Backlisted - À Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans

Episode Date: January 8, 2018

In a special edition of the show recorded at Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, John and Andy are joined by the bookstore's owner Sylvia Whitman and author Adam Biles to discuss Huysmans' novel of aesthetic isolation A Rebours.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)8'20 - An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It: A John Murray Original by Jessie Greengrass, 17'19 - Eve's Hollywood by Eve Babitz, 26'35 - À Rebours by J.-K. Huysmans* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Where are we, Andy? Where are we, Andy? If it's Tuesday, we must be on the left bank in Paris. Yeah, you can almost hear the accordions in the background.

Or the sirens. We were just out and about having an important... Flaneuring. Flaneuring. We were having an important pre-podcast meeting in a very nice restaurant. And so far, in about half an hour, people have come up to John and gone, oh, you are Karl Marx.

Oh, you are Victor Hugo. It's great. You can have a permanent stand here at the bookshop. I'm totally coming to live here. Yeah, definitely. You can live here. All I get in London is men coming up to me saying what do you use on your beard?

Can I touch it? No, you can't touch it. Yeah, I'm afraid. It's impossible to go out. And so we're sitting in the library and the library is open to the Sylvia Beach Memorial Library. Well, we're going to do the intro. It's open to people to come up

and browse and can they be allowed to borrow books? Normally, when there aren't podcasts. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's open at all times. I mean, the bookshop's open seven days a week, 10 a.m. till 10 p.m. And George, who founded this bookshop, was very intent on keeping a sort of non-commercial side of the bookshop and so the

whole of the first floor apart from the poetry corner are books that are just here to read i think anyone who comes here i came here for the first time in 1981 when i was 18 and um i hadn't it was before i'd been to university so i was doing my usual and it lodges somewhere in your head this place i mean i you know have haven't been to city lights but i'm sure that's the same and i ended up being a bookseller and i'm sure in some part of i don't know what you feel about this and in some kind of sort of waterstones ideal that shakespeare and company was carly but also i gotta i can't pretend i'm something I'm not, John. You know, W.H. Smith's incroiding is my cradle.

That's my... So it would have been lovely to have Shakespeare and Co. as an inspiration, but we didn't really have one. Early days of Waterstones, when we used to be, we used to talk about the books that, bookshops that inspired us, and John Sandow and Shakespeare and Co. and City House

tattered cover. All these bookshops, venerable institutions came up. I mean, I have to say, I don't think many of the Waterstones came anywhere near. Although there were one or two. The early one, yeah. Yeah, there were one or two. I mean, I think, you know, at its best, High Street Cairn

and the brilliant, Robert Topping's brilliant bookshop in Manchester. Bath. And Bath had some good... And still does, of course, should anyone be listening. It does feel, in that slightly pretentious way that one has, but you know that great line about

T.S. Eliot had about kneeling where a place where prayer had been valid. I do feel this is a place where reading has been proved valid, you know, that over generations of people, you do feel there is almost a kind of a sense of it being a shrine to certain kind of values, reading, literature, things that matter.

Well, let's go ahead and desecrate the shrine. Yes. Are we going to do this? Let's go. Okay. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. This show is a special edition as we've decamped from our usual berth around the kitchen table of Unbound, the website which brings authors and readers together to create something special.

Instead, we're gathered around a rickety table in the first floor library of the legendary Parisian bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, looking out from the left bank over the Seine to the front of Notre Dame. As a view, it's hashtag not bad. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Not Bad. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today are Adam Biles. Hello, Adam. Hello. Adam is a writer and novelist, and his book Feeding Time is published by the Galley Beggar Press. Adam is an expat Englishman, and he has lived in Paris for the last... Almost 13 years.

Almost 13 years. I noticed that you were described in The Guardian, Adam, as, quote, a megawatt talent. That's spelt W-A-T--t not w-h-a-t um and um also megawatt also adam uh works here at shakespeare and co and last year i did an event here a year ago which was huge fun yeah you do you had a year to be ready and um he he and i on both undertook to at the suggestion of a customer in the shop, to read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

I read it the next day and thought it was amazing. Adam, what did you think? I don't like to be told what to do. So a whole crowd shouting at me that I will read The Little Prince. Didn't work. Didn't work. I'm so sorry. Shocking. That's one of our top three sellers as well Prince. Didn't work. I'm so sorry.

That's one of our top three sellers as well. It's really good. I've never read it. Dan Kearney, my co-founder, is his favourite book in all the world. Not being funny. Have you read it, Sylvia? Yeah, I've read it a long time ago. Okay, so we're both saying to the other two members of the party today, you should

read it. It's really good. Have you read it? Yeah, I've read it. Matt's here as well, everybody. I could draw an elephant. And alongside Adam is Sylvia Whitman. Sylvia is the proprietor of Shakespeare & Co, a role she started helping her father, George Whitman, with in 2003. Yes.

Is that right? And when did your father move into these premises for Shakespeare and Company? He opened Shakespeare and Company here in 1951. He arrived in Paris in 1946 on the G.I. Bill and he moved into a hotel on the Boulevard Saint-Michel and he left his hotel door open at all times and he filled his room with books and at some point his friend that he met here lawrence ferlinghetti said george you know you really should open a bookshop because you're just stuffing this hotel room with books that people are hanging out here but you know

it's getting a little small and so he found this amazing space here, which is a 17th-century building opposite Notre Dame. It's a really magnetic part of Paris. I feel like I'm sitting... We're here in the library, and I feel like I'm sitting inside of the perfect back-listed listener's head. So I can look up, I read up to where I'm sitting, I can see books by Winston Graham,

I can see As If By Magic by Angus Wilson. Nicholson's Ghost by John Gardner, a book I've always wanted to read. I mean, it's honorary consul, Graham Green, just in the corner. Upstairs, there's a copy of Dentistry and Its Victims. Oh, is it on the third floor? Yeah. Have you read it? It's such an eclectic... No, I haven't read it.

It's not even on my list, but there's such an eclectic mix up there. A lot of medical textbooks as well. Yeah, next to't read that one. It's not even on my list, but there's such an eclectic mix up there. A lot of medical textbooks as well. Yeah, next to Stalin biographies. Which Burroughs referred to quite a lot, right? He did, yeah. Because he was researching and writing. And you have a cafe here and you have the antiquarian bookshop next door. Yes, we have...

