SommerHytten

LAv en spolebåndoptager om til guitarforstærker

2011-07-27T21:51:00.001-07:00

http://www.vacuumtubecollective.com/docs/ampstoconverttoguitar.pdf

gode mærker.
Tape Recorder Philips EL3541 (den her er drømmen)

Grundig TK20 TK24 TK25 (den her er mindre og SMUK)
Tjeck selv

Revox g36 --- med tube OG MED indbygget højtaler.

batteridrevet bærbar journalist-båndoptager med 4 hastigheder. Kultmodel anvendt af bl.a reportere fra DR. Der medfølger følgende tilbehør: Specialdesignet original solid lædertaske, strømforsyning, 2 spolebånd og tomspole. Kan anvendes med almindelige eller genopladelige batterier eller med strømforsyningen. God original stand, kr. 980
Måske er det den transportable optager du har ledt efter. Er der mikrofon i ?.

2011-02-15T15:56:00.001-08:00

Words and Bullets
The Condemned of the Lebovici Affair

That the publisher of Orwell was assassinated in 1984 is a sinister coincidence that history will certainly pass over, but this world's Big Brothers will not soon be cheered: the adventures of the dialectic are not ended and will spoil their pleasures.

Now that the clamorers have practically killed themselves over the assassination of Gerard Lebovici, we have to authenticate what was said without considering the essential aspect, that is to say, the evidence, about this "affair."

The diverse hypotheses, unwrapped at the start so as to give nourishment to the unhappy readers of the press, all lead back to two domains artificially framed as separate and as not having the power to affect the other: the cinema and politics.

In these two spheres, these hypotheses, considered in all their variations, provide all the reassurances of the reigning spectacle. Devoloped pell mell, theses about Lebovici alleged that he was a godfather in the film mafia, a protagonist of the Red Brigades or the Baader Gang, Francois Besse [trans: one of Jacques Mesrine's henchmen], videocassette pirates, an agent of the KGB, a schizophrenic whose destiny was inscribed in the fatality of his marginal habits, drugs and sex shops, shady poker games, whiskey, cigarettes and broads, that is to say, anything and everything. Because it's a question, as usual, of avoiding all the truly embarassing questions. Does one realize that, just before the assassination, Champ Libre published The History of Anarchy by Claude Marmel, with a preface in which Gerard Lebovici exposed the Nazi underworld past of its author, who today is recycled at the Institute for Social History and Sovietology? Or that, at the same moment, there was anonymously published in a fake issue of East and West, the Institute's review, an article -- in which the tone, subject and coincidental timing were reminiscent of Gerard Lebovici -- that denounced and provided supporting documentation about Harmel's Nazi past? Or that it is in this very virulent milieu of the extreme right, swarming behind the folding screen of this same Institute, that was the source of the dossiers that helped orchestrate the press campaigns against [Pierre] Goldman and [Henri] Curiel, press campaigns that preceded their assassinations [in 1979 and 1978, respectively]? Or that the collusion among the extreme right, the mafia and the secret services don't need to be further demonstrated, not at a time in which a murderous anti-Basque collaboration exists in the death squads that re-unite a long list of Spanish cops, ex-OAS [trans: Organization de Armee Secrete] officers, French SDECE [trans: Service de Documentation Exterieur et de Contre-Espionnage] agents and other assorted thugs? Or that the reprinting by Champ Libre of Jacques Mesrine's The Death Instinct constituted a not-so-small affront to the honor of the police? When one considers all this, one can see that at the very least one hypothesis is more plausible than all the others. And one also sees why it was necessary to keep it quiet.

But the question isn't simply knowing which straw broke the camel's back: the concurrence of the affairs of cinematic distribution, Mesrine, videocassettes, or the more directly revolutionary activity of Lebovici. In effect, whether the attack came from the more reactionary milieus of the cinema or from an extreme right more politically connected with the State's police services, one knows quite well that all the mafias have connections between them, that their members can be found at the same tables at certain restaurants and cafes, where they agree in their private salons on the one inviolable law that unites them: the bitter defense of this world. Their offers and encouragements, their promises, like their information, can easily pass for the others. It is in such a context that one learns that, after six months of investigation, all the trails have gone cold in the same icy silence [trans: omerta]. And the general complicity has been well proved by the press, which certainly hasn't demonstrated that the assassination wasn't encouraged and desired by all sides. This was an execution by the established social order.

If we now pay close attention to the particular role of the media in this affair, it is not to verify, yet again, that journalists lie above all and constantly, but instead to make precise the "how and why" of these lies. Because rarely does assassination by the spectacle and the spectacle of assassination find such a perfect coincidence. And in this sinister adequation between the second death of Lebovici and his physical death, seldom have hired pens and handymen [trans: valets de plume et hommes de main] so effectively shared their foul deed.

Since we, like Diderot, believe that "all the nonsense of metaphysics isn't as valuable as an ad hominem argument," we will cites these sources directly:

"Lebovici didn't hide his sympathies for the dynamiters of 'bourgeois society,' in particular, the Baader Gang in West Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy" (Lamy and Babronski, France-Soir, 9 March 1984).

"Lebovici voluntarily associated with the thugs of the underworld and the wanna-be thugs of intellectual terrorism who conduct physical terrorism" (Le Quotidien de Paris, 15 March 1984).

"Lebovici entertained relations with the milieus that are close to international terrorism . . . he is also the publisher of works consecrated to terrorism or written by terrorists. . . . " (Puyalte, Le Figaro, 15 May 1984).

"It wasn't a secret in extreme-left circles that he financed revolutionary groups" (Lemoine, VSD, 15 March 1984).

At Champ Libre, "he published the thoughts and strategies of the libertarian and terrorist Left. . . . Across the center of Leftist propaganda, Lebovici's contacts extended to all of international terrorism. He maintained relations in Germany with the Baader Gang, and also with the Red Brigades in Italy. In a general fashion, all the dynamiters of bourgeois society, Christian and Western civilization, fascinated this Israelite. . . . Lebovici, like all influential Jews, was constrained to spit upon Israel. . . . Subsidize subversion . . . accept the risks" (Cochet, Present, 10 March 1984).

"That these unhealthy passions caused his downfall is the opinion of all who knew him" (Minute, 10 March 1984).

"A most mysterious man, who provided the 'open sesame' to the clandestine milieus of the most destruction anarchism, fascinated Gerard Lebovici. He is the filmmaker and writer Guy Debord, 54 years old, the gray eminence of Champ Libre, chief of the situationists, a movement of libertarian tendency that was one of the detonators of the May '68 events. . . . Guy Debord, sympathesizer with the terrorists of the Baader Gang and the Red Brigades" (Babronski, Lamy, Brigouleix, France-Soir, 9 and 10 March 1984).

"Finally, is not Lebo a man under the influence? Beginning with Debord, did he not drift towards extremist organizations such as the Red Brigades and Direct Action, which he financed out of a taste for scandal and provocation? . . . He was fascinated by clandestinity, open contestation, revolt against society. But to live dangerously, one must take risks" (Alia, Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 March 1984).

"Strange person, this Debord. Author of ultra-Left theories that found their hours of glory in May 1968, he tried to obtain someone to produce every little thing he demanded." And so, didn't Lebovici "surrender the publishing house to Guy Debord . . . didn't Lebovici, as some think, fall under the influence of the 'guru' Debord?" (Huleux, L'Humanitite, 13 March 1984).

"I didn't know Gerard Lebovici, but I don't think I would have liked him. . . . With Guy Debord, the situationist who found a situation, he secretly worked to shake our society and the last traces of the sacred that it kept, notably in Art. Also, his murder appears to us like a translation of frenzied suicide, the death instinct that, in a certain way, turned against him and zeroed him out" (Charriere, Le Quotidien de Paris, 18 March 1984).

"In the life of Lebovici, Guy Debord plays the part of darkness. 'The Devil.' A crappy Mephistopheles in a real tragedy: that of the bewitching of a man" . . . . "And for many police officers concerned with crime, from the DST [trans: Direction de la Surveillance de Territoire, the French CIA] to General Intelligence [trans: the French FBI], the most serious trail leads to the entourage of Guy Debord" (Prier, Tiller, Le Journal du Dimanche, 11 and 18 March 1984).

"Who killed Gerard Lebovici? For many police officers, whether they work with DST, General Intelligence or the Criminal Bureau [trans: Parisian police], the most serious trails lead to the entourage of Guy Debord. . . . This frightening agent of destabilization was in contact with Italian intellectuals, Germans, who were themselves very close to revolutionary groups, Red Brigades and the Baader Gang" (Paris-Match, 6 April 1984).

In the "extravagant collection of correspondence published by Champ Libre, Debord wields the pen and Lebovici the signature in the writing of icy letters of hate and contempt, in which one senses a formible desire to do evil, to wound, to sully, to debase, to annihilate the receiver. Letters of crazy sadism, total cynicism. Literally diabolical; of which the true meaning, the political goal, is to subvert everything that exists and even the untouchable social convention of private correspondence. . . .

"And after ten years of oblivion, he reaches this unexpected madness of terrorism. The attacks of the Red Brigades and Baader, death elevated into a political system, the destruction, finally, of the ruins, as they've called them. These terrorists are enraged killers who require gurus, patrons, thinkers, ideologues, revolutionary justifications. It is in this dance of death that the Lebovicis, Debords, Feltrinellis, Goldmanns, Sanguinettis and others find their rhythm. . . .

"Who benefits? Who pulls the strings of these bloody puppets?

"One imagines the pleasure that a Lebovici must have experienced by debating ideology with a sectarian from Direct Action and a thinker from the Red Brigades, and then finishing the day at Maxim's, between his friend Badinter, Guard of the Seals, and his accomplice at the poker table, Montand. But can you imagine him laughing at 'Mohamed Mohamedovitch,' who holds up to this puppet the allures of the exhibitor of marinettes?

"This life of derision, of lies and appearances. All the things those who knew him could only imagine. Who could believe that Lebo had a dossier on him, contained in a metal case, at the DST? Who divined that behind Debord, the implacable enemy of Stalinism, there was a man who held a Soviet bank between his teeth? Who knew of the interest of the other, forgotten situationists, one [trans: Mustapha Khayati] in the armed struggle of Yasser Arafat, the Soviet general of the Palestinian army, while another [trans: Rene Vienet?] was arrested in China and charged with espionage? Who would believe that the young people, who in the revolt also anathematized Stalinism, would learn, 15 years later, as a result of an investigation into an assassination, what they had always been: agents of subversion and destabilization in the service of Soviet imperialism" (De Beketch, Minute, 17 March 1984).

The campaign didn't simply seek to discredit the people who attack the press or break with the consensus for sowing doubt and confusion. Beyond its subsidiary goals, this journalistic police force, for which words have the same function as bullets, clearly affirms: "That's why it was necessary to kill Lebovici; that's why it will, sooner or later, be necessary to do the same with Debord and the other revolutionaries." Moreover, nothing's lacking for the creation of truly descriptive files on targeted people, with their habits and addresses and telephone numbers. But the killers shouldn't start rejoicing yet: we will henceforth be on our guard and, whether it is in a parking lot or elsewhere, we will dispatch the first who come. In addition, the second attack has the disadvantage of being signed ipso facto, completely exposing the origin of the first.

In other similar affairs, the press campaign preceded the assassination; today it comes afterward. Whether this campaign served to reinforce the arms of the killers or the second blow dealt by the journalists who greeted the assassination with applause, there is an objective bond between those who killed and those who say why it was necessary to kill. As for those who applauded the loudest: did they do so only because they didn't have anything to do with the job?

At the top of the list of this visible party of the enemy, it is necessary to make a special place for those who, regretably, were unable to be at the actual execution:

"I went to see Lebovici in his office. . . . He dials up the mafia . . . he tried to draw me into a night of poker" . . . . "Debord has an unbelievable magnetism. . . . He makes use of psychological techniques. . . . " (Manchette, interviewed in Le Journal du Dimanche, 11 March and VSD, 15 March 1984).

"Guegan came up with the name 'Champ Libre' . . . Lebovici came up with the money. It's my belief that, since 1972, he was an agent for Belmondo or Cassell. . . . A representative of capital. . . . He paid badly. . . . Within several months, he turned a living place into a museum. Mixing sarcasm with suspicion, he drove diverse people away from him. . . . We think that the opinion of Debord . . . determined Lebovici's 'passage to action' and his metamorphosis into a dialectian and revolutionary. Debord's affirmations concerning his [Lebovici's] role as publisher . . . are inexact. They confirmed Lebovici's situation, prisoner of a role that led to verbal excess. Under the reign of a severe 'father', professor of radicalism [Debord], he [Lebovici] surrounded himself with 'gangsters'" (Sorin, Le Monde, 10 March 1984).

"Under the influence of Guy Debord, Lebovici became another man: he fired Gerard Guegan . . . and only stayed with his guru. Debord was already 41. Gerard Guegan ran into him later on; [trans: he was] antiquated, ceremonious, haughty. . . . Lebovici wanted to give the Left a whack. For Guegan and his friends, behind this whack was Guy Debord, the invisible one; Debord, the fanatic of himself. 'His only goal is posterity,' Guegan says. 'His disappearance is a trick so that people will still be reading him in 30 years. He'd like to be taken for Rimbaud, who left for Africa and never wrote another line. But for Rimbaud, it wasn't a trick" . . . "According to Gerard Guegan, Gerard Lebovici . . . adopted the hard, implacable tone of the situationists, headed by Guy Debord, without doubt thereby provoking the hatred of those who responded to [trans: killed] him" (Guegan interviewed in VSD, 15 March 1984; Le Journal du Dimanche, 11 March; and Le Quotidien de Paris, 9 March 1984).

"Gerard Lebovici wrote, not with humor, that Jacques Mesrine's 'machinations' were, 'for the French of our epoch, the perfect symbols of liberty' . . . 'The frightening honor of being the publisher of Jacques Mesrine, concluded Lebovici, fell to Champ Libre.' No doubt a victim of faltering memory, G. Lebovici failed to remember that Mesrine had also made death threats against his [previous] publisher. That is to say, to consider it a 'frightening' honor to reprint The Death Instinct, in which the affair's principal protagonist is banished to the dark side, is in effect to display exceptional recklessness. 'It is the man who holds the arms that is more important than the arms themselves,' Mesrine wrote. Strange morals, sad epoch -- that is to say, [trans: Lebovici was] a naive simpleton." (Alliot, Le Monde, 24 February, 1984).

"This [very common] name 'Francois,' written on a piece of paper [which Lebovici had on his person the day he was killed], is terribly disappointing for the 'All-Paris-Cinema,' for the last readers of the situationists, who dreamt of an end of politico-literary history . . . by [committing] murder. This clue reduces the brutal death of Gerard Lebovici to an intimate drama, too precise for the police, tomorrow or in a month, to put a name to the face of the assassins. . . . 'It's a shame. I would gladly imagine a wilder motive,' confided a producer on Monday, vaguely in relation to the affairs of Gerard Lebovici. . . . 'Lebo played with fire, said a press attache.' A certain taste for poker parties, furtive meetings. . . . In a certain way, Gerard Lebovici was asking for it [trans: appele le meurtre]. 'If someone had to die in the world of the cinema, it was him, confided someone who, like the majority of the people we talked to, preferred to remain anonymous.' Why? Because he apparently gave into the allures of permanent conspiracy; he hid his role as literary patron from the world of the cinema, and, at Champ Libre, his publishing house, he hid the extent of his power in the cinema. . . . This duality, which certainly qualifies as 'schizophrenic,' was surprising. Today it only adds weight to suspicions. Thus, it appears that this energetic man, active in the extroverted, self-promoting world of film, allowed himself to come under the influence of Guy Debord, the solitary one, who was discreet to the point of obsession, suffering from an evitably fatal weakness. Gerard Lebovici 'went downhill,' according to ten, twenty witnesses; he gradually turned away from the social norm accepted by his professional milieu, all because the 'guru' Debord led Lebovici psychologically and intellectually astray. 'Too many provocations, too many public insults; it had to end badly' . . . . It had to 'end badly' because of his hardly veiled fascination with criminal marginality, which, according to certain people close to him [Lebovici], found its full expression in the recent reprinting of Jacques Mesrine's The Death Instinct by Champ Libre" (Boggio, Le Monde, 15 March 1984).

There they are, the first convicts of the Lebovici affair. In making such judgments, they have judged themselves.

No doubt, a less mendacious epoch than ours, one in which the professionals of the press weren't also professional falsifiers, would find several who could ask good questions, such as these: For what "shameful reason of the State" (Le Matin, 23 March 1984) was [police superintendant James] Genthial investigated and removed from office, and replaced by a more docile functionary? Did he discover something embarassing? Why is it that, "in the Lebovici affair, General Intelligence and the DST didn't furnish their complete files to the head of the Criminal Bureau" (Le Journal du Dimanche, 25 March 1984)? Why did Besse, the honorable bandit, take pains to deny that he was accused of committing the crime? Isn't Besse himself still alive? Those who investigate Lebovici's death, aren't they the ones who have no interest in determining what the truth really is? There will be nothing astonishing: the State doesn't hide its crimes, and it isn't, for this reason, a criminal among other criminals, but the absolute mafia capo. (Thus, this same State, which for years had Lebovici and Debord under constant surveillance, didn't fear to announce its assuredly incompetent approval: "With confidence, Regis Debray declares 'that one leftist intellectual in two has read the very beautiful books by Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle and The Treatise on Living for Young People [trans: the latter is by Raoul Vaneigem, not Debord]" -- declaration on television by a special counsel to Mitterand, cited in Le Canard Enchaine, 3 April 1984. "Not only do they shoot us, but they search our pockets, as well," remarked the impressionist Degas. But, when touched by the hands of the enemy, the pure gold of theory becomes carbon).

The press claims that this deliberate media accumulation of obvious counter-truths and delirious inventions (the least of which is seeing terrorist or Stalinist traits in those who radically denounced terrorism teleguided by the State and Stalinism) constitutes a true historical eradiction of the Situationist International. Because that which motivates their hate has been involuntarily acknowledged:

Gerard Lebovici was a "fanatic of the Situationist International, the political and revolutionary movement that was at the origin of the events of May 68" (Rivarol, 16 March 1984).

" . . . the enrage Guy Debord, the leader of the situationists, the most nihilistic, the most destructive of the anarcho-surrealist movements, probably the principal promoter of subversion of 1968" (Present, 10 March 1984).

"But what is situationism? What is its program? It can be described in a few words: 'Discredit the good. Compromise all leaders. Shake their words. Deliver them up to disdain. Utilize vile men. Disorganize authority. Sow discord among the citizens. Turn young against old. Ridicule tradition. Disrupt supplies. Make people listen to lascivious music. Spread lechery.' Or, if one prefers: 'The extreme of nihilism is reached through a decomposition of the system and this is what the Situationist International is skilled in exploiting. We only construct on the ruins of the system'" (Minute, 17 March 1984).

To complete this presentation of the press's exagerrated simplification of the "situationist program," and so as to expose all the lies cited above, it suffices to read any revolutionary text published by Editions Champ Libre. And, when paging through the catalogue, the reader will easily see the subversive value of Editions Champ Libre, and the praise due Gerard Lebovici, which has already been demonstrated in a perfectly sufficient manner.

If now his person is slowing dissolving in our memories, the ideas that Gerard Lebovici defended are still alive, and each revolutionary anticipates that he or she will get revenge in one fashion or another, and not only through the blows dispensed every day against a world that has been condemned. Because it was him, because it is us.

"Les mots et les balles" was originally published as an anonymous pamphlet in Paris in August 1984. Translated by NOT BORED! August 2003.

To read Herve-Claude Lapidaire's hostile review of "Words and Bullets," published on May 1985 by a newspaper that claimed to be "libertarian," click here.situa

2010-12-21T11:38:00.000-08:00

Ok jeg ved godt der ikke er nogen som læser denne blog. Men dette er endnu et mirakel. Som en overspringshandling sidder jeg og stener Basketball og så falder jeg over denne video: http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/blog/ball_dont_lie/post/Video-Ron-Artest-lovable-badass?urn=nba-298898. For det første er Artest endnu en af de personer som ligesom Arenas kan kaldes et mirakel. For det andet er der en lille sød pige som siger det, meget klart, det er counter-intuitivt, at der i basketball skal findes de her personer som ikke er bange for at være sig selv... og kører det til grænsen. Men for det tredje og det er sgu lidt vanvittigt, så har Skeets engang boet hos mig. Dvs. ham der har lavet videoen har faktisk boet hjemme hos mig engang.

Lidt mere Arenas, mest til mig selv. En biografi

2010-12-20T18:08:00.001-08:00

Joke all you want about the “great shooting” of Gilbert Arenas and the way he “triggers” an offense, but when you face the dynamic the All-Star guard in the open court, it’s no laughing matter. An exciting player and unique sports personality, he has been proving himself since arriving on the scene as an underappreciated second-round pick. Now, coming off a career-threatening knee injury—and potential career-ending brush with the law—Gilbert has more to prove than ever. This is his story…

GROWING UP

Gilbert Jay Arenas, Jr. was born on January 6, 1982 in Tampa, Florida. (Click here for a complete listing of today's sports birthdays.) His mother, a teenager at the time, was unprepared for parenthood. She tried to raise Gilbert by herself in Miami but started to hang out with some unsavory types and eventually got in trouble with the police. When the authorities became aware of young Gilbert’s plight, they made arrangements to place him in foster care.

Gilbert’s dad was working in an auto parts store in Tampa when the call came. As the boy’s natural father, he had rights. Normally, the call made to him is just a cursory contact, a formality to clear the child before moving him into a new home. But Gilbert Sr. thought about his own childhood—he grew up without a father—and decided to do the right thing. He assumed sole custody of his two-year-old son. Gilbert went 20 years before he saw his mother again.

Gilbert Sr. had big dreams. A baseball star at Florida Memorial College, he walked on to Howard Schnellenberger’s University of Miami football squad as a fullback in 1980. That was the season freshman quarterback Jim Kelly became the team’s starter and the Hurricanes won the Peach Bowl. Gilbert Sr.'s sports career ended that year, however, when he injured his leg.

A tall, good-looking man, Gilbert’s father got into modeling, appearing in ads for Sears and JC Penney. He eventually found his way into acting and appeared in the first two episodes of Miami Vice. When the show became a hit, he decided to leverage his 15 minutes of fame and moved to Los Angeles to further his career. He and his son packed everything they owned into his Mazda RX-7 and headed west.

When they arrived in Hollywood, they discovered the rental market worked a little differently than in Miami. Landlords were looking for $1,000 or more up front, which was more than Gilbert Sr. had saved. The pair spent three nights sleeping in the car in a Burbank parking lot before securing a room at a YMCA.

The first order of business for Gilbert Sr. was to find a steady job. He talked up the manager of a furniture store, who couldn’t help but notice the seven-year-old kid dribbling a basketball between his legs while he waited near the car. Because his new boss was a hoops fanatic, Gilbert Sr. got the job.

Later, Gilbert Sr. landed a night job with UPS. He would work until morning, catch a couple of hours of sleep while his son was in school, and go on auditions in the evenings. He hired an agent, who helped him get bits parts in TV shows, movies and commercials (including high-paying ones for Tostitos and Pepcid AC). Gilbert Sr. was relentless in his pursuit of work. He was imaginative, too. Once he got into a softball game with the Days of Our Lives team and and launched several long home runs. Soon he was playing a fireman on the soap.

