In this continuation of our discussion with Stewart Home, we talk about the Fascist underbelly of Western Yoga practice, the toxic side of the Wellness Community, and learning how to do a headstand.
Books mentioned in this episode:
Transcript:
Cathy Evans (00:10)
Welcome to part two of the Indie Book Club’s chat to Stewart Home. So the first half of our podcast focused on his career as an artist and a novelist also a writer of non-fiction books. And the second half is going to dig into why he decided to write Fascist Yoga.
which exposes the underbelly of Western yoga practice, especially the postural practice. So we’ll get straight back into part two.
Cathy Evans (00:41)
I was really interested when you said you spent, after you gave up your job cutting squares for buses, read Hegel and would watch kung fu movies and that led to the whole Bruceploitation thing.
Stewart Home (00:45)
Listen.
Yeah, I mean, I was, you know, from when I was at school, I liked the Bruce Lee films and the other Kung Fu films. And again, it was a different era because here they all got well, generally there was the old AA, which meant you get in at 14, but they generally got X certificates, which meant you had to be 18. But it was really interesting because if you tried to see the X assist, which was an X certificate, you’d get turned away because it wasn’t suitable.
Nine times out of ten, if you went to see Bruce Lee film or another kung fu film, Cheng Pei Pei or whichever stars you happen to like, Angela Mao, I liked all those kind of big old school kung fu names, you’d generally get in, but you’d have to pay the adult price. So from when I was 12…
Cathy Evans (01:35)
Would
they let you in because the violence is seen as quite stylized in those movies, whereas, you know, the Exorcist is horror or, I don’t know.
Stewart Home (01:43)
Yeah,
I don’t know they just had some weird thing it would just be like okay you’re 18 if the police come in and ask you you tell them you’re 18 you told us you’re 18 they know you’re 12 but for whatever
Cathy Evans (01:52)
you
for a little
12 year old Stewart home. Yes, I’m 18. ⁓
Stewart Home (01:58)
I
was always baby faced and never looked my age. So I still got half fare on the bus without asking until I was 26 and refused service in pubs until I was over 30. But yeah, I think they just thought they couldn’t see why they were X-films and rules weren’t strictly enforced in the 70s. Because I didn’t smoke, but every child I knew smoked.
They could buy the cigarettes in the shops, but there were the machines outside the shops, so no one was checking the age because, you know, there used to be cigarette machines everywhere in the 70s. So that kind of stuff wasn’t enforced. So yeah, that was… I’d always like Kung Fu films, but I didn’t get VHS until the 80s, as most other people didn’t. And then, you know, you could go down Brick Lane or somewhere and get secondhand VHSs for, you know, not a lot of money, 50p or whatever. So I would always go down and…
get my second hand used from the video store but cheaper than hiring it for a week on end if you wanted to re-watch it. and discovered a lot of fantastic movies. mean that was just one day in the late 80s I bought a film called Scorpion Thunderbolt which turned out to be a cut and paste ninja film which I hadn’t come across before. So that’s where…
These Hong Kong producers would buy up pretty much any old film from South East Asia, which wasn’t saleable in the Western market, would shoot 15 minutes with white actors talking about being ninjas and often on a Garfield phone because they thought that was big in the States at the time. So they’d link up the two narratives. If you have one character on a phone in one film, you can have the other character.
the Ninja TV. You will return the Golden Ninja Empire ⁓ Warrior Statue. No, your Ninja Empire is evil. And they’d literally have these two narratives that made no sense together whatsoever. But this one, Scorpion Thunderbolt, happens to be a Taiwanese horror film mixed in with a kind of ninja action. I mean, it’s the most insane thing I’d ever seen. And there were also all the kind of copyist Bruce Lee films. So you had the clones of Bruce Lee and then films riffing.
the story of his brother or the real story of Bruce Lee’s death. Did he die from over sex? Which was a genuine rumour in Hong Kong that he died because he had too much sex. From the time, yeah, over sex is a risk of a celebrity lifestyle. yeah, I’d always had that interest in those films. And then
Cathy Evans (04:10)
I heard that rumour too.
Stewart Home (04:23)
probably around 2005 to about 2010, 11. Lots of those films on DVDs start turning up on Poundland, often four up on a disc. So you pay a pound and get four films on a DVD. So I started rewatching a lot of that stuff because it was in Poundland for a pound, or 25p for a film if it was four on a disc.
Cathy Evans (04:35)
Yeah.
Stewart Home (04:45)
And then I was also going over to New York and doing stuff like I had a retrospective of White Columns, mid-career artistic retrospective of White Columns going in New York in 2011. And that was when the DVD thing was beginning to wind down. So there were all these stores around 12th Street and stuff selling that kind of stuff. So the ones I wasn’t seeing in the UK and Poundland, I could get down 12th Street in Manhattan when I was there for next to nothing and come back with a huge number of…
Cathy Evans (05:13)
Yeah, I guess, because if you’d given your documents away, you had a whole suitcase to fill, didn’t you, for your return?
Stewart Home (05:13)
D-R-T-E-S.
Well, this
was later on, because I was going to do shows, you know, I was having my air tickets bought for me by then. other people. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I had hold luggage. No problem. This wasn’t the 80s anymore. Didn’t have DVDs then. But yeah, so I mean, from the 80s and then through the art strike, I spent a lot of time watching Kung Fu videos and martial arts videos and then came back to them through the kind of films appearing cheap on DVD in the
Cathy Evans (05:24)
⁓ there you go. You moved up the world.
Stewart Home (05:44)
earlier part of the 21st century and then eventually wrote a book on the films that riff on Bruce Lee, which…
Cathy Evans (05:52)
It’s such an interesting title, “Bruceploitation”, because actually he was quite exploited in his life. Was that intentional? Because I haven’t read that book, but was that intentional? ⁓
Stewart Home (06:02)
It’s about, well Bruce
Ploetation describes a subgenre of martial arts films. They’re not all necessarily kung fu because kung fu is Chinese and they’re made across the US and also in a lot in Philippines and Korea as well. Although a lot of the Hong Kong companies would go to Korea in the 70s because it was very cheap to film in, cheaper than in Hong Kong.
Cathy Evans (06:22)
and
Were they filmed a bit now in…
Stewart Home (06:24)
No, it’s describing the
genre of films which entails plots that kind of follow ones from Bruce Lee films. So, know, Fist of Fury, as it was in the UK, a Chinese connection in the US. Bruce Lee dies at the end of that or his character Chen Zhen dies. So you’d have the brother of Chen Zhen in the next Fist of Fury 2.