You see, you don't need to leave. We're trying to make it a space where we will lock people in, especially writers, for a long time. Now, we have the cafe we opened two years ago. And surprisingly, because last year was quite difficult after the attacks, we were very nervous about the fact that we'd just opened a cafe. But actually, it brought us a lot of French customers, and it really saved us last year, which was fantastic.

It's great coffee as well. And good coffee. So the book that we're here to talk about with Adam and Sylvia is Arribour, Against Nature, Against the Grain, depending on how you translate it, by J.K. Huismans. So we're going to come on to that in a minute. But, John, I have to ask you as is traditional even though we're in Paris let's not talk about being in Paris.

What have you been reading this week? I've been reading a collection of stories published last year by Jesse Greengrass with the brilliant title An Account of the Decline of the Great Ork According to One Who Saw It. We were talking earlier Andy but there's an amazing,

seems to me that there's been an amazing renovation of the short story. I know everybody says that this is happening and then it goes away again, but I think there are particularly, there are a group of younger women writers who've published amazing debut collections

I'm thinking about Atrib by Ely Williams who we talked about, I'm thinking about Pond by Claire Louise Bennett Joanna Walsh who was a guest on Backlist, but Jesse Greengrass this is, it's that sort of crackle of excitement when you read

someone, the stories are very very strong in this collection they're not all equally strong but just her use of language, her precision it's as good a first collection as I can remember reading and it's been a very very good year

for first collections When was that published? It was last year, it's won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and it also won a Somerset Maugham Award. She's just about to release a new novel, which I've read, which is also brilliant. So that's a... I mean, I know that's always the difficult second album problem.

You've done a collection of stories and how about a novel? Well, she's made that transition. That novel is called Sight. And this was a John Murray original. Very, very good editor at John Murray, bringing out, I think, a lot of really strong and interesting debut collections. But the stories are... I mean, they range from the opening story,

which is a very powerful sort of briny account by a sailor of the horrific destruction of the Great Ork. I mean, these birds were unable really to fly. And I'll read a tiny passage in a moment to give you a flavour of it. There's a sort of, I was thinking of things that reminded me, there's a theme of isolation and coldness and salinity in the book. There's an amazing, very Huisman's story about a woman who is imagining,

she's got different lives for herself, including being an observer of polar bears in Svalbard, in that sort of way that Huisman imagines going to London and doesn't actually get there. There's an amazing account of Paracelsus, the kind of alchemist, 16th century alchemist, drinking in taverns

and challenging people. I mean, she does historical, she does contemporary. Two of the stories are set in the future in that kind of... And again, I'm thinking of Sarah Hallah hall uh another great short story writer her madam zero collection that we talked about um there's a brilliant story set in a call center i'm going to read a tiny little passage from that as well um it's it's about class

there's a great last story where a woman a woman goes to, she takes the train journey back. It's called Scropton Sudbury Marchington Utoxeter. And she basically, her parents were greengrocers and she goes to a public school and she's embarrassed by the fact that the greengrocers sort of lies about. And then she has midlife crisis and ends up taking the train journey back and stands in the pouring rain for about four hours outside the greengrocer's shop and has a sort of i mean the books varies about the precariousness of self one story there's a man whose whole life he starts to see ghosts and more and more people die and more and more ghosts sort of they don't really say anything to him but they're just around he has to sort of live through them so the connection past present history it's

it's a really really ambitious first collection um but let me read to you i'll read two really short bits just to just to give you some flavor this is towards the end of the account of the decline of the great or the title story here is truth. We blamed the birds for what we did to them. There was something in their passivity that enraged us. We hated how they didn't run away. If they'd run away from us, we could have been more kind. We hated the birds. When we looked at them, we wanted nothing more than to smash and beat and kill we felt in them a mirror of our sin and the more we killed of them the cleaner we became sometimes we would be two days at the killing or three even and we wouldn't sleep we would keep at our slaughter through

darkness with the light from the fires only and in the morning the bodies thrown from the cliffs would cover the sea for yards around the rock the The eggs we trampled, dancing across them in our boots. No matter what we did, the birds stayed huddled to the rock, waiting for us to reach them. This is why we killed so many of them. Because of this way they had of watching us. This was why we killed so many more than we needed without thinking about what might happen next year this and the way their numbers deceived us making us think there could be no end to it

but we could go on and on forever it was a kind of madness they caused in us and afterwards we would be exhausted on the way home we wouldn't talk about what had happened but only about how much money we could make from the feathers but alone with ourselves we blamed the birds wow honestly she writes sentences and you don't get this very often you think i don't know why i bother i mean really really incredibly assured just very very quickly

and then because it's just a totally different thing it is a much shorter bit this just to say about the woman in the call center i tried to sound like someone who's answered the phone in the bath or like someone who was worrying that what's on the stove might burn i tried to sound like someone who was afraid of flying i tried to sound like colombo i tried to sound as if i was successful and in control of myself and my destiny sometimes i tried to sound like an old-fashioned Hollywood starlet. I lower my voice to a whisper and make it deep and husky and fill it with breath. I try to sound as if every word I utter is an invitation. I try to sound as if what I'm saying is laced with eroticism.

In this voice I say, can I take the long card number? I say, we can also offer you insurance from as little as 99% per month. I say, have you tried turning it off at the wall? That's the end of the story. Oh, that's so good. So she is a real find, and I think she'll, you know,

in that sort of terrible football manager way, I think she'll go all the way. Do we think that I... We've talked about short stories quite a lot on Backlisters, and we like reading short stories. I think bookish people like reading short stories. Do you feel there is a kind of short story renaissance going on? Is that making its way out into the world? I think so, yeah.

I mean, they're always popular. I don't know if the renaissance in as much as... I'm not sure they ever really went away. No. But there is a sort of feeling, there was for many years, and there might still be, that people don't buy, the public do not buy volumes of short stories in quantity. Well, worse than that, I think it's that publishers don't commission them, and I think maybe that's changing a little bit.