Having an actor for a father could be interesting. Gilbert once brought a friend home, and his father kept shouting, “Kick his ass!” Gilbert had to explain that his father, who was due to shoot a scene the next day in Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Lionheart, was practicing his one line until he had it down perfectly.

Left to his own devices, Gilbert became the neighborhood pain in the ass, busting windows, keying cars and getting into minor trouble in a major way. He hated to be home alone and didn’t know how to unleash his boundless energy. He did well enough in school and learned how to charm his teachers with a big smile and a sly sense of humor. Still, without an outlet, Gilbert was headed for problems.

Around the age of 11, basketball replaced street football as Gilbert’s primary outlet. He played after school and, when his father left for the night shift at UPS, he would sneak out and ball it up all night. Before long, Gilbert became a familiar face on the local playgrounds. His father had an inkling of what he was doing and developed a network of friends in the area who would keep an eye on his son.

Jim Kelly, 1992 Pro Line

When the Arenas men did spend time together, their natural competitiveness came out. They often faced off in take-no-prisoners one-on-one basketball. During one game, Gilbert reached in to knock the ball away from his father, who cracked him on the hand and dislocated his finger. Watch Gilbert now and you can see that he almost never gets whistled for reaching in.

Gilbert Sr. coached a park league team, and since most of the boys were bigger and older than his son, he kept him on the bench. He explained to Gilbert that his goal was to win, not to give his son playing time. Gilbert quit, joined another team, and dropped 15 on his dad’s squad in their next meeting.

Gilbert also beat his dad at video football. When he explained the controls to his father, he neglected to enlighten him about all of the buttons. Gilbert Sr. found out, became furious and punched his son in the arm. They have never played video games again. Today, they still compete at pool, darts and dominoes.

ON THE RISE

Gilbert enrolled at nearby Birmingham High School and made the junior varsity. He was playing well, having a good time, and not taking the game too seriously—until the varsity coach cornered him to let him know he had reached his ceiling as a player.

That summer, Gilbert got up with the sun each morning and practiced until other players began showing up for games. He usually stayed at the court past dinner. In the fall, he transferred to Ulysses S. Grant High School in Van Nuys, a long bus ride away. It was worth it. The Lancers had a decent basketball team, though Grant was not a large school and its schedule included a couple of powder puff teams. Being young for his class at 14 and standing just 5-9, Gilbert did not yet have the look of a hoops superstar. He earned a starting role on coach Howard Levine’s varsity as a sophomore. Within a month, he blossomed into the best player in the league.

With a growing repertoire of slick one-on-one moves, Gilbert toyed with defenders. He could penetrate and score or pull up and hit from downtown. He was an adept passer, aggressive rebounder, and a defensive demon who could strip enemy dribblers or hammer balls back in a shooter’s face.

The game may have come naturally to Gilbert, but he was always practicing, always working on something new. He would often sneak back into his old elementary school and shoot for hours in the deserted gym. Gilbert was voted 1997 Valley Pac-8 Player of the Year as a sophomore, as well as Los Angeles All-City. He would earn these dual honors twice more, as a junior and senior.

After Gilbert’s junior year, during which he averaged just under 30 points a game, he applied to a math and science magnet school in Sylmar and joined that school’s summer league team. Now standing 6-3, Gilbert made the move to increase his level of competition. Sylmar played teams from Compton and Dominguez in the southern part of Los Angeles. Fearing he would lose his star, Levine hoped to convince Gilbert to stay at Grant. In the end, though he was accepted at Sylmar, Gilbert returned for his final season with the Lancers. (He would lead Grant to a share of the league title, while Sylmar went on to win the LA’s 3-A championship.)

At the start of Gilbert’s senior year, he wandered over to the UCLA campus and talked to the coaches. He and his dad had long dreamed of wearing a Bruins uniform. The school had shown some interest in him, and he wanted to more clarification. The deal, the Bruins told him, was that they were waiting to hear from Carlos Boozer (who eventually chose Duke). UCLA was also worried about Gilbert's attitude, believing he had run up the score on so-so opponents in high school. His academic record was a concern as well. Ultimately, the Bruins would regret their decision to pass on Gilbert. They had all sorts of trouble at shooting guard the next two years, while Gilbert torched them whenever he met them in the Pac-10.

Meanwhile, Gilbert also received solid offers from DePaul, Kansas State and Arizona. With Wildcats’ assistant Ray Tention hot on his trail, he chose to stay out west. Gilbert committed to Arizona and Lute Olson prior to his senior season at Grant, when he was still only 16-years-old. And what a season it was. Gilbert put up huge numbers, averaging 33.4 points, 7.9 rebounds, 3 assists and 4.6 steals.

Gilbert Arenas,
2003 Upper Deck Hardcourt

Gilbert joined an Arizona team that was rebuilding after losing Michael Dickerson, Mike Bibby and Miles Simon to the NBA a couple of years earlier. Olson, however, still had loads of talent, including Jason Gardner, Richard Jefferson, Loren Woods, Luke Walton and Michael Wright. The starter at shooting guard was Ruben Douglas, and Gilbert was asked to redshirt for a year. He didn’t think much of the plan. Gilbert once torched Douglas for 49 points in a high school game.

During Arizona’s informal summer games, Gilbert took nothing but pull-up jumpers. When real practices began, however, he pump-faked Douglas out of his jock. Gilbert had publicly stated that he hoped to start by the mid-point of his freshman year, and it was immediately clear that he would make good on this boast. Douglas ultimately transferred to New Mexico and topped the nation in scoring one season there.

In Gilbert's debut in an Arizona uniform, for the Blue team in the Pepsi Red-Blue pre-season scrimmage, he scored 22 points and hauled down five offensive rebounds in front of a raucous student crowd. A couple of weeks later, he was voted MVP of the pre-season NIT after pumping in 20 points and registering five steals against Kentucky in the championship game.

Gilbert's major adjustment to Division I competition was learning what to do without the ball. At Grant, he always had the rock or was always about to get it. Working off screens and getting himself open for good looks at the basket was a tough transition. When he got the ball, however, he knew what to do with it. In his first game against UCLA, Gilbert victimized the Bruins for 20 points. Days later, he was named PAC-10 Player of the Week.

Off the court, Gilbert found an interesting role with the Wildcats: class clown. He kept his teammates loose and tried to crack them up when the super-serious Olson had his back turned. It wasn’t that Gilbert did not like or respect his coach; he simply thought he could be too demanding and inflexible. Olson discouraged his freshman from showboating, insisting he display class at all times.

Olson’s wife, Bobbi, was just the opposite. The unofficial team mother, she went out of her way to make Gilbert feel at home. Coupled with the free and easy lifestyle of the Arizona campus, freshman year was as close to perfect as he could imagine.

Gilbert was an excellent fit for Arizona’s up-tempo style, and he came up big at both ends game after game. He scored 15.4 points per game on 45.3% shooting from the field. He was also a terror on defense, averaging two steals a contest.

Arizona entered the NCAA Tournament as a #1 seed, but the team was beat up from hard regular season. Jefferson was coming back from a stress fracture in his foot and was not yet playing at full speed. Woods, the key man in the middle, was sidelined by an aching back.

In their opener, the Wildcats appeared tight against Jackson State. They led by only eight points at intermission. Arizona found its rhythm in the second half, pulling away for a 71-47 win. Next up was a dangerous Wisconsin squad, which specialized in slowing down teams like the Wildcats. This the Badgers did, building a double-digit lead and thwarting every comeback attempt that Arizona could muster. Gilbert was high man with 21 points, but the Wildcats lost, 66-59. It was small consolation that the Badgers continued to roll all the way to the Final Four.

Despite Arizona's early exit during March Madness, the 2000-01 preseason polls had the Wildcats ranked among the best in the nation. Some believed they were Final Four material. Privately, the players thought they could go undefeated. Then the news about Bobbi Olson came—she was dying of cancer. The coach was devastated, as were his players. Her illness was kept out of the papers, but the team got off to a terrible start. Everyone around basketball knew something was wrong. Bobbi died on New Year’s Day.

Gilbert and his teammates chose to honor her memory by dedicating their season to her. Energized and inspired, they won 20 of their next 23 games. Gilbert was fantastic, burning opponents off the dribble and extending his range well past the the 3-point line. For the year, he upped his scoring to 16.5 ppg, and at 42.5%, he was deadly from beyond the arc. Gilbert also stepped up his defensive effort—though this was a result of being benched by Olson for poor practice habits.

Richard Jefferson, 2002 HIT

The Wildcats headed into the NCAA Tournament like a team on a mission. Gilbert was on fire in the opening game against Eastern Illinois, nailing nine of 13 shots from the field for 21 points in a 101-76 win. Next, Arizona choked off upstart Butler, 73-52. Gilbert netted 15 in the tilt, along with eight rebounds.

It looked like the championship run would end in the Sweet Sixteen against Mississippi, as the Rebels opened an 18-6 lead. But Arizona caught up early in the second half and—led by 16 points and 11 rebounds from Woods—and the Wildcats cruised to a 66-56 win. In the Midwest Final against Illinois, Gilbert scored 16 of Arizona’s first 24 points. He finished with 21. Gardner, meanwhile, hit clutch threes and foul shots in the waning minutes for an 87-81 victory. The Wildcats earned their first trip to the Final Four since their national title in 1997.

In the national semifinal, a win over Michigan State, Gilbert stunned the Spartans with six steals. On one of those thefts, Zach Randolph crashed into his chest. Two days later, when he took the floor against Duke for the championship, Gilbert was still feeling intense pain. That morning, he didn’t think he could get out of bed, much less suit up. But there was no way he was going to miss a shot at the national title.

The Wildcats and Blue Devils tangled in an exciting final, which fans in Carolina remember for the brilliant all-around performance of Shane Battier. Arizona fans still fume about because of questionable officiating. Duke guard Jason Williams played recklessly throughout the game, initiating contact at both ends of the floor, yet the referees rarely whistled him for fouls. The Blue Devils outlasted the Wildcats, 82-72.

Afterwards, Gilbert decided to enter the NBA draft, along with Jefferson, Gardner and Wright. Olson went on record saying that Gilbert was too young. But he felt that he had tested himself against the best the NCAA had to offer. To his mind, Gilbert had proved he would make a top pro.

Was Gilbert ready? Although he led Arizona in scoring, many scouts considered him too young, skinny and inexperienced to be an impact player at shooting guard and too basket-happy to play the point. When Gilbert scanned the talent available in the draft, however, he thought he might go in the lottery. It soon became clear he was wrong.

Gilbert Sr. threw a draft day party for his son in Studio City. After 20 picks had passed and his name had not been called, Gilbert called the coach who had recruited him out of high school. He wanted to know if there was any way he could undo the damage. Could someone call David Stern? Gilbert was panicked and crying—the first time he had shed tears since he was a child. That's when he heard some good news. The Golden State Warriors had taken him in the second round, with the 31st pick overall.

Gilbert collected himself and made the same prediction he had three springs earlier: I’m going to start by mid-season. Then he headed to the gym to work out.

Gilbert arrived at training camp slotted behind first-round pick Jason Richardson and backup Bob Sura. Coach Brian Winters was not a fan of underclassmen in the NBA and promised to keep Gilbert on the pine regardless of the team’s record. The rookie practiced hard, got into a handful of blowouts, learned what he could from watching, and mostly kept his opinions to himself. Besides youngsters Richardson, Larry Hughes and Antawn Jamison, the Warriors were light on talent, and Winters had a hard time coaxing big efforts out of his players. The result was a dismal 21-win season.

Gilbert stayed sharp in practice. He managed to get a key to Golden State's facility so he could work on his game at night. He also played a lot of pickup games in the local playgrounds in defiance of his $850,000 contract. Gilbert reasoned that this was the only action he would see where guys came at him ferociously. And they did. Everyone wanted a shot at NBA meat, and Gilbert obliged them.

Still, he sat. When the teams were announced for the Got Milk Rookie Game, Gilbert’s name was nowhere to be found. It frustrated him to watch the contest, mostly because he had destroyed so many of the players in college. Gilbert became even more determined to be ready when his chance finally came. (He suited up for the sophomore squad the following year and was named MVP).

2001 Sports Illustrated, Final Four issue

With Hughes struggling at the point and the playoffs out of range, Winters asked Gilbert if he would like to try his hand running the offense. He had never been interested in playing point guard, but minutes were minutes, and he had seen precious few to that point.

Learning on the job, Gilbert dished out 3.7 assists and scored over 10 points a game the rest of the way. It wasn’t always pretty. When in doubt, Gilbert just turned on the jets and outran his defenders. Sometimes he raced into traps, but at other times he created great opportunities for his teammates. When all was said and done, Gilbert finished fourth in scoring and third in assists and steals among NBA rookies—despite starting just 30 games. In those starts, he averaged 14.1 points and 5.1 assists.

During a trip to Miami for a game against the Heat during his rookie year, Gilbert finally met his mother again. He had imagined an emotional reunion, but when she introduced herself neither knew what to do or say.

Over the summer, the Warriors unloaded Hughes, Blaylock and Dean Oliver, and drafted Mike Dunleavy instead of Jay Williams—which basically gave the point guard job to Gilbert. He took a crash course in the position, watching tapes of former Wildcats Mike Bibby and Damon Stoudamire. When the 2002-03 season started, he was not only prepared to run the point, he was expecting to lead the Warriors to victory every game.

MAKING HIS MARK

With the offense now in his hands, Gilbert was very serious about his job. Happy-go-lucky off the court, he became increasingly frustrated. The Warriors lost 44 games in '02-03, and a lot were decided by the end of the second quarter. Gilbert unleashed his anger at officials, racking up a lot of technicals, but he held his tongue with teammates—though sometimes he had to take halftime showers (in full uniform) to cool off. Gilbert also smashed his share of clipboards and threw his share of chairs. Richardson nicknamed him “Baby Ron Artest.”

Gilbert appeared in all 82 contests for the Warriors and finished with excellent numbers, including 18.3 points per game and 6.3 assists. He logged nearly 3,000 minutes and answered any questions about whether he could be a productive NBA player. At season’s end, he was voted the the league’s Most Improved Player, beating out fellow point guards Chauncey Billups and Tony Parker.

Gilbert’s emergence thrilled Golden State fans—until it exposed an interesting loophole in the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement. Because he was a second-round pick, Gilbert was not only eligible for early-bird free agency, but the Warriors were not allowed to offer him more than the average salary of $4.6 million to stay in a Golden State uniform. In order to keep Gilbert, the team would have had to gut its roster. The Bay Area faithful went crazy when they found out they were likely to lose Gilbert. Many launched web sites supporting him and urging the Warriors to find a way to keep him.

Ultimately, however, it was the Washington Wizards that put the best deal on the table—six years at $65 million. Having closed the books on the Michael Jordan era, the team’s new coach, Eddie Jordan, and new GM, Ernie Grunfeld, wanted to rebuild around a nucleus of exciting young talent. Already in the fold were Hughes and Kwame Brown, the top pick in the 2001 draft. Jerry Stackhouse, recovering from knee surgery, would serve as a veteran presence once he returned to action.

Gilbert blossomed in his new surroundings in the 2003-04 campaign, scoring a triple-double in his forth game as a Wizard. His goal each time down the floor was to get into the paint and either go to the rim or dish off. He also became adept at shooting off pick-and-rolls and screens. After a couple of months, NBA defenders learned that they were better off laying back and conceding the 20-foot jumper. This is where Gilbert got into a trouble sometimes. A streaky shooter, he rarely passed when he was feeling it and subsequently took his teammates out of the offense. When the shot wasn’t there, his fellow Wizards did not always move without the ball. Coach Jordan encouraged Gilbert to think about scoring but reminded him he also had to ignite the offense in other ways.

At season’s end, the Wizards had just 25 wins, but the team’s fortunes were looking up. Hughes stayed relatively healthy and played well, Stackhouse contributed after his February return, and role players Brendan Haywood, Juan Dixon, Etan Thomas and Jarvis Hayes logged valuable minutes. Gilbert led the Wizards in scoring at 19.6 ppg and reached the 40-point plateau twice. In a game against the Lakers, he equaled the franchise mark with eight three-pointers.

Gilbert Arenas, 2002 Bowman Chrome

Gilbert’s growing friendship with Hughes was another important part of his development. The NBA’s version of the “Odd Couple,” the two young stars found plenty of common ground, both on and off the court. Gilbert was the smiling, gregarious guy who wore his emotions on his sleeve. Hughes was the quiet, serious type, who liked his privacy, his family, and the occasional night out with a rap star.

They say every successful NBA team needs three go-to guys. In Gilbert and Hughes, Washington believed it had two. Prior to the 2004-05 season, Grunfeld picked up a third—another ex-Warrior, Jamison. The trio performed as hoped, with Gilbert and Jamison making the All-Star squad and Hughes leading the league in steals and being named to the NBA All-Defensive First Team. Though s everal players battled injuries—including Hughes, who missed 20 games with a broken finger, and Brown, with a broken foot—talent and teamwork steadied the boat whenever it reached troubled waters. The Wizards went 45-37 to finish with their best record in 26 years.

Gilbert ended the year averaging 25.5 points, 5.1 assists and 4.7 rebounds a game. With Hughes going for 22 a night, Washington featured the highest-scoring backcourt in the league.

Washington’s #5 seed in the playoffs earned them a shot at the young Chicago Bulls, who ambushed the Wizards in the first two games of the series. Washington came back to knot the series and seemed to have Game 5 locked up when the Bulls made a 10-0 run to even the score 110-110 with five seconds left. Gilbert responded with a dramatic buzzer-beater for the victory.

In Game 6, Gilbert was ice cold, but he made the game-turning play on defense. With two minutes left and Chicago up by four, Kirk Hinrich stole the ball from Hughes and drove the other way all alone. Gilbert broke toward his basket as soon as he saw the play developing and soared through the air to tip Hinrich's shot away. The defensive gem ignited a 7-0 run for Washington, which triumphed 94-91.

Next up were Shaquille O’Neal, Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat. Without a solid center, the Wizards were helpless against Shaq, and no one could stop Wade, either. Miami took the first three games easily. In Game 4, the Wizards found themselves on the short end again, down 13 points in the fourth quarter, their season just minutes away from its conclusion. But with one last, great gasp, Washington pulled it together and roared back into the lead—though only for a moment. The Wizards lost, 99-95.

Larry Hughes, 2001 Heritage

Gilbert and Jamison were joined for the 2005–06 season by Caron Butler, who was acquired from the Lakers for Kwame Brown. Together they formed the NBA’s top-scoring trio, with Gilbert netting 29.3 a game followed by Jamison (20.5) and Butler (17.6). Gilbert was also among the league leaders in steals and assists. Somehow, he was overlooked by the fans when the All-Star ballots were tallied. He did made it in as an injury sub for Jermaine O’Neal.

The Wizards finished strong and snagged a playoff berth with a 42–40 record. They were the highest-scoring team in the East. Unfortunately, they had to play the surging Cavaliers, a 50-win team led by LeBron James. Cleveland took a 2–1 lead in the series after Gilbert missed a game-winning 3-pointer in Game 3. He redeemed himself in Game 4 by exploding for 20 in the fourth quarter to even the series.

Alas, the Wizards couldn't hold back the Cavaliers, who took the series in six. The last two wins were one-point heartbreakers in overtime. Gilbert sent Game 6 into OT with a 30-foot buzzer-beater, but later he missed two free throws that allowed the Cavs to score the winning bucket.

Gilbert was certain that Washington was just a player or two away from having a dominant club. During the off-season, he offered to take a pay cut if the team used it to secure a key free agent or two. The team did sign two players—Darius Songaila and DeShawn Stevenson—but they were hardly difference-makers in 2006–07.

Gilbert definitely was, however. Time and again he hit long jumpers or driving layups in the waning moments of games to give the Wizards a victory, or at least keep them alive. In a December meeting with Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, Gilbert exploded for 60 points. The Wizards won 147–141 in overtime, and Gilbert smashed Earl Boykins's NBA record for points in an overtime period, dropping 16 on LA.

Performances like these enabled Gilbert to average around 30 points a game in the early going, and this proved enough for him to out-ballot Vince Carter for a starting spot in the All-Star Game. Butler, who was also having a nice year, made his All-Star Game debut as well.

As usuual, there was plenty of drama in Gilbert’s basketball life. After he was left off the roster for the FIBA World Championship, he vowed to make Team USA director Jerry Colangelo pay. When the Wizards played the Phoenix Suns, Gilbert lit them up for 54 points and glared at Colangelo throughout the game.

The season seemed to be heading in the right direction for Washington until second-half injuries began to diminish the starting five. The critical blow was a season-ending knee injury for Gilbert, suffered in an April collision with Gerald Wallace of the Charlotte Bobcats. The Wizards squeezed into the playoffs, but they were swept by the Cavs in the first round.

G’ilberts knee injury, a torn left MCL, robbed him of almost two entire seasons. He also underwent micro-fracture surgery. Gilbert made a total of 10 starts in 2007–08 and 2008–09. The Wizards did an admirable job the first year, finishing with a winning record (followed by another first-round loss to the Cavs). In year two of Gilbert’s absence, the team fell apart. Washington lost 63 games, tying the franchise record for futilty.

Caron Butler, 2007 Upper Deck

Gilbert was finally back in playing shape for the 2009–10 season. New coach Flip Saunders also had Jamison and Butler in the lineup, along with newly acquired role players Mike Miller and Randy Foye. Gilbert was getting his 20-plus a night and doing double-duty as Washington's de facto point guard, but the club was losing regularly and was mired in the Southeast Division cellar.

During the Christmas holidays, news began trickling out of the Verizon Center that Gilbert had brought three unloaded guns into the Washington locker room. Later it was revealed that he and Javaris Crittendon had been waving guns at each other in a dispute over gambling debts. This happened a month after beloved longtime owner Abe Pollin—who changed the team's name from Bullets to remove the taint of gun violence—had passed away. And of course it was not Gilbert’s first association with firearms. As a young player in Golden State, he was also caught with an improperly registered weapon in his possession.

When local cops and federal investigators got involved, Gilbert stopped talking. Prior to that, however, he had attempted to shade the incident as an all-in-fun tussle between teammates. He explained the presence of the guns—a violation of NBA rules and DC law—by saying he had brought them to work from his home in Virginia so his kids wouldn't get them. Gilbert also issued a public apology.

Bad things do happen to good people, and by all accounts Gilbert is a decent guy. The gun incident won't define him as a person or player, but it may bring him into the crosshairs of the NBA, which could use him as an example for other potential gun-toting stars. The league, in fact, suspended him indefinitely. A long suspension during a comeback season is not what Gilbert needed. Nor is a legal hassle over the morals clause in NBA playing agreements—which would give the Wizards a convenient out of a top-heavy contract.

The bigger problem for Gilbert may be DC's strict gun laws. There normally isn’t much room to manuever with authorities. There is a chance he could face jail time.

Whatever the outcome, one thing is certain. Gilbert always takes the court feeling he has something to prove. Having cemented his reputation as one of basketball’s most dynamic scorers, he must now lift a talented but often aimless club from mediocrity to the exalted status of a conference power—and live down the inevitable jokes as one of the NBA’s true gunners.

GILBERT THE PLAYER

Javaris Crittenton, 2008 Topps

Very few NBA stars can legitimately boast Gilbert's combination of skills. He has excellent range on his jumper, can nail the mid-range pull-up and can dunk over most players in the league. As a point guard, his penetrate-and-pass style works well with slashers like Antawn Jamison and Caron Butler.