Or you also had all these actors with names like Bruce Li and Bruce Lai and Dragon Lee. So the audience was supposed to think that these actors were Bruce Lee, but you know they’d be doing things like battling a stuntman in a gorilla suit in the film. So I don’t know honestly that much like Bruce Lee, know there’s some pretty… And then one of the most famous is Clones of Bruce Lee, where a kind of mad evil scientist after Bruce Lee dies…
gets his body because the government needs Bruce Lee to save the world and makes three clones, none of whom look like each other. They work as kung fu fighters, but in the end the scientist goes mad and rather than saving the world from crime, he wants to take over the world with them, so they have to kind of… he sets them to battle each other, but this is fought and then he gets killed by his own clones. ⁓
Cathy Evans (07:24)
So they’re failed clones.
No.
Stewart Home (07:43)
But yeah, Clones of Bruce Lee. there’s, you know, there’s kind of a lot of stock shots. So Queen Elizabeth Hospital where Bruce Lee’s body was taken after he died in Betty Ting Pei’s apartment features in many of the films. I mean, that’s where Clones of Bruce Lee starts basically with the body being rushed into the hospital with exterior shots of it. Yeah, yeah. And create the clones with test tubes and whatever else. So yeah.
Cathy Evans (08:03)
⁓ and then they nick the DNA or they… Okay.
It’s like, do
you ever read that book, The Boys from Brazil, about the Hitler clones, those boys that are, cloned from Hitler? like…
Stewart Home (08:14)
yeah. Yeah, that’s it.
Yeah, no, think I’ve seen the film rather than read the book, but yeah. Yeah, yeah, there’s a film, yeah.
Cathy Evans (08:24)
I didn’t know there was a film.
or the clone idea is great.
Stewart Home (08:29)
so that’s a book just about that aspect of martial arts films. It was great because the first time I went, well, only being once, sadly, I would like to go back to Manila, I suddenly understood what all montage shots in a lot of the films were. It was like the tourist highlights, like when you have American or Chinese films shot in London and they show Tower Bridge and Buckingham Palace. It was like, suddenly I understood what I was…
looking at it was the equivalent in downtown Manila. ⁓
Cathy Evans (08:59)
Yeah,
it’s not a very attractive city. But they filmed Apocalypse Now in the Philippines.
Stewart Home (09:05)
Yeah, they filmed a lot. They had a big film
industry. The Markcasers, Ferdinand Markas, the dictator and his wife, ⁓ bigged out the film industry and so a lot of Vietnam, most Vietnam War films are probably shot in the Philippines.
Cathy Evans (09:11)
Mm-hmm.
You know, a friend of mine went to Manila in the 80s and he was shown around the palace where the Marcos’s lived. And there was this huge crystal dome, which was full of this very fine green powder. And he asked what it was and it was a million dollars shredded for that’s what Ferdinand Marcos wanted. Whereas of course,
Stewart Home (09:29)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ha ha ha.
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (09:50)
Imelda was spending the money on shoes. I mean, can you anyway, it’s so decadent. It’s just awful.
Stewart Home (09:53)
Exactly, yeah.
Yeah, no, there’s an Australian filmmaker called Andrew Levine who made a documentary about a Filipino actor called Wang Wang, who’s a midget. So he did films like For Your High Only. These are these Filipino.
Cathy Evans (10:14)
is he, ⁓ Odd Job in the James Bond movies?
Stewart Home (10:17)
No, that odd job does actually turn up in some Sakura, turn up in some Bruce Blytation films. No, this is a dwarf actor, but anyway, he went to interview Imelda Marcos about her. And it’s this, if you’re familiar with the politics of the Philippines and the power of the Marcos family, I don’t know how naive he genuinely was, but he goes in as this kind of naive filmmaker and asks Imelda Marcos questions about Wen Wen, the…
famous action dwarfs superstar of Filipino film of the 70s and it’s just you’re kind of terrified for him as you’re watching the film thinking this could go terribly wrong but he sometimes somehow manages to pull it off. ⁓
Cathy Evans (10:59)
Well,
he could literally call off with his head or something like the Queen. ⁓
Stewart Home (11:02)
Yeah, yeah, or you know, get the heavies in.
I mean, they weren’t in power when he shot this, but you know, they still had a lot of influence and plenty of heavies and money. But yeah.
Cathy Evans (11:09)
Mm.
Stewart Home (11:11)
but I mean, I find the Philippines are an incredibly welcoming place. The people are really sweet.
Cathy Evans (11:15)
They are very much. In fact, I just went there
this summer with my daughter because she she’s learning to scuba dive and it was the people are fantastic. Really, really. And I always heard terrible things about the food, but actually the food was great. So.
Stewart Home (11:20)
Yeah, you’ve got the coral reefs are amazing, yeah.
No
food is good, I’ve some amazing bananas and stuff because just like varieties you never see anywhere else. But you know, I like Manila. ⁓ mean, Damagatti is probably more where people might want to go but Manila is cool too.
Cathy Evans (11:36)
Yeah.
yeah, we only spent a day in Manila, but we were in Dumaguete. Yeah, it was a lovely place, and the people are just so hospitable, really friendly. And it was great. Yeah.
Stewart Home (11:49)
Yeah.
Can I talk to anyone? You’d just be hanging out on the beach and some guy would come up and start talking to you.
Cathy Evans (12:04)
Yeah exactly. So, Fascist Yoga Stewart, what provoked you to write this book?
Stewart Home (12:09)
Yeah.
Well, given that I combine a visual art and a literary career and lot of visual arts performance, I always like to perform from my fiction. So I never wanted to read from the book, so I recited from memory. And having been born in South London and having a South London accent, as you can hear, we don’t open our mouths a lot. And I also have quite a stone face.
as by Ken Campbell, an artist who also did lot of ventriloquism. He saw me read one time and I didn’t know him, but he came up to me afterwards and said, you were born to be a ventriloquist. I want to teach you have to be a ventriloquist. And sadly, I mean, because he’s a great guy, I didn’t have time to learn from him, but I learned on my own later on. I was just busy at the time and Ken’s dead, sadly now. But he was the one who alerted to me to this.
latent talent I didn’t know I had. So I was doing ventriloquism to do my readings and pretending to be too drunk to remember the passage from the book so the puppet would… it’s okay I’ll come and assist him. Performances. So yeah from this I got the idea. Yeah I got the idea that I would stand on my head because I could do my readings standing on my head. So you know I went to a local gym in South Islington and did my weight lifting and boxing.
Cathy Evans (13:13)
So your readings were in effect performance. Yeah. And you did a lot of them on your head.
Stewart Home (13:28)
But yoga classes were included in the membership. That was the only place they did headstands. So I went to the yoga classes. And the first one I went to, I got a really bad reaction from the other students because I thought, well, I’ll go to the boxing class. And there’s a yoga class after. I asked at the desk and they said, yeah, they do headstands in that. And so I just stayed in. And then these students, yoga students came in.
and they complained to the teacher that I shouldn’t be allowed in the class because they’d seen that I was in the boxing class before the yoga class in the same space. And no, I know. And the teacher had to say, well, you know, I was within my rights. I paid my gym membership. I was entitled to go to whatever classes I wanted.
