But then I didn't read a book until I was 17, when I was really ill."Her mother brought her a biography of Greta Garbo to look at in bed, and Tracey was off. "I went through Hollywood," she says, "David Niven's The Moon's a Balloon, a book about Frank Sinatra, all the ones in the Rat Pack, Cecil B DeMille, Marilyn Monroe..." Later she "intellectually shifted up" when she started going to a pub in Margate frequented by students. "They used to go" - she puts on an affected voice - "'Do you think Jasper Johns would have been a different kind of artist if his name had been John Jasper?' And I'd go, 'yeah, maybe.' I didn't know what the fuck they were talking about They'd mention books by, oh, Kafka. Who the hell's Kafka?"So Tracey went to a local bookshop and read the back of books by, say, Kafka - "because I wasn't going to read the whole book" - but soon found that her interest extended to what lay inside the dust jackets "Then I couldn't put the fucking things down. So I went from Hollywood icons to Dostoevsky, Herman Hesse, Nietzsche."Along the way, in another part of Tracey's intellectual voyage that has been overshadowed by some of her public antics and pronouncements, she studied for a part-time course in the history of philosophy at Birkbeck College.
"I was thinking yesterday," she says, "that I've got enough money now that I could go off and do a philosophy degree, if I got in Maybe not next year, but when I'm 50 or something. I should do a PhD because I've already got an MA." (This was from the Royal College of Art.) "I had a friend who did a PhD," she adds, "in shoplifting. She had to do all her own research and start shoplifting to study the psychology behind it."In the meantime, Tracey has to go to New York for a new show, and then on to Los Angeles ("to see my mate Ronnie Wood") and finally to New Mexico to learn how to ride a horse. When she returns she'll be spending weekends at her new flat by the coast "It's great to be by the sea, it's good for my soul. I'll drive down to the sea, maybe with Docket, my cat, and go for walks along the beach. Maybe," she adds, "I'll do the odd watercolour."It's a long way from the young woman who stormed drunkenly out of a C4 Turner Prize debate in 1997 saying she wanted to be with her mum and her friends.
Are we witnessing the mellowing of Tracey Emin?'Strangeland' by Tracey Emin is published by Sceptre at £14.99. To buy a copy for £13.99 (p&p free), contact Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897. When is a phone not a phone? Well, now, actually. In the swiftly evolving world of telecommunications technology, very few manufacturers are interested in making straightforward mobile phones any more. Industry talk is of mobile "devices": cameraphones, videophones, music players, navigation units, games consoles, pacemakers.