Even post-surgery, Gilbert is a relentless attacker. Whether he is hot or cold, he comes at opponenets the same way. Unafraid of fellow guards, he instead studies the defensive tendencies of the forwards and centers he is likely to encounter after shaking off his primary defender. He jumps into the shot-blockers and pulls up against the wide-body defenders, ensuring him either of a trip to the foul line or an open look at the rim.

Gilbert is a smart defender who is conscious of beating his man to a spot, and he rarely reaches in to pick up cheap fouls. Most of his steals come from playing the passing lanes. He has also become adept at slapping the ball away from big men when they put it on the floor.

Gilbert has shown the ability to lead his team, but he also provide unnecessary distractions at times. No one disputes his talent. But critics question whether he has the mental make-up to win a championship.

En helt, hverken mere eller mindre.

2010-12-20T17:22:00.001-08:00

Lidt fra og om Gilbert Arenas. Den mand er ganske enkelt et mirakel, intet mindre. Manden er en basketball spiller i NBA, der havde 3-4 fantastiske sæsoner på et lorte hold. Som bloggede om alt mellem himmel om jord. Som tillod sig at have idiosynkrasier, og som ikke var flov over det. Som dyrkede sit spil med ægte dedikerethed, ingen lykke der, ingen latterlig tale om passion, også det, men mere end det. En tragedie, ikke så meget fordi han krydsede en streg, for ærlig talt havde han krydset den mange gange før, men fordi filmen knækkede lidt for ham. Og den knækkede mest af alt fordi han fløj højt, blev skadet, blev deprimeret og derefter tog et par pistoler med i omklædnings rummet og måske, måske ikke pegede dem mod en eller anden. Men nu er han blevet traded til Orlando Magic. Ikke et af mine ynglingshold, men det var hans gamle hold heller ikke (jeg hader begge holds dragter, de er blå og kolde.) og det bliver Orlando heller aldrig. Derfor kan jeg jo godt holde med dem alligevel, der er alligevel ingen af topholdende som er fede. Lakers har Kobe og kobe må man respektere, men ligefrem holde med ham? Niks. Miami har de tre store og Wade er fed, lebron kan jeg overhoved ikke blive fascineret af og Bosh er ordinær, men god. Boston, de er for fede og de har virkelig et hold. Orlando, har Howard, et fysisk monster med absolut ingen moves, men nu har de altså også Gilbert Arenas og det er ganske fucking fedt... jeg håber, for historien om en helt, at han vinder et mesterskab, eller to og smasker lebron og kobe på vejen. Det ville være fedt.

Lakers har også Phil Jackson og bare lige for at påpege hvorfor man ikke kan undgå at elske amerikansk sport så tjeck den her bog ud (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sacred-Hoops-Spiritual-Lessons-Hardwood/dp/1401308813/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1292895621&sr=1-1), Phil Jackson = The Zen master & det er fanme ikke for sjovt og han er ikke for sjov, han er tværtimod den absolut mest vindende træner de sidste 15 år.
Et par citater fra Phil "I gave it my body and mind, but I have kept my soul." "Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the Me for the We."

# "Once you've done the mental work, there comes a point you have to throw yourself into the action and put your heart on the line. That means not only being brave, but being compassionate towards yourself, your teammates and your opponents."

# "If you meet the Buddha in the lane, feed him the ball."

# "Like life, basketball is messy and unpredictable. It has its way with you, no matter how hard you try to control it. The trick is to experience each moment with a clear mind and open heart. When you do that, the game--and life--will take care of itself."

# "Approach the game with no preset agendas and you'll probably come away surprised at your overall efforts."

Her er en artikel fra Esquire, og lidt forskellige citater, pranks og lign og et link til hans blog på nba.com http://www.nba.com/blog/gilbert_arenas.html#061019_01. Og lad mig lige nævne hvorfor han er et mirakel, et af mine mirakler, sådan et som giver håb i mørket. Det er han fordi han er basketball spiller og prankster, en rigtig prankster laver ikke sine pranks de gængse steder, niks han dukker op de mærkeligste steder og får på en eller anden mærkelig måde skabt sig en niche hvor han kan få lov. En rigtig prankster kommer som regel også ud i noget tragisk og selskabt, det er en del af miraklet.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12185-2005Apr23.html

We can't remember Gilbert Arenas without remembering some of the pranks he pulled on teammates during his time in D.C. We do that in the next installment of Gilbert Arenas Tribute Day.http://www.bulletsforever.com/2010/12/20/1887057/gilbert-arenas-tribute-day-remembering-arenas-pranks

I understand what people think because of the perception of me. They read the funny stuff, like me taking a crap in [teammate] Andray Blatche's shoes. But nobody is going to ask what Andray did to deserve it.

So I was sitting in my house playing Halo and I'm looking at my surveillance camera and I see Dominic and Nick creep up to my property all decked out. They parked across the street and they're running towards my house wearing masks and helmets. They came around the side of the house, jumped the wall, and came in through the garage. But by the time they did all that, I already was out of the house and jumped the other wall. They were in the house looking for me and I was across the street flattening their tires so when they decided to leave they'd be on flats. They looked around the house and couldn't find me so they came outside and saw me across the street flattening their tires. I called my friend and had him come pick me up and take me back to the house.

When they left the house, they stole my daddy's toaster! I like making toast! So I told them, Since you don't want to give my toaster back, it's war.

EDIT: User ThaCaronic pointed out that I left off the culmination of this epic tale. Because no story is complete without an appearance by Andray Blatche's chubby cousin.

I told them, Since you don't want to give my toaster back, it's war. He wanted his stuff back, I wanted my stuff back so I told them that we were going to have a paintball shootout.

We all went to the store like Sports Authority and bought all these paintball guns, like eight or nine new ones (because I already had three), then we bought the CO2 cartridges and like 12,000 paintballs and I even bought a couple paintball grenades.

We tried to make the teams fair.

It was Nick and Dominic and then Nick recruited last year's rookie, Andray Blatche. I thought Andray had enough of the pranks, but I guess he didn't. Andray brought his two friends, to make it five on their team.

My team was me, my friend John and three guys who were at my house hooking up stereo equipment.

So we finished buying everything and were in the store parking lot and Nick was mad that I had all the CO2 so he started to take some of mine. I was like, "Put the CO2 down or I'm going to shoot you with the paintball gun." But then he realizes I'm really going to shoot him with the paintball gun, and he puts it back. "You see what happens when you follow directions" But as I'm closing the trunk with the CO2 in it, he takes some and tries to jump in Dominic's car. I said, "Dominic, do not close that door." Nick is screaming, "Close the door Dominic! Close the door!" So Dominic left the door open. I go to Nick, "You have three seconds to put the CO2 back. One! Two!" He started to scramble to put it back and I got him anyway. I got him like six times. So he's laying in the car all mad saying, "I don't want to play no more."

So the war is still on.

I tell them that the shootout is planned for 12 o'clock midnight in my backyard because it's pure black back there. You can't see nothing. So I tell them, "12 o'clock, be in my backyard and we're going at it five on five."

We're putting all our stuff together at my place and they're putting their stuff together at their place but they are having trouble with it so I have my boy John and my other teammate Adam to go over to their place and have them help them fix their guns. And when John and Adam showed up at their place they tried to ambush them, thinking that I was going to come too. But I wasn't. So John and Adam had to run out of there.

So it's like 11:10 at night and all you here are paintball hitting the windows. POOM. POOM. POOM. POOM. POOM. They were already in the backyard. They showed up an hour early.

So we hurried up and put on all of our gear and snuck outside through some of the vents in the house.

And then we had a nice, good old paintball shootout in the dark.

They ran out of CO2 pretty quick because my team had most of it so one of Andray's friends yells, "Aww, it's not fair!" and they started to bail and jumped back over the wall. But one the kids was a little too heavy. His name is Jamar. That's 'Dray's cousin. Jamar couldn't get over the wall because Jamar has been eating one too many Twinkies.

So Jamar got stuck in my yard with the five of us. We gave him the chance to walk out like a man, or cry like a girl. He did both. He cried like a little girl while he was walking and running while we were shooting paintballs at him. I told him, "Hey, come in the lion's den, you're bound to get hit."

They said that he got hit so many times that he had trouble putting his clothes on the next day.

We played for about an hour and a half. I haven't had that much fun in a long time. What people don't realize is that when you're in the NBA, you lose stuff like that. You're not in there with kids, you're in there with grown men that have families. By having these young kids on the team, it's fun for me because I get to have that childhood that I lost. I lost it when I came into the NBA when I got picked No. 31 because I was so determined to be the best that I didn't get to actually have fun having fun, if that makes sense.

That's the moral of the story: I had fun.

Et par qoutes: http://www.gilbertology.net/quotes/
10. "Congratulations! You get to go into the mind of me, Gilbert Arenas, of the Washington Wizards. Good luck."

This was the first line from Arenas' first blog entry on NBA.com. Even at the beginning, he knew that anyone who dared to read his thoughts was in for a wild ride, and indeed we were.

9. "i wake up this morning and seen i was the new JOHN WAYNE..lmao media is too funny."

Arenas' first tweet after news broke about his gun scandal Like the first line from his blog, his first tweet after gun-gate gave us a pretty good idea that things were only going to go downhill from there.

8. "I told them to cut the leg off a couple times. You know, cut it off and then bring it back to me when it was all healed. Because, you know, Heather Mills on Dancing with the Stars, she had that leg. I was saying I could borrow one of those and finish out the season. But they wasn't going for that."

Arenas describing his somewhat ill-conceived plan on his blog to get back on the court after his first surgery.

7. "When coach said after we get the rebound to get the ball to me, from there I knew the shot I was going to take. I just feel so comfortable taking that shot because I practice it. It's not a rushed shot. You know, it's a great shot for me.

Like I said, I'm 8-for-8 for this year on anything behind the 30-foot line and I feel comfortable shooting that.

I mean, because I know I'm going to shoot it, he's still in retreat. You know, if I know I'm going to shoot it, I'm always more dangerous than the defender."

When Arenas was in full-attack mode, he knew how to put his defenders on retreat in almost any situation, even in final moments of the game. His description of how he created space for his game-winning shot on his blog gave us the best window into his attack mentality.

6. "Before, in Eddie's offense, because it was made for the 3s and the 4s, I took a lot of wild shots, fastbreak threes. But since I have the ball more, I probably don't need to do that," he said. "I plan on taking less than 100 threes. I'm not going to be a three-point shooter this year. I worked most of the year on mid-range jumpers."

Arenas on his new role in Flip Saunders' offense. He took 181 threes in 32 games that season.

5. "They read the funny stuff, like me taking a crap in [teammate] Andray Blatche's shoes. But nobody is going to ask what Andray did to deserve it. You read about it because that's when I'm at my goofiest, when I'm around my teammates. I don't get in trouble outside of this building. You are not going to catch me drinking and driving, or picking up prostitutes. People don't see what my teammates see, the guy who is in here three times a day working out. That's the guy they don't see."

The last great quote from Arenas. In fairness, we really didn't hear enough about his incredible work-ethic or how he avoided some of the pitfalls of the NBA nighlife. But seriously, how can we focus on that when he's talking about taking a crap in someone's shoe?

4. "They told me that I might have won. They was 95 percent sure that I won, but they still didn't know yet, they were still calculating the numbers.

They said, 'We're 95 percent sure that you overtook Vince Carter.'

So I woke my daughter up and we started dancing.

She was crying because she was still sleepy, but I considered it laughing."

Arenas on his blog, showing off his parenting skills after learning he had been named to the starting lineup for the 2007 All-Star Game.

3. "The hibachi is coming to a city near you. I'm cooking chicken and shrimp, but if you want to throw a double team my way, filet mignon gets cooked too."

Arenas on his blog, after his Hibachi nickname caught on with the public.

2. "i guess everyone wants me to act like the rest of the nba twitters players...(i bought a shirt today from the mall)(practice was tough 2 (coach said he likes my high socks lol lol)(we had a close game today) is that really who u wanna follow..sounds a little boring to me"

Gilbert Arenas summing up what makes him different and what endears him to fans better than any of us ever could on Twitter.

1. "My swag was phenomenal."

Arenas after draining a buzzer-beater to defeat the Bucks. If there were four words more apt at describing Arenas at the peak of his talents, I haven't heard them.

ABSTRACT: A pseudo-psychotherapeutic assessment that attempts to shed light on the eclectic nature and unique brain chemistry of the NBA's most unheralded superstar.

SUBJECT: Gilbert Arenas
AGE: 24
HEIGHT: 6'4"
WEIGHT: 210

OCCUPATION: Point guard, Washington Wizards, National Basketball Association

OCCUPATIONAL FUNCTION

To dictate and maintain the flow of the game; to get the ball to the bigs; to shoot when he can, from wherever he can, which is pretty much wherever he wants; to run an offense formulated around him, in particular his physical strength, his inherent toughness, and his desire to take the big shot (see complicating factor 5, below).

ACHIEVEMENT LEVEL

Fourth in the league in scoring last year (twenty-nine points per game); second in three-pointers made; led his employer, a perennial league doormat, to the playoffs for the second straight year--this time while averaging a league-high thirty-four points postseason.

SYMPTOMS

Never stops training (never), never leaves his hotel room while on the road, starts ridiculously ambitious collections he cannot possibly finish, goes to extreme lengths to keep others from leaving him voice-mail messages, sleeps on a couch even while at home, maintains grudges for self-motivation, formulates grandiose architectural plans, fights dirty with coworkers, crushes his opponents in Xbox without remorse.

COMPLICATING FACTORS

1. Subject was not selected until the second round of the 2001 NBA draft.

2. Despite previously noted achievements, subject was left off the 2006 All-Star team initially and the U. S. national team.

3. Subject plays (excellent) basketball in what is otherwise a football city.

4. Subject works in the shadows of more visible, highly marketable players throughout the league.

5. Subject ended last season by uncharacteristically choking on two free throws against the Cleveland Cavaliers after playing LeBron James to a standstill for six games.

PRELIMINARY DIAGNOSIS

Hypercompetitiveness syndrome tempered by disruptive patterns of obsessively focused semipointless addictions, masochistic recreational-wrestling tendencies, a sociopathic room-service addiction, and a demonstrated case of manufactured-nemesis dependence.

ENTRY 1: SUBJECT REPORTS A DREAM

SUBJECT: Lately I've been dreaming I'm playing basketball on a desert island.

OBSERVER: Like in the middle of the ocean? With palm trees?

SUBJECT: Yeah, playing full court, a real game. That's all there is on the island--just the court, water lapping right up to the edge of the blacktop. It's just water all out there. Deep. Then I notice there are fans out in the waves, circling us.

OBSERVER: What are they doing? Swimming?

SUBJECT: They're watching. Riding Jet Skis, lying on floats out there in the waves. Swimming, too, I guess. But a long way out. What do you think that means? I've been asking people.

OBSERVER: Maybe you want a little distance. Or you feel surrounded.

SUBJECT: Yeah. The other dream I've been having is my teeth falling out. But that just means that someone is stabbing me in the back. So I know that one.

ENTRY 2: SUBJECT'S PEER-ASSESSMENT METHODOLOGY

I was taught that you find out who players are just like how you find out about dogs. If you have a litter of dogs and you put them in the dark, put them in a corner, and you shake your keys, whatever dogs come to those keys, them's the ones you want. They're curious. They want to know what's going on. They're ready. They're fighting. The ones who sit in the corner, they're afraid. They don't have the heart. That's how I look at people. You put them in a situation and see how they act. Some of these great stars in the league, some of them are scared to take big shots. Some of them are scared to fail. Some of them don't have the heart. You start seeing it and you start picking at it. Other people--like Earl Boykins, he's a fourth-quarter player. Ben Gordon is a fourth-quarter player. The fourth-quarter player is the one you want. Me, I'm gonna shoot that shot every time. Every time.

ENTRY 3: OFF-SEASON TRAINING HABITS OBSERVED

The Wizards' strength coach feeds the subject the ball, off both makes and misses, which aren't many. He shoots from beyond the three-point arc, stringing together nine made shots in a row at one point, then twelve. Later, from a full four paces farther back, he makes fourteen in a row. That, it should be noted, is a heave. The subject is expressionless when the ball goes in. The loose upward thrust of his body, the calibrated arc, the soft thwick of the net--it does not seem to please him or affirm anything about what he is doing. But missing, even once, makes him wince. Missing twice makes him tilt his head, as if the world were presenting him with a puzzle, a slight recalibration that needs to be made. When he reaches a thousand shots, he turns, smiling and loose, and fires at every basket in the gym from that one spot--twenty-eight feet, then twenty feet, then fifty and at least sixty and fifty and twenty again. He makes four out of six.

ENTRY 4: SELF-IMPOSED ISOLATING TENDENCIES

OBSERVER'S NOTE: In five seasons in the NBA, first with Golden State and now the Wizards--forty-one road games per year, plus exhibition trips and, more recently, the playoffs--the subject estimates that he has left his hotel room a total of six times, and only in L. A., where he grew up.

I think it came from my first year. I was so depressed that I wasn't playing that I didn't want to go out. I'm gonna stay and do sit-ups or jumping jacks. And I'm not gonna come out. Not till morning. There's nothing out there for me. I don't know those cities. I don't know where to go. I don't have any people. Other guys will be out, the steak house, the clubs, just rollin'. Me, I'm fine. Time is falling off. Sun's coming up. I'm doing more sit-ups than the night before. I'll watch three or four movies. I'll watch infomercials. The last thing I bought was this colon cleanser. I just got talked into it. I'm like, Man, he makes it sound so good.

ENTRY 5: SELF-PERCEPTION OF OCCUPATIONAL ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES

When I go into the ring, I know every team and what those players do. I don't pay attention to the guards. Get those bigs. Okay, this one takes charges, so I have to stop and pull. I've got to trick him. Or, say, Alonzo--he loves to block shots, so I'm going to jump into him every time. I have to think: How many fouls does Shaq have? Two in the first period? Okay, no one else is going to get that next foul on him. Our bigs--they're going to jump away from Shaq. So all right, let me go in there and get hammered. That's okay--I like the contact. Then that's three fouls, and I don't have to worry about him until after halftime. I would run into anything. Once that ball goes up, I don't feel none of that. I'm ready to get dirty. Let's play a little dirt.

ENTRY 6: THE SUBJECT OBSERVED IN OBSESSIVE MODALITY

It is Wednesday, the day after movies are traditionally released on DVD, and the subject piles up purchases at a local video store. He collects with no particular agenda in mind. He's just hungry for more. He grabs the new releases first, two and three at a time, piling them against his chest like a stack of library books. He is not picky. On this day his haul includes The Libertine, The Matador, Basic Instinct 2, three submarine movies, a dance movie, two romances, and a handful of comedies. As the stack grows higher, he slows. How many does he plan to buy today? "I usually stop when I get to here," he says, holding a finger to his chin.

He doesn't know when he will watch them, or even if he ever will. Back at home, in the supremely carpeted media room of his cozy, overcouched theater, he has a hard drive capable of holding more than ten thousand titles. Ask him and he'll tell you he wants them all. All the movies. Ever.

"I have so much entertainment going on in my house that I don't need to go out," he explains. "I don't need to go to the movies if I own all these movies. I don't need to go out to a game because I've got all these video games. I don't have to leave my house to have a conversation because I just hop online and have fun with my friends, talk trash, and do whatever we're gonna do right there."

ENTRY 7: EARLY FORMATIVE EXPERIENCE (GETTING CLOTHESLINED BY A BENCHWARMER)

The guy who helped my career out, truthfully--it's hard to believe--was Marc Jackson from Philly. Not the guard Mark Jackson. The big Marc Jackson. The year after he signed his contract with Golden State, he wasn't playing, either, so we'd come to the gym, eight o'clock, and we'd play full-court one-on-one. Me, him, and Dean Oliver. We'd play twenty-one, one-on-one, two-on-one, full-court one-on-one. From eight until practice started. Three hours. Every day. Every time we drove past him, he'd clothesline us. He was like, "Well, you're in the NBA now. You're going to feel pain." He just hammered us every day. So I learned how to be tough. And once I started playing, I was like, Okay, I'm used to this already.

ENTRY 8: UNUSUAL SLEEPING RITUALS

SUBJECT [interviewed while playing two-man Halo in his bedroom]: You can't see very good. I'll sit down on the floor if you want.

OBSERVER: No, I can tell you like to play on the bed. I'll stay here.

SUBJECT: I just started sleeping in this bed after three years. I used to sleep over there.

OBSERVER: Where? On the couch?

SUBJECT: Yeah. I trained myself to sleep on the couch.

OBSERVER: Why would you do that?

SUBJECT: You know.

OBSERVER: Not really.

SUBJECT: I don't like women all up on me, touching me. So I get up and go.

OBSERVER: Yeah?

SUBJECT: Then they get up and go. [Subject points to the video-game screen.] Stay there. Wait for me behind that door.

OBSERVER: What door?

SUBJECT: [shaking his head]: I discovered that women don't like that much.

ENTRY 9: EARLY FORMATIVE EXPERIENCE (GETTING SCHOOLED BY THE GLOVE)

It's my first year, and I'm finally starting to play. I'm getting comfortable. I'm averaging, as a starter, sixteen, six, and six. And then I run up against Gary Payton. First time in my career I'm happy to get subbed out of a game. That's when he was still the Glove, and he's just doing everything, anything. He's posting up our big. He's grabbing and pulling the ball. Any time he gets close to me, I'm picking the ball up. He's just got me screwed up. So he has eighteen points in the first period. And he comes up to me, he's like, "Rookie, you're lucky I'm not an A. I. type of player or I'd have forty on you." And coach subs me out. BRRRRR. [Note: Subject does an excellent imitation of a buzzer.] Woo! I run off the court and I'm like, "Oh, my God. Eighteen points! I'm glad I'm out. All right, Bobby Sura. Go get 'em, tiger." I never said one word to G. P. But now, after that game, I got him every time. I think it's something in my mind about what he did to me that first year. He embarrassed me so bad. As soon as he thinks about sticking me, I go at him. I know he's slower than me, so I have to take advantage of that. That's my mentality: This is your chance.

ENTRY 10: EXPLORATION OF ABERRANT CLUTCH PERFORMANCE

OBSERVER: In between those free throws against the Cavs, LeBron came over, pressed his hand against your chest, and said something to you. What did he say?

SUBJECT: He said, "If you miss this shot, you know who's gonna hit the game winner."

OBSERVER: What went through your mind?

SUBJECT: I wasn't even thinking about it. Like, I heard him. But I don't miss free throws. That's the thing: I never miss free throws at the end. And this was a big free throw. The first one, I shot it, and I went, like, What? That wasn't me. It reminded me of this movie I saw where a kid is controlling the ball from the stands. All of my balls hit the front or back of the rim--nothing ever to the left or right.

OBSERVER: In the middle of all that, you're thinking about the mechanics?

SUBJECT: Yeah.

ENTRY 11: SUBJECT'S PERCEIVED IMPORTANCE OF CATHARTIC VIOLENCE IN A TEAM SETTING

We have a couple of players who are very aggressive, like Awvee Storey. You know, when you have aggressive people, they have to relieve some of that. And I'm one of those people. I don't care--I wrastle. Wrestling. Hurting. I'll bite, punch him in the side. I'll say, Look, you punch me in the stomach once, I'll punch you in the stomach once. We'll see who falls on the floor first. It's like: No punching in the face. No chest and ribs. We don't hurt each other. I mean, a couple of rug burns here or there. I remember one day, he laid on top of me and was pinching my nose so hard that it bruised. For two days, it was just burgundy. He was calling me Rudolph. Me and him, we can't be in the same room. Our personalities clash because he's a bully and I don't like being bullied by anybody.