Cathy Evans (13:57)
That’s crazy.
But also,
that’s like saying your earlier comment about if you like Northern Seoul you can’t possibly like anything else. This is nuts.
Stewart Home (14:14)
Yeah, no, it is, but you know, that was what it was. But anyway, you know, the instructor had to be hospitable, but, know, moved on to talking about things like chakras and meridians and, you know, strange bodily energies I didn’t think existed. And I thought this is, yeah, the mystical stuff. So I thought this is quite incredible. you know, I was going back and
Cathy Evans (14:31)
Back to our the mystical rubbish. Yeah.
Stewart Home (14:39)
practicing at home because I wanted to do my headstand. So, you know, the first teacher I went to, quite soon asked me, you’ve learned to do a headstand very fast, why is that? And I said, well, I practice all the time at home. And she said, well, why were you so desperate to do a headstand? I said, well, I write books and, you know, I’m reading from my books standing on my head. She said, you can’t do that, that’s not possible. So, well, I’ve done it in Paris and I’ve done it in wherever else I’d done it at the time, Berlin, and I’m about to do it in London.
So, yeah, I can’t.
Cathy Evans (15:07)
And how long
do you maintain the headstand for?
Stewart Home (15:09)
I mean now I don’t do so long and I also you know they taught the basket headstand like this whereas I prefer the tripod gymnastic but the basket was the first I learned but I would do up to half an hour which is not what I do now I do five ten minutes at the most. ⁓
Cathy Evans (15:15)
Yeah.
Can I say,
didn’t you get to, how did you feel when you came down after half an hour?
Stewart Home (15:31)
I felt fine because you you got performed and you just get used to it. But you know, got older and I had a shoulder injury, which was what actually decided me against doing so long. I had to be a little bit more careful. That wasn’t from doing yoga, that was from doing weightlifting. but I just got fascinated by the craziness. I started reading up about yoga. And, but this was 2009 when I started on it and…
Cathy Evans (15:33)
Maybe.
Stewart Home (15:55)
2016 I saw a newspaper article about a fascist who did yoga but they were talking about it as though it was something weird. But I was familiar with countercultural fascism in other forms so you know I was aware of fascists being into kind of tarot and all kind of…
Cathy Evans (16:11)
Before
we go, what is your definition of a fascist?
Stewart Home (16:15)
Well, it’s someone who is in favor of kind of authoritarian leadership in society, usually has racist views, but you know, in favor of society being run as a dictatorship rather than as a democracy where everyone has a say in what goes on. ⁓ I can’t give a more eloquent answer and I’ve read plenty of books of… ⁓
Cathy Evans (16:33)
Okay.
Stewart Home (16:38)
there’s a lot of disagreement about how you theorise fascism, but I would also say it is something that mutates.
Cathy Evans (16:43)
But you,
the biggest thing is authoritarianism. Okay.
Stewart Home (16:47)
Yeah, yeah, it’s
and a kind of othering of certain groups on whatever basis. ⁓ Yes, usually minority groups, although, you know, whether you think women are a minority is they’re treated as such. yeah. So, yes, I saw this piece about this, ⁓ you know, the journalists thinking it was counterintuitive that a fascist should be into yoga and tarot.
Cathy Evans (16:52)
Yes.
usually of minority groups.
Stewart Home (17:14)
and kind of spirituality and prediction and stuff, but I was familiar with counter-cultural fascism to kind of rooms and tarot and all that stuff. So I thought, well, where there’s one, there must be more. So I start doing a little bit of research and found some more fascist yogis, although the book isn’t just about fascist yogis. There’s three sections. The first is kind of pre-fascism because we start with Pierre Bernard, who was certainly
doing yoga by 1910 and possibly by 1905 he had an international tantric order which only had an American branch in 1905 which published a journal, number five of the journal which was the only issue because making it number five probably made people think that there were four that preceded it although there weren’t. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, and he didn’t write a huge amount.
Cathy Evans (17:59)
Yeah, quite clever really.
Stewart Home (18:09)
himself but his followers did write stuff and they were clearly white supremacists but if you go along with Zeke Sternhell in the birth of fascist ideology who I think is a very interesting historian and theorist but people disagree with him then fascism emerged in France in 1913 therefore Pierre Bernard who was definitely a yogi with white supremacist and Aryanist tendencies in 1910 couldn’t have been a fascist yogi in 1910 because fascism didn’t exist I mean
you know exactly where and when you move on to Regecca which in Italian is called Fiume which is what the name you see more generally used in English language discourse as well but I like to use the term Regecca because it signifies which side of a certain political struggle you’re on. That was occupied by Gabriele D’Annunzio in 1919 who was a Italian poet who thought he was the greatest Italian writer since Dante. He was actually
Cathy Evans (19:04)
But that was
self-declared, wasn’t it? Yeah.
Stewart Home (19:06)
Self declared, yeah, yeah.
You know, I think he was self deluded as well. Very pompastic.
Cathy Evans (19:12)
Well, the fact
that I’ve never heard of him probably bears that out, whereas, you know, obviously I’ve heard of Dante, so there you go.
Stewart Home (19:17)
Yeah, yeah,
he wasn’t the greatest Italian writer since Dante. Anyway, he sort of led this ragtag army of Adretti and whatever else into Rejeka after the First World War, which was a disputed territory. now in Croatia.
One of his assistants was a guy called Guido Keller who was founded with Giovanna Cosimo and some kind of Italian futurists who were in there with Marinetti. First of all, they had a column in the Futurist newspaper for their group, Yoga, and then they had their own Yoga newspaper, tastefully decorated with a swastika, of course. So this was in 1920 they were doing this stuff. It came to an end quite quickly because…
There was a treaty that resolved the issue of the status of Regeca and they got shot at by Italian naval ships and had to abandon the kind of occupation. But while this was going on, Denunzio and his assistants created the kind of theatre of fascism, so there were the balcony speeches, the Roman salutes, the treatment of those who fell in for the cause.
as as along religious lines of secularized religion of martyrs, political martyrs. So all that got kind of fed through mainstream fascism and into Nazism because while all Nazis are fascists, not all fascists are Nazis because Nazism is just one type of fascism. So, you know, Mussolini’s rise is tied to that occupation because he supported it and that was
Cathy Evans (20:40)
which yes, absolutely.
Stewart Home (20:48)
an element within his rise to create a fascist state in Italy as well. So there’s a yoga connection there, which was the first one I went on to. And then there’s a whole subsequent connected to Pierre Bernard, one of his followers, Francis Yates Brown. And the thing is most of these people tell folk stories about where they learned their yoga.
Cathy Evans (21:08)
⁓
totally, yeah it was a total con, yeah.
