TS Eliot 2: The Waste Land

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Secret Life of Books 1h 21m 5 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 2 months ago

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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

What personal experiences do the hosts share about their own wastelands?

Sophie Gee 0:00

I love a wasteland, Jonty. Have you got a personal favourite wasteland?

Jonty Claypole 0:04

Well, there have been so many in my life, Sophie.

Sophie Gee 0:07

I can imagine.

Jonty Claypole 0:08

The wasteland par excellence in my life has to be the Park Royal Industrial Estate in West London, where I've curiously spent rather too much of my life. So Park Royal is a vast, vast estate. industrial estate in between two motorways. And it is incredibly dreary. I mean, you just feel so depressed when you go there. And it's normally to try and get a car fixed at a particularly low cost by some mechanic who's, you know, undercut the other mechanics. But I used to go there a lot because I had some rehearsal studios that I used to go to with my band. But also like other parts of my life led me to the Australian friends who, in the late 90s, who I discovered had turned up in England and were staying above a pub in the Park Royal Estate.

Jonty Claypole 0:59

And when I heard this, I sent in the emergency services, me and my dad's car, and whipped them out into the family home.

Sophie Gee 1:09

Something more respectable in West London.

Jonty Claypole 1:11

Yes. And I notice actually that the Park Rural Estate is now set for a massive regen scheme. It's been called the Canary Wharf of West London. So Lord knows what it will be like in 10 years time, Sophie. It may be the Paris of West London for all we know.

Sophie Gee 1:27

Yes, absolutely. The Champs-Élysées. So my wasteland was one that I drove through many times a week for many, many years because I commuted from New York City to Princeton, as you know. which is about an hour and a half's drive south from New York to sort of the middle of New Jersey. And one drives along the New Jersey Turnpike, which is a major interstate highway. And as you leave New York and you either go through tunnels or across bridges, you're flanked by the wastelands, the kind of industrial outskirts, the massive coal-burning infrastructure required to keep New York City going. So you pass through acres, hectares of shipping containers and massive container ships, these kind of marshlands filled with a combination of bulrushes and garbage, which periodically in the winter times freeze over into this

Sophie Gee 2:24

Arctic wasteland and then you pass beyond that into this zone of massive power plants belching huge clouds of white smoke into the air with their smokestacks and their chimneys and those sort of scary looking metal towers with lots of wires coming off them. You feel the toxicity of it as you drive through. And I did that every day to the point actually where, you know, it's my big Elliot identification moment. I've become perversely fond of it. I find it a rather beautiful, austere, magnificent cityscape of urban decay.

Jonty Claypole 3:03

And I can't resist quoting Sophie, Paul Simon, who wrote what I think is possibly the greatest verse of pop music, which is the last verse of America describing that exact same landscape and road you've been on. It goes, Kathy, I'm lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping. I'm empty and aching and I don't know why. Counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike, they've all come to look for America, all come to look for America.

Sophie Gee 3:29

Oh, yeah. Well, we found America, Jonty. We found it on the turnpike.

Jonty Claypole 3:34

Right, but we're going to have to turn the other direction and cross the Atlantic to London because... This is The Secret Life of Books. I am Jonty Claypole, a city commuter heading into work in the centre of London. I've come out of the underground at London Bridge, crossing over the bridge to go and work in the bank where I'm a clerk, and I bump into an old chum, and we suddenly remember that we together fought a Roman naval battle 2,000 years ago. So that's a surprise.

Sophie Gee 4:04

Hugely surprising. One of your most surprising bios yet. I'm Sophie Gee. I'm an ordinary working class London woman who's grown up in the poor inner city suburbs. I go to the pub. I live with my husband, Arthur. I smoke quite heavily. And I'm sorry to say that I'm going to have an unwanted pregnancy.

Jonty Claypole 4:23

Sophie and I do these joke biographies because we get so self-conscious and confused about how to actually describe ourselves.