ENTRY 12: COMPETITIVE RESPONSE OBSERVED (OFF COURT)

The subject is playing NBA 2K6 on Xbox 360 in the players' lounge at the Verizon Center before going in for yet another off-season shooting session. He's come an hour before the gym opens, as usual, and in these moments he will take on all comers at Xbox. He won't just beat you. He will beat you by as many points as you want. Just name the amount. He treats it like a golf handicap. For this game, he's giving away two hundred points to his friend John, who has flown in from L. A. for a visit. It's the Cavs versus the Wizards all over again, except this time Gilbert has the Cavs.

He knows every kink of NBA 2K6--and how to exploit it. He has shifted LeBron to guard and put his team in a game-long full-court press. He is playing against his video-game self and doesn't like the way John is using him. "You gotta get me square to the basket," he says as the Game Gilbert misses a shot from twelve feet. "You gotta get two point guards in there."

There's a minute and a half left, and Real Gilbert is up by 191. Then Game Gilbert gets a steal and throws a long pass--only to have LeBron pick it off. "Sorry, Gilbert," says Gilbert. "You can't stop the King."

As the game ticks down, the Cavs and Gilbert--Real Gilbert--are up by 201. John has the ball and is running the clock down for the final shot. At the last second, Antawn Jamison flips in a layup that makes it 331-132. John screams, circling the room, knocking magazines here and there. The man just got beat by 199 points and is ecstatic. Gilbert shakes his head.

ENTRY 13: CONSTRICTED DIETARY HABITS

On the road, I eat hamburgers every day. The team tries to get me to eat differently, but no. Burgers, burgers, burgers. I like burgers. McDonald's burgers. Wendy's burgers. Burger King burgers. There's this one place in Canada--I even look at the schedule to find out when we play there--best burger I've ever tasted. Real soft and sweet. I ate twelve of them in one night.

ENTRY 14: TRAINING HABITS (NOCTURNAL)

It is 10:15 P.M., and the subject phones the Wizards' strength coach to ask him to open up the Verizon Center. He then sets out from his home, driving the thirty-five minutes through the light nighttime traffic. He does this often enough that it feels routine. But he's not going there now to shoot or dribble or even touch a ball. He wants nothing more than the familiarity of running the stairs in his home arena--the skit-skit-skit of his feet on the cement treads, the bass line of his own breathing, the deep ache of muscles tested once more--until the hours have passed.

He doesn't care what the clock says. He doesn't care what other players are doing just then. He cares only about filling the time. It's night, remember, a while before midnight, a time when most people his age, most people with his sort of money and cars and good looks, are drawn to the expansive and throbbing possibilities of clubs, parties, concerts. Gilbert shows no sign of that pull. He is simply dealing with time. There is so much of it in the NBA. It's the thing that surprised him the most when he came into the league. There's practice at 1:00, there's a game at night, and that's it. Even though it's late, there are so many hours left to fill until he will find sleep on the couch in his bedroom that night.

ENTRY 15: SELF-IMPOSED COMMUNICATION BARRIERS

When I get a new cell phone, first thing I do is turn it off and call from my house phone and leave stupid little messages to myself. Like: "It's me." "It's me." "This is Gilbert." "It's me." "It's Gilbert." I just fill it up, so no one can leave messages. If you don't, you leave for an hour and thirteen people have called. So there are thirteen new messages you have to listen to and it's like, Oh, man. I don't feel like hearing people's stories. Most people love leaving messages that they don't want to tell you in person. So I cut that off.

ENTRY 16: SELF-MOTIVATIONAL MECHANISMS

The subject steps out of his dressing closet holding a list he keeps there of every player in the 2001 NBA draft who was selected ahead of him. All thirty. He runs his fingers down the page. He has scratched out each player who is no longer in the league. "Hmpff," he says, pausing on a name. "I got to get the pencil out. Utah. Raul Lopez? Ain't seen him much lately."

ENTRY 17: EARLY FORMATIVE EXPERIENCE (FINANCIAL HUMILITY)

I never look at my check. I learned that lesson my first year. I got my first stub, and it said $16,000. And I'm like, "That's what I'm talking about! I'm rich!" And I'm dancing and having fun, and then something told me to look over at Antawn Jamison's stub. It said $360,000. I look back at mine: sixteen. Three hundred and sixty thousand?! That's my whole year right there--in one check! So I asked Bobby Sura, "Man, how much you make?" Bobby Sura said, "Mine says $5 million. I get mine up front." I'm like, Whoa. I never looked again. Not once. Not even tried.

ENTRY 18: ADDITIONAL OBSERVATIONS OF OBSESSIVE BEHAVIOR

The subject has a five-and-a-half-foot-tall safe in his basement full of jerseys of great NBA players past and present. They're all signed, too. Each of them is in a plastic bag, each numbered and cataloged. Tracy McGrady? Got him. Home and away. Hedo Turkoglu? Got him, too. There are so many jerseys packed into this safe that the plastic packages tumble out when he opens it, like a sight gag in a sitcom. There must be a thousand. It is a collection he started only a year ago. Now they come in two, three, five a day.

The subject harbors plans to build a basketball court made of glass. He doesn't know where he will build it. He doesn't know when. But the plan is to showcase these jerseys behind the glass. There will even be a mirror behind each jersey so that you can see the back of it. When the subject realized that the court floor wouldn't be big enough to hold the burgeoning collection, he decided to make the walls glass, too. And the ceiling. "When I realized I could do the ceiling," he says, "that made me feel good." More than anything, it seems to soothe him to think about building this house of glass, which he imagines wrapping him in some way, buffering him in a museumlike calm.

ENTRY 19: SUBJECT HAS AN IDEA FOR A SHOE COMMERCIAL

You know how I always throw my jersey into the stands after a game? In Washington, they just go crazy for it. So in this commercial, that's what I'm gonna do with my shoes. I've just hit a game winner, and I throw these shoes. Everyone starts to react, and you see everything in slow motion. Everyone's pushing, shoving, doing whatever it takes to try to get to these shoes. People from the 400 level, they're jumping off the ledge, they're missing the pile, hitting nothing but chairs, and you can just see in people's faces like, Ooooh, that hurt. While all this stuff's going on, one of the shoes pops out of the crowd, and a little girl gets it and she takes off. A couple of people see she has it, and they start chasing her, and she's looking back running--and then she gets clotheslined by a kid in a wheelchair. So he picks the shoe up and says--he's gonna have the only line in there--"They said I couldn't get it. Heh. Impossible is nothing." And then he rolls off.

CONCLUSION:

The subject presents divergent sets of behaviors that suggest traditional pathologies, and their concurrent presence--well, that might make you think he's flat crazy. But there is no acceleration to his madness, no manic upward slope, no crashing depressive spiral. The collections, the isolation, the aggressive tendencies, the endless training--they focus him, shield him from distractions, toughen him up. And while all that may make him a little nutty, it also makes him really, really good.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/sports/ESQ1106gilbert#ixzz18hlukBRy

How to play Guitar by David Fair

2010-12-19T15:11:00.000-08:00

How to play Guitar
by David Fair
I taught myself to play guitar. It’s incredibly easy when you understand the science of it. The skinny strings play the high sounds, and the fat strings play the low sounds. If you put your finger on the string father out by the tuning end it makes a lower sound. If you want to play fast move your hand fast and if you want to play slower move your hand slower. That’s all there is to it. You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people use, but that’s pretty limiting. Even if you took a few years and learned all the chords you’d still have a limited number of options. If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.
Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get skinnier and skinnier as they go down. But he thing to remember is it’s your guitar and you can put whatever you want on it. I like to put six different sized strings on it because that gives the most variety, but my brother used to put all of the same thickness on so he wouldn’t have so much to worry about. What ever string he hit had to be the right one because they were all the same.
Tuning the guitar is kind of a ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning pegs to just a certain place, that implies that every other place would be wrong. But that absurd. How could it be wrong? It’s your guitar and you’re the one playing it. It’s completely up to you to decide hoe it should sound. In fact I don’t tune by the sound at all. I wind the strings until they’re all about the same tightness. I highly recommend electric guitars for a couple of reasons. First of all they don’t depend on body resonating for the sound so it doesn’t matter if you paint them. As also, if you put all the knobs on your amplifier on 10 you can get a much higher reaction to effort ratio with an electric guitar than you can with an acoustic. Just a tiny tap on the strings can rattle your windows, and when you slam the strings, with your amp on 10, you can strip the paint off the walls.
The first guitar I bought was a Silvertone. Later I bought a Fender Telecaster, but it really doesn’t matter what kind you buy as long as the tuning pegs are on the end of the neck where they belong. A few years back someone came out with a guitar that tunes at the other end. I’ve never tried one. I guess they sound alright but they look ridiculous and I imagine you’d feel pretty foolish holding one. That would affect your playing. The idea isn’t to feel foolish. The idea is to put a pick in one hand and a guitar in the other and with a tiny movement rule the world.

Captain Beefheart's 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing

2010-12-19T15:09:00.000-08:00

Budding guitarists take note.

1. Listen to the birds

That's where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren't going anywhere.

2. Your guitar is not really a guitar

Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you're good, you'll land a big one.

3. Practice in front of a bush

Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn't shake, eat another piece of bread.

4. Walk with the devil

Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the "devil box." And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you're brining over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.

5. If you're guilty of thinking, you're out

If your brain is part of the process, you're missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.

6. Never point your guitar at anyone

Your instrument has more clout than lightning. Just hit a big chord then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field.

7. Always carry a church key

That's your key-man clause. Like One String Sam. He's one. He was a Detroit street musician who played in the fifties on a homemade instrument. His song "I Need a Hundred Dollars" is warm pie. Another key to the church is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf's guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty — making you want to look up her dress the whole time to see how he's doing it.

8. Don't wipe the sweat off your instrument

You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music.

9. Keep your guitar in a dark place

When you're not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don't play your guitar for more than a day, be sure you put a saucer of water in with it.

10. You gotta have a hood for your engine

Keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house, the hot air can't escape. Even a lima bean has to have a piece of wet paper around it to make it grow.

--------------------------

This sound advice can be found in the book Rolling Stone's Alt-Rock-A-Rama (1996) which includes an article written by John McCormick about Moris Tepper.

"Though they bear numbers, they are not arranged heirarchically — each Commandment has equal import."

Participatroy Video

2010-12-05T11:42:00.000-08:00

http://deepdishwavesofchange.blogspot.com/2010/05/interview-with-pv-sateesh-participatory.html

http://www.scribd.com/doc/12956925/Philip-Pocock-Collaborative-Documentary-Datatecture-1980

http://documentation.leisa.info/tools/guides.html

Jeg vil med det samme sige, at det er svært at finde teknikker af seriøs karakter. Så snart de specefikke teknikker bliver formuleret, bliver det nemt at se hvor det kan gå galt. Teknikker kan ikke redde os og er aldrig uden farer. Men sådan er det nu engang.

2010-11-23T17:44:00.000-08:00

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- On the Absolute, Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth
- Minnesota Declaration
On the Asolute, the Sublime and Ecstatic Truth

This text was first published at ARION 17.3 Winter 2010

ON THE ABOSLUTE, THE SUBLIME, AND ECSTATIC TRUTH

by WERNER HERZOG
(Translated by Moira Weigel)

[This text was originally delivered by Werner Herzog as a speech in Milano, Italy, following a screening of his film “Lessons of Darkness”on the fires in Kuwait. He was asked to speak about the Absolute, but he spontaneously changed the subject to the Sublime. Because of that, a good part of what follows was improvised in the moment.]

The collapse of the stellar universe will occur—like creation—in grandiose splendor.
—Blaise Pascal

The words attributed to Blaise Pascal which preface my film Lessons of Darkness are in fact by me. Pascal himself could not have said it better.

This falsified and yet, as I will later demonstrate, not falsified quotation should serve as a first hint of what I am trying to deal with in this discourse. Anyway, to acknowledge a fake as fake contributes only to the triumph of accountants.

Why am I doing this, you might ask? The reason is simple and comes not from theoretical, but rather from practical, considerations. With this quotation as a prefix I elevate [erheben] the spectator, before he has even seen the first frame, to a high level, from which to enter the film. And I, the author of the film, do not let him descend from this height until it is over. Only in this state of sublimity [Erhabenheit] does something deeper become possible, a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual. Ecstatic truth, I call it.

After the first war in Iraq, as the oil fields burned in Kuwait, the media—and here I mean television in particular—was in no position to show what was,beyond being a war crime, an event of cosmic dimensions, a crime against creation itself. There is not a single frame in Lessons of Darkness in which youcan recognize our planet; for this reason the film is labeled “science fiction,” as if it could only have been shot in a distant galaxy, hostile to life. At its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, the film met with an orgy of hate. From theraging cries of the public I could make out only “aestheticization of horror.” And when I found myself being threatened and spat at on the podium, I hit upon only a single, banal response. “You cretins,” I said, “that’s what Dante did in his Inferno, it’s what Goya did, and Hieronymus Bosch too.” In my moment of need, without thinking about it, I had called upon the guardian angels who familiarize us with the Absolute and the Sublime.

The Absolute, the Sublime, the Truth . . . What do these words mean? This is, I must confess, the first time in my life that I have sought to settle such questions outside of my work, which I understand, first and foremost, in practical terms.

By way of qualification, I should add at once that I am not going to venture a definition of the Absolute, even if that concept casts its shadow over everything that I say here. The Absolute poses a never-ending quandary for philosophy, religion, and mathematics. Mathematics will probably come closest to getting it when someone finally proves Riemann’s hypothesis. That question concerns the distribution of prime numbers; unanswered since the nineteenth century, it reaches into the depths of mathematical thinking. A prize of a million
dollars has been set aside for whoever solves it, and a mathematical institute in Boston has allotted a thousand years for someone to come up with a proof. The money is waiting for you, as is your immortality. For two and a half thousand years, ever since Euclid, this question has preoccupied mathematicians; if it turned out Riemann and his brilliant hypothesis were not right, it would send unimaginable shockwaves through the disciplines of mathematics and natural science. I can only very vaguely begin to fathom the Absolute; I am in no position to define the concept.

THE TRUTH OF THE OCEAN

FOR NOW, I’ll stay on the trusted ground of praxis. Even if we cannot really grasp it, I would like to tell you about an unforgettable encounter I had with Truth while shooting Fitzcarraldo. We were shooting in the Peruvian jungles east of the Andes between the Camisea and Urubamba rivers, where I would later haul a huge steamship over a mountain. The indigenous people who lived there, the Machiguengas, made up a majority of the extras and had given us the permit to film on their land. In addition to being paid, the Machiguengas
wanted further benefits: they wanted training for their local doctor and a boat, so that they could bring their crops to market a few hundred kilometers downriver themselves, instead of having to sell them through middlemen. Finally, they wanted support in their fight for a legal title to the area between
the two rivers. One company after another had seized it in order to plunder local stocks of wood; recently, oil firms had also been casting a greedy eye on their land.

Every petition we entered for a deed vanished at once in the labyrinthine provincial bureaucracy. Our attempts at bribery failed, too. Finally, having traveled to the ministry responsible for such things, in the capital city of Lima, I was told that, even if we could argue for a legal title on historical and cultural grounds, there were two stumbling blocks. First, the title was not contained in any legally verifiable document, but supported only by hearsay, which was irrelevant. Second, no one had ever surveyed the land in order to provide a recognizable border.

To the latter end, I hired a surveyor, who furnished the Machiguengas with a precise map of their homeland. That was my part in their truth: it took the form of a delineation, a definition. I’ll admit, I quarreled with the surveyor. The
topographic map that he furnished was, he explained, in certain ways incorrect. It did not correspond to the truth because it did not take into account the curvature of the earth.
In such a little piece of land? I asked, losing patience. Of course, he said angrily, and pushed his water glass toward me. Even with a glass of water,you have to be clear about it, what we’re dealing with is not an even surface. You should see the curvature of the earth as you would see it on an ocean or a lake. If you were really able to perceive it exactly as it is—but you are too simple-minded—you would see the earth curve. I will never forget this harsh lesson.

The question of hearsay had a deeper dimension and required research of an entirely different kind. [Arguing for their title to the land] the Indians could only claim that they’d always been there; this they had learned from their grandparents. When, finally, the case appeared hopeless, I managed to get an audience with the President, [Fernando] Belaúnde. The Machiguengas of Shivankoreni elected two representatives to accompany me. [In the President’s office in Lima] when our conversation threatened to come to a standstill, I presented Belaúnde with the following argument: in Anglo-Saxon law, although hearsay is generally inadmissible as evidence, it is not absolutely inadmissible. As early as 1916, in the case of Angu vs. Atta, a colonial court in the Gold Coast (today Ghana) ruled that hearsay could serve as a valid form of evidence.

That case was completely different. It had to do with the use of a local governor’s palace; then, too, there were no documents, nothing official that would have been relevant. But, the court ruled, the overwhelming consensus in hearsay that countless tribesmen had repeated and repeated, had come to constitute so manifest a truth that the court could accept it without further restrictions. At this, Belaunde, who had lived for many years in the jungle, fell quiet. He asked for a glass of orange juice, then said only Good god, and I knew that we had won him over. Today the Machiguengas have a title to their land; even the consortium of oil firmsthat discovered one of the largest sources of natural gas [in the world] directly in their vicinity respects it.

The audience with the President granted yet another odd glimpse into the essence of truth. The inhabitants of the village of Shivakoreni were not sure whether it was true that on the other side of the Andes there was a monstrously large body of water, an ocean. In addition, there was the fact that
this monstrous water, the Pacific, was supposedly salty.

We drove to a restaurant on the beach a little south of Lima to eat. But our two Indian delegates didn’t order anything. They went silent and looked out over the breakers. They didn’t approach the water, just stared at it. Then one
asked for a bottle. I gave him my empty beer bottle. No, that wasn’t right, it had to be a bottle that you could seal well. So I bought a bottle of cheap Chilean red, had it uncorked, and poured the wine out into the sand. We sent the bottle to the kitchen to be cleaned as carefully as possible. Then the men
took the bottle and went, without a word, to the shoreline. Still wearing the new blue jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts that we had bought for them at the market, they waded in to the waves. They waded, looking over the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, until the water reached their underarms. Then, they took a taste of the water, filled the bottle and sealed it carefully with a cork.

This bottle filled with water was their proof for the village that there really was an ocean. I asked cautiously whether it wasn’t just a part of the truth. No, they said, if there is a bottle of seawater, then the whole ocean must be true as well.

THE ASSAULT OF VIRTUAL REALITY

FROM THEN on, what constitutes truth—or, to put it in much simpler form, what constitutes reality—became a greater mystery to me than it had been. The two intervening decades have posed unprecedented challenges to our concept of reality.

When I speak of assaults on our understanding of reality, I am referring to new technologies that, in the past twenty years, have become general articles of everyday use: the digital special effects that create new and imaginary realities in the cinema. It’s not that I want to demonize these technologies; they have allowed the human imagination to accomplish great things—for instance, reanimating dinosaurs convincingly on screen. But, when we consider all the possible forms of virtual reality that have become part of everyday life—in the Internet, in video games, and on reality TV; sometimes also in strange mixed forms—the question of what “real” reality is poses itself constantly afresh.

What is really going on in the reality TV show Survivor? Can we ever really trust a photograph, now that we know how easily everything can be faked with Photoshop? Will we ever be able to completely trust an email, when our twelveyear-old children can show us that what we’re seeing is probably an attempt to steal our identity, or perhaps a virus, a worm, or a “Trojan” that has wandered into our midst and adopted every one of our characteristics? Do I already exist somewhere, cloned, as many Doppelgänger, without knowing anything about it?

History offers one analogy to the extent of [change brought about by] the virtual, other world that we are now being confronted with. For centuries and centuries, warfare was essentially the same thing, clashing armies of knights, who fought with swords and shields. Then, one day, these warriors found
themselves staring at each other across canons and weapons. Warfare was never the same. We also know that innovations in the development of military technology are irreversible. Here’s some evidence that may be of interest: in parts of Japan in the early seventeenth century, there was an attempt to do
away with firearms, so that samurai could fight one another hand to hand, with swords again. This attempt was only very short-lived; it was impossible to sustain.

A couple of years ago, I came to grasp how confusing the concept of reality has become, in a strange way, through an incident that took place on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. A friend was having a little party in his backyard—barbecued steak—it was already dark, when, not far away, we heard a few gunshots that nobody took seriously until the police helicopters showed up with searchlights on and commanded us, over loudspeakers, to get inside the house. We sorted out the facts of the case only in retrospect: a boy, described by witnesses as around thirteen or fourteen years of age, had been loitering, hanging around a restaurant about a block away from us. As a couple exited, the boy yelled, This is for real, shot both with a semi-automatic, then fled on his skateboard. He was never caught. But the message [Botschaft] of the madman was clear: this here isn’t a videogame, these shots are for real, this is reality.

AXIOMS OF FEELING

WE MUST ask of reality: how important is it, really? And: how important, really, is the Factual? Of course, we can’t disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges. If only the factual, upon which the so-called cinéma vérité fixates, were of significance, then one could argue that the vérité—the truth—at its most concentrated must reside in the telephone book—in its hundreds of thousands of entries that are all factually correct and, so, correspond to reality. If we were to call everyone listed in the phone book under the name “Schmidt,” hundreds of those we called would confirm that they are called Schmidt; yes, their name is Schmidt.

In my film Fitzcarraldo, there is an exchange that raises this question. Setting off into the unknown with his ship, Fitzcarraldo stops over at one of the last outposts of civilization, a missionary station:

Fitzcarraldo: And what do the older Indians say?

Missionary: We simply cannot cure them of their idea that ordinary life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.

The film is about an opera being staged in the rainforest; as you’ll know, I set about actually producing opera. As I did, one maxim was crucial for me: an entire world must undergo a transformation into music, must become music; only then would we have produced opera. What’s beautiful about opera is that reality doesn’t play any role in it at all; and that what takes place in opera is the overcoming of nature. When one looks at the libretti from operas (and here Verdi’s Force of Destiny is a good example), one sees very quickly that the story itself is so implausible, so removed from anything that we might actually experience that the mathematical laws of probability are suspended. What happens in the plot is impossible, but the power of music enables the spectator to experience it as true.

It’s the same thing with the emotional world [Gefühlswelt] of opera. The feelings are so abstracted; they cannot really be subordinated to everyday human nature any longer, because they have been concentrated and elevated to the most extreme degree and appear in their purest form; and despite all that we perceive them, in opera, as natural. Feelings in opera are, ultimately, like axioms in mathematics, which cannot be concentrated and cannot be explained any further. The axioms of feeling in the opera lead us, however, in the most secret ways, on a direct path to the sublime. Here we could cite
“Casta Diva” in Bellini’s opera Norma as an example.

You might ask: why do I say that the sublime becomes accessible to us [lit. “experience-able”; erfahrbar] in opera, of all forms, considering that opera did not innovate in any essential way in the twentieth century, as other forms took its place? This only seems to be a paradox: the direct experience of the sublime in opera is not dependent on further development or new developments. Its sublimity has enabled opera to survive.