Stewart Home (21:11)
Yeah,
Yates Brown in his kind of best-selling Bengal Lancer book, which the film with Gary Cooper, which bears about as much relationship to the book as the book does to Yates Brown’s life, was one of Hitler’s favorites and supposedly when Hitler told him how much he liked the film of his book, Yates Brown was very happy. ⁓ But anyway, you know, there have been academic historians like Kate Ime who’ve
research the archives which are in universities of Yates Brown and also Jeff C. Fuller. So Yates Brown learned yoga in New York with Pierre Bernard in the mid-20s. And if you read his earlier books like Caught by the Turks from 1919, which was a failure, he…
Cathy Evans (21:54)
Wasn’t it
also a far ago of untruths as think George Carman would describe it?
Stewart Home (22:00)
Yeah, is the term.
Yeah, he wrote a book about being imprisoned by the Turks and dressing up as a German governess to escape them in the First World War. With no, yeah, I mean, who wouldn’t want to dress up like a German governess? Whether they need to escape from somewhere or not.
Cathy Evans (22:10)
Great story.
Ha ha ha!
Stewart Home (22:22)
Yeah, in the first book length telling of this, there’s no yoga. And then he learned yoga with Pierre Bernard. And when he retells the story in a later book, yoga saved his life. Yeah, he shoe-horns it in. And also, so he wasn’t aligned to a fascist party in the UK, but he was a fascist supporter and wrote articles in support of fascism and knew all the main fascist leaders and wrote books supporting fascism as well, basically.
Cathy Evans (22:30)
So he shoe-horns the yoga in.
Yeah.
Stewart Home (22:51)
and how great Hitler was in his books and that kind of stuff.
Cathy Evans (22:55)
Hitler was not a yoga fan, was he? It was Hemla. Yeah.
Stewart Home (22:57)
No, Himmler wasn’t, but Himmler was. But
I was going to stick with the British before I got onto the Germans. ⁓ No, that’s okay. It’s hard to tell the story or know how someone else wants to tell it. So yeah, you had J.F.C. Fuller, who was a disciple of Alistair Crowley, who we mentioned earlier, or I mentioned earlier, who learned his yoga from Crowley. But Light Yates Brown claimed to have learned it in India when he was there as a soldier. But again,
Cathy Evans (23:04)
sorry.
Stewart Home (23:23)
K. I. Me has done the archival research to disprove that. But it’s also, if you read their text, you can kind of see it as well. It’s shown in various ways. But Fuller was a top member of the British Union of Fascists. He was a pay-up, card-carrying member of the biggest British Fascist party. also he was a military theorist and historian, so he was very interested in mechanised war. So he came up with the ideas of mechanised warfare that the
the Nazis turned into the blitzkrieg tactic that they used in the Second World War. And again was invited, like Jens Braun, as a guest of honor to events by Hitler and other big fascist leaders. there’s the story which may or may not be apocryphal, which when Fuller was invited to watch a militarized parade of Nazi hardware, Hitler turned to him and said, how do you like your children here, Fuller? To which Fuller replied, I hardly recognize them.
Cathy Evans (23:53)
Mm.
Stewart Home (24:18)
⁓ because the Nazis had done so much with his theories around mechanised warfare. So yeah, there’s a lot of fake literature which is essentially fiction but marked as non-fiction about Nazi occultists and Nazi occultism. It goes back to books like Morning of the Magicians by Pals and Berger who were a couple of French writers in the 50s.
And that’s been taken up by people like Hugh Trevor Ravenscroft with The Spirit of Destiny and there’s endless books about the Nazis and the occult, most of which isn’t true in There are some more reliable writers on that kind of field debunking a lot of the other stuff. yeah, Himmler was interested in Indian religion, influenced by an Indiologist.
Cathy Evans (24:59)
Thank
Stewart Home (25:06)
called Howe. But within the Nazi party there was a split in what was considered to be the best religion for National Socialism. So you had some people supporting Christianity, some people supporting kind of Norse Paganism, and within the SS an interest in Indian religion. this is precisely how Pierre Berners’ disciples described what they were doing in yoga.
as the 5,000 year old invention of the Aryan invaders of the Indus Valley. So these are beef-eating Brahmans who had blonde hair and blue eyes. No, it’s absolute nonsense because Aryan referred to kind of linguistic and cultural distinctions, not to ethnicity originally anyway, but it got…
Cathy Evans (25:37)
It’s just absolute nonsense, isn’t it? Yeah.
And I’ve always found it
so ironic, Hitler being so obsessed with the Aryans when he was a little dark, mustachioed, no relation to the Aryans whatsoever.
Stewart Home (25:55)
You ⁓
But yeah,
so there’s that theory. you know, in terms of Hamish McLaren, was another Pierre Bernard follower, the great Om, who wrote books, he thought that, Aryans should follow Tantra and yoga precisely because it was an Aryan religion, whereas Christianity was Semitic. He was rather anti-Semitic. McLaren.
Cathy Evans (26:18)
A
lot of them were, yeah.
Stewart Home (26:20)
So, ⁓ yeah, so there were those arguments within Nazism and then obviously you have the figures like Savitri Davy who was a supporter of National Socialism from quite early on and was obsessed with Arianism and from a kind of mixed English, French, Greek background had gone to India to kind of find living Arianism there.
After the war, she tried to refound national socialism as a religion. So she saw Hitler as the late born child of light or he who returned whenever he was needed. Yeah. So she, she basically said that, Hitler was the 10th incarnation of Vishnu as Kalki. And you can compare that to a lot of the QAnon theory where, which I do in the book.
Cathy Evans (26:52)
Yes, I remember. I’ve found it very funny reading that.
Stewart Home (27:09)
where people think that Donald Trump is this supernatural being within QAnon theory come to save the world from pizza eating paedophiles and cannibalistic pizza eating paedophiles. So Davey kind of portrays Hitler as this supernatural savior as well. there’s… Yeah. ⁓
Cathy Evans (27:21)
Yeah.
Talk about backing a losing horse. This is after it’s lost as well. This is just crazy.
It’s like, you know, completely nonsensical, deluded rubbish. It is, but the thing is that I’ve done yoga for years in various, I never keep it up for long, but I always restarted and I do it sort of little bits at a time. And so I’ve done it in many forms and many classes and I have never, no one’s ever tried to.
Stewart Home (27:40)
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (27:56)
recruit me to a fascist army. However, they do bang on about chakras and things like that. I just ignore it. You know, I just do yoga because it makes me feel good afterwards and that’s good enough for me. I don’t want eternal life. I don’t want any of this other stuff, you know.
Stewart Home (28:10)
no, I mean, the thing that I think is problematic is the wellness ideology as much as anything else. So I certainly heard when I stopped going to yoga before the pandemic, so I went from 2009 to 2019 and I heard a lot of anti-vax talk, which was anti-MMR at the time. And, now we’re seeing the results of that. We’ve got kids dying.
And I think that’s the problem. also came, I wouldn’t say any of the teachers, instructors I encountered were configured politically, but I came across some very reactionary students and heard some really quite appalling political opinions going to the agrify.