We get a lot of story collections coming through at Unbound because it's a kind of, it's a kind of, it's a sort of, it's a classic way of somebody starting because you tend, I suppose the way you tend to start writing is a lot of people start with short stories because they're kind of, I mean I do feel that with the Jesse Greengrass to an extent, some of them feel like exercises in style but there is a kind of a just a you know the quality of the language is so is is so good and i mean and a range i think somebody's trying out different different registers different characters different historical periods i do feel there's a

because i i'm with you in that there was a few years where publishers were struggling to to sell them to sell the short story collections? Well, traditionally, I think volumes of short stories would be published by novelists between novels. Yeah, no. Right? What have you got? Stuck.

But actually, I think there is a change. I think writers who specialise in the short story are more prevalent now than they were ten years ago and I think A Trip that was such a brilliantly thought through there are also sort of collections where the stories are

kind of connected the Fernanda well it's funny you should say that good because Andy what have you been reading Well, it's funny you should say that. Good. Andy. What have you been reading? So I've been reading a book by a writer called Eve Babbitt called Eve's Hollywood,

which was republished a couple of years ago by NYRB Books, our friends at NYRB Books. And it's sort of fiction, but not fiction. It's clearly highly autobiographical fiction they're not even short stories they're sketches and they're about Eve Babbitts or someone very like Eve Babbitts who has changed the name to avoid certain repercussions

I suspect growing up in LA and Eve Babbitts is a kind of she's a journalist, a writer. She's written fiction, non-fiction. She designed album covers for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and Linda Ronstadt. Wow. There's a very famous photograph of Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a naked woman. She's the naked woman.

Wow! So she's kind of an and she gets mentioned in the same breath as Joan Didion, Grace Paley, Renata Adler and so

Eve Hollywood. Is this her first collection? I think this was her first book, yeah she went on to write another novel called Slow Days, Fast Company which was published in the late 70s about LA but this one is kind of sketches of LA in the 50s and 60s

she writes about her high school she writes, there's a brilliant piece in here, a sketch of Graham Parsons when he fell in and then fell out again with Keith Richards. She's wonderful. A bit Candice Bushnell? Yes, I think so, yeah.

And so I'm just going to, I've just got a couple of little bits to read because she's so good, she's so funny and she's got such an eye for a one-liner. The opening chapter is called Daughters of the Wasteland. The wasteland being in LA. She says, I don't remember how old I was when I first heard Los Angeles described as a wasteland or seven suburbs in search of a city or any of the other curious remarks uttered by people. It was never like that for us growing up here. For one thing, there was always so much going on. So many different people and my mother's constant soirees and sorry, my mother's constant soirees and dinners. Wasteland is a word I don't understand anyway, because physically, surely, they couldn't have thought it was a wasteland.

It has all these citrus trees and flowers growing everywhere. I know they meant culturally, but it wasn't. Culturally, LA has always been a humid jungle, alive with seething LA projects that I guess people from other places just can't see. It takes a certain kind of innocence to like LA anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in LA, to choose it and be happy here. When people are not happy, they fight against LA

and say it's a wasteland and other helpful descriptions. Vera Stravinsky once told me that in 1937 she went on a picnic in a few limousines. Isn't that brilliant, right? I'll start, hang on. Vera, this is such a good story, I don't want to build this up. It's going to a very good place, right? Vera Stravinsky once told me that in 1937, she went on a picnic in a few limousines

that Paulette Goddard had prepared, quote, because she was quite a gourmet, unquote, Vera said. And on the picnic were the Stravinskys, Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard, Greta Garbo, Bertrand Russell and the Huxleys. They got into the cars to drive to a likely spot, but there were no likely spots, and they drove and drove.

There had been a drought, and everything was dry. There was no grass. And so finally they spotted the measly LA, quote-unquote, river, and decided to spread their blanket on its ridiculous banks and make the best of it. The LA river is a trickle that only looks slightly like a river if there's been a downpour for three months. But even then it doesn't look like a river.

Anyway, they spread out the food, the champagne, the caviar, the pate, and everything, and sat on the banks of the river beneath a bridge over which cars were going. Hey! They looked up and there

was a motorcycle cop with his fists on his hips looking cross. Yes, Bertrand Russell stood up to inquire. There was a sign that said people were not allowed to picnic by the river. The cop pointed at the sign, looked at Bertrand Russell and then said,

can't you read? If the story's details are different, if it was another year and the Huxleys weren't there, still, it is an LA wasteland story. It's a story of LA. The cop only relented when he recognised Garbo. So that's one.

So it's terrific. She's so good. She's got such a... There's a brilliant one-liner here. She's talking about how much she... She writes a whole little chapter about Lawrence of Arabia, how much she loved Lawrence of Arabia. She's trying to work out why Lawrence of Arabia grabbed her so much.

And she says, Why is there only one Lawrence of Arabia? And why isn't it still playing? I could kick myself for missing that first year. It was all those Academy Awards which made me so wary. Someone should have told me it was good. And then she has a brilliant chapter, and I'll just read a tiny bit. Matt, you can always get rid of this.

Get rid of it, but we're enjoying it. Called The Hollywood Branch Library, where she talks about, and it's this seemed appropriate, what books meant to her, the books that she loved. And, John, she has so many good little one-liners in here she says my education has been through reading which has been my salvation and backbone throughout life the time i wanted to kill myself in new york dombey and son save me charles dickens is perfect for accidental hit bottom anthony trollop is too but he's so divine that it's a shame to waste him just because you're in trouble. It's another

thing. I'm just going to read a couple of them. This is so brilliant. Virginia Woolf is hard, but I've done it. We did an episode about Virginia Woolf a few months ago, so that resonates. Virginia Woolf tantalises me. I wish I could write like that. She is in love with London and I am in

love with LA, but London has seasons and this giant history and strata of society. Virginia Woolf wouldn't like LA. But maybe she'd forgive me for loving it anyway. The Waves is the best she's written. You go crazy, it's so perfect. And then it was her A Room of One's Own that made me believe in women's lib. I never liked it when Gloria the Crass and Gross was trying to write about it. It was like reading that radical propaganda where the words are so

poorly selected and so divorced from humans that you have to really discount your eyes to be able to let what they're saying get into your head. But when Virginia Woolf does it, it's easy. She's right and they're wrong. And she's got another couple of things. I love that description

of how Virginia Woolf how this book is so good pure enjoyment man is it a reissue or what? yeah it's a reissue, it's in the early 70s and it was out of print for 30 years the picnic scene just sounds like some sort of really niche fan fiction can't you read

can't you read so we've got we've got Chad Wynn who else should we invite? I've read Proust all the way through because everyone said I'd like it, but Colette's little sketch of Proust coming into a room after everyone had thought he'd gone

and already had begun gossiping about how he was a fag was only about three paragraphs, and you could simply imply the other nine million pages. Nevertheless, nevertheless, I like the other nine million pages. Nevertheless, I like the other nine million pages and I recommend them to anyone in solitary confinement or otherwise out of commission who can't read Proust at the laundromat. And last, I think, but not least...