ECSTATIC TRUTH

OUR ENTIRE sense of reality has been called into question.
But I do not want to dwell on this fact any longer, since what moves me has never been reality, but a question that lies behind it [beyond; dahinter]: the question of truth. Sometimes facts so exceed our expectations—have such an unusual, bizarre power—that they seem unbelievable.

But in the fine arts, in music, literature, and cinema, it is possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through vision, style, and craft. In this context I see the quotation from Blaise Bascal about the collapse of the stellar universe not as a fake [“counterfeit”; Fälschung], but as a means of making possible an ecstatic experience of inner, deeper truth. Just as it’s not fakery when Michelangelo’s Pietà portrays Jesus as a 33-year-old man, and his mother, the mother of God, as a 17-year-old.

However, we also gain our ability to have ecstatic experiences of truth through the Sublime, through which we are able to elevate ourselves over nature. Kant says: The irresistibility of the power of nature forces us to recognize our physical impotence as natural beings, but at the same time discloses our capacity to judge ourselves independent of nature as well as superior to nature . . . I am leaving out some things here, for simplicity’s sake. Kant continues: In this way nature is not estimated in our aesthetic judgment as sublime because it excites fear, but because it summons up our power (which is not of nature) . . .

I should treat Kant with the necessary caution, because his explanations concerning the sublime are so very abstract that they have always remained alien to me in my practical work. However, Dionysus Longinus, whom I first came to know while exploring these subjects, is much closer to my heart, because he always speaks in practical terms and uses examples. We don’t know anything about Longinus. Experts aren’t even sure that that’s really his name, and we can only guess that he lived in the first century after Christ. Unfortunately, his essay On the Sublime is also rather fragmentary. In the earliest writings that we have from the tenth century, the Codex Parisinus 2036, there are pages missing everywhere, sometimes entire bundles of pages. Longinus proceeds systematically; here, at this time, I cannot even start in on the structure of his text. But he always quotes very lively examples from literature. And here I will, again, without following a schematic order, seize upon what seems most important to me.

What’s fascinating is that, right at the beginning of his text, [Longinus] invokes the concept of Ecstasy, even if he does so in a different context than what I have identified as “ecstatic truth.” With reference to rhetoric, Longinus says: Whatever is sublime does not lead the listeners to persuasion but to a state of ecstasy; at every time and in every way imposing speech, with the spell it throws over us, prevails over that which aims at persuasion and gratification. Our persuasions we can usually control, but the influences of the sublime bring power and irresistible might to bear, and reign supreme over every hearer . . . Here he uses the concept of ekstasis, a person’s stepping out of himself into an elevated state—where we can raise ourselves over our own nature— which the sublime reveals “at once, like a thunder bolt.”1 No one before Longinus had spoken so clearly of the experience of illumination; here, I am taking the liberty to apply that notion to rare and fleeting moments in film.

He quotes Homer in order to demonstrate the sublimity of images and their illuminating effect. Here is his example from the battle of the gods:

Aidoneus, lord of the shades, in fear leapt he from his throne and cried aloud, lest above him the earth be cloven by Poseidon, the Shaker of Earth, and his abode be made plain to view for mortals and immortals—the dread and dank abode, wherefor the very gods have loathing: so great was the din that arose when the gods clashed in strife.

Longinus was an extraordinarily well-read man, one who quotes exactly. What is striking here is that he takes the liberty of welding together two different passages from the Iliad. It is impossible that this is a mistake. However,
Longinus is not faking but, rather, conceiving a new, deeper truth. He asserts that without truth [Wahrhaftigkeit] and greatness of soul the sublime cannot come into being. And he quotes a statement that researchers today ascribe either to Pythagoras or to Demosthenes:

For truly beautiful is the statement of the man who, in response to the question of what we have in common with the gods, answered: the ability to do good [Wohltun] and truth.

We should not translate his euergesia simply with “charity,” imprinted as that notion is by Christian culture. Nor is the Greek word for truth, alêtheia, simple to grasp. Etymologically speaking, it comes from the verb lanthanein,“to hide,” and the related word lêthos, “the hidden,” “the concealed.” A-lêtheia is, therefore, a form of negation, a negative definition: it is the “not-hidden,” the revealed, the truth. Thinking through language [im sprachlichen Denken], the Greeks meant, therefore, to define truth as an act of disclosure—a gesture related to the cinema, where an object is set into the light and then a latent, not yet visible image is conjured onto celluloid, where it first must be developed, then disclosed.

The soul of the listener or the spectator completes this act itself; the soul actualizes truth through the experience of sublimity: that is, it completes an independent act of creation. Longinus says: For our soul is raised out of nature
through the truly sublime, sways with high spirits, and is filled with proud joy, as it itself had created what it hears.

But I don’t want to lose myself in Longinus, whom I always think of as a good friend. I stand before you as someone who works with film. I would like to point out some scenes from another film of mine as evidence. A good example
would be The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner where the concept of ecstasy already shows up in the title.

Walter Steiner, a Swiss sculptor and repeat world champion in ski-flying, raises himself as if in religious ecstasy into the air. He flies so frightfully far, he enters the region of death itself: only a little farther, and he would not land on the steep slope, but rather crash beyond it. Steiner speaks at the end of a young raven, which he raised and which, in his loneliness as a child, was his only friend. The raven lost more and more feathers, which probably had to do with the feed that Steiner gave him. Other ravens attacked his raven and, in the end, tortured him so frightfully that young Steiner had only one choice: Unfortunately, I had to shoot him, says Steiner, because it was torture to watch how he was tortured by his own brothers because he could not fly any more. And then, in a fast cut, we see Steiner—in place of his raven—flying, in a terribly aesthetic frame, in extreme slow motion, slowed to eternity. This is the majestic flight of a man whose face is contorted by fear of death as if deranged
by religious ecstasy. And then, shortly before the death zone—beyond the slope, on the flat, where he would be crushed on impact, as if he had jumped from the Empire State Building to the pavement below—he lands softly, safely, and a written text is superimposed upon the image.
The text is drawn from the Swiss writer Robert Walser and
it reads:

I should be all alone in this world
Me, Steiner and no other living being.
No sun, no culture; I, naked on a high rock
No storm, no snow, no banks, no money
No time and no breath.
Then, finally, I would not be afraid any more.

NOTE

1. hupsos de pou kairiôs exenechthen ta te pragmata dikên skêptou panta dieforêsen . . . “Sublimity flashing forth at the right moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt” (1.4).
Minnesota Declaration

Truth and fact in documentary cinema "LESSONS OF DARKNESS".

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail."
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."

9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999
Werner Herzog

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Citater om LSD. Udgangspunktet er selvfølgelig Bill Hicks og Hunters - de rammer rimelig spot on.

2010-11-19T09:32:00.001-08:00

“That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling ‘consicousness expansion’ without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously . . . All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create . . . a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel.”

"Always that same LSD story, you've all seen it. 'Young man on acid, thought he could fly, jumped out of a building. What a tragedy.' What a dick! Fuck him, he’s an idiot. If he thought he could fly, why didn’t he take off on the ground first? Check it out. You don’t see ducks lined up to catch elevators to fly south—they fly from the ground, ya moron, quit ruining it for everybody. He’s a moron, he’s dead—good, we lost a moron, fuckin’ celebrate. Wow, I just felt the world get lighter. We lost a moron! I don’t mean to sound cold, or cruel, or vicious, but I am, so that’s the way it comes out. Professional help is being sought. How about a positive LSD story? Wouldn't that be news-worthy, just the once? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition and lies? I think it would be news-worthy. 'Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves' . . . 'Here's Tom with the weather.'"

"I believe that with the advent of acid, we discovered a new way to think, and it has to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind. Why is it that people think it's so evil? What is it about it that scares people so deeply, even the guy that invented it, what is it? Because they're afraid that there's more to reality than they have confronted. That there are doors that they're afraid to go in, and they don't want us to go in there either, because if we go in we might learn something that they don't know. And that makes us a little out of their control."

"'Turn on' meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. 'Tune in' meant interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. 'Drop Out' meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean 'Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.'"
—Flashbacks, 1983

"Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I attained as a fundamental understanding from all of my LSD experiments: what one commonly takes as 'the reality,' including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous—that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego. One can also arrive at this insight through scientific reflections. The problem of reality is and has been from time immemorial a central concern of philosophy. It is, however, a fundamental distinction, whether one approaches the problem of reality rationally, with the logical methods of philosophy, or if one obtrudes upon this problem emotionally, through an existential experience. The first planned LSD experiment was therefore so deeply moving and alarming, because everyday reality and the ego experiencing it, which I had until then considered to be the only reality, dissolved, and an unfamiliar ego experienced another, unfamiliar reality. The problem concerning the innermost self also appeared, which, itself unmoved, was able to record these external and internal transformations. Reality is inconceivable without an experiencing subject, without an ego. It is the product of the exterior world, of the sender and of a receiver, an ego in whose deepest self the emanations of the exterior world, registered by the antennae of the sense organs, become conscious. If one of the two is lacking, no reality happens, no radio music plays, the picture screen remains blank."
—LSD: My Problem Child, 1980

Hvad du lærer når du tager lsd... er rigtigt nok at der ikke er noget fikseret selv, at der er mange realiteter, men her betyder mange faktisk nogle konkret oplevede nogen. Måske er det mig, måske er det min mangel på fantasi, men det kunne også være omvendt. For mig var det sådan her - først var der en i sandhed ueendelighed. Derefter var der en, to, tre, fire og det er rigtig nok de ikke kan tales, men fucking pludselig var der en mængde og hvor jeg før ikke kunne eller overhoved tænkte på at vælge, så aner jeg ikke hvem jeg selv er nu. Engang var jeg en uendelighed, nu er jeg en endelighed, hvor mærkelig den så er. Er det godt eller dårligt? For mig er det dårligt... igen, jeg mangler fantasi, hvor jeg før ikke havde andet. For andre kan det være de ser konstruktive muligheder, at de startede med en mangel på fantasi og bygger den op derfra. For mig er der nu kun en vej og det er ned, ned, ned.

warren zevon - om hans mafia far.

2010-11-15T18:35:00.000-08:00

Crystal Zevon
The Writing of Crystal Zevon
March 10, 2007
Stumpy and Mickey Cohen

Most people who know anything about Warren know that his father, William Zevon, was known as Stumpy. I’m not sure how much people know about his life… a gambler, a mobster, a rough and tumble little guy (5′4″ at most)… but also a proud father. Anyway, here are a few stories that didn’t make it into the book (the editors thought readers wouldn’t be that interested in Warren’s family history…) Another argument I lost. So… for those who ARE interested, this first quote is from Warren’s cousin, Dr. Sanford Zevon, who was considerably older than Warren and someone Warren and Stumpy always looked up to. Stumpy used to tell me, “If you’re ever in trouble, just call on the doctor, Sandy. He’s a big shot heart doctor, you know. He’ll help you out anytime you call. He’s a Zevon.” He was right.

This incident took place when Sandy was a boy, long before Warren was born.

SANDY ZEVON: There was one incident I remember where Willie visited us in Brooklyn when I was probably 12 or 13. He brought with him one of his good friends, the very famous Jewish gangster, Mickey Cohen. This I remember. It was just the two of them, and there was my mother and father, my sister and I. Cohen had a hankering for some ice cream. This was on a Sunday, so I knew of a little candy store around the corner. The guy who owned it was a miserable son-of-a-bitch. Very nasty to the kids in the neighborhood. “Don’t loiter. Don’t hang around.” So, we walked around the corner and he was just closing. Mickey Cohen said, “We want some ice cream,” and the owner of the candy store waved us off. Mickey Cohen wraps on the door again and says he wants ice cream. The owner says, “Can’t do it.” He says “I want a whole tub of ice cream.” So, he let us in and Mickey bought an entire tub. You know what a tub is? It’s like five gallons of ice cream. We walked home with that tub to my house and we all had ice cream. I don’t know what happened with the rest of it, but that was a very memorable occasion…

This next quote is actually from Mickey Cohen’s autobiography:

MICKEY COHEN: “…Then we went and got married in some marriage chapel. I’ll never forget this. I had come with Tuffy, who was my dog at the time. Now we gotta stand there to get married. So I got Stumpy Zevon as my best man. Now I look down at this preacher guy’s feet, and I says to Stumpy, “Take a hinge at this guy’s feet.” So Stumpy looked down, and I guess the preacher guy got blown up because I like made fun of him, and he said, “The dog can’t be in here while I put the ceremony on.” I said, “Let’s get outt of here, we ain’t gonna have no marriage”… Anyway, he finally said Tuffy could stay. So we did too. We got married.”

Another story from Sandy:

SANDY ZEVON: It was probably around 1956… before I got married, a friend and I went out West to check out an internship… I remember Willie, on a trip we made to Vegas. We were looking for them, Willie and Hymie. They were supposed to be staying at The Stardust, and someone at The Stardust said they were probably at a club in downtown Vegas at a card game. They’d been gone for days in this game. Believe it or not, we found the card game. The two of them were sitting behind piles of chips, obviously making a lot of money. Willie had his teeth out on the table, and he showed us his bank book which contained something like a million and a half dollars. As you probably know, he made it and he lost it, many times over.

* Filed by Crystal at 8:03 pm under Book, Book interview
2 Responses to “Stumpy and Mickey Cohen”

1.
Vicki007
March 10th, 2007 | 8:52 pm

It’s hard to imagine how the editors could claim that WZ’s family history is insignificant to the complete story. His family’s dysfunction was the foundation of his genius, for crying out loud!

Anyway, I deeply appreciate that you’ve shared this historical perspective with us. Thanks, Crystal!
2.
lzevon
March 14th, 2007 | 10:29 pm

I’m sorry to hear the editors didn’t feel readers would be interested in family history but now you have a great forum to share what was not published.

I enjoyed reading my father’s (Sandy) account of Stumpy, the ice cream story was told to us several times growing up. You are also right on about his always being there, he always is when I call :)

Glad I found the blog Crystal. Looking forward to reading more ‘outtakes’ and learning what you’re up to! You have a lot of irons in the fire but always have time for family.

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Et interview med Fassbinder.

2010-11-09T16:45:00.001-08:00

http://www.scribd.com/doc/12729699/interview-with-fassbinder

Digt af bonnen der måske er skrevet forkert af.

2010-11-04T10:46:00.000-07:00

Uden hjemmet, hvad er vi så,
flintrende begær, der forsvinder i kroppens dunkle rum, hidsige bevæ-
gelser bag øjnene. Streger af negle og lagnernes folder,
uden begæret, hvad er vi så,
fint forgrede programmer, den skabende kærligheds centre,
arbejdsmennesker, et nemt beskriveligt stykke arkitektur.
Alle disse dele, som samles i et hjem : hjemmet er rammen
for kærligheden. Hjemmet er det rum,
som du ikek blot skaber for familliens skyld, hjemmet er den skal,
som er endnu en del af dit jeg. Det er det sted hvor kærligheden
er sat til at vogte, og hjernen bog i et skab.
Kærligheden har huse på samvittigheden. Den bygger glade hjem
og huse til sine guder af frygt for, at vi skal miste hinanden.
Kærligheden skyder op mellem mennesker, resultatet er huse,
som vi må ofre til og til stadighed må udvikle sammen.

Begæret bygger mange sære kontruktioner,
begæret bygger flygtigere konstruktioner end husenes.
Begæret er sprækkerne i isen og tasterne på telefonen.
Det er flygtig arkitektur.

2010-10-01T03:49:00.000-07:00

Det her er smukt og lige til at grine og græde over.
Folkeskolens formålsparagraf

Fra lovbekendtgørelse nr. 1195 af 30. november 2006

§ 1. Folkeskolen skal i samarbejde med forældrene give eleverne kundskaber og færdigheder, der: forbereder dem til videre uddannelse og giver dem lyst til at lære mere, gør dem fortrolige med dansk kultur og historie, giver dem forståelse for andre lande og kulturer, bidrager til deres forståelse for menneskets samspil med naturen og fremmer den enkelte elevs alsidige udvikling.

Stk. 2. Folkeskolen skal udvikle arbejdsmetoder og skabe rammer for oplevelse, fordybelse og virkelyst, så eleverne udvikler erkendelse og fantasi og får tillid til egne muligheder og baggrund for at tage stilling og handle.

Stk. 3. Folkeskolen skal forberede eleverne til deltagelse, medansvar, rettigheder og pligter i et samfund med frihed og folkestyre. Skolens virke skal derfor være præget af åndsfrihed, ligeværd og demokrati.

§ 2. Folkeskolen er en kommunal opgave. Kommunalbestyrelsen har ansvaret for, at alle børn i kommunen sikres vederlagsfri undervisning i folkeskolen. Kommunalbestyrelsen fastlægger, jf. § 40 og § 40 a, mål og rammer for skolernes virksomhed inden for denne lov.

Stk. 2. Den enkelte skole har inden for de givne rammer ansvaret for undervisningens kvalitet i henhold til folkeskolens formål, jf. § 1, og fastlægger selv undervisningens organisering og tilrettelæggelse.

Stk. 3. Elever og forældre samarbejder med skolen om at leve op til folkeskolens formål.

Gode internet skribenter.

2010-09-30T12:26:00.000-07:00

Egentlig bare en huskeseddel til mig selv.
1. Dahr Jamail
2. Amy Worthington
3. Michel Chossudovsky
4. Webster Tarpley
5. Joe Vialls
6. Dave MacGowan
7. Chris Floyd
8. Mark Morford
9. Christopher Bollyn
10. Xymphora

+
Et interview med den mærkelige helt Daniel Ellsberg. http://vimeo.com/8129340

Paternak.

2010-09-29T11:41:00.001-07:00

Gentleness

With blinding brilliance
The evening dawns at seven.
From streets toward awnings
Darkness marches apace.
People – they are manikins;
Only lust and sadness lead
Them across the universe
Feeling their way by touch.
The heart under the palm
Betrays with its shuddering
Tension of chase and escape,
Glimmers of fright and flight.
Feelings take to liberty
And freedom with ill-ease,
Tearing just like a horse
At the bit of its mouthpiece.

Links til andre Psternak ting.
http://books.google.com/books?id=9IcclDJ4QrYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=boris+pasternak&hl=da&ei=goijTJ3GIJWTOIy3saYD&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=Tle7SAlWFRkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=boris+pasternak&hl=da&ei=goijTJ3GIJWTOIy3saYD&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Heller og Vonnegut - interview i playboy.

2010-09-27T10:56:00.000-07:00

The Joe & Kurt Show
with Carole Mallory
Playboy 39:5, May 1992
© Playboy 1992

We are settled on the patio Joe's house in Amagansett on Long Island. Kurt sits in the shade, Joe nearer the lawn and in the sun. Both men wear khaki shorts.

PLAYBOY: You said last night that Joe was older.

HELLER: It depends on how we feel at the time.

VONNEGUT: Based on the thickness of his books, he's senior.

HELLER: You probably worked it out to the number of pages. You have twenty-seven books. They're all short. I have five books. They're all long.

PLAYBOY: How long have you been friends?

HELLER: I don't think we're friends now. I see him maybe twice a year.

VONNEGUT: We're associates. We're collegues.

HELLER: We call each other when one of us needs something.

VONNEGUT: I don't know. We were both sort of PR people and promotional people at one time. I used to work for GE and I had ambitions to be a writer and I'd go to New York. I'd say we probably met about 1955 or so.

HELLER: No, no, I didn't meet you then. I met you at Notre Dame.

VONNEGUT: When was that?

HELLER: It was 1968, when Martin Luther King was shot. He was shot the night we were there. I remember flying back from South Bend to Chicago with Ralph Ellison and reading the papers. They were worrying that Chicago was on fire. I think he was supposed to stop there and decided no to. So that would be the time I met you. And that turned out to be a cataclysmic year. Bobby Kennedy was shot in 1968. Martin Luther King. The Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia.

VONNEGUT: Can I tell the story about you and the shooting of Martin Luther King?

HELLER: No. Of course you can.

VONNEGUT: It was a literary festival at Notre Dame and it went on for about three or four days and we took turns going on stage. It was Heller's turn to be screamingly funny and he got up there and he was just about to speak, no doubt with prepared material, and some sort of academic, a professor, came up over the footlights to the lectern and shouldered Joe aside politely and aid, ''I just want to announce that Martin Luther King has been shot.'' And then this guy went back over the footlights and took his seat, and Heller said, ''Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I wish I were with Shirley now. She's crying her eyes out.''

HELLER: Shirley was my first wife. And then I went into my prepared speech. It was a tough beginning. That's how we met. Kurt Vonnegut gave a speech that was probably the best speech I've ever heard. I think I haven't heard a better one since. He was so casual and so funny and it all seemed extemporaneous and and when I came up afterward to shake this hand, I noticed be was drenched with sweat. I asked him a few years later if he had written the speech or was speaking off the cuff.

VONNEGUT: Every writer has to write his speech.

HELLER: I don't do that.

VONNEGUT: You don't?

HELLER: Nope. I have only one speech I give depending on whether or not Martin Luther King has been shot that day.

PLAYBOY: Would you like to give a speech now?

HELLER: Nope. I get paid for the speeches. And it's still nothing compared to what Ollie North gets when he's in his prime. Or Leona Helmsley -- she can get more than that. Usually there is a year when certain people are very hot. Angela Davis was. Abbie Hoffman was.

VONNEGUT: Bork had about six months. But that was a scandal.

HELLER: I don't think it's a scandal.

VONNEGUT: The students come only to see reputed pinwheels and freaks. If you get an enormously dignified, intelligent, experienced man like Harrison Salisbury, nobody comes.

HELLER: You have a small audience and a few people walking out.

VONNEGUT: The best audience in the world is the 92nd Street Y. Those people know everything and they are wide awake and responsive.

HELLER: I was part of a panel there on December seventh. The fiftieth anniversay of Pearl Harbor.

VONNEGUT: Were you bombed at Pearl Harbor, Joe?

HELLER: No.

VONNEGUT: Of course, James Jones was. I was saying this would be sort of a valedictory interview because our generation is taking its leave now. James Jones is gone. Irwin Shaw is gone. Truman Capote is gone.

HELLER: Yeah, but nobody's replaced us.

VONNEGUT: No. Laughter

HELLER: By the way, that's the subject of a novel I'm doing now to be called Closing Time. It has to do with a person about my age realizing not only that he's way past his prime but also that life is nearing its end. The aptness of the invitation from the Y fits in because this novel begins with these lines, ''When people my age speak of the war, it's not of Vietnam, but the one that broke out a half a century ago.''

PLAYBOY: What are you working on, Kurt?

VONNEGUT: On a divorce. Which is a full-time job. Didn't you find it a full-time job?

HELLER: Oh, it's more than a full-time job. You ought to go back and read that section in No Laughing Matter on the divorce. I went through all the lawyers. But yours is going to be a tranquil one, you told me.

VONNEGUT: It seems to me divorce is so common now. It ought to be more institutionalized. It's like a head-on collision every time. It's supposed to be a surprise but it's commonplace. Deliver your line about never having dreamed of being married.

HELLER: It's in Something Happened: ''I want a divorce; I dream of a divorce. I was never sure I wanted to get married. But I always knew I wanted a divorce.''

VONNEGUT: Norman Mailer has what--five divorces now?

