Listen to this episode at theallusionist.org/trouble
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, carve a scary face into language and pop a tealight into it.
Slight change of scene for this episode: I mentioned to you recently that I was a guest on Making Trouble, the podcast about the trouble we're having with the things we're making, hosted by the brilliant poet and performer Molly Naylor, and she has very kindly let me run a version of it for you here. Before we recorded, Molly had sent me a list of topics and told me to pick one, hence we are ostensibly talking about the topic of ideas, which have been a little fraught for me periodically. I do have ideas, but a seed is not a meal; you sow seeds and they don’t all grow… Molly has some very interesting prompts for generating some, we also talk about how things go behind the scenes here at the Allusionist, and stuff about podcasting and creative work and what happens in the medium- and long-term as a maker of those things? Proviso: these are very much non-problems, on the real world problems dial they do not even make the needle twitch.
For future Allusionist, I seek your languagey questions and problems - need a new word for a thing, a replacement word, something else been bothering you? The weirder or nicher the better, I say. You can request etymologies, you can give me feedback about previous episodes - after the episode about feminist restaurants, some of you have written to suggest I check out The Moosewood Cookbook, so I’m tracking that down on eBay. Anyway, let me know what’s on your mind, go to theallusionist.org/contact where you can write a message or record one using your voice, and if you want to be anonymous or pseudonymous just say so.
Content note: this episode contains some category A and B swears.
On with Making Trouble with Molly Naylor
MOLLY NAYLOR: I guess we've started. Helen Zaltzman. It's official. It has begun. Thank you so much for doing this.
HZ: Oh, that's all right. You don't have to thank me unless something terrible is about to happen that I don't know about yet.
MOLLY NAYLOR: It's not; only that – I should have said this before we started – I don't like to compliment my guests or talk about how brilliant they are.
HZ: That's fine. That means I don't have to rebuff your compliments in that kind of, “Oh no, praise! I feed on it, but also, I don't know how to handle it!” We won't have to do that.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Yeah, I hate to receive it. And if I didn't receive it, I would die.
HZ: Who are we? We're uninflated balloons. Not just uninflated, balloons that had been previously inflated and had deflated.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Left over at the kids party. Shrivelled. That's what we are. Great.
HZ: I do worry that in the era of Twitter, when it was easy to pay a stranger a compliment for the podcast that they make, that I became more dependent on that than I had realised, now that I don't use Twitter and nor do the people that listen to my podcast. I'm like, “Where's my regular small dose of praise?”
MOLLY NAYLOR: Oh, that's so interesting, because you're right – as much as I love to say like, “Oh, I only went on Twitter for five seconds a day,” that's what we all think – but actually, you're right. There was a bit of every now and again, you could probably get a little dopamine hit from the little notification button. Can't even remember what it looks like now. And that has gone, hasn't it? And it's not the same on Instagram.
HZ: I think it was also just the ease of paying a compliment so it wasn't awkward because it was no big effort. I got more insults as well, because it was easier to deal an insult. So I suppose I get fewer complaints now, but also fewer compliments. And I think that has fed into my self-esteem a bit, of wondering: am I on the right path or the wrong path? Generally, I have to be fairly self-guided; but some external force or external signposts on the edge of the path can be useful. And that coincides with a time of life where I'm like, what the fuck is happening? What am I supposed to be doing? Help! Are there wheels on this wagon?
MOLLY NAYLOR: How are you with negative feedback then? Like when you used to get sort of, I imagine some genders more than others on Twitter, having a few thoughts – did that get to you or did you not give a shit? How was it?
HZ: I think it would be disingenuous to say I didn't give a shit. I think what really caused an emotional effect on me was when the negative feedback was correct. And sometimes that was great because it was really educational, or it'd be very kindly put, and it would lead me somewhere better. That was great. That was the perfect kind of criticism, because it was improving. The ones that were annoying but didn't really get to me as much were the certain gender always, which boiled down to: “It's not how it was in my head. And if I had made this, which I didn't, but if I had, it would have been better.”
MOLLY NAYLOR: Right. Yeah. That one is galling.
HZ: Yeah. “I just want you to know I'm better than you, even though I've done nothing except write this email with no paragraph breaks.”
MOLLY NAYLOR: Helen, you chose ‘ideas’ from the list.
HZ: Yeah. Have you got any?
MOLLY NAYLOR: I haven't got any, famously. I tend to have one idea. And I tend to milk it over about eight years. Yeah.
HZ: And then you get a different one on the eight year cycle?
MOLLY NAYLOR: I am due one at the moment. It's not happening. And I feel really disingenuous because when I teach workshops, I teach how to generate ideas. And I've never tried to use those exercises on myself. And maybe I should, but I could.