That's a T-shirt. And last, I think, but not least, is Henry James. When I grow up, that's what I want to be. Henry James is just right. Not too simple like Dickens, not too impossible like Proust, just right. And my cousin tells me,

she's reading that enormous biography of him that just came out, that he was always going out to dinner and to parties. So when I grow up, I can still have fun. I don't know about being celibate, though I don't want to, and nowadays it would ruin your reputation.

And Henry James always understood the spirit of the times. Very good. And that's what Eve Babbitt's... You read Eve Babbitt's for the spirit of the times, late 60s, early 70s LA, as one would read, say, Joan Didion, perhaps. But unlike Joan Didion, Eve Babbitt says, if you're not happy in yourself,

then LA's a nightmare. If you go into it as an avian, it's exactly right. Well, at which point the delighted laughter comes screeching to me. We've talked about books enough. Now for some capitalism.

So we are now going to switch to talking about Against Nature, Araboor by Joris Carl Huysmans. And as is traditional on that listed, Adam. Yes. Where were you when you first read this extraordinary book? I was in Paris. I'd only just moved here. My brother was living here at the time as well.

And I'd fallen in with... Well, we had fallen in with a couple of friends. One Irish guy called Gerard, one French guy, Jean-Francois, who you knew him as Jeff. And this sort of atmosphere... We were all big readers already, but this sort of atmosphere built up between the four of us of this kind of

weird sort of literary one-upmanship. You know, I think probably a little bit of that pervades this podcast as well. You want to recommend the next big book, the next book that is going to sort of... The next stoner. The one that's going to surprise somebody, shock somebody.

And so, for example, I remember Gerard recommended Céline to me for the first time. That was just something which completely blew my mind. Blaise Sandras was another one. L'Autrement, people like that. And then Jean-François one day, I think it came out of a conversation of sort of literature that has a physical effect on you. And I remember him giving me Arébo and saying, this one will make you sick.

But obviously, there's always a way to recommend it. It's going to leave you feeling nauseated. It's going to leave you feeling stuffed in some way. But you're going to love it. And that was the first time that I read it. And he was right. I'm going to state my interest right now i read uh this book in for the first time in 2006 it's one of the 50 books that i read for the year of reading dangerously but i ended up not writing about it i have one of these weird things that happened when i was working on

that book but there were books that as i was reading was thinking oh wow i can't wait to write about this i've got so much to say about it and then when it came to on that book, that there were books that as I was reading them I was thinking, oh wow, I can't wait to write about this, I've got so much to say about it, and then when it came to the finished book there wasn't room because it didn't fit in the narrative that I was trying to put together, so I never ended up writing about Against Nature, but I think

this is just just I'm reading it again and reading some more Huysmans for this backlisted. I just love this book so much. And John, when did you read it? I'd never read it, but it's one of those books that you can't read anything about the development of the novel and the development of actually all kinds of things.

kinds of things uh kind of french catholicism uh the uh the development of decadent art symbolism malame modernism it's it's one of those books which has it's an important kind of uh sort of navigational point for the development of modern literature so you have an idea of what it's about but as it were getting my hands in and kind of circling around with it and reading it for this podcast it's everything that everybody always said it was it's completely unlike anything else that I can think of although it has some

it's on one level a nightmarish version of that Channel 4 show what's it called the house makeover thing with... Grand Design. Grand Design. It's sort of Grand Design set in the seventh circle of hell.

It's amazing. What are you doing with this room? Oh, wow, this room. It's also, on another level, a biblio-memoir. I mean, I love what he says. And we should talk a little bit, obviously, about Huysmans, but I love what he says about it. He said, as I thought about it,

the subject grew requiring painstaking research. So each chapter in this book, in a way, is a kind of an imaginative essay or a sort of trippy kind of phantasmagoria. So he says, each chapter contained the concentrate of a specialised subject, the sublimate of a different art. Each chapter condensed itself into a meat essence

of precious stones, of perfumes, of flowers, of religious or secular literature, of profane music or of plain song, and certainly painting as well. So it is like that. It's a novel about a man who... It's got almost no plot. ...who basically does up his house in the most insane way

and thinks about going to London, leaves, and then comes back. Then he gets ill. I mean, I don't think there is a spoiler problem here he gets ill and then he finds one of the most unpleasant ways of getting over his illness which is to do with he has dietary problems

instead of eating he starts to have meat enemas which is I mean if I were Graham Norton I would be and he is you were talking on Twitter this year about somebody boiling your piss, Andy, which is a great... This year, yeah.

No, this week, I was. This book is a... It must be the first really proper kind of angry rant against... It's a sort of fictional character. I can't think of many books where the invective is more brilliant. It's so dense and so rich, the language. I mean, the scholarship in it is just remarkable. And just one of the things I absolutely love about Huysmans

is he is the master of spleen. Yeah. And I'll just read you this tiny amount because it seems appropriate. It's about a character called Desessent. That's right, isn't it, Adam? How's my pronunciation? Desessant. Desessant.

Thank you. Not Des as in desert. Who we should say is the last sort of slightly diseased kind of scion of a kind of an aristocratic family. Who may or may not have resembled Huysmans himself. Money? Or Baudelaire. Yes.