HELLER: One of my idols used to be Artie Shaw. He used to marry these beautiful women who were very famous and be able to afford to divorce them. At that time, divorces were hard to get. You had to go to Nevada. The second thing, you needed a great deal of alimony because the women were always getting it. And I was wondering how a clarinet player could afford-was it Ava Gardner? Lana Turner? Kathleen Winsor? Oh, I've forgotten the others. He had about eight wives. All glamourous.

VONNEGUT: I used to play the clarinet and I thought he was the greatest clarinet player ever.

HELLER: You thought he was a better clarinetist than Benny Goodman or Pee Wee Russell?

VONNEGUT: It was explained to me by some musicologist. I said to him, ''I've got these vaudeville turns and the clarinet thing is one of them,'' and he said, ''Shaw used a special reed that nobody else used and a special mouthpiece that allowed him to get a full octave above what other people were playing.'' And that's what I kept hearing him do. Christ, he was getting way up there where nobody else was getting. But no I think probably the greatest clarinet player in history was Benny Goodman.

HELLER: I would think so.

VONNEGUT: I wound up going home from Mailer's one time in a limo with Goodman and I said to him, ''I used to play a little licorice stick myself.''

PLAYBOY: Why are men more readily able than women to distinguish the differece between sex and love?

HELLER: Your question implies that when a woman engages in sex, she does so only when she's in love. Or she thinks of it as an act of love. Our vocabulary has become corrupt in a way that's embarrassing to me. Have you ever heard a man use the word ''lover'' about a woman? Have you ever heard a man say, ''This gal, she's my lover?''

VONNEGUT: I'll say it of a woman. To close friends.

HELLER: I used the word only once in a book, when the character Gold is reacting exactly the way I am and the woman says, ''You are my lover.'' He never thought of himself as a lover. He says he always thought of himself as a fucker, not a lover.

VONNEGUT: Well, this is Joe. Joe doesn't vote either. Is that right, Joe?

HELLER: I will say -- Sound of a lawn mower -- Oh, shit! Is he coming to do the lawn now? He is.

PLAYBOY: Shall we stop him? Or shall we go inside?

HELLER: We can go over there. No, we can't stop him. You're lucky to get him.

We move inside Heller's modern country home. Kurt sits on a hassock between two sofas. Joe reclines on the middle of a sofa perpendicular to the hassock. They begin talking about the war.

VONNEGUT: Only one person came home from World War Two who was treated like a hero and that was Audie Murphy. Everybody knew he was the only hero.

HELLER: I felt like a hero when I came home. And I still feel like a hero when people interview me. People think it quite remarkable that I was in combat in an airplane and I flew sixty missions even though I tell them that the missions were largely milk runs.

VONNEGUT: And what kind of medals did you get?

HELLER: I got the conventional medals, which came automatically. Air Medal with five or six clusters. You know, you're in my new book. Unless you object.

VONNEGUT: Good. Good.

HELLER: In that sense it's not a sequel. One of the characters does end up in Dresden and he's talking to a guy named Vonnegut. You're not in Catch-22, so it's not properly a sequel.

VONNEGUT: Joe, when he was working on this book earlier, wanted to get an officer or a high-ranking noncom into Dresden. You know, the guy who had done bombing. Then, finally, he's bombed, and this is technically impossible. Noncoms and officers were not allowed to work. They were kept in big stalags out in the countryside.

PLAYBOY: How did you feel when Iraq was bombed?

HELLER: I felt awful about the whole Gulf war. My feeling is that at that time Bush still hadn't figured out why he had invaded Panama, and he didn't know why he was making war in Iraq. And he still doesn't. I think it was an atrocity.

VONNEGUT: I can see where you might catch a whole lot of people and have to kill them that way, particularly from the air. But people in our war, the good war, were sickened by it afterward and would not talk about it. When we went to war, we had two fears. One was that we'd get killed. The other was that we might have to kill someone. Imagine somebody coming back from the Gulf, particularly a pilot, saying, ''Gee, I'm lucky. I didn't have to kill anybody.'' TV has dehumanized us to the point where this is acceptable. It was like shooting up a crowd going home from a football game on a Saturday afternoon. Shoot the front vehicle and the back vehicle and then go up and down and kill everybody dead. A disgraceful way to act. In the SS-probably a tough branch of the SS and maybe just officers--they had to strangle a cat during their training. With their hands. And I think TV has done this to a whole lot of people without anybody's having to strangle a cat.

HELLER: I would guess that after one strangled the first cat, the rest are easier. The next five or six are pure fun. Then it becomes a kind of pastime. A careless hobby. Like lighting a cigarette.

PLAYBOY: Why do we celebrate war with a parade?

HELLER: I think it's dangerous to use the expression ''we'' in dealing with war. One of the fallacies has to do with democracy. I don't think we've had a President in my lifetime who came to the White House with a significant proportion of the eligible voters voting.

VONNEGUT: Yeah, but you got at least one great President, didn't you?

HELLER: Which one?

VONNEGUT: Roosevelt.

HELLER: I often wonder, if I were an adult in Roosevelt's time, whether I would have revered him and loved him the way I do in retrospect.

VONNEGUT: The Russians loved the czar as long as they could. right up until the last minute, because he was the father.

HELLER: Once the war broke out, I think everyone wanted it over quickly and did not want to see a U.S. defeat. There was so much bunkum and deception.

PLAYBOY: Instead of killing several hundred thousand Iraqis, why wasn't Saddam Hussein ''disappeared''?

HELLER: It's not that easy. I think they were bombing places selectively in the hope of getting him. The way they missed Qaddafi and got his daughter.

VONNEGUT: There's a wonderful documentary Canadians made when people were really sick of the war--World War Two, that is. People were dying in industrial quantities. Fifty thousand nameless guys going over the top and they focused on these romantic figures up there in the airplanes and revived interest in the war.

HELLER: Is this in the U.S. or France?

VONNEGUT: All fighter pilots. Everybody loved Von Richthofen as much as anybody else. It was, Who was going to get him? My agent, incidentally, Ken Littauer, who is dead now, was Lieutenant Colonel Littauer, who in military history was the first man to strafe a trench. He was a full colonel at the age of twenty-two and he and Rickenbacker and Nordoff and Hall were all in the Lafayette Flying Corps. They were the only guys in the American Air Force who really knew how to fly and fight. Littauer was supposed to be just an observation guy, out for artillery. He decided, ''What the hell! The object is to kill people.'' And he peeled off and I guess he had a machine gun.

HELLER: It was fun in the beginning. We were kids, nineteen, twenty years old, and had real machine guns in our hands. Not those things at the penny arcades at Coney Island. You got the feeling that there was something glorious about it. Glorious excitement. The first time I saw a plane on fire and parachutes coming down, I looked at it with a big grin on my face. I was disappointed in those early missions of mine where nobody shot at us.

VONNEGUT: Morley Safer wrote about going in after B-52s dropped these enormous bombs on an area suspected of sheltering Viet Cong. He said the small was terrible, there were parts of human bodies hanging in treetops. The poor pilots don't usually see that.

HELLER: Air Force people don't see it. I didn't realize until I read Paul Fussel's book on World War One that almost everybody who took my artillery shell or bombing grenade was going to be dismembered, mutilated. Not the way it is in the movies where somebody gets hit, clutches his chest and falls down dead. They are blown apart. Blown into pieces.

PLAYBOY: Is there a hidden agenda behind our romance with war?

HELLER: American rulers are discovering that the way to get instant popularity is to go to war. I think if the Vietnam war had been over in a month or two, Johnson might still be President--and might still be alive.

PLAYBOY: Do you think there's a relationship between the CIA and the war?

VONNEGUT: I know Allen Ginsberg made a bet with Richard Helms, who was the head of the CIA. When the Vietnam war was going on, Allen bet him his little bronze dumbbell or some sacred object that the CIA was in the drug business and it would come out sooner or later. Flying drugs in and out of East Asia. I don't know whether Allen won the bet or what Helms was supposed to have given him, but I'm sure it's true.

HELLER: There's one thing about being involved in a drug trade. There's another thing about being the drug trade.

PLAYBOY: Were we in Iraq and concentrating on foreign affiars to cover up problems at home?

HELLER: Doing this last novel of mine, I find that Thucydides filed the same charge against Pericles in the war against Sparta - -to divert attention from allegations of personal scandal. It's so much easier than administering your country. It's also extremely dangerous because of the temptation in a democracy.

VONNEGUT: It's also very bad if the enemy shoots back.

HELLER: Well, you have to pick enemies that won't. During the Spanish-American War, American casualities at Manila Bay were four or seven. Panama was instructive to me because such a high percentage of the number of people who went were either killed or wounded.

VONNEGUT: What was that island we attacked before, with that long runway?

HELLER: Grenada.

VONNEGUT: some of the first guys we lost were SEALs. Because they were dropped into the ocean and never heard of again. Nobody knows what the hell happened to them.

PLAYBOY: Let's switch to censorship. Are you at all concerned about the government's intrusion into our privacy?

HELLER: Do I think, for example, this guy Pee-wee Herman should be arrested for playing with himself in an adult theater?

VONNEGUT: Did he play to climax? I really haven't kept up with the news as I should.

HELLER: But is that a crime? I would say no.

VONNEGUT: I agree with Joe.

HELLER: We may have an aversion to the idea of somebody's masturbating in a theater or in a bathroom but so long as he didn't call attention to himself--that's what we call exhibitionism.

VONNEGUT: This is a huge country. There are primitive tribes here and there who have customs and moral standards of their own. It's the way I feel about religious fundamentalists. They really ought to have a reservation. They have a right to their culture and I can see where the First Amendment would be very painful for them. The First Amendment is a tragic amendment because everyone is going to have his or her feelings hurt and your government is not here to protect you from having your feelings hurt.

PLAYBOY: What about the hurt being done to women deprived of the freedom of choice?

VONNEGUT: I think Bush is utterly insincere on the abortion issue. He probably feels about it the way most Yale graduates do. There's just political capital in pretending to be concerned about abortion. He doesn't want to push it any harder than he has to because he'd lose a big part of the electorate.

HELLER: Even if he's pretending. I'm going to quote from the introduction of Mother Night, ''We are what we pretend to be.'' If those people in government are only pretending to object to sex displays or abortion, the effect is the same as if they were sincere.

PLAYBOY: Do you think Senator Helms is pretending?

VONNEGUT: Yes. There are several famous hypocrites in the South and he's surely one of them. Like the illegible thumpers. To attract a crowd.

PLAYBOY: Do you see him illegible a real threat?

VONNEGUT: He has a good many Christian fundamentalist followers. So he is, in fact, serving his constituents--and they are not hypocrites, I would say. But in that little railroad car that runs under Congress, I rode with a guy who worked for Helms, one of his assistants. This guy was as hip and sane and liberal as anyone. He simply had a job to do.

PLAYBOY: Let's turn to books. Are you alarmed about the corporate role in publishing?

HELLER: ''Alarmed'' is a strong word. I'm aware of it and I don't think the effects will be beneficial toward literature. As I get older, I begin thinking that not only are certain things inevitable, everything is inevitable.

PLAYBOY: How about censorship in publishing? What about when Simon and Schuster decided not to publish a book it had contracted for -- Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho -- because of pressure?

HELLER: The allegation was made that the decision came from the head of Paramount which owns Simon and Schuster. But the book was published. I don't think censorship is a widespread threat in this country.

VONNEGUT: You can publish yourself. During the McCarthy era, Howard Fast published Spartacus. Sold it to the movies. Nobody would publish him because he was a Communist.

PLAYBOY: Are writers supportive of one another or resentful?

VONNEGUT: Writers aren't envious of one another.

HELLER: We may be envious of the success but not of one another.

VONNEGUT: Painters and poets can be deeply upset by the good luck of a colleague. Writers and novelists really don't seem to give a damn.

PLAYBOY: Are nonfiction writers more jealous and envious of one another than novelists?

VONNEGUT: I know one very close friendship that ended when one guy was working on a book and his best friend came in right behind him.

PLAYBOY: Is it more difficult to get blurbs for nonfiction than fiction because of jealousy?

VONNEGUT: Blurbs are baloney. Anybody who reads a blurb is crazy. Calvin Trillin said that ''anybody who gives a blurb should he required right on the jacket to reveal his relationship to the author.'' It's a good way to advertise. Keep your name around.

HELLER: That's one reason, but they don't advertise as voluminously as they used to do.

VONNEGUT: When Alger Hiss wrote a book--his most recent, his side of the story--I wrote a blurb for it and I was the only blurb on the book. Starting! I thought other people would be on there with me. Howard Fast or somebody. . . .

PLAYBOY: Did you ever review each other's books?

HELLER: No.

VONNEGUT: Yes. We hadn't known each other very well. And then we were neighbors out here and Joe had finally written another book.

HELLER: That was 1974.

VONNEGUT: Since Something Happened was only his second book, he was rather anxious to find out who was reviewing it for the Times.

HELLER: I'm going to correct this impression when you finish.

VONNEGUT: It wasn't unethical at the beginning of the summer because I really didn't know him that well. But I spent most of the summer writing the review and I got to see more and more of Joe. Who did they tell you was reviewing it for the Times? You change the story.

HELLER: I knew fairly early you were doing it because Irwin Shaw brought it out. And I said, ''You never should have told me that.'' I knew enough about you to know that you would not undertake it unless you were going to write favorably about it. Then I began to get anxious about you and myself. Each time they got word of a good review from somewhere else, I made it a point to tell you.

VONNEGUT: Talk about disinformation.

HELLER: I didn't want you to feel inhibited in your praise.

VONNEGUT: Was there anyone who really tied a can to your tail? Anybody who really hated the book?

HELLER: There were reviewers who were disappointed, because it was not another Catch-22 and they expected it to be.

VONNEGUT: Well, Catch-22 was sort of a fizzle when it first came out, wasn't it?

HELLER: Despite an advertising campaign that has never been equaled or surpassed in terms of the number of ads.

VONNEGUT: Did Bertrand Russeil praise the book?

HELLER: He not only praised the book, he had his secretary call me up and arrange for us to meet. It was one of the few thrilling encounters I've had in my lifetime. It's a long drive to Wales from London. Russell was already ninety. And he looked exactly like his photographs. I had that experience with Venice the first time I went to Venice. It looks exactly like Venice. Paris doesn't. London doesn't. New York doesn't. Venice looks exactly like Venice and Bertrand Russell looked exactly like Bertrand Russell.

VONNEGUT: I suppose it was the first unromantic book about the Air Force.

HELLER: I don't know about first. It's not a romantic book. It is romantic. I know the underlying sentimentality. Phillip Toynbee began a review of it with a paragraph that embarrasses me still. He begins listing the great works of satire in the English language and he puts this among them. I think he was the one who said it was the first war book in which fear and cowardice become a virtue.

PLAYBOY: So, who are the new Kurt Vonneguts or Joe Hellers?

HELLER: Oh, I don't think there has been anybody after us.

VONNEGUT: Well, we haven't seen Schwarzkopf's memoirs yet. Laughs

HELLER: You've got the name wrong. Scheisskopf.

VONNEGUT: I remember Schwarzkopf's father, a police commissioner in New Jersey. Then he was the host on a radio show called Gangbusters.

HELLER: Somebody told me his father was also the head of the regional Selective Service department in New Jersey and New York.

VONNEGUT: Four stars is a lot of stars. That's all Pershing had was four stars.

HELLER: They didn't have five stars then. Five stars was a rank in World War Two.

PLAYBOY: I had a little trouble when he said that being under a missile attack was no more dangerous than being in a thunderstorm.

VONNEGUT: His comment on the Scud, I think, was that shooting down a Scud was like shooting down a Goodyear blimp, because these things are not very fast or hard to hit. There was a story in World War Two about a Dutch cruiser that escaped from the Nazis just as they were occupying Holland. The ship pulled into a fiord somewhere and put on war paint, purple and green stripes, and sailed into the Firth of Clyde, where the British navy was anchored in Scotland, and the skipper of the cruiser called to the flagship and asked, ''How do you like our new camouflage?'' And the answer that came back was ''Where are you?''

PLAYBOY: Is that true?

HELLER: Would Vonnegut joke?

PLAYBOY: Do either of you read any contemporary writers?

VONNEGUT: Well, it's not like the medical profession where you have to find out the latest treatments. I've been reading Nietzsche.

HELLER: And I've been reading Thomas Mann. I hesitate because maybe I'm reading more difficult books to grasp than nonfiction. Scientific books. Philosophy, I would not be able to read rapidly. I have a definite impression that I'm reading more slowly than I used to.

VONNEGUT: There's no urgency about reading anymore. We're not trying to keep up. I have that big book by Mark Helprin and I don't think I'm going to read it because I'm too lazy.

PLAYBOY: What about Norman Mailer's?

VONNEGUT: That's none of your business. Norman's a friend of mine.

HELLER: I intend to read it at one sitting. I read contemporary writers.

PLAYBOY: Such as whom?

HELLER: It wouldn't be whom. It would be a particular work. If the work is described in a way I feel would be interesting to me. Not enjoyable. Interesting. I look into every galley I'm sent. I don't have time to read them. Just the way I don't get as many invitations to parties as Kurt Vonnegut does.

VONNEGUT: They've stopped coming. Well, I'm reading Martin Amis.

HELLER: The last book?

VONNEGUT: It's a new one. The whole thing runs backward. Time runs backward. It's very hard to follow.

HELLER: I will read Julian Barnes's new novel. I like Julian Barnes for reasons I can't explain.

PLAYBOY: Any women?

HELLER: You have to name some.

PLAYBOY: Ann Beattie.

HELLER: I've read Ann Beattie.

VONNEGUT: I read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and thought it was terrific. I wrote her a fan letter. Joe said one time in an interview or somewhere that people in advertising are better read and wittier than most novelists.

HELLER: And most academics. That was my experience when Catch-22 came out.

PLAYBOY: What is your favorite book of Joe's?

VONNEGUT: He hasn't written enough to choose from.

HELLER: There's no answer that would be convincing and satisfying.

VONNEGUT: You know about the frog-and-peach restaurant? Well, there are four things on the menu. You can have a frog. You can have a peach. You can have a frog stuffed with a peach or a peach stuffed with a frog. When you ask what is my favorite of Heller's, you don't have a very long menu. I have gone the extra mile with Joe. I have seen ''We Bombed in New Haven'' performed at Yale. Not many people can say that.

HELLER: More at Yale than on Broadway. I used to think Catch-22 was my best novel until I read Kurt's review of Something Happened. Now I think Something Happened is.

PLAYBOY: What is your favorite book of Kurt's?

HELLER: OH, I DON'T LIKE ANY OF HIS WORKS. I just give blurbs to his books so we can remain friends.

VONNEGUT: I'm sure Joe doesn't mind this beign discussed. It takes him a while to write a book. He might be a different author in each case because he's a decade older. Nietzsche says the philosopher's view of the world makes his reputation and he doesn't change it. It reflects how old he was then. Plato's philosophy is the philosophy of a man thirty-five.

PLAYBOY: You're writing a movie, we hear.

VONNEGUT: Yes, with Steven Wright.

HELLER: Boy, I'd love to write a movie script.

PLAYBOY: Why don't you collaborate?

HELLER: Take me as a secret collaborator? Pay me just enough to qualify for the medical plan of the Writers' Guild.

VONNEGUT: It's hack work. I just got interested in Steven Wright. He was out here and stayed with me for a couple of days. You know who he is?

HELLER: Not really.

VONNEGUT: He has sort of the build of a Woody Allen and that melancholy and he doesn't know what the hell he's going to say next. And so you're listening and finally he says it, but he never says where he is from, what he is. He is in fact a Roman Catholic. Most people assume he's Jewish. But he's very smart not to say, ''I'm from Boston.'' He's very hot on the college circuit. He gets fifteen thousand dollars an appearance and he does fifty a year.

HELLER: Are you being paid for the screenplay?

VONNEGUT: I'm doing it on spec. But I won't show it to them until they pay me.

PLAYBOY: What about Hollywood?

HELLER: I love it. I don't work that much and I will accept every offer I get. I love going to Hollywood because I know people there. When I go there, somebody else is always paying the expenses.

VONNEGUT: How do you know people there?

HELLER: Almost every friend I had on the Island moved out there after the war. Then my nephew was out there working for Paramount TV.

PLAYBOY: Kurt, we gather you're less enthralled in dealing with Hollywood.

VONNEGUT: No. There are two novelists who should be very grateful to Hollywood. Margaret Mitchell is one and I'm the other one.

HELLER: ''Thelma & Louise'' is the first movie I've seen in years. I liked it. Well, a year ago I saw that Italian film ''Cinema Paradiso.'' I usually don't like the movies.

PLAYBOY: Did it bother you that in ''Thelma & Louise'' the heroines killed a man?

HELLER: No. It doesn't bother me when they kill cowboys or Indians. It's only the movies. There are so many movies where the woman turns out to be the murderess. I didn't see it as a movie with any kind of morality. It was a movie about two women who get into trouble.

PLAYBOY: Does a movie like ''Thelma & Louise'' indicate a change in the culture?

VONNEGUT: You have forgotten that we are so old we are contemporaries of Bonnie and Clyde and of Ma Barker. She was the head of the family. We know about some really rough women.

PLAYBOY: Bonnie still followed Clyde, didn't she?

HELLER: You're not asking us about women. You're asking us about characters in motion pictures.

PLAYBOY: At the recent St. John's rape trial in New York, one of the jurors wore a T-shirt that read, UNZIP MY FLY. What is that all about?

VONNEGUT: I don't know, but it's a very popular T-shirt.

PLAYBOY: Where is that coming from?

VONNEGUT: A T-shirt factory, obviously.

PLAYBOY: Why would someone want to wear that?

VONNEGUT: Joe and I had a publisher in England for a while and his fly was always unzipped.

PLAYBOY: Does sex get better when you're older?

HELLER: Does what?

PLAYBOY: Does it get better when you're older or not?

HELLER: I don't know. I haven't had it since I was young.

VONNEGUT: I don't know if he's kidding or not.

HELLER: Oh, I've had no sex as an adult.

VONNEGUT: He's a comedian.

PLAYBOY: Well, what about you, Kurt? Does sex get better when you get older?

VONNEGUT: You get to be a better lover.

HELLER: I find I'm much more virile now than I was.

PLAYBOY: More what?

HELLER: More potent. I want to do it more often than when I was seventeen or eighteen.

PLAYBOY: Why don't you guys write more explicitly about sex and its emotional trappings?

HELLER: More explicitly than what? You keep projecting. You keep attaching emotional reactions to sexual reactions. Earlier you used the words ''love'' and ''sex'' and now you're suggesting emotional reactions to sex. By emotional I'm sure you mean something different from the sensory responses.

PLAYBOY: Well, emotions are different from senses.

HELLER: I don't think there is a necessary correlation between emotional responses and sex.

PLAYBOY: Didn't D. H. Lawrence write about emotions?

HELLER: That was the content of his artistic or literary consciousness. I don't think writers have a choice, by the way. I think we discover a field in which we can be proficient and that's our imagination. My imagination cannot work like Kurt's and I don't think his can work like mine. Neither of us could write like Philip Roth or Norman Mailer. I know John Updike has a lot of tales of the sexual encounter. And I suppose there are writers who can do it and will do it and want to do it.

PLAYBOY: Henry Miller?

HELLER: What you get there is the raw activity.

PLAYBOY: Anais Nin?

