BR: Hi Jim. Welcome to the virtual studio of The Strange Recital.
 
JG: Thanks Brent, I’m very happy to be here. I’ve followed The Strange Recital for a while now and really enjoy listening to most of the stories you put out…
 
BR: Good.
 
JG: Especially the ones by Philip K. Dick, of whom I’m a big fan of course. You know, do you know anybody who isn’t a big fan of Philip K. Dick?
 
TN: Well you know, I grew up in London so the characters in your story were quite familiar to me, as well as The Knowledge—that rather arcane and incredibly thorough test for taxi drivers, archaic in these times of Uber and GPS maybe. It’s a rather beautiful concept that gives me tinges of nostalgia like Trollope’s invention of the letterbox. Was there anything in particular that inspired this story?
 
JG: As you grew up in London Tom, you’ll realize that getting into a London taxi, or probably a taxi in New York or anywhere else is an act of absolute trust, because in reality you never know where you’ll end up. You could end up being taken into the countryside and having your throat slit, or something like that. But we trust taxi drivers.
 
TN: Yeah.
 
JG: And The Knowledge… Yeah well that’s… as you say that’s an interesting concept. In fact it’s more than a concept. It actually exists. Taxi drivers are supposed to know London as well as they know the back of their hands. So it’s that kind of idea that inspired me to write this story—that we trust taxi drivers but at the end of the day where are they taking us?
 
BR: I’ve never been there. But I have wandered in the desert canyons of southern Utah, where there are oddly similar tales of people disappearing. So do the cabbies in London actually tell stories of mysterious disappearances and secret knowledge, or did you invent that?
 
JG: I’ve never heard a cabbie actually to have one of their number disappearing but I’m sure there are a few examples. As for the secret knowledge—I’ve never heard of that either, so I guess I must have invented that. You know writers do have some kind of license to invent, I suppose. You only have to look at folk tales for stories of people vanishing in sort of strange circumstances, just disappearing. Nobody knows where went. Nobody knows if they’re dead or alive. Some of these folk tales go back centuries and they exist in all cultures, all societies. I’ve got two books of folk tales—large books. One of English folktales, one of Irish folktales and there are numerous accounts within them of strange disappearances and so forth. And they’re usually put down to sorcery, or witchcraft, or the work of the Devil, but who knows? I certainly don’t.
 
TN: There’s a line in your story, which goes: “There’s a hidden city inside the city, that goes back centuries, and there’s something there that no one wants to know.” That line really strikes a strange chord with me—B diminished maybe. Like this. (SFX B diminished) Now you know what I mean... I once wrote a story about an explorer who set out to find the London within London, a hidden city inside the city, occupying the same space in a slightly different dimension perhaps. Ultimately he went the way of Johnny Swigert and disappeared on The Isle of Dogs. I feel maybe there’s some synchronous connection between our two stories. The dark side of the obvious perhaps. Does that ring any bells with you?
 
JG: I’m not a musician and I don’t play an instrument, so musical terms tend to get lost on me a bit. But I can understand what you mean when you say: “strikes a chord with you”, because it’s entered the language in a way. The way in which you describe your story, Tom, is exactly the kind of idea I like. There’s something hidden in our world, in our cities, and not everybody knows they’re there. In fact very few of us know they’re there. So we don’t think about them, we don’t know about them and that is the kind of idea that’s contained within The Knowledge. I’ve also used it in another story, an extract of which appears in my book and that’s the story entitled Shadow, which stands alone fairly well as a self-contained piece but it is in actual fact part of a longer story, which I’m still writing. So yes, I think there is very definitely a connection between my story and yours.
 
BR: There at the end of the story, the narrator is driving past narrow streets and alleys he doesn’t remember ever seeing before. It’s the sudden strangeness of the unfamiliar in a familiar place, but it’s really more darkly mysterious than that. I’m reminded of the ancient mnemonic technique of building imaginary architecture in your mind to help you with memorizing large quantities of material… walking through the streets of memory you might say. And in the 16th century, some of those memory systems were based on diagrams of hell. So hell is in the mind. And suddenly there’s a question: will the dark unknown labyrinth of my own subconscious swallow me up?
 
JG: In some ways the familiar places are often the strangest places to be, because they evolve and quite often we don’t notice that evolution and so we’ll suddenly become aware of something. It might be that the front of a store… it might be a new building that we haven’t realized had changed or been erected. That doesn’t apply to old streets and alleyways because they’ve always been there. Years ago I used to work in a city but I lived in the countryside and it was quite a remote place where I lived. And I used to catch the bus to work, and the bus stop was about a mile and a half from where I lived. And that walk  to the bus stop was through woodland. And on the journey, the walk, I used to become quite familiar with some of the trees. And I used to use them as kind of milestones for my walk. That was fine in summer on light mornings or light evenings but in the winter it was totally different. Those trees became something else. They’d merged with the other trees into a kind of dark background and that was when my memory used to play tricks with me.
 