Well, the relationship between Huysmans and Baudelaire is a very, you know, is again fraught with interest. Desessant dropped these people and sought the society of men of letters Oh yes imagining that theirs must surely be kindred spirits with which his own mind would feel more at ease a fresh disappointment lay in store

for him, he was revolted by their mean spiteful judgements their conversation that was as commonplace as a church door and the nauseating discussions in which they gauged the merit of a book by the number of editions it went through and the profits from its sale. At the same time, he discovered the free thinkers, those bourgeois doctrinaires who clamoured for absolute liberty

in order to stifle the opinions of other people, to be nothing but a set of greedy, shameless hypocrites whose intelligence he rated lower than the village cobblers. His contempt for humanity grew fiercer, and at last he came to realise that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels. It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies, no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own,

took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude no hope of associated intelligence as sharp and wayward as his own with that of any author or scholar and that my friends is in the is on page eight he puts his foot down on page eight what happens is desicccente, utterly sick of the world, leaves Paris, takes himself into seclusion, attempts to, as you were saying, John, distill pure aesthetic experience and fails. I mean, the core being the idea that nature was an unimaginative, you know, repetitive old bore,

and that the great thing was the human imagination, and that not only could the human imagination match anything that nature had to offer, it actually could transcend it. This is at the beginning of an essay, a very short beginning from a wonderful book called Parisian Sketches, which was published before Against Nature. This is about the Bière.

It's like somebody's written an impressionist sketch of the canal that runs through Camden. The Bière, which no longer exists. Which no longer exists, right. Or rather, it runs underground. Anyway, as in what you were saying, John, this is, you know, we're in the age of nature writing, as you know. This is what Huismans has to say on the topic.

And his favourite. Nature is interesting only when sickly and distressed. I don't deny her prestige and her glory when with a fulsome laugh she cracks open her bodice of sombre rocks and flaunts her green nipple breasts in the sun. But I confess I don't experience before these sap-induced debaucheries, that pitiful charm that a run-down corner of a great city, a ravaged hillside, or a ditch of water trickling between two lank trees inspires in me.

Fundamentally, the beauty of a landscape consists in its melancholy. Now that's some nature writing I can get behind. And to add to that, he asks in the book, or rather, Desiccant asks, does there exist anywhere on this earth a being conceived in the joys of fornication and born in the throes of motherhood who is more dazzlingly, more outstandingly beautiful than the two locomotives recently put into service on the northern railways yes i know and then he goes on to point these sort of erotic descriptions of these

i mean it it's it's properly bonkers this book but bonkers in a kind of i wonder if this you know it's the epitome bourgeois that kind of oh yeah anger against sort of i know it's there in swift but it it does seem to be one of the this this is one of the great angry books well france has a great tradition doesn't it of of um epate le bourgeoisie from moliere moliere huismans gansbourg welbeck we're going to come on to Welbeck because of the links between Huysmans and Submission. That's when I read just a few paragraphs of this book in French, was when it came back in conversation with Welbeck's Submission. Yeah.

And like you said, it's so striking, the language, the richness, and it's very flowery and very kind of... It made me think somehow a little bit of Georges Perrec, Les Chaux. Just the detail. It's like the opposite of what Zola does in Pantinian social context. He really, really upset Zola. I mean, Adam, maybe we should do a little bit more context about the book and where it came from.

I want to ask Adam how he felt reading it again, because you read it again for us. Yes, so this was the third reading, and actually I'm not a big re-reader generally, so this could be possibly the only novel I've actually read three times. And I started reading it in French because I thought I'd already read it twice in English. I thought after 13 years I'd give it a go.

And you translate, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your French is pretty good. It's all right, but after probably about 15 minutes, I decided I wasn't going to get very far with it. It's an incredibly dense, incredibly florid French. And also he, as I think we're going to talk about later um with andy like this uh he coins uh quite a few words as well so when you're not 100 stable let's say

in your appreciation of a language you're not entirely sure whether he's leading you up the garden path or whether it's just your inadequacies with a language that... I will say, I mean, we were talking about this. We both... The thing that shocks me the first time I read this book and shocks me on rereading and I think is one of those things which gets marginalised in books like this, but it is extremely funny. Oh, God, yeah, yeah.

And it's meant to be funny. You know, the film director Bruce Robinson, the gentleman who wrote and directed Withnaught and I... There's a lot of Withnaught in there. This is his favourite book. And he says this is the funniest book ever written. Amazing. And I certainly think there are three or four set-piece chapters

in Against Nature. I mean, they're the famous ones. John, you mentioned one. There is a chapter where, inspired by reading Dickens, Desessant decides that he will travel to London. But what happens is, he just goes to a restaurant in Paris. And by the end of eating his meal, he thinks, oh, I've probably had the English experience, and goes home again.

But the whole book is about this. It's about all you need is your imagination and some strange aids. I mean, we can talk to... What, the mouth organ? The mouth organ, right. He plays music. He kind of... Basically, all the instruments in the orchestra are assigned a different spirit. It's a synesthetic mouth organ.

Right. But what's so brilliant about Huismans, assigned a different spirit and you could he would literally a synesthetic mouthful right which but what's so brilliant about huismans in and and also we haven't talked about that there's a chapter four is a chapter where huismans orders his jeweler to encrust his pet tortoise with rubies and diamonds and magnificent stones and And at the end of the chapter, he notices that the toursters have died and he can't stand all the way. I mean, it's one of the most brilliant comic set pieces. But here's the thing that's so brilliant about Huysmans. Several other writers, including Zola,

who was one of his inspirations, Andre Breton, say the thing about Huysmans is he's inviting you he's brave enough and bold enough to invite you to find him absurd before he points out the absurdity so there's a real method to it if he's making you laugh

he also really means it at the same time similarly with his flowers as well so he decides originally he decides he's a fan of artificial flowers, obviously because artificial flowers can supersede nature. But then he decides what he'd rather have are

real flowers that resemble artificial flowers. And so he goes about ordering and finding the ones that are the real flowers that look the most artificial. And then when you're reading it, you think, well, these are going to die. You know, this is going to sort of fall apart within a few days.