VONNEGUT: I haven't read the porn she wrote. If you have an attractive man and woman coming together, the reader is going to want to see them do it or find out why they didn't do it. And so you can't talk about anything else. The example I use is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. It's about this black guy who is looking for comfort and englightenment somewhere in American society. It's a picaresque novel. If he ever ran into a woman who really loved him and he loved her, that would be the end of the book. It would be as short as my books. And Ellison has to keep him away from women.

HELLER: I must say, for me, it doesn't normally make good literature. Fiction having extensive detail about the gymnastics of copulation or sexual congress--or even the alleged responses to it--does not make interesting reading to me. It's like trying to describe the noise of a subway train. There are people who can do it. Young writers go in for that type of description. But when they're finished, all they've done is described the noise of a subway train coming into a station or pulling out of a station. Is that the noblest objective of a work of fiction? To convince the reader that what you're writing about is really happening? I don't think so.

PLAYBOY: Isaac Bashevis Singer said, ''In sex and love, human character is revealed more than anywhere else.''

VONNEGUT: He is liable to say anything to be interesting. He entertains in that way. Do you know what he said about free will? ''We have no choice.''

HELLER: That's not been proved. I would not agree with that. The same two people could have come together sexually numerous times and it could be a different experience and the person's character doesn't change from copulation to copulation.

PLAYBOY: But one gets to know the other better with increased copulation.

HELLER: I don't think so.

VONNEGUT: Well, this is the French theory of the golden key.

HELLER: You learn more at lunch than you do in the meeting before. In phone conversation.

VONNEGUT: Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, ''Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?'' That's how to pick a wife.

HELLER: If people were more widely read, there'd be fewer marriages.

VONNEGUT: I will give you all the money that's left after the divorce if you can get me a film clip of Frank Sinatra making it with Nancy Reagan. I think that is the funniest damn thing.

PLAYBOY: In the White House?

VONNEGUT: I don't care where. Those two scrawny people.

PLAYBOY: Have you read Kitty Kelley?

VONNEGUT: Sure. Parts of it. Joe gets all those books. And I just leaf through them. About the Kenney or about any scandal.

HELLER: I didn't look at it.

PLAYBOY: Why do you think we're so interested in scandal?

VONNEGUT: Just because it's in the papers. The same way we pretend to be interested in sports, a way to say hello to a stranger. ''What did you think of the second game of the World Series? What did you think of this? What do you think of the Super Bowl?'' It's a way of saying hello.

HELLER: I agree with him. I have a slight, diminishing taste for gossip and for scandal. If you're taking about the most interesting things in the newspapers, I think our news reporting is abominable. There shouldn't be daily papers. Maybe once a week they ought to publish.

VONNEGUT: John F. Kennedy was off the scale. He was a freak! I mean, he was in the Guinness Book of Records for the number of women he screwed, apparently.

HELLER: I would have liked him a lot more if I had known at the time what was going on.

PLAYBOY: Why is a man respected for having many sexual relationships and a woman disrespected or scorned?

HELLER: The explanation would be the terrible fears of impotency men have and the jealousy that's concomitant with that. Mark Twain says that the only reason the Bible was against adulery was to keep the woman from screwing someone else. His explanation is that a man is like a candle and he's going to burn out, and the woman is like a candlestick and she can hold a million candles.

PLAYBOY: But women also scorn women who have had many sexual experiences.

HELLER: Women with bad reputations can be attractive to a man. They are to me. But a wife or a daughter like that would be a terrible embarrasment to me.

VONNEGUT: Joe's got the Freudian explanation. I think that men can't help suspecting that women are stronger and better people than they are and they learn that from their mother. I would agree with that.

PLAYBOY: Do you think younger women are sexier than older women?

VONNEGUT: No.

HELLER: I agree with Kurt.

VONNEGUT: I taught at Iowa for a year and there were a whole lot of blondes there because of our Scandinavian population. I was not interested in these undergraduate girls at all.

HELLER: Even when I was young, I found older women more attractive than young girls.

PLAYBOY: Is there anyone for whom you lust in your heart?

VONNEGUT: My goodness!

HELLER: Madonna. Madonna.

VONNEGUT: Joe mentioned one of Artie Shaw's wives. Seemed to me the sexiest woman I ever saw was Ava Gardner.

HELLER: Kathleen Winsor was pretty hot.

VONNEGUT: Rita Hayworth. I took it hard when she came down with Alzheimer's.

PLAYBOY: Joe, were you serious about Madonna?

HELLER: No.

PLAYBOY: Who's going to win the Democratic nomination?

HELLER: I have a feeling it might be me.

PLAYBOY: You? Are you going to vote for yourself?

VONNEGUT: He will have to register first.

HELLER: I'd register and I'd pose. I would if I ran.

PLAYBOY: Kurt, would you vote for Joe?

VONNEGUT: Certainly. It's a figurehead job in any case.

HELLER: I'd run on two issues. And I believe I'd win. The first would be, as President of the federal government, I would take no steps whatsoever to interfere with a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy. The second is I would find some way to institute a national health program in this country. Don't ask me where the money's going to come from, I will find a way to do it.

VONNEGUT: The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that killing doesn't seem to bother the conservatives at all. The liberals are chickenhearted about people dying. Conservatives thought that the massacre, the killing, of so many people in Panama was OK. I think they're really Darwinians. It's all right that people are starving to death on the streets because that's the nature of work.

HELLER: Western civilization has made a pact with the Devil. I think the story of Faust has to do with Western civilization. You might say white civilization. The Devil or God said, ''I'll give you knowledge to do great things. But you're going to use that knowledge to destroy the environment and to destroy yourself.'' You mentioned Darwin. I think what we're experiencing now is the natural state of evolution. Half the society is underprivileged and maybe a third of the rest is barely surviving. The trouble with the Administration is that it doesn't want to deal with the problem. It doesn't want to define it as a problem because then it will have to deal win it.

Shirley Jackson og wikipedia.

2010-09-27T08:50:00.000-07:00

Dette er et plot summary fra Wikipedia af bogen 'we have always lived in castles', tror jeg. Der er vist en diskusion, en akademisk diskusion (i den dobbelte betydning af både virkelig at være akademisk og ligegyldig.) der handler om wikipedias unøjagtighed og måske mere generelt om nettets tendenser til at udflade, bl.a. fakta. Som sagt er diskusionen ligegyldig. Der sker hvad der sker og hvis man vil have noget at sige der til, må man skabe noget. Man skaber noget ved at være bagrstræberisk, men det har visse tendser til at afmontere sig selv igen, det man har skabt.
Nå men der er i hvert fald et punkt hvor Wikipedia nogen gange er mange gange mere suverænt end et hvilket som helst opslagsværk, det være et leksikon, eller mere specefikke bøger om forskellige emner og det er i plot opsurmeringer. Wikipedia er den perfekte blanding af saglighed og lidenskab. Der er i nogle af dem en sjælden evne til at kondensere ikke bare handlingens ydre træk, men også handlingens kondeseren af sig selv. Denne opsumering(nedenfor) er et eksempel. Den formår på ret godt tid, at skrue de forskellige elementer ind i hinanden, på en måde så den faktisk også opsurmere historiens bevægelse og ikke bare dens elementer. Det lyder fint, er sikkert ret ligegyldigt, men en vældig nydelse at læse ikke desto mindre.

Plot summary

The people in the village have always hated us.

The novel, narrated in first-person by 18-year-old Mary Katherine "Merricat" Blackwood, tells the story of the Blackwood family. A careful reading of the opening paragraphs reveals that the majority of this novel is a flashback.

Merricat, her elder sister Constance, and their ailing uncle Julian live in isolation from the nearby village. Constance has not left their home in six years, going no farther than her large garden and seeing only a select few family friends. Uncle Julian, slightly demented and confined to a wheelchair, obsessively writes and re-writes notes for an autobiography, while Constance cares for him. Through Uncle Julian's ramblings the reader begins to understand what has happened to the remainder of the Blackwood family: six years ago, both the Blackwood parents, an aunt (Julian's wife), and a younger brother were murdered — poisoned with arsenic, mixed into the family sugar and sprinkled onto blackberries at dinner. Julian, though poisoned, survived; Merricat, having been sent to bed without dinner as a punishment for an unspecified misdeed, avoided the arsenic, and Constance, who did not put sugar on her berries, was arrested for and eventually acquitted of the crime. The people of the village believe that Constance has gotten away with murder (her first action on learning of the family's illnesses was to scrub the sugar bowl), and the family is ostracized, leading Constance to become something of an agoraphobe. Nevertheless, the three Blackwoods have grown accustomed to their isolation, and lead a quiet, happy existence. Merricat is the family's sole contact with the outside world, walking into the village twice a week and carrying home groceries and library books, often followed by groups of the village children, who taunt her with a singsong chant:

Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you'll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!

Merricat is a strange young woman, fiercely protective of her sister, prone to daydreaming and a fierce believer in sympathetic magic. As the major action unfolds, she begins to feel that a dangerous change is approaching; her response is to reassure herself of the various magical safeguards she has placed around their home, including a box of silver dollars buried near the creek and a book nailed to a tree. After discovering that the book has fallen down, Merricat becomes convinced that danger is imminent. Before she can warn Constance, a long-absent cousin, Charles, appears for a visit.

It is immediately apparent to the reader that Charles is pursuing the Blackwood fortune, which is locked in a safe in the house. Charles quickly befriends the vulnerable Constance. Merricat perceives Charles as a demon, and tries various magical means to exorcise him from their lives. Tension grows as Charles is increasingly rude to Merricat and impatient of Julian's foibles, ignoring or dismissing the old man rather than treating him with the gentle courtesy Constance has always shown. In an angry outburst between Charles and Julian, the level of the old man's dementia is revealed when he claims he has only one living niece: Mary Katherine, he believes, "died in an orphanage, of neglect" during Constance's trial.

In the course of her efforts to drive Charles away, Merricat breaks things and fills his bed with dirt and dead leaves. When Charles insists she be punished, Merricat demands, "Punish me?... You mean, send me to bed without my dinner?" She flees to an abandoned summerhouse on the property and loses herself in a fantasy in which all her deceased family members obey her every whim. She returns for dinner, but when Constance sends her upstairs to wash her hands, Merricat pushes Charles' still-lit pipe into a wastebasket filled with newspapers. The pipe sets fire to the family home, destroying much of the upper portion of the house. The villagers arrive to put out the fire, but, in a wave of long-repressed hatred for the Blackwoods, break into the remaining rooms and destroy them, chanting their children's taunting rhyme. In the course of the fire, Julian dies of what is implied to be a heart attack, and Charles shows his true colors, attempting to take the family safe (unsuccessfully, as is revealed later). Merricat and Constance flee for safety into the woods. Constance confesses for the first time that she always knew Merricat poisoned the family; Merricat readily admits to the deed, saying that she put the poison in the sugar bowl because she knew Constance would not take sugar.

Upon returning to their ruined home, Constance and Merricat proceed to salvage what is left of their belongings, close off those rooms too damaged to use, and start their lives anew in the little space left to them: hardly more than the kitchen and cellar. The house, now without a roof, resembles a castle "turreted and open to the sky". Merricat tells Constance they are now living "on the moon." The villagers, awakening at last to a sense of guilt, begin to treat the two sisters as mysterious creatures to be placated with offerings of food left on their doorstep. The story ends with Merricat observing, "Oh, Constance...we are so happy."

2010-09-24T10:16:00.000-07:00

Det her er det mest klare udtryk for en romantisk arv, som gennemsyrer al visionær tænkning, alle forestillinger om en anden overskridende verden. Den er åbenlys smuk og den er åbenlys naiv. På mange måder er skønheden dens pragmatiske ledetråd, det som stadig holder den i live og gør den relevant. Naiviteten er det som vi stadig har temmelig store problemer med at overskride og således undgår skønheden os.

When no longer numbers and figures
Are the keys to all God’s creatures,
When those who sing or kiss
Know more than the greatest wits,
When the world is given back to life
And frees itself from earthly strife,
When light and shade in unity
Create a higher clarity,
And people see world-history
In fairy tales and poetry,
Then all confusion will fly away
At a single secret word.

Filosofien havde en drøm om virkelighed: Borges siger “Verden er ifølge Mallarme, skabt til at blive en bog; ifølge Bloy er vi versikler eller ord eller bogstaver i en magisk bog, og denne uophørlige bog er det eneste, som er i verden: Den er, for at sige det bedre, verden.” (s. 156, Andre inkvisitioner).
Drømmen har på mange måder aldrig udviklet sig udover en nærmest kompulsiv trang til at skrive huskesedler, for jeg fik hurtig færden af at det ikke var den drøm jeg ønskede. Jeg vil ikke have orden, jeg tror ikke på den, det er meget svært at tro på den. Men det er endnu sværere i Bloys version, hvis vi skal tage den et skridt videre. Forestillingen kunne være denne, at vi kunne blive istand til at skrive verden. Der er dette forhold mellem talen og skriften, nemlig at talen er givet i tredimensionelt men ikke tidsligt blivende og skriften er givet todimensionelt men tidsligt blivende. Drømmen er måske en kombination, hvor man så og sige skriver verden, mens man er i den, sådan at den foreligger og måske endda så den foreligger som ens eget værk. Dette er en drøm om at være skabende, samtidgt med at man skriver, at det at skrive, sætte ord på, er skabelse af farver osv.

På mange måder er computeren grobunden for at vi overhoved kan forestille os noget der kunne være en sådan forening.

Novalis.

2010-09-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

Novalis and Philo-Sophie
Works now being published in English reveal the key role Novalis played in German culture
Jeremy Adler

The success of the French Encyclopédie and its place in the Enlightenment has tended to obscure the role of encyclopaedism in German culture. Yet the ideal of universal knowledge has been a potent force in Germany, shaping the way the nation defined itself ever since the seventeenth century. Novalis played a key part in this debate, not least in seeking to redefine what he called “total science” – his name for encyclopaedism – as a means to achieve cultural renewal. Yet he was sentimentalized after his early death as the dreamy poet of the Blue Flower, and while this ensured his posthumous appeal, it resulted in the comparative neglect of his philosophy. His contribution to German idealism was only fully revealed, a century and a half after his death, by the editors of the critical edition of his works, a literary monument forty years in the making (reviewed in the TLS, October 13, 2000). The edition showed the full extent of the unpublished journals and notebooks, including hundreds of jottings and aphorisms, often circling round a plan for a Romantic encyclopaedia. The new image of Novalis, not unlike that of Coleridge brought about by the editing of his Notebooks, led to a wider revaluation, in which the Romantic dreamer has given way to the incisive philosopher. Now, two centuries after his death, the new material is at long last becoming available in English in versions beginning with Margaret Mahony Stoljar’s Philosophical Writings (1997) and Jane Kneller’s Fichte Studies (2003), and continuing with the volumes under review.

The new Novalis more than confirms Thomas Carlyle’s view of him as “the German Pascal”. Both men had practical talents, yet they both evinced a radical purity that drove them to treat the infinite as the only measure, and hence to redefine the thinking of the age; moreover, they both pursued a trajectory from mathematics to theology and did so with such intensity that their precocious beginnings could perhaps only be fulfilled in an equally premature death; while the search for a higher, absolute truth ended in fragmentary utterance. Yet if Pascal’s Pensées were the anguished conscience of the neoclassical age, Novalis’s Fragmente were rather the electrifying consciousness of modernity.

With Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis regarded Germany’s task in modern Europe as a dialectical reversal of the French Revolution: the reflective German Geist should respond to and transcend the materialistic excesses of the Terror. Novalis’s speech “Christendom or Europe” (1799), though on Goethe’s advice excluded from the founding journal of German Romanticism, the Athenaeum, constitutes the most potent political manifesto of the first Romantic school. At its core lies an encyclopaedic vision of European diversity that goes back to the Middle Ages, when the opposing states were spiritually united under Catholic hegemony, a period Novalis treats as a golden age. The German tradition from Kant and Lessing to Goethe and Schiller regarded enlightenment as the means for humanity to prevail over strife, and Novalis explicitly invites the enlightened “encyclopaedists” to participate in the movement towards not just a German revival, but a new, spiritually self-aware Europe.

The ultimate reliance of the political visionary on the mystical poet of the Blue Flower is evident in later poems such as the Hymns to the Night and in “Wenn nicht mehr Zahlen und Figuren . . .”. The latter, as Ludwig Tieck recognized, distils Novalis’s belief into its most limpid form:

When no longer numbers and figures
Are the keys to all God’s creatures,
When those who sing or kiss
Know more than the greatest wits,
When the world is given back to life
And frees itself from earthly strife,
When light and shade in unity
Create a higher clarity,
And people see world-history
In fairy tales and poetry,
Then all confusion will fly away
At a single secret word.

This is the doctrine of a world history founded on inwardness that the late Penelope Fitzgerald so admired. In an essay on Yeats, she rehearses the credo almost verbatim: “the world will not be right till poetry is pronounced to be life itself, our own lives but shadows and poor imitations”. The Birth of Novalis, edited by Bruce Donehower, the title of which recalls the outworn image, actually dismantles the Novalis legend. This invaluable biographical collection concentrates on the engagement to Sophie von Kühn, from the poet’s meeting with the twelve-year-old to her excruciating death at just fifteen. It includes letters by Novalis, his brother Erasmus and Schlegel, and Sophie’s pathetic journal with its jottings such as “today was like yesterday nothing at all happened” – four days before her engagement to Novalis, which didn’t even rate an entry. The texts culminate in Novalis’s Journal of 1797, and conclude with the most important sources: the life by his brother Karl (1802), that by his mentor, August Cölestin Just (1805) and, still the best essay, that by Ludwig Tieck (1815). As Donehower aptly comments: “contrary to the stereotypical image of the otherworldly, solitary romantic”, Novalis is rarely alone. The diaries are filled with references to social events, to conversations, meals, walks, and so on. There are also some fairly frank notes on his sexual activity, what Novalis calls “the satisfaction of my fantastical desires”. Apart from occasional solecisms (“the father” for “father”, for example) the translation reads well.

Donehower follows recent scholarship in teasing out the poet’s changing identities, from the philosophy student, aspiring lawyer and gallant (“Fritz the flirt”), to Sophie’s admirer, her grief-stricken fiancé, the committed student at the Freiberg Mining Academy and the conscientious mining engineer. Sophie’s forbearance in her suffering became a cult – even Goethe visited her sickbed. She suffered three operations, but her liver tumour was incurable. Yet it was less the by all accounts remarkable living Sophie than the experience at her grave, the stimulus for the Hymns to the Night, which proved the defining factor in the poet’s life. The journal – as translated by Donehower – narrates:

"In the evening I went to Sophie. There I was indescribably joyful – lightning-like moments of enthusiasm – I blew the grave away from me like dust – centuries were as moments – her presence was palpable – I believed she would appear at any moment – "

Novalis anatomizes his unio mystica with Sophie in quasi-scientific detail, dissecting his actions and emotions to disclose the physical basis for the transcendental:

"As the mortal pain subsides, the spiritual sorrow grows stronger, along with a certain calm despair. The world becomes ever stranger – I feel increasing indifference towards the things around me and inside me. The brighter it gets around me and inside me – "

The narrative recalls the spiritual exercises practised by the Pietists to encourage the “inner light” to emerge. In following this goal, Novalis unites the mental with the affective sides of his personality to establish what he calls his “Philo-Sophie”. In his elevation of her into his ideal, Sophie becomes a mythical cult-figure, sharing aspects of the Virgin Mary and Christ, and personifying knowledge and wisdom. Human identity in general becomes a complex phenomenon for Novalis:

"A truly synthetic person is one who resembles many persons at once – a genius. Each person is the germinal point of an infinite genius. He is able to be divided into many persons, yet still remain one. The true analysis of person as such brings forth many persons – the person can only be individualized as persons, dissolution and dispersion. A person is a harmony – no admixture no movement – no substance such as “soul”. Spirit and person are one. (Energy is origin)"

It remained for Proust to realize Novalis’s starry dream, and to complete a novel as memory (“Er-Innerung”), a fiction that recreates the plural self by manifesting society as an inner cosmos.

Collectivism, on this Romantic view, was the social correlative of the plural self, and with Schlegel Novalis pursued what they called “symphilosophical” collaboration, a central axis of Jena Romanticism. The chief impetus for Novalis’s intellectual development, however, came from his encounter with Fichte at the University of Jena, and his breakthrough as a thinker is documented in the notebooks now known as the Fichte Studies. These form the philosophical counterpoint to his relations with Sophie. Jane Kneller’s translation of these is now followed by David W. Wood’s excellent version of the fragments from the next major phase in Novalis’s thought, generally known as The Universal Brouillon, to which Wood gives the more plausible and attractive title, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia. It is to be hoped that this dextrous change will help establish the notebooks as a central text of early German Romanticism. Like other recent translators, Wood follows the historico-critical edition, and thereby confirms that the apparently intuitive thinker presented in the Athenaeum aphorisms (1798) was in fact a systematic seeker after truth. Wood’s volume also includes a short selection from the Freiberg Studies in Natural Science (1798–9). With its lucid introduction and notes, this essential volume enables the English-speaking reader to approach the Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia (1798–9) for the first time as a coherent text, part of a wider search in Germany for a new scientific method, a plan only later realized in modern physics. It should now take its rightful place alongside the “Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism” (1796) by Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling, the first Romantic work to herald a poetically orientated physics; and Goethe’s exemplary fusion of science and poetry, On Morphology – which partly prompted, partly responded to the younger men’s theses. From anti-Newtonian musings such as these, the German scientific revolution associated with Planck, Einstein and Heisenberg was to draw a significant cultural inspiration.

Novalis called the philosophy of his Encyclopaedia “magical idealism”. Perhaps the nearest he came to explaining it was in a jotting of July 1798:

"To be an empiricist means to see thinking as conditioned by the influence of the outer world and things – empiricists are passive thinkers. Voltaire is a pure empiricist and so are many of the French philosophes . . . . the transcendental empiricists . . . make the transition to the dogmatists – from there to the visionaries – or transcendental dogmatists – then to Kant – from there to Fichte – and finally to magical idealism."

The magical idealist “wonderfully refracts the higher light”, and poetically transforms nature by “the magical, powerful faculty of thought”. This involves reinstating the Renaissance concept of the magus and applying it systematically to modern science.

On one occasion, Novalis also compares his project to a voyage of discovery:

"I have been on my journey of discovery, or on my pursuit, since I saw you last, and have chanced upon extremely promising coastlines – which perhaps circumscribe a new scientific continent. – This ocean is teeming with fledgeling islands.

The Athenaeum aphorisms, Blüthenstaub, only intimated the greater project:

"We are connected to every part of the universe, as with future and prehistory. It only depends on the direction and length of our concentration which relation we particularly wish to develop, which will become the most important for us, which will take effect. A true method of this procedure is probably nothing less than the long-sought art of invention; in fact it is probably more . . . ."

The newly translated notes go much further in exploring the new science Novalis calls “encylopaedistics”. The name for this “science of the sciences” may echo Diderot’s Encyclopédie, but Novalis seeks to outdo the French model by introducing dynamism to the idea of an Encyclopaedia, to study the “relationships – similarities – equalities – effects of the sciences on each other” to create “a scientific Bible”. His procedure instances the root meaning of the word “encyclo-paedia”, that is, a “circle of learning”. The approach entails turning scientific method on its head, as when Novalis claims to transform Bacon’s inductivism into a deductive method for “generating truths and ideas writ large – of generating inspired thoughts – of producing a living scientific organon”. As the Freiberg notebook records: “The combinatorial analysis of physics might be the indirect art of invention that was sought by Francis Bacon”.