Cathy Evans (28:48)
yeah, the anti-vaxxing
is terrible. And I agree with you. and there are some children who can’t get vaccinated, for example, if they have cancer or horrible morbidities and they actually rely on the rest of the population getting vaccinated. So it is really irresponsible. It’s terrible. But I don’t think it’s like necessarily associated with yoga.
Stewart Home (29:01)
Exactly.
no, I mean, the thing is that, the yoga influences during the pandemic, like crystal tinny or other ones you could take did come out as very strongly anti-vax. there’s other people quoted in the book who have those positions. some of them got into the QAnon conspiracy theory as well.
and it is something that is associated with yoga which is opened up. I one of the things I found going to the yoga classes and talking to people that some of them would start telling you about papers like The Light which is an awful new age far right paper, features articles by people from the the homeland party and other fascist groups within it and
they’d be talking about how there was no longer any left right, and this is the kind of pastoral Q Anon thing that I’m talking about. You won’t find it in every yoga class, and I have come across yoga instructors who are pro-masking as well as anti-masking, but it did seem to be a problem with certainly my experiences and then researching the book, I certainly found more.
Cathy Evans (30:12)
You obviously felt strong enough about it to write a book. I mean, that does take a level of fashion, which you have to respect. But I’ve always associated yoga with that sort of lefty progressive stuff, know, the
Stewart Home (30:17)
Thank
Cathy Evans (30:25)
the almond latte guzzling lot from California, which is very different to, but I do believe that a lot of it was made up by shysters who wanted to make money and who, used it as a way of selling a pup to very credulous people who couldn’t accept their own mortality.
Stewart Home (30:44)
Yeah.
the left-wing thing you’re describing, I think, partly comes out of, the 60s counterculture, which I think is often misread as left when it’s often libertarian, which, you know, it’s anarchism goes from left to right. So you have anarcho-communists and you have anarcho-capitalists.
and the libertarians are more on that side. And certainly when you look at how the counterculture was funded, which I can see from my own mother’s life and her friends and her circle, but also more broadly, you see that it was drugs and prostitution, which a lot of libertarians would like legalized. I mean, let’s not get into an argument about drugs and legalization of prostitution. I’m not necessarily opposed to those things, but I’m saying that was the funding and there was a kind of more libertarian.
Cathy Evans (31:14)
which is very.
Stewart Home (31:27)
element and it could be misread as left but I don’t think the counterculture overall was particularly left-wing. But then you had all the kind of Maharishi stuff coming up with the Beatles so that’s why people make those associations and think of hippies and yoga but I don’t necessarily think that makes it left-wing.
Cathy Evans (31:45)
No, you’re quite right. I don’t think it’s necessarily of any wing. It just proves that, I suppose just because, for example, Hitler loved dogs doesn’t mean dogs are intrinsically evil. I wouldn’t necessarily write off the whole of yoga, but I do think it’s really interesting to be aware of this history. Have you had any sort of backlash against your
your treaties, for example, from Indians who actually a lot of them are very knocked off that yoga has been used by influencers and it’s basically been commoditized to make money hasn’t it from
Stewart Home (32:22)
Yeah,
I mean, you know, one of the things people tell me because I haven’t been to India, my mother had been to India for extended lengths of time, but I’ve never been. Is that the, you know, the yoga schools are full of white students when you go to India and not Indians. But, you know, I actually had a really nice review from the Hindu. Was it last week?
Cathy Evans (32:37)
Yeah.
did
you?
Stewart Home (32:48)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was touching, you know. I mean, it was a very interesting reading of the book, but it was pleading for understanding the… not claiming yoga so much as a kind of Indian and specifically Hindu, but understanding that there were all sorts of things feeding into it, what I try to do in the book is make a distinction between, postural practice or what’s practiced in…
gyms and yoga studios in the West and ancient Indian meditation techniques.
Cathy Evans (33:17)
Yeah, and actually
the postural practice is usually used by, for example, yummy mummies so they can look good in a bikini. It’s got nothing to do with the spiritual or meditative side at all, whatever they might say.
Stewart Home (33:25)
Yeah.
No, I know. So yeah,
you know, but certainly some Western yoga people who didn’t like the book, but that’s the way it goes. If you’re going to, I mean, that was in what happened. Whenever a book is more successful, you get more negative reactions. I mean, Dead Princess was my most successful novel in English. I mean, it changes depending on what language you put in.
that got some fantastic reviews on Goodreads because it reached readers who wouldn’t normally read me. And my favourite review was “This Book is Fucking Stupid.” Which a friend of mine who also writes Christopher Nosben or is his pen name thought that was such a great review that he actually wrote a book where that was the title
Cathy Evans (34:18)
That’s brilliant.
Stewart Home (34:19)
So, you
know, but it’s, I think if you write, it’s quite interesting because when you go and look at reviews of books, if a book hasn’t really reached very far, you’ll find nothing but positive reviews. And if it has reached further, you’ll find some really negative reviews and more split.
Cathy Evans (34:32)
Exactly, you
need that J, that classic J curve. So you’re mentally positive, but actually, you need some negative reviews to prove that the book is genuine, because who’s going to like it? What book is going to be liked by everybody? I mean, exactly.
Stewart Home (34:36)
Yeah.
No, can be liked by everybody, whether it’s a song,
whether it’s a film, whether it’s a play, a TV program or a book. If it reaches a reasonable number of people, some of them are going to dislike it.
Cathy Evans (34:56)
Exactly and in
fact, I’m a member of two book clubs and there’s nothing more fun than having a good old ding-dong with someone you’re polarised about on a book.
Stewart Home (35:05)
Exactly, yeah, because if everyone
loved the book it would be really boring and there would be nothing much to discuss. So yeah, there have been some negative reactions but you know I’m quite used to that and quite happy about
Cathy Evans (35:10)
Exactly. Exactly.
But
people who bang on about chakras and things actually should have the veil lifted because it is a load of nonsense. And I don’t know if you’ve heard of this guy, David Webster. He wrote, I think he’s a lecturer at some university and he wrote this book called Despirited, which is how, new age and spiritualism and all that is actually making people depressed and unhappy
because you’re aiming for something that’s just not possible. know, and actually one of the preconditions for a happy life is to accept your mortality, just accept there possibly is nothing else in the afterlife and just make the best of this one and, and once you accept that, your life actually becomes a lot more relaxed and meaningful.
Stewart Home (36:00)
No, it sounds great, I haven’t read the book, but…
Cathy Evans (36:02)
It
is a really good book. I’m sure that’s what it was called, “Dispirited”, Yeah, that’s it. And it starts with this great quote, so, “When someone tells me that they are not religious, but they’re deeply spiritual, I want to punch them very hard in the face.”
Stewart Home (36:06)
Yeah. No.
