Latest / The Downing Arts Podcast / MT25.8 The Little Prince

Transcript

MT25.8 The Little Prince · The Downing Arts Podcast

• 0:00
  Welcome to the downing arts podcast.
• 0:07
  The temperature has dropped, the puffer jackets are out in force and arts activities
• 0:11
  continue apace. The Dramatic Society's evening with Chekhov went very well
• 0:16
  last week and was much enjoyed by all. And Sunday evening in chapel turned
• 0:20
  out to be very special indeed with Carl Jackson's superb organ recital,
• 0:23
  followed by a choral Eucharist featuring Longle's Mess Solonelle. It's a bit
• 0:27
  of a bonkers piece, but the choir really rose to the occasion and it was
• 0:30
  just a fantastic service. The countdown to Christmas begins in earnest now with
• 0:34
  carol service preparations well underway, as well as some Christmas comedy from the Dramatic
• 0:38
  Society. Stay tuned to find out more.
• 0:46
  This week's guest is Remy, who is a PhD student.
• 0:50
  Welcome, Remy. Hi. Great. So you're a PhD student.
• 0:54
  What are you studying and where are you based? So I work at ebi,
• 0:58
  which is near Cambridge itself and I
• 1:02
  am studying cancer biology. What does that involve? Like, what's your kind of daily
• 1:06
  routine? So I'm on the computer analytics
• 1:11
  side of things. So it would be about analyzing how if there
• 1:15
  is pattern in the genomes of cancer and how
• 1:19
  can we predict how it will impact the treatment of
• 1:23
  those tumors? Wow. And how did you come
• 1:27
  to be doing a PhD in that? I mean, presumably, did you do Natsuki or
• 1:31
  did you just have an interest in it? So I did my study in bioinformatic
• 1:35
  and I was looking for something that was more applied and
• 1:39
  yeah, I just got an offer and I wanted to move away
• 1:43
  from my home country, so I just accepted it. Wow, brilliant. And now you're here.
• 1:47
  That's fantastic. Yeah. So you have chosen to talk
• 1:51
  about the Little Prince. Can you tell us a little bit about what it is
• 1:55
  and why it's so important to you? Yeah.
• 1:58
  So the Little Prince is a book that was
• 2:03
  published first in 1943. I think
• 2:07
  it's. People call it a children book,
• 2:11
  even though I hate this term. But yeah, we can come back to
• 2:15
  this later. I don't know. I think it's a book that I've read
• 2:19
  as a child and I've always been kind of on my mind and
• 2:22
  I read it, I wrote it again recently and it
• 2:27
  was just really eye opening because I felt like this book was much deeper
• 2:31
  than what I first understood. That's really interesting
• 2:35
  because I know some. Some people have. Have come on here and talked about books
• 2:39
  that they've read as children and then read
• 2:43
  again as an adult and actually been really disappointed. Yeah, it's great that that's
• 2:47
  sort of the other Way around. Can you tell us just a little bit about
• 2:50
  the story? Basically, it's airplane
• 2:54
  pilots who crash into the Sahara Desert. He tried
• 2:58
  to fix his plane and he encounters
• 3:02
  a child in the middle of the desert, which is very frightening.
• 3:06
  And the child doesn't. Doesn't seem to be tired,
• 3:10
  thirsty or hungry. And then
• 3:14
  he start to build this very strong friendship with
• 3:18
  the child that he calls the Little Prince. And he
• 3:22
  learns his journey and what. Why is he doing in
• 3:26
  the desert? And. Yeah, through this journey,
• 3:29
  you learn that the Little Prince used
• 3:33
  to be on a planet and left this planet and arrived
• 3:37
  after a journey on Earth. And you kind of have this
• 3:41
  strong. Throughout this journey, you have like, so Little
• 3:45
  Prince learning about the complexity of relationship
• 3:49
  and love and learning about life as a whole,
• 3:52
  I would say. Wow. So how old were you when you first read it?
• 3:56
  I must have been like 11 or 12, to be fair.
• 4:00
  I didn't. I don't think I read it first. I think I listened to it.
• 4:03
  It was one of the CD we had and we used
• 4:07
  to play in the car going in, holiday trip. And then
• 4:12
  I must have read it like a year or two after hearing
• 4:16
  about it first. Was there a sort of gap of time before you came
• 4:20
  back to it? Yeah. So to be. I just rediscovered
• 4:24
  the book while I was cleaning a house,
• 4:27
  the house of my grandmother, and I rediscovered
• 4:31
  this book and I was like, oh, let's try it again, let's read it again.
• 4:35
  Because it's a very short book. So I knew it wasn't going to take
• 4:39
  much time. And, yeah, I was surprised. So who's
• 4:44
  the author of the book? So the author is Antoine de Saint
• 4:48
  Exupery. He was a
• 4:53
  pilot during the First World War. So you'll
• 4:57
  see, like, this book is heavily inspired by his own
• 5:01
  life because he was a pilot, and at some point he crashed
• 5:05
  into the Sahara deserts during World War I.
• 5:07
  Then he started to, like. He had already
• 5:12
  a lot of success with his book. And in between the two wars, he moved
• 5:16
  to New York. And it was a very hard time for him, especially when the