HZ: Are you allowed to reveal what they are on the podcast? Or is that giving away your trade secrets?
MOLLY NAYLOR: Well, it's more that I'm afraid they'll sound shit. And then everyone will know my ideas-generating ideas are rubbish.
HZ: I really want to know. Maybe I'll generate some ideas.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Okay. Let's try it. So there's one where I just make you write - so they're all writing lists, most of them. And one of them, we won't do it, but like maybe something will pop into your head. So one of them is called Life Stealing: you make a list of like 10 things that have happened in your life that feel significant, but they don't have to be your trauma and they don't have to be, you know, massive things. It could be that sad holiday you went on to Devon. But you come up with ten of them and then see if there's anything in there.
Another one is called “What's missing” and you make a list of ten things that are not currently represented for you in media, but that you would want to see. And then another one is, I just do real quickfire: what's making you angry at the minute? What's inspiring you? What are you curious about? And then people write things down like ‘astronomy’. And then they learn that they might want to write something about astronomy.
HZ: “I'm so angry about it!”
MOLLY NAYLOR: – because I'm angry, fuming, about astronomy.
HZ: It's very interesting when I think if I had ten experiences that meant anything... I just don't retain all that much of my life in such a way that I can think of it as material. I mean that in a positive way, not in a kind of living in order to have things to then make work out of. But I've always found it very difficult to turn my life into other things, or to give it any kind of narrative interest or shape. I enjoy living it, that's fine – it's just plotwise. And also maybe I'm just bad at looking at it and thinking what are ten things that meant something, because then the something may not have been an obvious, may not have obviously come out of one of those things.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Does that mean you're quite a present person? Would you consider yourself to be quite in the moment?
HZ: Yes. And sometimes that's a problem because I cannot really conceive of anything more than a couple of weeks ahead. So if someone asks me to do something, I don't really want to do it, but I don't know how to say no, I'm like, “Oh, it's in a year? That's fictional,” and then a year passes: “Oh, fuck, that was real?!”
MOLLY NAYLOR: So you're very aware of Helen in the present, but you're not sure about what Helen's done in the past or what she might do in the future. Yeah. Who the fuck knows?
HZ: And in terms of sort of planning ahead artistically, it is more just running from one little post to another. And then when you get to the post, you’re all puffed out from running from that last post, “I'm going to take some time to, oh no, now I get to the other post and I haven't done all the things instead of resting!” It's like that all the time. That's the problem of being present. The future will at some point become the present.
MOLLY NAYLOR: I suppose it's quite nice for anxiety, kind of like you're not doing that sort of ruminating future anxiety, but then you're probably experiencing quite a lot of anxiety in the moment because you're going, I haven't prepped for this and it's happening. Fly by the seat of your pants.
HZ: Yeah, exactly. And sometimes it's just perhaps the not diagnosed neurodivergence that I have is one of those ones where it's like you leave everything till very late because you need the injection of panic hormones to make you do anything. Cool!
MOLLY NAYLOR: Yeah. That is clever of that neurodivergence, isn't it, to kind of do that to you.
HZ: It's not as clever as decent time management.
MOLLY NAYLOR: No, it doesn't work in this society, does it?
HZ: But you're right in that I have a concern queue. So if I don't need to worry about something now, or if I'm like, “That would be something that will probably be worriable in four months, but there's really no reason to worry about it now. It's just a pre-worry that would be ruining my time now for no good reason,” then that goes to the back of the concern queue. And that part of it is good, I think. Just worrying about something needs to be worried about now, and not otherwise ruining my present by worrying about things that don't need to be worried about.
MOLLY NAYLOR: So you've been doing your podcast for how long?
HZ: I have been doing my podcast The Allusionist for ten and a half years. And I've been doing my podcast Answer Me This since the start of 2007 with a three-year retirement break until recently.
HZ: Yes. Answer Me This is back! Check it out in the podplaces and at answermethispodcast.com, there’s a nearly two-decade back catalogue to choose from!
MOLLY NAYLOR: It strikes me that you need to be having ideas all the time for these projects. And so how does that work? And how hard is it?
HZ: Well, with Answer Me This, luckily, the ideas are supplied by the audience, because we answer questions from the audience. And sometimes you can tell they are a bit out of ideas because they'll send something like, “I'm folding laundry. Why do we do laundry?” Or, “I'm in a traffic jam. What is car?” You can tell when someone is bored, often the question they have to ask is not particularly interesting. But at least they are supplying all of the ideas. It's essentially the same show every time but different. Whereas The Allusionist, I do have to come up with ideas all the time. I work on it pretty much alone. And when I was starting the show, I started two Google Docs, one for short ideas and one for long ideas that might be the length of an episode, rather than like a little facty nugget. And I still have those Google Docs, and they're absolutely sprawling. And I've covered a tiny, tiny fraction of the ideas that are in there. And there's always more ideas to go in there, because the show is about language and there's infinity things to say about language and the people that use it, which is all of them, pretty much.
