the bath where she’s clinging on to me. And then she recedes back into the bath. And it’s never really explained. Like it’s just left open that she emerges every now and again in the narrative. How do you pitch that, how do you pitch it?
[LAUGHTER]
LD: I don’t know I’m not sure that was the way though!
PL: Yeah, yeah! But yeah so the thing I love about Jean Philippe-Toussaint is I’m fascinated, and this is where there’s some overlap with all of these really to be honest, with Joyce, with Limmy’s book, is this idea of frenetic standstill and idleness and stasis and this idea of ‘once again this’. And care homes are very, very repetitive. There’s a sort of cyclical nature to those environments and it’s why I love Chris Ware’s comics and graphic novels as well and I love the book Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, I can’t remember his...
LD: That’s it.
PL: Withdrawing from reality and sloping around in your dressing gown, that type of stuff, which is what I did for five years being a drug user in a fraught tempestuous dynamic, relationship, where she had something and I had addiction problems. And I would go from this flat that smelled of mince and I remember once our bedroom flooded and I refused to siphon out the water from the flooded bedroom while she was at work because I was too busy making a stop motion animation of a sweetcorn wrestling a peanut on the countertop.
[LAUGHTER]
PL: And I got so deeply engrossed in this and I needed the animation to come to some kind of logical conclusion and then she came home from work, went fucking mental. And so then when she went mental I’d escape to the public bathroom with my laptop and my dongle and I’d sit in the cubicle that was like pockmarked by barely realised gloryholes and I’d be sitting there and I’d have like vodka there and I’d have vodka and morphine together.
LD: Oh God.
PL: And a box of Monster Munch. And I’d sit there for hours on my laptop and my dongle in this toilet cubicle just doing a bit of business. Doing a bit of work. And then I’d, yeah that was my life for ages, was bouncing from that to then over to my Mum and Dad’s house.
LD: For an egg.
PL: Which was just at the other end of the road and turning up there absolutely pissed out my mind, trying to help my Dad get a bed out of the front window or whatever it is.
[GASP]
PL: Yeah. And then occasionally I’d have a jaunt like, I’d just go on my own to a package holiday to Estonia for a couple of days on an impulse. I remember I was in Estonia and I went into an antique shop and i noticed there was a little bit of Nazi paraphernalia. And I thought that’s a bit weird but like, fair enough and I turn around and there’s a whole fucking Nazi drape and it’s like a Nazi shop. It’s just full to the brim with Nazi. And I felt rude for browsing so I bought myself a knife which is, I bought myself a knife from the Nazi because I felt it was rude to browse.
[LAUGHTER]
LD: I love how you’re so outspoken and forthright but then you’re like I should buy some Nazi stuff becauase I’ve been in here for a while.
PL: Yeah it was, it was like, it felt a bit rude. Like I shouldn’t waste a Nazi’s time with browsing.
LD: Like, I shouldn’t be rude to Nazis.
PL: So I bought this knife knowing that I could never smuggle that across customs I smuggled the knife into a, like a food cart that was unattended, I smuggled it in and thought, ‘Oh I’ll just get a package holiday back to Estonia to visit the knife at some point’.
[LAUGHTER]
LD: Your final book is the one I tried to read and it is driving me mad and it is Kafka’s ‘The Castle’.
PL: Yep. I’d be really interested to hear what your take on it is. What are you struggling with?
LD: I just don't think, I don’t think I’m getting from it what I’m assuming you did and what other things I’ve read about it people have. That was a really inarticulate sentence.
PL: No no.
LD: But I’ve read one Kafka before and that was ‘The Trial’ and I’m getting the same thing. I’m getting the kind of bureaucracy, I’m getting the cyclical nature of ‘ah everything you do I’m stuck’.
PL: Yeah.
LD: And I like that aspect of it but it’s starting to feel a bit like Groundhog day in the sense that I’m not getting the kind of deeper aspect that people seem to get from this book.
PL: No, I think that it is supposed to be a bit repetitive and irritating and frustrating.
LD: Yeah it is.
PL: It’s like being trapped in a phone queue of a call centre or something like that.
LD: Yeah.
PL: And there’s a book called Working the Phones, control and resistance in call centres where
they describe the Kafkaesque quality of a call centre.
LD: He gets that right on doesn’t he?
PL: Yeah. And, so David Lynch, his favourite ever writer is Kafka, he once wanted to do a movie based on one of the Kafka books and there’s that same thing. I’ll read from this quickly ‘It’s a real world in which all your control patterns, all of your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behaviour begins to fall to pieces’. It’s very hard to get into the motivating drive of Kafka characters. You don’t understand why they’ve done that. It’s the same with Jean Phillipe-Toussaint where there's a bit when he just throws a dart at his wife’s head and then goes to hospital with his wife. Kafka characters do things like that. They’re almost a bit, actually I was going to say, they’re the opposite of neurotypical. So they’re, it can be hard to know, they’ll just do something out of the blue and then it’s not revisited, like it’s never spoken about again.