• 5:20
  second war started, because he felt like he was obligated
• 5:24
  to finish his book, but he felt like he was letting his country and even
• 5:28
  his old war friends down by just sitting
• 5:32
  in New York City and not, like, contributing to the fight.
• 5:36
  And his publisher was asking. He had a contract to
• 5:40
  publish another book and he chose to make a children's
• 5:44
  book, which was very surprising for everyone. But,
• 5:47
  yeah, he made it work. So you said earlier that
• 5:51
  you dislike the term children's book. Is that in general or just
• 5:55
  in relation to this book? I would say that at first it
• 5:59
  was in relation to this book and then become in general, like speaking about
• 6:03
  the people that I wanted to do this podcast and talk about the little prints,
• 6:07
  people were very surprised, were telling me that like it was a children's
• 6:11
  book and there was nothing implying that there was nothing really more to
• 6:15
  talk about. And I think what I don't like about the terminology
• 6:19
  children's book is that it implies that it's simple
• 6:23
  and it's not profound, which I just believe is not true.
• 6:27
  When you think like Disney movie or even like other
• 6:31
  children's book, they are all quite interesting and quite profound.
• 6:35
  And I guess that's why I suppose.
• 6:38
  It comes from, I don't know, sort of fairy tales, you know,
• 6:42
  were meant to be, you know, on the surface it was a simple
• 6:46
  story, but below that there's sort of, it's meant to be quite like teaching children
• 6:50
  a lesson or, you know, or teaching them, I don't know, some kind of moral
• 6:54
  code or something. I don't know. I mean, do you think
• 6:57
  that more modern, and by modern I mean 20th
• 7:02
  century, 21st century. Do you think more modern children's books have continued
• 7:06
  that kind of trajectory? I would even argue that this trajectory
• 7:11
  was never the case because when you take like the Perrot and
• 7:14
  Grimm, like first fairy tales before the Disney adaptation,
• 7:19
  those fairy tales were very dark and very profound.
• 7:23
  And it wasn't always like the good guy winning
• 7:27
  in the end or like, you know, so I think it was much more profound.
• 7:30
  So I just believe that children book in itself have always a
• 7:35
  more profound meaning that might not appear to your eyes if
• 7:39
  you're not like ready to receive it in some ways.
• 7:42
  Like for instance, in the beginning of the Little Prince,
• 7:46
  the narrator explained that as
• 7:51
  a child he used to love drawing and what he would draw.
• 7:55
  His like speciality was to draw a boa who swallowed
• 8:00
  an elephant. This would create this very
• 8:04
  strange shape and he was very proud of it. But the adult
• 8:08
  kept telling him that he just. It was a heart, it looked like a
• 8:12
  heart, the shape of a heart. So he stopped drawing
• 8:17
  because he felt that like his talents were not appreciated.
• 8:21
  And. And I think this book is kind of like this boa.
• 8:25
  If you just look at it without asking yourself, you will just consider that it's
• 8:29
  a heart. Especially if you're like a grown up that is used to see heart
• 8:33
  everywhere at work and everything. But when you dig deeper,
• 8:37
  you can find much more meaningful stuff in even what
• 8:41
  seems to be a simple drawing. Yeah, I think that's a really good point.
• 8:45
  I think that's really true. Yeah. So has the author written
• 8:48
  any other books that you've read? He has written other books, but I have to
• 8:52
  admit that I don't know, I haven't read any of them. Those are
• 8:57
  like more grown ups book. But yeah, this book
• 9:01
  is definitely the one that made him the most famous, especially like across
• 9:05
  the globe. It was like heavily translated in a lot of language I
• 9:09
  think, which for the time was like quite rare. Cool. Great.
• 9:13
  Well, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts on the Little Prince. Thank you.
• 9:16
  You're welcome.
• 9:22
  This week in College this evening at 9 o' clock the Chapel Choir
• 9:26
  sing choral compline followed by Port and Hot chocolate. On Sunday, they then sing
• 9:30
  the final evening song of term with a sneak preview of some of the music
• 9:33
  for the forthcoming Advent Carol service. On Monday at 7:30pm
• 9:38
  our Organ Scholar Matthew Chanray will be giving an organ recital in the chapel.
• 9:41
  All welcome. And on Tuesday, 6 till 8pm There is
• 9:45
  a life drawing workshop in the Hyon gallery. Then at 9pm on Tuesday
• 9:49
  there's another Come and Sing compline in the chapel. All are very welcome.
• 9:53
  Just turn up if you'd like to have a go. Further afield. Downing alumnus
• 9:57
  Declan Hickey is performing at St. Andrew's Leytonstone at 1pm on Sunday.
• 10:01
  See the show Notes for details on this and everything else. And if you'd like
• 10:05
  to come on the show next term and chat about anything related to the creative
• 10:08
  arts, the do drop me a line on artspodcastao.com.ac.uk
• 10:13
  thanks for listening.