And even if I did finish all of those ideas, by the time I finished, new things would have occurred to talk about. So in a way, the shortage isn't of ideas. The shortage is of me having things to say about those ideas, or the ability to find people that have things to say about them, which is one of my tricky bits. If you're writing to someone from an independent podcast, it's not the same as writing to them from the BBC where they're like, “Oh, BBC, I've heard of that.” They're like, “Independent podcast? What's that? Three people talking in the garage unedited about just the farts that they do?”
Sometimes it is tricky on that score, but also just I'm sick of myself. I'm sick of this brain, Molly, and the very limited amount of things that's in there. As far as a barrel that has been scraped, we've gone right through the wood, right through the splinters. And then you're like, “Oh, there's another barrel on the outside of this barrel. Okay. It doesn't feel full, but we're not through the barrel, I guess, that we're scraping.”
MOLLY NAYLOR: Do you mean you're sick of – when you say you're sick of this brain: is it like the way your brain works, or do you feel like there's a kind of different way of working out there that would inspire you more? Or do you just feel like the constraints of like the podcasts that you do mean that, coupled with your brain, it just has to be the way it is, and that's gone on for quite a long time?
HZ: The good thing about podcast as I do it is that if I think of a particularly funny or weird way to cover a topic, I can. I can vary the format quite a bit when inspiration strikes, which it occasionally does. So there's that. I think the true limitation of my brain is that the more I know, the more I'm aware that I know nothing. And when I was doing A-levels – no, GCSEs, I did GCSE Ancient Greek, and we had to study one of the books of Plato's Apology, which is about the trial of Socrates. And the thing that he keeps saying that is, “I am the wisest man in the world, because I know that I know nothing.” And at the time it pissed me off so much. And now that I'm 45, I'm like, “Yeah, he's got a point. I know that I know nothing.”
I wouldn't say I'm the wisest, but I just feel less and less confident, even though my brain is probably better because of everything that I've learned in the course of adulthood. I think that when I was younger, the idea of education when I was growing up was really quite confining, but I didn't know it yet. It felt very outcome-based. And although a lot of that was interesting and enjoyable, it didn't really mean very much.
And the true education, I think, has been since I started The Allusionist, and a lot of that is just the amount of unexpected things. When I started those Google Docs, I hadn't really thought much beyond, “Ooh, language is full of interesting stories, isn't this word funny? Ooh, all these weird decisions people made 800 years ago that mean we've got this word.” And I hadn't really thought yet about all the human behaviour, which is the most interesting thing about language, and the ways that power is encoded in it and reinforced by it, and that things that we're still doing, we maybe don't understand, because a lot of us were never taught to analyse this very complex tool we use all the time – I wasn't. So I'm very grateful to have had that as my career, the self-education. And then I think: what was all the formal education doing? What kind of propaganda version of information was my time being whiled away with then?
MOLLY NAYLOR: I went to dinner at someone's house the other night, and I asked a question. It was quite a lot of people. It was nine people around a table. Can you imagine that? Imagine the size of the table. And it was really nice.
HZ: Was it round, or rectangular, or square?
MOLLY NAYLOR: It was rectangular, long rectangle, really nice. It made me very avaricious. You know when you go in certain houses, and they make you angry, because you're like, “This is exactly the house I would have –”
HZ: “– if I was living correctly.”
MOLLY NAYLOR: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
HZ: “We've got a real adult here!”
MOLLY NAYLOR: “We've got a real adult here, and they're five years younger than me. Woohoo!”
HZ: Nauseating.
MOLLY NAYLOR: So I was in this lush house, being avaricious. And because I felt a bit like, oh, this is a sort of dinner party for fancy people, I'm going to ask the table a question, because that's the sort of thing people do at dinner parties on TV and films.
HZ: “Politics: what do you think of it?”
MOLLY NAYLOR: Exactly. So I asked a question that I do actually think is a good question, and it was about redesigning the school system – if you could have one lesson, if you could add it to the curriculum – and people said some really cool stuff. Somebody said bodily acceptance, acceptance of my own body. I was like, “That is mint.” And someone else said food, but not in a kind of we're designing a pizza for nine weeks and drawing some pictures, but actually just like how to make a fucking banging pasta sauce. Do you know what I said? I don't know if I stand by it – I said DIY.