There’s
a writer who was called Robin, Robin Cooper had to write in the 80s as Derek Raymond, because he a time 10 years off from his career during which time another Robin Cook and American author became very successful with blockbusters. But he was one one of his great quotes was, I like intellectual arguments that end in violence.
Cathy Evans (36:42)
Hahaha!
Stewart Home (36:44)
But he was, yeah, I mean, he went and lived abroad for a long time. And when he came back in the 80s, a lot of us got to know him. He was a really interesting guy, real character, and wrote some really interesting, he was writing detective novels when he did his comeback, but more literary novels in the 60s. But yeah, that’s a great quote. So he’s worth having a look at because he has such a great quote. ⁓
Cathy Evans (37:00)
It is a great food.
I will definitely count
them.
Stewart Home (37:08)
The
other thing I was going to say about the yoga is I also think people should just look, I can’t stop people doing yoga and if that’s what they want to do, that’s what they’re going to do. But I do think one, they should know something more of the history and the kind of charlatanism that’s gone into it. And two, they should look at it as exercise and compare it to other exercise because are they, you know, it depends what they’re trying to get out of exercise. know, it’s not necessarily a particularly effective
Cathy Evans (37:30)
Yes.
Stewart Home (37:35)
exercise for certain things like you know if you do Tai Chi you’re working the legs a lot more and as people get older falls are a thing that often lead to injury and death so that that might be better but also you know obviously the thing that’s fashionable now which I’m very pleased with is heavy weight lifting and that will you know you can really build your legs with squats and deadlifts at heavy weight. You know it depends what you look if you’re just looking to relax for an hour or two then it’s great and you know there are some.
difficult yoga postures, you know, you can call it a planche in gymnastics or peacock in yoga. You know, you do need a certain amount of core strength to do that, you know, you have to build up to it. But that’s not something I’ve seen actually taught in any class I’ve ever been to. And I went into the low thousands number of classes. I mean, people criticize me because I say in the book, I barely had to go outside Islington to learn all this stuff, because it all comes to Islington.
Cathy Evans (38:11)
Yeah, for example, yeah.
Stewart Home (38:28)
But know, the Yama I went to had a yoga class every day and often two. So, you know, I could easily go to seven yoga classes in a week and try a lot of different styles. I mean, some I would only do once. mean, for example, Iyengar, I absolutely hated Iyengar. the teacher realized I could do some yoga when I went to the class. allegedly studied under Iyengar, was quite old. And she said…
Cathy Evans (38:55)
What’s the difference
between that and other yogas?
Stewart Home (38:57)
Well, Iyengar is very much focused on the alignment and they spend a lot of time arranging the props to do the poses. So quite slow and easy. But anyway, she asked me if I could do a headstand and I said yes and she said, well do one. So I just did a headstand in the middle of the floor and she started screaming at me, you don’t do it in the middle of the floor, you do it against the wall. Well, I hadn’t been to an Iyengar class, did I know?
Cathy Evans (39:04)
Okay.
And also you should have said to actually hold on a tick and I’ll just start reciting my book for half an hour.
Stewart Home (39:25)
Yeah, should have done it.
well, fill up the yoga class. I mean, the other thing that was weird about that class, I never went back, was there was an old guy who lay at the back of the room for the entire class with a towel over his face.
Cathy Evans (39:39)
Then corpse pose. Okay.
Stewart Home (39:40)
Yeah, in corpse pose, yeah, but with a towel
over his face. And she gave me a leaflet about some guru when I went, which I put in the bin on the way out of the gym.
Cathy Evans (39:48)
course
you did and you know I don’t put any value in these ridiculous claims I just I do yoga because I like to stretch and it makes me feel good afterwards that’s it and you know I certainly I think you have to know what it’s for and actually I saw a quote by you about Tai Chi where someone was claiming
Stewart Home (39:58)
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (40:07)
that Tai Chi is something like 5,000 years old and has this ancient history and you know, there are lots of people who get a lot out of Tai Chi, but I totally agreed with you. I think you said something like, it’s just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s good.
Stewart Home (40:21)
No, it doesn’t. You know, because someone could have invented something yesterday, but if you find a fantastic exercise system that works for you, then it doesn’t matter that it was invented yesterday. And someone had to make it up sometime.
Cathy Evans (40:32)
Exactly.
It’s a really good
thing, I think, that women are doing more weightlifting and bodybuilding. So obviously they were always terrified in the past that they’d start looking like Sylvester Stallone, whereas we know that doesn’t happen. And actually it’s really good for your bone density. And it helps with, you so you can’t just stick with yoga, you should be doing other things as well.
Stewart Home (40:49)
No it is really good, I’m gonna go.
No, I agree you should do some cardio too, but you know if you’re only going to do one thing I do the strength training. And you know the only way you can look like Arnold Schwarzenegger is to take steroids. There’s no, you know whether you’re a man or a woman.
Cathy Evans (41:06)
or actually,
or get a good genetic hand.
Stewart Home (41:11)
Yeah, well, I
think the steroids for the really big guys. You know, you can build quite a lot of muscle without steroids, but if you want to look like some of those, the really big bodybuilders, steroids is the only way to do it. And again, you know, I think there’s a lot of moral panic around steroids. yes, I can have
Cathy Evans (41:23)
Yeah, that’s true.
Stewart Home (41:29)
poor effects but I think the whole thing around roid rage is kind of over-hyped. I’m not saying people should do steroids, I certainly don’t. And I do do the weight training but it depends what people want to do. If they really want to be that big then that’s the way to do it and they should evaluate whether the risks are worth the benefits for them.
Cathy Evans (41:52)
know but the problem is vanity is such a, it’s such an overpowering force isn’t it? People do lots of really silly things in the name of vanity and Maybe they should be protected from themselves sometimes, I don’t know.
Stewart Home (41:56)
Yeah.
Well, I think if people have information and haven’t been conned with a load of bullshit, let them make the choice. Because I do think there is a moral panic around aroid rage and steroids, but at the same time I don’t think it’s a good idea to do them. And I also think it’s good that smoking is banned in indoor places, which it wasn’t when I was a kid and I used to go to clubs.
Cathy Evans (42:10)
Yeah.
Stewart Home (42:27)
I’d follow smoke, but at the same time I wouldn’t stop people smoking, although I tell them it’s not a good idea.
Cathy Evans (42:32)
Yeah. Have you always stayed away from substances when you were part of the art scene and everything where you never attempted to get involved in any of the sort of the drug taking and…
Stewart Home (42:42)
No, the drug
taking is boring. And my mother took enough drugs for the next ten generations of the family, I don’t need to. She did it for me.
Cathy Evans (42:45)
Go for you.
Yeah,
okay, When I was at school, do you remember the band Free with Paul Kossoff and he died of a heroin overdose? And when I was at school, his father, David Kossoff, who was an actor, he used to go around schools.
Stewart Home (42:58)
Yeah, cost more. Yeah.