And then he sort of remarks upon this a few pages later and seems quite surprised by the fact. I know. I mean, there's a famous description of the Black Dinner in the book as well, where he's sort of making stuff out of black things, having a black meal. But I love, there's a sort of the mad kind of obsessiveness of this. This is instead of going to the seaside, OK? There, by salting your bathwater and mixing into it, according to the formula given in the pharmacopoeia,

sodium sulphate, hydrochloric and magnesium and lime, by taking from a tightly closed screw-top box a ball of twine or a tiny piece of rope specially purchased in one of those huge ship's chandlers whose enormous warehouses and basements reek of sea tides and seaports, by sniffing those fragrances which will still cling to the twine or piece of rope, by perusing a really good photograph of the casino and zealously studying in the Guizhon a description of the beauties of the seaside resort where you would like to be, by letting yourself be rocked in your bathtub by the waves made by the bateau mouche

as they pass close beside the pontoon, finally, by listening to the moaning of the wind gusting under the arches of the bridge and the rumbling of the omnibuses as they cross the Pont Royal just a few feet above you, the illusion of being near the sea is undeniable overpowering absolutely

i don't think there's anything in literature up to that point quite as mad as that i mean it is a totally it's it's and yet at the same time you you know, we'll talk about the... He ends his life, obviously, not just as a Catholic, but as an oblate, as a... That's it as well, it's the delight in the artificial, and the celebration of it. Like, even when he's deciding what colour to paint his rooms, he decides against painting one of them purple,

because he says it is possible to see purple by ingesting a specified amount of santonin and thus it becomes a simple matter for anyone to change the colour of his walls without laying a finger on them. So it's mad drugged up and then it's flowers and then it's amazing gemstones

and the whole, I mean, it's every sense, as you say, that synesthesia, senses sort of swapping out for one another. What's so interesting about this book is that it has retained its power to, as you were saying, make you feel sick or shock you in different eras. When it's published, it's seen as a reaction against naturalism, against Zola. It's described famously as a breviary of the decadence. It's as a decadent text

that Oscar Wilde discovers it, adores it, makes it one of the motive in the plot of the portrait of Dorian Gray that Dorian Gray, this evil book, this decadent book, falls into his hands and corrupts it. It's not published

properly in English until the 1950s and is then adopted by the It seems very corrupted. It's not published properly in English until the 1950s. Really? And is then adopted by the 60s generation as this kind of anything-goes text. Marianne Faithfull says in her autobiography that the way it worked in the 60s, she literally says this, she says, you know, we would say to somebody,

have you read Arab War? And if they said yes, you'd fuck them. And then, but when I That's still going. My friend Chris Sullivan, he was in Blue Rondo, Ella Turk's 80s, you know, rag club. It's one of his

favourite books. And he wrote an essay saying, you know, he didn't know whether Bowie had read it, but he was pretty sure Bowie had read it because in a way yeah this is a is a classic is i mean it there there is that sense of the outsider the person who who just doesn't want to be like everybody else you can't stand i mean the the final jeremiah against the bourgeoisie in this book is one of the it's just one of the great it's just one of the great sort of bird flipping moments in literature i am i i mean i when i the first time i read it and again indeed

reading again i don't know you feel about this i felt it was a book you know like i say it speaks to different generations it felt like a book about consumerism yeah completely so modern you know the idea of somebody who is able to get whatever they want, to have a surfeit of everything, and what spiritual effect does that have? They're empty. He exhausts it. He's left with...

He throws himself on the mercy of the Catholic Church. That's how the book ends. When it was published, wasn't it, didn't he become a sort of figure that everyone wanted to be like? He says... He says, This is him writing 20 years afterwards.

Araboor fell like a meteorite into the literary fairgrounds, exciting both stupefaction and anger. The press were thrown into total confusion. Such ramblings and ravings had never been seen. After describing me as a misanthropic impressionist and calling Desessant a maniac and an imbecile of a complex kind, the academics

like Monsieur Lemaître waxed indignant because I did not sing the praises of Virgil. And it goes on. It's sort of, it's in all this hurly-burly, only one writer saw clearly, Barbé d'Orvilliers who incidentally did not know me at all.

And then he goes on to say the great line that he says, after such a book, the only thing left for the author is to choose between the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the cross. There it is. The choice is made. So it was immediate success when it came out? Yes. It's a huge success.

It's scandalous. It defines the particular era. It wouldn't be an episode of backlisted if i didn't mention the brooklyn moment anita brooklyn as luck would have it anita brooklyn in her actually the her book the genius of the future but republished here in romanticism and its discontents she uh has an essay about huysmans i'm just gonna let we normally do the biographical thing about Huysmans. I'm going to give you that he was born in 1848. He died in 1907. He lived up the road from where we are now

for the most part of his life. Never married. And then I'm going to hand over to Dr. Bruckner. This is how she introduces Huysmans in a single paragraph the most brilliant of the critics the most ardent of the disciples the most outrageous of the solipsists and the most sadomasochistic of the romantics was J.K. Huysmans whose desire to be not only Baudelaire but Edmond de Goncourt and Zola combined overtook him at an early age but was discarded when his moi pointed out to him a more excruciating form of self-denial.

The story of Huysmans' career and his life is a series of novels that move from naturalism to decadence to Satanism in La Barre to a trilogy of novels based around his conversion to Catholicism and Bruckner describes it as a calvary it's a spiritual autobiography

spread through 30 years of writing fiction I also just want to bring to your attention this magnificent book spread through 30 years of writing fiction. I also just want to bring to your attention this magnificent book that I read last week, The Life of J.K. Hwistons by Robert Baldick, which was written in 1955, published in 1955. Absolutely incredible book,

one of my favourite books that I read this year. Was it published alongside his translation? Yes, it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he describes it thus. He says, Besides their interest and importance as human documents, Huisman's novels have considerable historical

significance, since each of his major works epitomises some vital phase of the aesthetic, spiritual or intellectual life of late 19th century France. Thus, Avalos, the missile of minor misfortunes, is permeated with the pessimistic spirit of the post-war years and impregnated with the ideas of that period's favourite philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. Aribor, which Simons aptly called the breviary of the decadence, expressed the taste and aspirations

of an entire generation of writers and artists, and hero as gustav jeffrey observed embodies part of the soul of the dying century and he goes on to to say how he moves through en route and then to the cathedral and then he talks about his remark what he calls huysman's remarkable style which his former friend leon Bloyer picturesquely described as continually dragging mother image by the hair or the feet down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified syntax. But he says it's deliberate. It's a deliberately heightened, slightly gamey, that's the word,

the medicine and food are the images that he's constantly drawing on. I love the way he just turns, he just gets cross. He doesn't like bars. He just decides he doesn't like bars, because bars are not as good as brothels. Actually, at least in brothels, you know what you're going in for. The girls working in bars were as stupid, as self-seeking, as base and as self-indulgent as the women who worked in brothels.