HZ: You know, that would be so great.
MOLLY NAYLOR: It would be useful. Drilling –
HZ: Simple fixes; what is a fuse box?
MOLLY NAYLOR: What is a fuse box? How do you hang a picture? How do you drill? So what about you? What's your immediate – with our school that we're setting up around the long rectangular table – what would you like to teach or learn?
HZ: The practical answer – I wouldn't want to teach it, I would need someone else to teach it – but basic financial management.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Oh, yeah, great one.
HZ: How do you do it? Sensible budgeting, things like that. And then the more esoteric theoretical thing was sort of like how to be a person skills. So what would that be like: sociology? Which a lot of schools do teach – my nibling just did an A-level in it, and I was quite jealous because like our A-levels were all subjects, topics, things that you put in a textbook and they don't need to crawl out the textbook and infect real life.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Yeah. What were you like in school?
HZ: When I was little, like up to 11, I was academically very good. I found exams and things very easy. And after 11, I just kind of stopped working. And everyone was like, “You've got so much potential and you waste it.” And I suppose it was my form of rebellion to do worse, because I'd kind of been hot-housed.
And similarly, I was very good at drawing and painting when I was little, technically, but I couldn't express myself through it. I had nothing to say. And I still run up against this, like I have quite a lot of technical skill, but what for? And so in a way, I suppose, I was a bit trapped in myself. And I think I also felt very insecure in my body. And my response to that was to, I suppose, be a bit of a weirdo.
Oh, yeah – so another thing that I didn't understand, and this, I guess, would not get into schools now either, but I grew up in Section 28, so we were not taught about any kinds of queerness. It took me so long to learn that all my life I had felt like I was doing the performance of female and femininity wrong. But I just didn't know it was a performance. I just felt like a worse person, a low-grade person, because I hadn't succeeded on the things that were considered valuable. And then in my mid-30s, which is like partly through doing The Allusionist and considering things through a language sense, I was like, “Oh, no, that was just like, because femaleness had been imposed on you. And actually, you don't have to subscribe to that.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, great.” And I just wish I had known that from a formative age.
MOLLY NAYLOR: So yeah, let's put gender on there.
HZ: Terrible time to do that, but I think it's so essential. And I think for a lot of cis people, it would be really essential too. And particularly cis men thinking: what is masculinity? How has the forced performance of it affected me? I see that a lot of men dealing with that, whether they know it or not. Everyone can use it, is what I'm saying. Everyone can use it. And maybe some of the extreme resistance at the moment in many places to contemplating it is people's pain that they do not know about, and that they do not understand is just spewing out in the wrong directions.
HZ: Molly asked me where ideas come from. Some of mine came from insomnia.
HZ: I used to get terrible insomnia a lot. And as I would be lying awake in the dark, I would think, “I wonder how this came to be. I'll just look it up and then put it, oh my God, I didn't expect that.” I remember early on in the Allusionist life, I did an episode about the word ‘step’, as in step-parent, step-child. And that was an insomnia idea, where I was like, I'll just stick it up just in case it isn't what I expect the word to be, because I thought, oh, maybe it's just people who are a step away from the biological lineage. And it wasn't. ‘Step’ meant grief. And I was like, oh, interesting.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Wow!
HZ: So sometimes ideas were insomnia.
MOLLY NAYLOR: What do you put that down to? Do you put that down to that sort of altered state being in some way, I don't know enough about the brain, the science of the brain...
HZ: No one does really.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Oh, good. What about step- and grief then?
HZ: Oh yeah. So that was, I think it's like 10 years since I actually did it, but I think it was like an Old English word, like ‘steop’. And the reason it was because at the time, divorce wasn't yet really a thing. So if there was a new parent in the family, it was because a previous parent had died. Or if you had a stepchild, it's because their parent had died. And other languages have different ways to cope with it. And I think quite a lot of them use the term ‘bonus’, which I think in the modern day is preferable for a lot of people. When I was making the episode, I just put out a call on Facebook to my Facebook friends: I was like, “How do you feel about the word ‘step-’, if that is part of your family situation?” And a lot of them were like, “I'd never really thought about it before, but now I think about it, I don't feel good about it.” And then some of them had their own systems within their family for addressing relatives. I know a lot of people who are far closer to their step-parents, bonus parents, than to bio relatives. And yeah, indeed, there's no guarantees that your bio relatives should be ones that mean more to you. Or they had come up with special terms for their various different non-bio parents and parent figures and children. It's complex, isn't it?
MOLLY NAYLOR: It's very complex, but that's such an interesting etymological bonus. Thank you very much. I feel like I've stolen a bit of your podcast.