Cathy Evans (43:10)
and he did impersonations of what his son was like when he was under the influence of heroin. It was so powerful, it made such an impression on me that I never touched heavy stuff at all. I I always had a bit of weed maybe and I used to smoke like a two-stroke engine, but I never did anything more than that. And I really wish I’d written to him at some point, tell him.
Stewart Home (43:28)
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (43:34)
And by the time I thought about it, he was already dead. He was a very old man when he died, I think.
Stewart Home (43:39)
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (43:41)
So yeah, so I stayed off the hard stuff too. Yeah. So what are you working on at the moment?
Stewart Home (43:45)
Jesus.
I’m looking at a whole lot of things. I mean, I have a novel written in first draft, which I’m not in any hurry to publish because it’s a kind of lockdown novel. think it’s easier, you know, it’s more interesting to leave a little bit of time. So I’m not revising that. I’ve been very busy doing the promotion for this, but thinking about do I want to talk about Christianity and exercise next? I mean, there’s actually… ⁓
I’ve got all these books that I picked up cheap. I have a whole load of Christian yoga books, for example.
Cathy Evans (44:25)
I thought
there was a contradiction in terms. ⁓
Stewart Home (44:29)
No, mean,
this was interesting because I had someone ask a question saying, but surely Christians don’t like yoga when I was doing a talk about the book. But I’ve got several books by J.M. Dushanay, who’s the most famous one, the most famous book being Christian Yoga. But I also have these books like Yoga and the Jesus Prayer Tradition. I’m trying to remember who the author is. on the shelf in the other room. you know, there was Christians in the 60s and 70s interested in yoga.
to develop their Christian spirituality. But if you go back to muscular Christianity in the 19th century, which Tom Brown’s school days and Tom Brown at Oxford are the classic expositions of that in fictional form.
Cathy Evans (45:08)
thing about that book was Flashman. That whole, you know, the George MacDonald Fraser books, you know, so funny.
Stewart Home (45:10)
Hahaha
Yeah,
but yeah, I mean, my last book, Art School Orgy, I hung the story on a frame taken from Tom Brown at university, which isn’t as well known as Tom Brown’s school days.
Cathy Evans (45:27)
I’m so glad you brought that up. I I wanted to ask you, because that book tells the story of David Hockney, doesn’t it? Of a character called David Hockney. the real David Hockney at any point complain about you borrowing his name, or did he just…
Stewart Home (45:35)
Yeah.
No,
it wasn’t just Hockney, it was all his contemporaries at the Royal College of Art, although it’s the Republican College of Art in the book. But I think he has a sense of humour and no one would publish the book. It ended up coming out with an indie record label because they wanted to get into book publishing because they weren’t scared of it. But it turned out the guy who runs it has a friend who knows Hockney’s lawyers and they all thought it was hilarious and didn’t have a problem with it.
Cathy Evans (45:55)
Yes.
Okay, good. Yeah.
Stewart Home (46:11)
So, know, Hockney has a sense of humour and he
came out with it published in this weird way. But then a friend of mine was in New York and had a copy of the book which he was taking from a friend to give to a friend and they’re friends with Danny Fields, who’s a friend of Hockney, but also famously managed the Stooges and the Ramones. If you know your kind of history. Yeah, the Stooges was Iggy Pop’s band before he was solo.
Cathy Evans (46:31)
I know there are moments, yeah.
Stewart Home (46:37)
So ⁓ anyway, Danny Fields, who’s a big friend of Hockney, saw the book lying on the table because it’d been brought around as a present for the hostess and picked it up and saying, does David know about this? He’ll think it’s hilarious. He was just reading it and roaring with laughter and said, I’m sorry, but I have to take the book.
Cathy Evans (46:57)
That
was it, the cover is you with a blow up doll. It’s really funny, it’s brilliant. anyway, it’s delightful to hear that he’s got a sense of humor about it, good.
Stewart Home (47:07)
Yeah,
no, which is great. know, there’s not been a peep out of the lawyers who the publisher has had dinner with, they seem perfectly happy. But, you know, I did get some offers from kind of more regular publishers to do the book, but only if I changed the names. It would have done. Yeah, yeah. So you just do what you can do. And, you know, so that was a small book, but… ⁓
Cathy Evans (47:14)
Yeah.
And of course that would have taken all the fun out of it. Yeah.
Stewart Home (47:34)
Yeah, he was a guy learning how to publish. It’s a curve, a learning curve. And now I’ve got my bigger book again. Dead Princess was a bigger book. So, you know, it’s up and down in the old career.
Cathy Evans (47:46)
By the way Stewart, on your website there are two hilarious videos, one of which is you tied to a bed and the other is in some nightclub called Bar Sexy or something.
Stewart Home (47:54)
Yeah.
It’s
actually because I had a Spanish friend who worked to make a lot of corn.
Cathy Evans (48:03)
Yes, who is that
wonderful woman on the video?
Stewart Home (48:07)
Well, Gina Snake is her professional name, but Marlena is her real name. And she was living in London for a long time. Brexit sent her away. And she was a porn actress and said she’d do a video to promote my… That was for a record. And the one where I’m tied up, she was supposed to have a friend, so it was going to be girl on girl action with the screwdriver in the belly button.
Cathy Evans (48:29)
Yeah, yeah.
Stewart Home (48:29)
But
the friend who she knew from a bar or somewhere said she’d do it and then turned up and was too frightened to do it. So, you know, I had a camera woman, I had my actress, so I had no choice but to take her place.
Cathy Evans (48:44)
But
the other, I’ll put the links to those videos in the description on YouTube.
Stewart Home (48:49)
They were actually on
YouTube and YouTube removed the one in the club Sexy allegedly, but it’s actually just Molina’s bathroom in College Street in London, South Camden. But that was on Vimeo for years. just I can’t remember when, a few months ago, they both got removed. Yeah, I think what you can put online has changed.
Cathy Evans (49:10)
Maybe someone complained or something.
Stewart Home (49:15)
But they had enormous numbers of hits. ⁓
Cathy Evans (49:18)
They are so
funny and in fact we, there’s the one of the club sexy one where she literally pisses herself. It does not, we don’t say in our house, are we going to the loo anymore? We say, I piss myself.
Stewart Home (49:25)
Yeah.
No, was
fantastic and she’s always like, I’ve never done this before. She was really excited because I came up with an idea that she hadn’t done on film.
Cathy Evans (49:45)
It was so funny. ⁓
Stewart Home (49:47)
She’s a real trooper and a real professional. I think one of things people don’t appreciate is that she actually has a real skill for what she does. Absolutely brilliant.
Cathy Evans (49:56)
And obviously a real sense of humor as well. She was obviously really having fun doing it.