Like the prostitutes, they drank without being thirsty, laughed without being amused, went to raptures over the caresses of a common labourer, maligned one another, and scrapped with one another without the slightest provocation. In spite of that, the youth of Paris had never yet observed that as regards beauty of form, skill of technique, and desirable attire, barmaids were clearly inferior to the women cooped up

in the luxurious salons of brothels. My God, thought Desessant, what fools these fellows are who hang around here. Quite apart from their idiotic illusions, they even managed to forget the risks associated with damaged or dubious merchandise, to no longer take into account the money spent on a lot of

drinks the landlady charges for in advance, or the time wasted in waiting for the goods whose delivery is deferred so as to enhance their value, or the endless shilly-shallying used to prompt and promote the sport of tipping. It's like, because you're not getting your shag, you're just getting a drink and you're paying for it. I think the thing about... I'll come on to this in a minute.

Adam, do you consider that your writing has been influenced by this? If you'd have asked me that before I re-read it I would have probably said mildly but not enormously but there were some scenes

particularly I think because a lot of my writing is kind of people on their own, not necessarily sort of isolated in a building like Desessant, but sort of, for example, in Feeding Time, the director is sort of a recluse in his study. And there are scenes which are almost sort of unconsciously... I can't remember which chapter it is. There's one where it opens and he's lounging in his chair

and he's reflecting on something he's recently been up to. And there is a chapter in Feeding Time that opens on almost exactly the same tone. That's interesting. Yeah, and I really... I can't say it crossed my mind at all when I was writing it, but there's something to do with that sort of, certainly I think turning the volume up to 11 in a way at a certain moment. I mean, I'm interested to know how it's sort of, its status in France.

I mean, it seems to me that there's something brilliantly French about the way he becomes a Catholic. French about the way he becomes a Catholic. I mean, and that there's sort of, there's a very sniffy essay that T.S. Eliot wrote about Baudelaire, you know, sort of saying he was man enough for damnation. But, you know, in a sort of Anglicany way

you can't imagine, you can't imagine quite the same transition. The essay that he writes 20 years after when he looks back on the book and he basically says, I was right about pretty much everything except for that chapter, the number six chapter where I corrupt a young boy and portray him to be a murderer. I probably wouldn't write that in the same way. But otherwise, he's basically kind of unrepentant. He's just saying, I was just training.

This book was just a staging post. It was an amazing phrase he used about God. He says, God was digging holes to lay his wires, which is just, that's what he was doing with the book. So he's able to sort of justify and defend his book as a, as I say, not just as a Catholic, but as an oblate, somebody who is, you know, essentially gone into monastic orders, but still living in society.

In France, Arabois I assume is still read but I was reading something saying Labai is the book here in France for which Satanism is the one that's best known. Yeah, yeah. Very French. And actually I was looking at just our, we have quite

a big French literature and translation section here and definitely that's the title that we sell most of for him. That's very interesting. What's the one you were telling me about, about the country? That was what I want to read. OK, so the book... So he has a huge... We're publishing people.

He has a publishing phenomenal success with Araboa. Three years later, he follows it up with a book called En Rade, where a couple move to the country and have a terrible time because all the local peasants, who they think are going to be marvellous, rustic, H.E. Baines types, rip them off. Disappoint them. And it's interspersed with these extraordinary dream sequences,

some of the most obscene dream sequences imaginable. And at the end, guess what? It's a failure and they come back to Paris. It's the Huisman's narrative. It's the attempt to withdraw to find something, be it a rural idyll or an aesthetic height or extreme Satanism, and coming through it and going, there's nothing.

There's nothing. Perhaps there's spirituality. And towards the end of his life, Huysmans died in a particularly lingering and unpleasant way. But he felt that there was nothing more to write about because suffering was the expression of faith. And therefore that's where he had been going all that time. I guess, in your case of the prosecution,

there's a sort of a vein of misogyny that's kind of, that runs through the book. You're either some mad goddess kind of Salome. There's an amazing, very quite erotic scene. I mean, the other thing, a lot of the artists like Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, which he

kind of popularised through his through the book. But anyway, but there's that then, or there's the, so it's whores or kind of the book. But anyway, but there's that, then all there's the, so it's whores or kind of goddesses. But also, to be fair, there's not many books where a man hires a ventriloquist

to come and throw her voice into a sphinx and read Flowbear for his sexual gratification. So I'm not sure what category that falls into. Niche. Yeah, I mean, I... I wonder if that's a bit to do with the decadence in itself, though. That's sort of, in the sense of, you know, decadence and this decline, it's sort of the end of nature, the end of sort of...

the overcoming nature. And I guess, in a way, to somebody who's committed to that, the figure of woman will sort of, in a sense, will represent the continuance. Well, it seems to me, weirdly, it is a very strange devotional text. I mean, it's a very odd religious book. Absolutely. And I think if you read it as a sort of...

If you read it in that way, if you're looking backwards on it, it's the absolute antithesis of a sort of he hates at one point. Utilitarianism is his idea of a nightmare. I mean, it's it's a very it's a very extreme, spiritually intense. So, you know, all that sensory speed. I mean, it's there in the in the tradition of self mortification through the church, there in the tradition of self-mortification through the church, that the senses need to be engaged and stimulated to the point

of excess, almost, to get to that sort of religious insight. We talked a bit about Soumission by Welbeck. Welbeck's last novel, very controversial last novel, less remarks upon aspect of it, is that

the protagonist is an expert in Huisman and I realised when I went back to this book having re-read Against Nature and read Robert Ballick's book that you can read Soumission as an extremely ironic version of the Huisman's

journey, that Welbeck's protagonist has a moment of spiritual awakening deeply ironically when he converts to Islam because he's totally lost faith in Huysmans that's the story of the book

and there's a bit here by Welbeck I must you know if you're playing Andy Miller bingo at home you'll realise that I've managed to Welbeck and Anita Bruckner in this. Have you got the kinks in yet? I haven't quite. I just want to read a couple of paragraphs.