HZ: No, no, no, it's there for free.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Great. Thank you. I wanted to ask you about your podcast then and like – because we're in our forties now, Helen.
HZ: We're in our forties, Molly.
MOLLY NAYLOR: It is interesting, isn't it? Because I've never, ever, ever thought about age, really, properly. Or, I didn't really think about dying; I did not fear the reaper – and then one day, I suppose I did. And it wasn't even when I turned 40. I turned 40 and I had about 9 million little celebrations and just was like, “This is just a little weird, funny thing. Look at me turning 40, who'd have thought?” And then I think it was like 41 where I was like, “That does mean something. Like time is ticking away.” And it was the first time I'd ever thought about it. Do you think about death? Do you think about ageing? Where are you at with it all?
HZ: Yes, I think I feel lucky in that I don't think about ageing like a lot of people I see online, rather than people that I know in real life, where they spend an awful lot of money on skincare, they're very obsessed with injectables and stuff like that, and I'm like, “You cannot conquer time!” I think having a job where I'm most of the time not visible might help, but I think I'm also just quite dissociated from my physical reality.
And maybe also the way that I was growing up to have performed femininity wrong and not have been beautiful means that I haven't lost a certain youthful currency because I never had it. So that's freeing in a way. On the other hand, when you're like, “Oh, a new bit of my body hurts now, is that going to be like that forever?” And the sense of being an AFAB person in my 40s, is this the invisibility time? Will no one care what I have to say? And do I then have to wait to be 80 and then doing things where people are like, “Oh, that's unexpected, look at that 80-year-old doing headstands” or whatever. I can't do headstands. But you know how those adverts –
MOLLY NAYLOR: You've got a long time to learn how to do them.
HZ: Exactly – you know, where it's like a toddler and an 80-year-old break dancing or something like, it's funny because it's surprise age groups, you know, shit like that. I don't want that. And I don't know if I'm in for the kind of thing where I get to be a venerated middle aged/older middle aged intellectual man, if that's still a career that is available to them, like the 20th century intellectuals and stuff; I'm also not smart enough. But I think the main thing that gets me is just the feeling like there's more behind me than in front of me now.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Yeah.
HZ: And also in my 20s, I kind of wasted them a bit, but also, you can always be in discovery mode. I think that doesn't need to end, whatever era of your life you're in. And The Guardian's regular feature, A New Life at 60, is very comforting in that score. Really recommend it. But in my 20s, it was like, “What am I doing?” 30s, it was like, “Here's some interesting things that your 20s threw up, let's see what we can make of them,” in 40s, it's like, “OK, this is what you have. There are fewer things that are going to happen now. There is less potential. There just is now the things that you built without necessarily even realising it. What are you going to do with those? Oh, great. One of those is podcasting, something that for a lot of the time you were doing it was not – well, for basically all the time you're doing it is not respected, but you spent time building it into a medium that mattered so that some other people could flounce in, make a load of money, destroy it and then leave.”
MOLLY NAYLOR: Yay! Thank you!
HZ: Where's my retirement money from the boom time? It is nowhere! So there's the sort of fear financially. I do think to some extent, certainty and security are illusory and guaranteed through no job and no purchases. But I do feel like there's all these ways in which I could have been more prudent and I didn't know what I don't know.
MOLLY NAYLOR: You were sort of building something you didn't know you were building. And I think that as well, like my 20s, I was just sort of reacting to things and trying to stay afloat and having to just do whatever it took to do that. And then suddenly it's kind of landing in my 30s and going, “OK, I think I'm just about there with a career that doesn't involve too much other work that I don't really want to do. But it's definitely not one that I sat down and sort of sketched out and designed. But here I am.” And that's it just sort of has to be OK, doesn't it? And then going, I'm not looking ahead to this kind of hypothetical future where it might all like pop off for me. It just is this.
HZ: Yeah. That's a very interesting thing to contemplate, isn't it? What is success?
HZ: It only just occurred to me to look up the etymology of ‘success’, and when it was first documented in English in the 1530s, it really meant an outcome or a conclusion - not necessarily a splendid one, that meaning appeared around 1580 and after a couple of hundred years the earlier neutral meaning of ‘success’ had been trounced out of existence by the successful one.
HZ: Because I find myself the last few years without knowing what to strive for. I've never been good at thinking that's a goal and I would like to do what it takes to get there. I think I've always been more about the journey than the destination.
But all the things that were supposed to be aspirational aren't the ones that drive me. But now it is: what is there?