TN: Brent tells me this story is part of a collection called “Dolls,” with the subtitle “and other brief tales of unusual occurrences in ordinary places.” I suppose that description could apply to quite a few of my stories too.
 
BR: And mine.
 
TN: So you’re questioning the nature of reality, as we like to think we do.
 
JG: I don’t think I’m questioning the nature of reality. I think I’m more questioning perceptions of reality, because I think we all perceive our own reality in a different way. It’s something different for all of us. I’ve never had a “supernatural” experience but I’ve got a number of friends who have experienced odd things and they’ve told me about them. And some of those things form the basis of some of the stories in my book Dolls. They’re not supernatural experiences in the sense of ghosts, like the M.R. James ghost stories, or Edgar Alan Poe, or anything like that. They’re little things, almost inconsequential things often, which rationality tells us couldn’t possibly be. The thing about them is, is that they all take place in familiar places—in a modern house, in a town carpark, in an orchard, by a roadside—all the kind of places most of us see every day of our lives. Maybe this links back to what I said a little earlier about the evolution of the familiar. It is perhaps these kind of events to some, are actually the evolution of their familiar. I think in a way we’re all fascinated by these unexplained little events. Even if we don’t believe in them we’re still fascinated by them and I think that’s probably why all three of us write about them. They have a fascination. We’d like to believe perhaps that they’re real, even though we don’t believe they are.
 
BR: The inexplicable amongst the mundane. A veneer of realism with an abyss underneath. And I mean “abyss” in a good way. Tell us where this rather abnormal orientation comes from.
 
JG: The abyss underneath is probably no more than the place where our memories hide—you know, the things we’ve forgotten, the things we choose not to remember until our psyche, or whatever you want to call it, wants us to recall them. When that will be, we have no control of course.
 
TN: Your book is published by Leaky Boot Press, your own publishing company, which has a substantial catalogue of poetry and fiction books. How did you become a publisher, and what are your views of literary publishing today?
 
JG: I published my book myself because I’m vain. Or maybe not. Perhaps I am vain, I don’t know. I sent it to two or three other small publishers and one of them said they’d gladly publish it but it wouldn’t be scheduled before 2021, or 2022. I didn’t want to wait that long, so I published it under my own imprint. Maybe that was a mistake but it’s done now. I can live with it. And very few people read it anyway, so it doesn’t matter too much. My first involvement with publishing was a few years ago when I and a group of friends decided to set up a little publishing company. We had access to a novel by quite a well known British writer that the commercial publishers had rejected and we told him we’d publish it, so we did. We went on to publish a few books, not a great number, about twelve or thirteen, all in hardcover editions, which were very nice and generally very well received. Most of them were original books. One or two were reprints, or first hardcover editions as we liked to call them, including Valis by Philip K. Dick. That project eventually ended and it was quite a few years before I decided to have another go with Leaky Boot Press, and it was only the advent of print-on-demand technology that really made Leaky Boot Press possible, because it makes it financially viable for an individual to have a go at publishing books at least. My views of literary publishing today are principally that it’s accountancy driven. It’s a profit motive drives it. That works well enough for established writers, no matter how good or bad they are and most of them are pretty bad but it doesn’t work very well at all for newcomers, and newcomers have to start somewhere—you know even Graham Greene or Stephen King had a first book. That accountancy driven publishing was exactly the reason why I set up Leaky Boot Press. I knew there were a lot of writers and poets out there, many of whom I knew, who had unpublished work. Some friends were showing me stuff they’d written and even though they’d published books previously, they couldn’t get published. So I said “Let me have a look at it. If I like it I’ll publish it.” And so Leaky Boot Press came into being.
 
BR: And it’s important to say what is meant by “leaky boot.”
 
JG: I picked the name Leaky Boot Press on a whim really. Although it derives from a fairly well known statue of a young boy holding up a leaking boot that appears in various locations around the world. Nobody knows the exact origin of the statue. According to Wikipedia it was probably Germany. I like the image because somehow the boot made me think of commercial publishing and the water dripping from it made me think of the authors who have the good sense to escape from that rat race.
 
TN: Well thank you Jim, and we appreciate your contribution to our podcast.
 
JG: Thank you gentlemen. It’s been a pleasure answering your questions and even more a pleasure having my story selected for inclusion on The Strange Recital. I feel quite honoured, I must say.
 
BR: Yes. Keep on writing and publishing!
 
JG: You keep writing and publishing too, both of you. The world needs mavericks like us. At least I think it does.
 
BR: Oh, I almost forgot. With this episode, we begin year number five. Unbelievable.
 
TN: Should we celebrate?
 
BR: With masks and social distancing? Not much of a party. Maybe I’ll just get drunk safely at home. Alone.
 
SFX: champagne pop and pour
 
TN: I think the way it’s usually done is that we both open bottles simultaneously while connected by Zoom. But have it your way. I’m going to do a belly flop into my new pool.
 
SFX: big splash
 
TN: Aaaah!
 
BR: Hmm…