So the book starts with the description of Huysmans and studying Huysmans. He says, Welbeck's protagonist says, The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know. Unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career

teaching the academic study of literature. It is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95% of the time. Still, it's harmless and can even have a certain marginal value. And then he goes on to say

how do you follow Arabor? The obvious answer is with great difficulty. Indeed, Enraad, which follows Arabor is a disappointing book. How could it not be? And yet, if it's false, it's air of stagnation and slow decline never quite overcome our pleasure

in reading it. This is thanks to a stroke of genius on Weisman's part to recount in a book bound to be disappointing the story of a disappointment. The coherence between subject and treatment makes an aesthetic hole. It gets pretty boring,

yes, but you keep reading because you can feel that the characters aren't the only ones stranded in their country retreat. Huismans is stranded there too. It would almost seem that he was trying to go back to naturalism, the sordid naturalism of the countryside, where the peasants turn out to be more adept and greedy even than the Parisians.

And so on and so on. You know, it's wonderful. Adam, is this a good place to start with Weismans, do you think? I think it's the only place to start with Weismans, to be honest. I mean, none of his books are going to be easy, I think. None of them are... I think maybe Laberre is a bit more narrative driven but it's

the reputation of this book overhangs Wiesman's as a writer so heavily that I don't think all of his other books in a sense gravitate around it. I think it is completely exhilarating I think it is a totally

we overuse this word here but it is remarkable and it is completely exhilarating. I think it is a totally... We overuse this word here, but it is remarkable, and it is extraordinary, and it is unique. There is no other... Most books are like other books. This is like no other book. There's one moment where he's talking about Moreau in the text, and he says, with no real ancestors and no possible descendants, he remained a unique figure in contemporary art. That sentence really stood out to me

as something that could equally be applied to this novel, if you want to call it that. If it's that, absolutely. Who knows what it is? Who knows what it is? But he found the piece. This is the best defence of literary elitism. It's just so really short. He said, he's basically this idea of you could boil it down, a novel you ought to be able to boil down

by taking out all the ridiculous, superfluous descriptions, boil it down to a tiny couple of pages. Thus condensed into one or two pages, the novel would become a communion of thought between a magical writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration of a handful of superior beings scattered throughout the universe, a treat for literary epicures accessible to them alone.

And that's what's so interesting about that. That is Joyce's definition of the perfect reader. Who are you writing Finnegan's Wake for? A reader who doesn't exist, who is able to comprehend what I'm trying to do. Well, it was there and that that sense of you know the universe god paring his fingernails and the writer being the kind of that sort of the writer as priest it's there in elliot as well you know but um yeah should we adam could you give us another one another gamey extract from uh um yeah I've marked quite a few actually but I think

maybe just kind of give an example of the kind of in a sense the underlying absurdity but also the sort of the beauty of the construction of this book so this is quite near

the beginning this is chapter beginning of chapter 2, in fact, where he sold all of his goods. He's moved into his house. Working on his designs. And he's trying to figure out how to essentially eliminate as much of the

exterior world as possible. So here we go. Beginning of chapter two. After the sale of his goods, Desessant kept on two old servants who had looked after his mother and who between them had acted as steward and concierge at the Chateau de L'Orpe while it waited empty and untenanted for a buyer.

He took with him to Fontenay this faithful pair who had been accustomed to a methodical sick room routine, trained to administer spoonfuls of physic and medicinal brews at regular intervals, and inured to the absolute silence of cloistered monks, barred from all communication with the outside world, and confined to rooms where the doors and windows were always shut.

The husband's duty was to clean the rooms and go marketing, the wife's to do all the cooking. Desessant gave up the first floor of the house to them, but he made them wear thick felt slippers, had the doors fitted with tambours and their hinges well oiled, and covered the floors with long pile carpeting to make sure that he never heard the

sound of their footsteps overhead. He also arranged a code of signals with them so that they should know what he needed by the number of long or short peels he rang on his bell. And he appointed a particular spot on his desk where the household account book was to be left once a month while he was asleep. In short, he did everything he could to avoid seeing them or speaking to them more often than was absolutely necessary. However, since the woman would have to pass alongside the house occasionally to get to the woodshed and he had no desire to see her commonplace silhouette through the window,

he had a costume made for her. He had a costume made for her of Flemish fie with a white cap and a great black hood let down on the shoulders, such as the Beguines still wear to this day at Gent. The shadow of this coif gliding past in the twilight produced an impression of convent life and reminded him of those peaceful, pious communities, those sleepy villages shut away in some hidden corner

of the busy, wide-awake city. Oh, my God. It's so funny. Oh, brilliant. Definitely, there's a bit of Royston Vasey there. It's just the madness, isn't there? It's just... Yeah, put those felt shoes on.

I don't want to... But in a way, it also makes me think... Let me talk you through the keys. But it made me think of Tom McCarthy's Remainder as well, in that sort of obsessive attention to detail. Yeah, it's it's you know i don't think i don't think we're going to get anywhere any better than that as a place to end and if if all we've done is made you think of arabor as a comic a classic of comic literature i think it is i don't know who knows what it is it's a great book this is one of those books that

we occasionally do like when we did Under the Volcano. Yeah. You know, there's only one of it. Yeah. And whatever it is, like I said earlier, exhilarating is the word, I find it hilarious and thought-provoking and boring in places because he wants it to be boring.

Yeah, when he's doing the history of Latin, you know, interminable history of a period of Latin literature that really nobody much cares about. And then he drops into Pepto-Nenemas. Yeah, the Pepto-Nenemas. Meat enema. On that savoury, gamey note, we should stop. Thanks to Adam and to Sylvia

and to the glorious Shakespearean company in Paris, to our producer Matt Hall, and thanks once again to our sponsors Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter at BacklistedPod, on Facebook at Backlisted, and on our page on the Unbound site, which is now unbound.com forward slash boundless forward slash backlisted. Thanks for listening.

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