MOLLY NAYLOR: When you came up with the idea for The Allusionist, at the time, did you feel like, “Oh, this is an idea. This is the one. This is going to sustain me for a long time,” or was it just something that you were going to play with for a little bit? How much of that was a kind of really sort of ambitious choice that was quite calculated, or were you just going, “I don't know, but I like this?”
HZ: Yeah, mostly that. Because I had already been podcasting for eight years at that point, what I knew was you can't know what a show is before making it. Maybe like some places will do pilots for months or years, but that's not my method, and also you have to have money for that. But there's something to be said for discovering it through making and through seeing what the audience responds to – and assuming that you will learn stuff through making, and also that you'll make a few episodes and you think, “Wow, I've really figured it out now at episode six, the things I didn't know at episode two, what a little baby.” And then you get to a year and you're like, “Gosh, I was real muggins at episode six, a real know-nothing!” And then you get to like five years, you know, “I can't believe I thought I knew stuff then.”
So going into the Allusionist, that was kind of freeing, to just know that it might not be bad when I started because I wasn't a novice, but it would get better with time. And I've never really been a new things person. I sort of resent, in fact, the discomfort of some new things. I was like, “You'll probably enjoy this podcast more when it's like a year and a half old and when you've blown through the really obvious things, and that takes you to some things that are more unexpected and a bit more intellectually demanding.” And when things feel easy is when I often get suspicious of them, because I'm like, “What am I not paying attention to anymore?” I'm not thinking the right thing, which is just: “Now you are practised, it is easier to do that thing that you have learned how to do,” I'm like, “What are you missing?”
MOLLY NAYLOR: You don't trust that voice, you think that voice is some kind of self-flagellatory thing that doesn't let you let it be easy?
HZ: I don't think it drives me to create difficulty where none exists, which I think some people do do. I think for me, it's like, okay, if it's easy, you'll probably be a bit bored, so you've got to go and find new things.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Yeah.
HZ: And generally with the Allusionist, if I know about something already, I don't want to make an episode about it. I want it to be something where there's a learning to happen; because if I'm not discovering anything, what will the listener discover by listening to it?
MOLLY NAYLOR: Yeah.
HZ: Although a lot of them know more than I do about language and linguistics. They can just feel smug that they were already way ahead of it.
MOLLY NAYLOR: They can be like, “Oh, bless, Helen's discovered something!”
HZ: That's my gift to them: superiority.
MOLLY NAYLOR: It's funny, isn't it, with the podcast, because if you'd written a film, it would have a life and then it would end and maybe that would be five years or six months, but it would definitely have an end point. Even a very long-running TV show. We expect an end point, don't we? A novel, all of these other art forms that started as an idea have an end point. And with this, I guess: have you ever thought about like ending it? Have you ever thought about when it's going to end? Have you ever thought, because you'd have to, you'd have to artificially kind of close it off, wouldn't you? Because no one else is telling you to stop – other than maybe the occasional man on the internet.
HZ: Yeah. Well, I do think about it, but it's a scary thought, because I don't have other streams of income anymore, because the podcasting is so time-consuming. That's what I've been doing full-time for over ten years. But if I stop it, I don't know what I do. Ideas are welcome, please. And then there are all these thoughts I have about ways it can stop that are out of my control. The whims of a tech man can pretty much kill my career.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Yes.
HZ: For instance, the decline of Twitter has had a direct impact on it, it's much harder to get the word out; it's much harder to get ideas; it's harder to get guests. The platforms on which podcasting is available: they can do things that slice our audience into bits, metaphorically. And then advertising: I'm mostly ad-funded, and I also have Patreon, but people's belts are tighter and tighter, and so I have sympathy for them not wanting to pay for it. I'm happy to take the money off advertisers that I don't find ethically completely objectionable. But that money has been getting less. So those are some of the external forces that would make me stop.
And then also if I lose my voice, it's over. Or if I have a head injury that affects my ability to process language, that will make it very difficult to do this particular job; things like that. Lots of stuff. I was in hospital several years ago, and I was surgically intubated, so I couldn't speak for a few days, and I wasn't heavily enough medicated to not have thoughts about what that would mean for my career. And although I did get better, my voice was affected for many months. And I looked into insurance after that, voice insurance, but it's actually quite tricky to get that.
More voice work would be great, if anyone's listening – or if anyone's listening who knows about creative careers and would like to just tell me what to do.
MOLLY NAYLOR: You must have thought about writing a novel.
HZ: I don't think I have much knack for story. I would like to write a book, it would probably be a nonfiction book. A lot of publishers listen to The Allusionist and I'll get emails where they're like, “You should do a book.” And I'm like, “Yeah, I should!” But what? Do I have an idea that is book length? Because you can also get away with a lot of things in podcast form, but book feels exposing.