LD: Yeah.
PL: And there’s loads of that in David Lynch. That characters are illogical or unemotive, humans are often object-like or objects become quite human like and tend to become personified or imbued with something and it becomes, Kafka and Lynch, ‘a gestural theatre, a shifting and mobile arena of codes, conventions and habits that are attempts to reify, to regard something as a concrete thing, the nature of the private’. But it’s very mysterious and abstract and there's like an unmooring of reality because a lot of stuff just remains unresolved or it’s hinted that there’s a greater implication that’s just out of grasp or that.
LD: Yeah.
PL: But that’s a strangely accurate representation of real life. Because real life, little things happen. That’s not any, we apply a narrative cohesion to events of real life and to our life and experience, but all the time a little thing happens, you never find out what the conclusion of that little sequence of events that you just happened to witness while you’re walking down the road. And that’s life.
LD: That’s why I’m stressed though I think by it. Because reading in my escape often.
PL: Ah yes.
LD: Even my non-fiction. I like to read about the brain but I like to read about why things work.
PL: Yes. This book would drive you fucking mad then.
LD: It is.
PL: It’s a puzzle that can never be solved. And it goes back to what I said about Limmy and looking at the poster and not being able to comprehend because he’s looked at it too long. And Limmy does that in his work as well, because he’ll do a facial expression that’s slightly too protracted and then suddenly that facial expression can mean a million different things at once and it’s unnerving, it’s uncanny. That’s how the book makes you feel and how it’s supposed to. And I think some of that’s by design by Kafka but I also think some of that is because he had a full time job working in the bank and he wrote in the evenings in a very piecemeal way. And I think he probably, yeah I think he probably had a habit of rewriting the same stuff quite regularly. I don’t know, it might be something to do with his working method maybe.
LD: OK.
PL: And environment. Just working in a bank again. Something about the labyrinthine quality of bureaucracy. And having worked in the LCA, the Live Comedy Association, I totally get that. The mechanisms of government, the obscurations and the misdirection. I’m fascinated by that. I love it.
LD: Yeah maybe I just feel stressed about it in real life. But I will finish it and I will feed back when I’m finished.
PL: Thank you.
LD: I’m about 3⁄4 of the way through. But before we go.
PL: Yeah.
LD: Tell me about your memoir.
PL: I can’t say too much because I’ll get a slap on the wrist. I’m writing a memoir with Penguin. It, the primary focus will be eldery care but it’ll have comedy and my addiction to prescription opiates and it’s about my life around my experiences of the care home and that’s kind of as much as I can say for the time being.
LD: I’m very excited. And it’s out 2022.
PL: Yeah hopefully. I mean yeah, it’s got to be in on March 1st and then there’ll be a year long promotional campaign.
LD: So exciting.
PL: Yeah I’ve loved writing it, it’s been a lot of fun so I’m hoping people actually enjoy reading it.
LD: Oh no I think it’ll be great. Just before you go, every episode we try and get someone to, we try and get our guest not someone, you specifically. To choose an independent bookstore which has now become particularly more important again.
PL: Yes.
LD: To support. Which one would you choose?
PL: So in Chalkwell Hall in Chalkwell which is near Southend, METAL who are an arts collective, they own the building CH which used to be like a shooting gallery for junkies and they own it, they've renovated it, it’s beautiful now. It works as an artist residence and people like Hannah Gadsby and Chris Krause, I stayed there when Chris Kraus was there,
LD: Cool.
PL: They’ve all stayed there, big people. And the bottom floor, as well as a performance area, they’ve got an amazing bookshop called The Bookshop Experience from a local collector. It’s like second hand books but they’re specifically selected and it’s just got such a diverse range of books and it’s brilliant and they’re really affordable. The amount of times I’ve come out of there with big piles of books is incredible. Yeah.
LD: Exciting. I’ll visit it one day.
PL: Yeah do, Iain Sinclair travelled down, the psycho-geographer, he travelled down just to go there. And when I brought Robin Ince down for an event he ended up, being the bibliophile that he is, he ended up walking out with a big pile of books as well. So,
LD: Amazing. Thank you so much for discussing books with me today.
PL: Thank you, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Really glad we got to do it.
LD: Yeah me too. After our first failed attempt, we’ve absolutely nailed it this time.
PL: Yeah perfect.
LD: So I wish you best of luck with this period of time whatever it is, but lots of reading.
PL: You too. Have a, have a lovely lockdown. People are dying mate!
LD: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Comics’ Books. Hopefully you’ve had a chuckle, learned something new and, most importantly, added some new reads to your list. You can find full listings of all the books we talked about today in the show notes. If you enjoyed the podcast it’d help us out massively if you could leave us a review on your listening platform. Finally, you can follow us on twitter, facebook and instagram at ComicsBooksPod.
[MUSIC]