Stewart Home (49:58)
Yeah, he’s having
fun, but she’s actually a brilliant actress. You just look at her facial expression. She’s really talented. And I think, it’s a shame that, women who do what she does, which is, make porn, don’t always get the appreciation for the actual skill that goes into what they do. But, you know, she was fantastic because it was just like, this is fantastic. I’ve never done this before. But I mean,
Cathy Evans (50:13)
you
Yeah, well,
there’s a real dark side to it. So, you know, I, and, obviously there’s this whole exploitation thing, which we really needn’t get into now, but I can see that, there’s always going to be a market for it, isn’t there? So if there is, I hope people who do it have fun doing it and make money and are not exploited. So.
Stewart Home (50:25)
yeah.
Yeah, no,
I mean, that’s definitely the case with Marlena. She wanted to do it and she was happy doing it and she had a real talent as well.
Cathy Evans (50:49)
I’ll put the links to those on the description and we’ll see if YouTube takes it off again. I don’t know.
Stewart Home (50:56)
No,
that’s why they’re on my website because they were taken from YouTube and Vimeo. But you just see what you can do. I I also did a project called Stewart Home Nude, which was a website where I searched when there were a lot more search engines and things than there are now when the internet was more diverse. It just consisted of me doing this search and the searches would affect the algorithm.
Cathy Evans (50:58)
Yeah.
Stewart Home (51:23)
So that when you did the search, the next time you did the search, the previous search started affecting it. So I was just playing around with the algorithm. And I did that, think it was originally on WordPress, but I had to re-put it up on a different site because WordPress said I was breaking the rules, which was the rule was manipulating the algorithm for financial gain, but I was only manipulating the algorithm. I wasn’t doing it for financial gain. But you know, and all it…
Cathy Evans (51:23)
Mm.
Stewart Home (51:47)
it basically consisted of search results, but it was quite interesting to follow through how using the different search engines and doing a search every day for this term affected the algorithm. Obviously if you took Madonna as your search term, you’re not gonna have much impact. need something slightly more obscure. Even Madonna and you would probably, you’d have a hard time impacting.
Cathy Evans (52:06)
you
Stewart Home (52:09)
But me knew it definitely worked. WordPress obviously became aware that I was manipulating the algorithm. But I didn’t think I was breaking the rule because I wasn’t doing it for financial gain.
Cathy Evans (52:24)
Amazing
that they were paying attention as well, so.
Stewart Home (52:26)
Yeah,
yeah, but it’s amazing why you get pulled and why. But you know, it happens to me a lot, but you’ve always got to explore the limits of what you can do.
Cathy Evans (52:37)
know Stewart, I’ve kept you for so long, it’s been really fun chatting to you.
it’s been brilliant so good luck with your next book. So is the next book really going to be about Christianity and yoga?
Stewart Home (52:47)
No, not just Christianity and yoga, mean Christianity and sport and its opposite. I mean I’m not 100 % sure, you know, I’m working on the ideas.
Cathy Evans (52:51)
Okay.
And the novel you mentioned, that, can you tell it?
Stewart Home (52:59)
That’s,
I’m just going to leave it for a while. You know, it’s written in first draft and when I feel like doing the second draft, I’ll do it. But I want to do, probably do a non-fiction book next. I mean, I have a book with PM Press coming out, which is in their Outspoken Writers series. So that’s like some old work, some unpublished work, an interview with me. So that should be either next year or the year after, depending how fast they are.
Cathy Evans (53:06)
See you.
Stewart Home (53:24)
They were just flabbergasted by the number of changes I wanted made to the contracts. But you know, I like to talk percentages as well. And clauses. And rights. well, you’re saying you want the translation rights. Actually, what kind of translation sales team do you have? You know, questions all that should be asking. You know, because I did the same with Pluto and
Cathy Evans (53:30)
Okay. ⁓
Yeah. Good.
Well, yes, exactly.
Stewart Home (53:49)
turns out they do have a good track record of selling translation rights. They have no track record of selling film rights, so I managed to convince them that they shouldn’t take them.
Cathy Evans (54:01)
Well, we
do it on a use it or lose it basis. So we have all rights with our authors, but if they find a better deal than we can offer, then they’re free to go with it. So we wouldn’t want to hamstring anyone, but yeah.
Stewart Home (54:04)
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I think it’s if the publisher is more likely to sell the rights than you then fair enough. You know, if they’ve got a team dedicated to it, do they get the rights? But if they have where they have it, you know, we argued over the audio rights, but they did have a track record on that as well with Pluto and they hold the audio rights. But, know, with film rights, they’re a nonfiction publisher. actually hard to sell nonfiction books for film. I mean, I had
Cathy Evans (54:21)
and
Okay.
Stewart Home (54:37)
several people approached me but I think especially now you’ve had the documentary boom and that’s fallen away it’s very hard to to sell a non-fiction book for a docu even for a documentary but you know
Cathy Evans (54:48)
surprises me, I thought documentaries were still really big.
Stewart Home (54:51)
I don’t think there is, you know, all the producers I’m talking to are saying no, it’s harder because there’s a guy who I’ve kind of vaguely known for 20 years who was interested as well as kind of big Hollywood people who showed some interest and then, went away and didn’t come back. But I said, you know, we had a discussion and our conclusion was probably the best thing was to use it, you know, I should write a fiction treatment for it and use the book as a basis, you know, because it’s a series of character studies of con men essentially.
the odd con woman as well. And you could kind of morph the characters together because it’s the same story again and again. And just do a kind of more contemporary book with a figure like Bernard or whoever else. I just have to find time to write the treatment. We figured that was probably more likely to get funding for film
Cathy Evans (55:31)
Yeah.
Stewart Home (55:35)
than a documentary. mean, this producer has been producing documentaries and he’s fed up with it and moved into doing more fiction films ⁓ because he’s finding it so hard to get the money. So yeah, it changes. But yeah, you can spend a lot of time trying to get a film project off the ground. It’s an enormous time waster for a lot of people. I mean, I’ve certainly had lots of discussions with film people that have taken up lots of time and ended up not really going anywhere. ⁓
Cathy Evans (55:44)
Okay.
and then they don’t go anywhere.
Well, only a fraction get made and only a fraction of those get successful.
Stewart Home (56:06)
Exactly.
Yeah, but I don’t mind a publisher taking rights if they’ve got active people, you know, trying to sell those rights, but if they’re just passively weighing for someone to offer, then, I don’t see why they should have them rather than me.
Cathy Evans (56:12)
Mm.
Yeah well and also you presumably know your way around a publishing contract now because you’ve worked with so many different publishers. ⁓
Stewart Home (56:26)
Yeah, exactly.
You know, it’s always good to get some professional advice on top as well, but you know, I know where to get that too. Yeah. Okay. No, my pleasure, Patrick.
Cathy Evans (56:31)
Yeah.
There you go. Excellent. Well, thank you so much. And yeah, good luck with
your next project. yeah, good luck with fascist yoga. I hope it gets, you know, widely read and picked up.
Stewart Home (56:47)
No, it’s done really well, so I’m very happy. yeah, even more sales will be better. OK, great. OK, take care.