MOLLY NAYLOR: I think a book that, I think this is it.
HZ: Do you? You've written books. How do you feel when you have completed a book? And how do you feel when said book is published? Are those similar feelings, different feelings?
MOLLY NAYLOR: Do you know what? It's sad actually, because it is always not as fun as you want it to be. I remember the last time I had a book launch – and I tell you what, I had one when I wrote a graphic novel with Lizzie Stewart. I actually really enjoyed it.
HZ: Read it, very good.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Oh, thank you. I enjoyed that book launch because she was there too, and I felt like I was sort of celebrating her. I was going, “Look at this fucking legend that I managed to persuade to do a book with me.” And so it felt very different to me going, “I've done a book of poems and please come and see” – that is sort of thing I feel like in my 20s and maybe early 30s, I would have actually really enjoyed and got a lot of like glittery jizz from. And now I just feel a bit like, “I'm sorry guys, it's a Tuesday night, I can't believe I've dragged you out to this.” And I don't know how to kind of access the person who wants to be a glitter guy anymore. I feel like I might have lost that guy.
HZ: Well, maybe it's more awareness of what the glitter guy is and that it's not that substantial.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Yeah, yeah. And it's not because it is just one day. So it would be weird if you'd spent two years working on something and you were putting too much stock in this one night; it's probably a healthy thing to hold it quite lightly and be like, “That's a sort of necessary thing I've got to do.” Be nice to have a nice time though, wouldn't it? For once in our lives.
HZ: Nice times = great. And I think that's what's satisfying about performance is you can have a nice time doing it, and a nice time immediately after, and there's a certain immediacy to it. It's terrible when you have a bad gig, and then you feel bad. But I also don't get particularly high off a good one. I think because I learned fairly early on, that's not a feeling I wanted to become dependent on, and therefore, I couldn't really trust it. And I think that is similar to how I feel about the glitter guy occasions. I think if I were to do something like write a book, it would be to prove to myself that I could write a book. And maybe that is the right perspective to have. But it's all very kind of internalised, isn't it?
MOLLY NAYLOR: It is. But I'm really excited about your book. So, you know, I think it's going to be good.
HZ: I think we'll enjoy it in like 17 years.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Helen, I'm going to ask you some quickfires now. Are you a bath or a shower person?
HZ: Shower.
MOLLY NAYLOR: I knew it! What is a treat for you?
HZ: Ooh! Sometimes when I'm really tired, but I've done a lot of work, going to sit in bed at like three in the afternoon and reading a book from beginning to end and basically not getting out of bed for the rest of the day. Most cups of tea that I make for myself; that's an eight times a day treat. I think I have quite a lot of treats and I live life from treat to treat. Going to the cinema by myself? Aah!
MOLLY NAYLOR: Delicious.
HZ: Yes.
MOLLY NAYLOR: In what ways are you unkind to yourself?
HZ: I think some people who've listened this far might be able to deduce some. Yeah, I think I say a lot of self-loathing things, even though I don't consciously loathe myself. And I think often I'm unkind to myself in procrastination because I'm not doing the useful thing, but I'm also not doing a fun thing because I feel like I shouldn't. And also, yes, constant self-flagellation at all the things I haven't done, small and big.
MOLLY NAYLOR: How has being creative shaped your life?
HZ: Well, I don't really think of myself as much of a creative person, honestly. Because –
MOLLY NAYLOR: FUCK OFF.
HZ: I know, no, but I'm not being modest. When I was young, it was having the technical skills, but not the things to express. And then in podcasting, so much of what I do is technical. So much of it is boring edit software and fixing sound problems and stuff. And even the more creative things, which is, I suppose, making information into something palatable and occasionally emotional, that feels like a lengthy series of small practical decisions. And then a tiny little waft of magic might creep in, just as if I didn't control it. So I basically don't feel creative at all.
MOLLY NAYLOR: When I said “fuck off” it was because I suppose I was thinking like being creative is a real compliment. But actually –
HZ: Yeah, it seems great!
MOLLY NAYLOR: – It seems great. But everything you've said, I think there's so much skill there. After answering that, do you feel like, “Oh! Yeah, I want to have more creativity in my life. I want to be more creative.” Does that feel like something that you want?
HZ: Yeah, I would definitely like to find different forms in which to be creative. I did an illustration course at the start of this year. I took a little bit of time off The Allusionist and I did this Saturday morning illustration class, in order to do it, and to see if I could develop that form of expression. But also just because it didn't matter; it didn't even need to be good. And so just more of that would be good. But I think that it is important to indicate to people that a lot of the creative process – I know it's a cliche being like, oh, it's 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration, but it's okay if it doesn't feel creative or fun at the time.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Yeah, yeah. And it rarely does.
HZ: You're not doing it wrong.
MOLLY NAYLOR: You're absolutely right. It rarely does. If I think about projects that I've completed, there's moments where it feels creative and fun and enjoyable. But the time I feel probably most creative in its kind of pure positive form is when I'm doing a bit of craft, when I'm doing something where there's no pressure, it doesn't have to be good.
HZ: Right, I love making things with my hands – but often just not having the excuse – and also doing things that are non-verbal like sewing or painting or whatever. But I think that creative experience gives you the ability to edit things out faster, often without even really knowing about it. My first drafts are pretty close to a final draft – partly because I leave things till the last minute. But it just means things have to come out quite close to being right. But that is also because I'm an experienced editor. I do think editing is an extremely underrated creative task and creative force. And in podcasting in particular, a lot of people treat it like it is deceit. And I hate this idea, because every other form of media and art involves editing. And it is to reveal the truth. It is not to manipulate and hide it. It's to clarify it.
MOLLY NAYLOR: That is absolutely spot on. And whenever I see a podcast, I subscribe to some podcasts that often they offer a bonus unedited version of the same podcast: absolutely not! That is the last thing I want.
HZ: Editing is respect for the people that have to absorb this content. Give me the director's cut that's twenty minutes shorter!
MOLLY NAYLOR: When I didn't realise that until I started doing this and kind of going, “I am making people sound so much better than they sounded,” you know, because I'm just cutting out all the moments where they said “um” for ages, or said something in five different ways. And then I'm making them say it once.
HZ: Thank you for your service.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Thank you for yours.
HZ: It is also freeing for people to go down avenues that might not go somewhere good.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Yeah, because that's part of it.
HZ: In the moment, knowing that post-production happens can lead to far more creative thought and speech in the moment in a podcast.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Well, I doubt I'll have to edit this very much at all.
HZ: I took a long swig of tea earlier. I'd like it if you could take that out, thanks.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Absolutely not.
HZ: Glug glug glug.
MOLLY NAYLOR: Helen Zaltzman, thank you so much.
HZ: Thank you, Molly. And you can send me the bill for therapy.
HZ: Thanks to Molly Naylor for this episode of her podcast Making Trouble - some of your fave podcasters are in other episodes, such as Adam Buxton and alumsionist Cariad Lloyd. I also love Molly’s poetry collection Whatever You’ve Got, and the book she mentioned that she did with graphic artist Lizzy Stewart, which is the beautiful novel Lights! Planets! People! about a famous astronomer.
Molly is also on tour around the UK right now with protest singer and comedian Grace Petrie, so if you go to see Grace Petrie perform her show This Is No Time To Panic! then you might get bonus Molly Naylor performance. Find Molly’s work at MollyNaylor.com.
The Allusionist is kept going by the delightful bunch of you who go to theallusionist.org/donate and become paying members of the Allusioverse, who, along with livestreams where I read from my collection of dictionaries, and Paul Hollywood-inspired works of fiction, and watchalongs of such things as the Great British Bake Off and Canadian variant and the new yarncraft show hosted by Tom Daley and coming up on 8 November we’ll watch the beautiful Mira Nair film Monsoon Wedding, they also get each other’s company in the Allusioverse Discord community: at the moment they’re organising a festive gift exchange of spoons - why spoons? Because spoons are great! And who couldn’t use more spoons?
In the community we also share many thoughts and language info and thanks to Bianca for this intriguing fact: “There's a saying in Brazilian Portuguese, "a cobra vai fumar" (the snake will smoke) which used to mean something like "when pigs fly." In the early 1940s in Brazil it was a common saying that it would be easier for a snake to smoke a pipe than for Brazil to join the war. Of course Brazil did end up joining the war, and the Brazilian expeditionary force was sent to the european theatre, nicknaming themselves "cobras fumantes" (smoking snakes), with this smoking snake logo. Due to this, the phrase flipped in meaning: it now meant that a thing will happen, and there will be consequences, and that's how it's still used today.”
Anyway, for that kind of good stuff and more, be in the Allusioverse: theallusionist.org/donate.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
wrack:
1. verb: variant spelling of ‘rack’ (R A C K).
2. noun: a coarse brown seaweed which grows on the shoreline, often with air bladders providing buoyancy.
3. noun: a mass of high, thick, fast-moving cloud.
4. noun, archaic or dialect: a shipwreck; wreckage. Related to ‘wreak’ and ‘wreck’.
Try using ‘wrack’ in an email today; it has given you several options.
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And you can listen to or read every episode, get more information about the topics and people you hear therein, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, and submit a request or feedback, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