The “circles” Novalis envisages in his “combinatorial analysis” are inspired by the medieval ars combinatoria, whose ideas retained an attraction for German thinkers down to Leibniz and Kant. The concentric wheels that Ramon Lull devised as a tool for inventing new ideas also serve Novalis as a model, and provide him with a motor for recombining existing ideas to create new ones. This method is, incidentally, related to the ones which the late Mary Douglas traces with such passion in Thinking in Circles (2007). As Novalis writes:

"There exists a sphere in which every proof is a circle – or an error – where nothing can be demonstrated – that is the sphere of the developed Golden Age. This and the polar sphere also harmonize. I realize the Golden Age – by developing the polar sphere. I am unconsciously in [the Golden Age], insofar as I am unconsciously in the polar sphere – and consciously, insofar as I am consciously in both."

The encyclopaedic Bible inducts the reader into the Golden Age: man returns to the prelapsarian state by rearranging the totality of all knowledge, thereby achieving a higher, paradisal consciousness. Man’s intellectual versatility reflects the universality of his creator. Yet the construct, like the self, remains unstable:

"Philosophy disengages everything – relativizes the universe – And like the Copernican system, eliminates the fixed points – creating a revolving system out of one at rest."

Novalis musters a dazzling array of disciplines to constitute his Romantic Encyclopaedia including mathematics, mineralogy, medicine, law, economics and music. Everything he touches he illuminates. Yet the totalizing aesthetic has its risks, both in precipitate insights, and in aspects of his theory of the State, understood as a “spiritual being” comparable to God. To combat absolutism, however, the Romantic Encyclopaedia looks for Kantian limitations: “Resolution of the main political problem . . . . Are combinations of opposed political elements possible a priori?”.

The philosophy of magical idealism led inevitably to the practice of literature. When Novalis abandoned the Romantic Encyclopaedia, it was to write the poetry it preaches, the “art of transforming everything into Sophie – or vice versa”. The Hymns to the Night brilliantly exemplify the turn: the poem’s success stems in no small part from the way it illumines the poet’s grief and mystically resolves his problems by an exegesis of world history. It is the first modern panoptic lyric, unmatched in visionary compass before Eliot’s Waste Land and Rilke’s Duino Elegies. In The Novices at Sais, his fragmentary Bildungsroman, Novalis develops the conceit of encyclopaedic circles to educate its main character, thereby also showing how world history advances by the combinatorial progress of humanity. The novel stems from an infatuation and later disappointment with Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Goethe may not have approved, but he listened. In Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, he likewise favours the scientific path for his central character, and adapts Novalis’s method to represent the circles (“Kreise”) that compose society. In so doing, he replaces the abstract ars combinatoria used by Novalis with a sociological principle, more in tune with his own novel’s social theory, which offers a peaceful alternative to the route later proposed by Marx: a revaluation of labour, to remove the alienation that might lead to revolution, and a new respect for collectivism as a value.

For a fragile moment around 1800, then, there was a balance between individualism and collectivity in German culture, recalling the “Symphilosophie” envisaged by Schlegel: “Perhaps a whole new era will begin in the arts and sciences if Symphilosophie and Sympoesie become so general . . . that . . . complementary natures produce collective works”. Goethe paid homage to this ideal, when he called his Faust an “être collectif”. Novalis’s Romantic Encyclopaedia translates this joint activity to the political sphere, as in an entry on “Theory of a Nation. Pedagogy of a Nation”, concerning the interdependence of individual and collective. The protean method of his Romantic Encyclopaedia underpins much of his writing, where the disarming negations, reversals and pirouettes dissolve the rigidities of linear thought into a supple, lyrical dialectic. Thus Novalis the advocate of the State can also conclude: “In many places States should not be established at all . . .”. Such provocations retain a startling topicality.

Bruce Donehower, editor
THE BIRTH OF NOVALIS
Friedrich von Hardenberg’s Journal of 1797, with selected letters and documents
159pp. State University of New York Press. $25.
978 0 7914 6969 9

Novalis
NOTES FOR A ROMANTIC ENCYCLOPAEDIA
Das Allgemeine Brouillon
Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by David W. Wood
290pp. State University of New York Press. $35.
978 0 7914 6973 6

Jeremy Adler's translation of Hoelderlin's philosophical essays will be published next year.

Chaitin - Chaitin! Chaitin!

2010-09-18T03:48:00.000-07:00

The Omega Man
Photo: Kevin Knight
Photo: Kevin Knight
He shattered mathematics with a single number. And that was just for starters, says Marcus Chown
TWO plus two equals four: nobody would argue with that. Mathematicians can rigorously prove sums like this, and many other things besides. The language of maths allows them to provide neatly ordered ways to describe everything that happens in the world around us.
Or so they once thought. Gregory Chaitin, a mathematics researcher at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, has shown that mathematicians can't actually prove very much at all. Doing maths, he says, is just a process of discovery like every other branch of science: it's an experimental field where mathematicians stumble upon facts in the same way that zoologists might come across a new species of primate.
Mathematics has always been considered free of uncertainty and able to provide a pure foundation for other, messier fields of science. But maths is just as messy, Chaitin says: mathematicians are simply acting on intuition and experimenting with ideas, just like everyone else. Zoologists think there might be something new swinging from branch to branch in the unexplored forests of Madagascar, and mathematicians have hunches about which part of the mathematical landscape to explore. The subject is no more profound than that.

The reason for Chaitin's provocative statements is that he has found that the core of mathematics is riddled with holes. Chaitin has shown that there are an infinite number of mathematical facts but, for the most part, they are unrelated to each other and impossible to tie together with unifying theorems. If mathematicians find any connections between these facts, they do so by luck. "Most of mathematics is true for no particular reason," Chaitin says. "Maths is true by accident."

This is particularly bad news for physicists on a quest for a complete and concise description of the Universe. Maths is the language of physics, so Chaitin's discovery implies there can never be a reliable "theory of everything", neatly summarising all the basic features of reality in one set of equations. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but even Steven Weinberg, a Nobel prizewinning physicist and author of Dreams of a Final Theory, has swallowed it. "We will never be sure that our final theory is mathematically consistent," he admits.

Chaitin's mathematical curse is not an abstract theorem or an impenetrable equation: it is simply a number. This number, which Chaitin calls Omega, is real, just as pi is real. But Omega is infinitely long and utterly incalculable. Chaitin has found that Omega infects the whole of mathematics, placing fundamental limits on what we can know. And Omega is just the beginning. There are even more disturbing numbers--Chaitin calls them Super-Omegas--that would defy calculation even if we ever managed to work Omega out. The Omega strain of incalculable numbers reveals that mathematics is not simply moth-eaten, it is mostly made of gaping holes. Anarchy, not order, is at the heart of the Universe.

Chaitin discovered Omega and its astonishing properties while wrestling with two of the most influential mathematical discoveries of the 20th century. In 1931, the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel blew a gaping hole in mathematics: his Incompleteness Theorem showed there are some mathematical theorems that you just can't prove. Then, five years later, British mathematician Alan Turing built on Gödel's work.

Using a hypothetical computer that could mimic the operation of any machine, Turing showed that there is something that can never be computed. There are no instructions you can give a computer that will enable it to decide in advance whether a given program will ever finish its task and halt. To find out whether a program will eventually halt--after a day, a week or a trillion years--you just have to run it and wait. He called this the halting problem.

Decades later, in the 1960s, Chaitin took up where Turing left off. Fascinated by Turing's work, he began to investigate the halting problem. He considered all the possible programs that Turing's hypothetical computer could run, and then looked for the probability that a program, chosen at random from among all the possible programs, will halt. The work took him nearly 20 years, but he eventually showed that this "halting probability" turns Turing's question of whether a program halts into a real number, somewhere between 0 and 1.

Chaitin named this number Omega. And he showed that, just as there are no computable instructions for determining in advance whether a computer will halt, there are also no instructions for determining the digits of Omega. Omega is uncomputable.

Some numbers, like pi, can be generated by a relatively short program which calculates its infinite number of digits one by one--how far you go is just a matter of time and resources. Another example of a computable number might be one that comprises 200 repeats of the sequence 0101. The number is long, but a program for generating it only need say: "repeat '01' 400 times".

There is no such program for Omega: in binary, it consists of an unending, random string of 0s and 1s. "My Omega number has no pattern or structure to it whatsoever," says Chaitin. "It's a string of 0s and 1s in which each digit is as unrelated to its predecessor as one coin toss is from the next."

The same process that led Turing to conclude that the halting problem is undecidable also led Chaitin to the discovery of an unknowable number. "It's the outstanding example of something which is unknowable in mathematics," Chaitin says.

An unknowable number wouldn't be a problem if it never reared its head. But once Chaitin had discovered Omega, he began to wonder whether it might have implications in the real world. So he decided to search mathematics for places where Omega might crop up. So far, he has only looked properly in one place: number theory.

Number theory is the foundation of pure mathematics. It describes how to deal with concepts such as counting, adding, and multiplying. Chaitin's search for Omega in number theory started with "Diophantine equations"--which involve only the simple concepts of addition, multiplication and exponentiation (raising one number to the power of another) of whole numbers.

Chaitin formulated a Diophantine equation that was 200 pages long and had 17,000 variables. Given an equation like this, mathematicians would normally search for its solutions. There could be any number of answers: perhaps 10, 20, or even an infinite number of them. But Chaitin didn't look for specific solutions, he simply looked to see whether there was a finite or an infinite number of them.

He did this because he knew it was the key to unearthing Omega. Mathematicians James Jones of the University of Calgary and Yuri Matijasevic of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in St Petersburg had shown how to translate the operation of Turing's computer into a Diophantine equation. They found that there is a relationship between the solutions to the equation and the halting problem for the machine's program. Specifically, if a particular program doesn't ever halt, a particular Diophantine equation will have no solution. In effect, the equations provide a bridge linking Turing's halting problem--and thus Chaitin's halting probability--with simple mathematical operations, such as the addition and multiplication of whole numbers.

Chaitin had arranged his equation so that there was one particular variable, a parameter which he called N, that provided the key to finding Omega. When he substituted numbers for N, analysis of the equation would provide the digits of Omega in binary. When he put 1 in place of N, he would ask whether there was a finite or infinite number of whole number solutions to the resulting equation. The answer gives the first digit of Omega: a finite number of solutions would make this digit 0, an infinite number of solutions would make it 1. Substituting 2 for N and asking the same question about the equation's solutions would give the second digit of Omega. Chaitin could, in theory, continue forever. "My equation is constructed so that asking whether it has finitely or infinitely many solutions as you vary the parameter is the same as determining the bits of Omega," he says.

But Chaitin already knew that each digit of Omega is random and independent. This could only mean one thing. Because finding out whether a Diophantine equation has a finite or infinite number of solutions generates these digits, each answer to the equation must therefore be unknowable and independent of every other answer. In other words, the randomness of the digits of Omega imposes limits on what can be known from number theory--the most elementary of mathematical fields. "If randomness is even in something as basic as number theory, where else is it?" asks Chaitin. He thinks he knows the answer. "My hunch is it's everywhere," he says. "Randomness is the true foundation of mathematics."

The fact that randomness is everywhere has deep consequences, says John Casti, a mathematician at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and the Vienna University of Technology. It means that a few bits of maths may follow from each other, but for most mathematical situations those connections won't exist. And if you can't make connections, you can't solve or prove things. All a mathematician can do is aim to find the little bits of maths that do tie together. "Chaitin's work shows that solvable problems are like a small island in a vast sea of undecidable propositions," Casti says.
Photo: Kevin Knight
Photo: Kevin Knight

Take the problem of perfect odd numbers. A perfect number has divisors whose sum makes the number. For example, 6 is perfect because its divisors are 1, 2 and 3, and their sum is 6. There are plenty of even perfect numbers, but no one has ever found an odd number that is perfect. And yet, no one has been able to prove that an odd number can't be perfect. Unproved hypotheses like this and the Riemann hypothesis, which has become the unsure foundation of many other theorems (New Scientist, 11 November 2000, p 32) are examples of things that should be accepted as unprovable but nonetheless true, Chaitin suggests. In other words, there are some things that scientists will always have to take on trust.

Unsurprisingly, mathematicians had a difficult time coming to terms with Omega. But there is worse to come. "We can go beyond Omega," Chaitin says. In his new book, Exploring Randomness (New Scientist, 10 January, p 46), Chaitin has now unleashed the "Super-Omegas".

Like Omega, the Super-Omegas also owe their genesis to Turing. He imagined a God-like computer, much more powerful than any real computer, which could know the unknowable: whether a real computer would halt when running a particular program, or carry on forever. He called this fantastical machine an "oracle". And as soon as Chaitin discovered Omega--the probability that a random computer program would eventually halt--he realised he could also imagine an oracle that would know Omega. This machine would have its own unknowable halting probability, Omega'.

But if one oracle knows Omega, it's easy to imagine a second-order oracle that knows Omega'. This machine, in turn, has its own halting probability, Omega'', which is known only by a third-order oracle, and so on. According to Chaitin, there exists an infinite sequence of increasingly random Omegas. "There is even an all-seeing infinitely high-order oracle which knows all other Omegas," he says.

He kept these numbers to himself for decades, thinking they were too bizarre to be relevant to the real world. Just as Turing looked upon his God-like computer as a flight of fancy, Chaitin thought these Super-Omegas were fantasy numbers emerging from fantasy machines. But Veronica Becher of the University of Buenos Aires has shown that Chaitin was wrong: the Super-Omegas are both real and important. Chaitin is genuinely surprised by this discovery. "Incredibly, they actually have a real meaning for real computers," he says.

Becher has been collaborating with Chaitin for just over a year, and is helping to drag Super-Omegas into the real world. As a computer scientist, she wondered whether there were links between Omega, the higher-order Omegas and real computers.

Real computers don't just perform finite computations, doing one or a few things, and then halt. They can also carry out infinite computations, producing an infinite series of results. "Many computer applications are designed to produce an infinite amount of output," Becher says. Examples include Web browsers such as Netscape and operating systems such as Windows 2000.

This example gave Becher her first avenue to explore: the probability that, over the course of an infinite computation, a machine would produce only a finite amount of output. To do this, Becher and her student Sergio Daicz used a technique developed by Chaitin. They took a real computer and turned it into an approximation of an oracle. The "fake oracle" decides that a program halts if--and only if--it halts within time T. A real computer can handle this weakened version of the halting problem. "Then you let T go to infinity," Chaitin says. This allows the shortcomings of the fake to diminish as it runs for longer and longer.

Using variations on this technique, Becher and Daicz found that the probability that an infinite computation produces only a finite amount of output is the same as Omega', the halting probability of the oracle. Going further, they showed that Omega'' is equivalent to the probability that, during an infinite computation, a computer will fail to produce an output--for example, get no result from a computation and move on to the next one--and that it will do this only a finite number of times.

These might seem like odd things to bother with, but Chaitin believes this is an important step. "Becher's work makes the whole hierarchy of Omega numbers seem much more believable," he says. Things that Turing--and Chaitin--imagined were pure fantasy are actually very real.

Now that the Super-Omegas are being unearthed in the real world, Chaitin is sure they will crop up all over mathematics, just like Omega. The Super-Omegas are even more random than Omega: if mathematicians were to get over Omega's obstacles, they would face an ever-elevated barrier as they confronted Becher's results.

And that has knock-on effects elsewhere. Becher and Chaitin admit that the full implications of their new discoveries have yet to become clear, but mathematics is central to many aspects of science. Certainly any theory of everything, as it attempts to tie together all the facts about the Universe, would need to jump an infinite number of hurdles to prove its worth.

The discovery of Omega has exposed gaping holes in mathematics, making research in the field look like playing a lottery, and it has demolished hopes of a theory of everything. Who knows what the Super-Omegas are capable of? "This," Chaitin warns, "is just the beginning."
Further reading:

* Exploring Randomness by G. J. Chaitin, Springer-Verlag (2001)
* "A Century of Controversy Over the Foundations of Mathematics" by G. J. Chaitin, Complexity, vol 5, p 12 (2000)
* The Unknowable by G. J. Chaitin, Springer-Verlag (1999)
* "Randomness everywhere" by C. S. Calude and G. J. Chaitin, Nature, vol 400, p 319 (1999)
* http://www.cs.umaine.edu/~chaitin/

Chai

2010-09-18T03:47:00.000-07:00

Bill Hopkins.

2010-09-05T17:43:00.000-07:00

Et interview med Bill Hopkins. Han har måske udgivet mere, men ikke meget, end romanen The Leap! (a.k.a. The Divine and the Decay). Jeg har over en længere, vel egentlig årrække læst bøger af 'the angry young men'. Der er en mærkelig problemstilling i dem, som interessere mig ret meget. Det her interview, skønt Bill Hopkins er lidt for lidt neurotisk, er interviewet et godt eksempel på problemstillingen. Han mangler lidt ængstelighed, lidt angst, der er lidt for meget afstand til det han selv er, til at han virkelig kan være en god repræsentant for dem. Til gengæld er han den yderkant jeg vidste der måtte findes. Indledningen til interviewet gengiver det ganske godt, der sker en omvendelse af det moralske problem. Problemet handler om hvordan vi kan blive skabende igen. Hopkins, siger at england var gået i stå, at der intet skete. For Hopkins er det hele problemet, og han er yderst direkte mht det, romanen, litteraturen skal skabe mænd som kan skabe og forandre. Direkteheden behøves, at skabelsen så ikke er direkte er en anden sag, men der er en ærlighed her som er totalt overset. Det er en forestilling jeg har, at der efter krigen, var et kort øjeblik hvor der fremkom en mærkelig form for ærlighed. Den var i virkeligheden på visse måder en fortsættelse af nazisternes ærlighed, for den handlede om handlekraft. Den handlede om at blive til, om at kunne skabe. Der var ikke noget accepteret, intet andet end en hvis form for virkelighed. Men man ville stadig skabe, man ville stadig gerne finde måder at blive til på, at tage sig retten. Den ene sti endte i marxisme og lign. I yderkanten af den finder vi terrorister. Folk som vil forandre, dvs. skabe, ved at destruere. Ambitionen er at se igennem det hele, penetrerende og det er en ærlighed, stadig, selvom den er blandet med meget meget lort og derfor ikke kan se ærlighed ud. Men der er ingen vej uden om, den er ærlighed for den handler om at handle, den handler om radikalitet, den handler om at være singulær. Der er noget rodløst hos en del af disse forfattere. Rodløshed er selvfølgelig et temmeligt brugt ord. Men det er godt her, for det er en direkte lukkethed, krigen er blevet lukket, den er blevet vundet og de andre er onde og hele spektrummet er et morads, for hvem skabte krigen, hvem har skylden. Nazisterne har skylden og dog er de ikke alene, det er hele tiden lige omkring os. Nå så fik jeg pladret.... nu kommer interviewet.

En ærlighed som var meget direkte, som fx trak litteraturens rolle tilbage til en plads, hvor den kunne starte med at finde sig selv. Det er den samme ærlighed der for Lindsay Anderson til at lave if...! De drømmende, surrelle scener i den film er ærligheden. Den er nød til også at være ren og brutal. Den er nød til at gøre opmærksom på en anden verden inden i den anden, den er nød til at acceptere den.

Hopkins An angry young man

by Jonathan Bowden

Bill Hopkins was born of theatrical parents in Cardiff in 1928. His father was the artiste and music hall star Ted Hopkins, while his mother attained recognition as a well-known society and artistic beauty. Her name was Violet Brodrick.

Hopkins was one of the ‘Angry Young Men’ group of writers who emerged in the 1950s. He was the most prominent of the ‘Outsiders’ trio amongst the ‘Angry Young Men’ - a groupuscule which consisted of himself, Colin Wilson and Stuart Holroyd. His most outstanding contribution was a succes de scandale with the novel, The Divine and the Decay, published by MacGibbon & Kee in 1957 - and his artistic credo, Ways Without a Precedent, contained in Declarations, the manifesto of the ‘Angry Young Men’. Doris Lessing, in the second volume of her literary autobiography, Walking in the Shade, says that Bill Hopkins revealed a great talent at this time. She also goes on to mistakenly declare that he died tragically young! His greatest achievement remains The Divine and the Decay.

The Leap! (a.k.a. The Divine and the Decay) is largely forgotten today - yet when it appeared in the late 1950s it produced an absolute furore in the press; a cause celebre which was almost unprecedented at the time. As an anonymous author, who wrote a foreword to the book’s de luxe second edition, put it: - “an abscess seemed to have been punctured in the general culture”. He goes on to say that anyone who wishes to analyse the nature of contemporary literary censorship - no longer about explicit mentions of sex (of erotica per se) but now primarily to do with ‘incorrect’ political thoughts - should spend a couple of hours in the Colindale Newspaper Library in North London (the country’s largest repository of ephemeral non-fiction) surveying the literary press’s response to this novel. The book is essentially a consideration of philosophical ideas. It deals with an ideological viewpoint, an aesthetic response to political reality, laid out in the form of a traditional narrative - i.e., a book with a beginning, middle and end. In a sense it is similar to a range of politicised fictions that occurred in the early 1950s across the Channel, such as Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy and Camus’s existentialist tour de force, The Outsider. But the irony about this novel is that although it takes a relatively ‘traditional’ form it is, in actuality, a complete moral reversal of the left-existential works mentioned above.

In his anatomisation of the culture of the 1950s, The Angry Decade, Kenneth Allsop describes this work as both unregenerate and morally ‘evil’. He basically declares that it is a loathsome product which should have been banned - although, like all true liberals of his ilk, Allsop could not bring himself openly to advocate the censorship that he seeks for this book (somewhat inevitably). The work in question deals with the psychological origins of a dynamic leader (a veteran ‘Outsider’). It depicts the spiritual trajectory of a ‘British Caesar’ on his way to complete power - or what is conceived as such. If you like, it is a version of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game played with human eyeballs! It denotes the ‘amoral’ power-curve of Peter Plowart - at least after he has succeeded in ‘murdering’ the chairman of the New Britain League: (the latter his vehicle to obtain supreme power): and furthermore, once he has successfully taken refuge on an almost deserted island called Vachau, which is depicted as a small outcrop off the Channel Islands. In actual fact this island does not exist; it is purely imaginary. It is merely used for the purposes of narrative-drive, even though it may be based on the Anglo-French outpost of the Barclay brothers, Brechou, a tiny isle off Sark. On his arrival in Vachau Plowart comes across various human types (or archetypes) against which he tests his will and his future view of the world. These correspondents - i.e., characters in a dramatic dialogue, all contained in the form of a novel - represent a Christian and ‘female’ perspective (Clermont); a weakened, male, humanist viewpoint (ultimately speaking) (Lumas); and the drunken sensualist, the man addicted to fleshey pleasures (Lachanell).

Plowart is a man obsessed by the nature of his own destiny, irrespective of all other things such as human warmth and comfort (for example). He is a perfect paradigm of the dictatorial urge (the ‘Will to Power’). Moreover he resembles a novelist’s version of the young Saddam Hussein (as it were) set in England around the middle of the century. (We should remember that Saddam Hussein had set upon his course at an early age. Indeed he first came to prominence, as a mere stripling of seventeen, when he tried to machine-gun the Premier of Iraq). Plowart is made of a similar human material. For he is a man who believes – in a purely Nietzschean sense – that the ‘Will to Power’ is the basis of all existence (whether civil or otherwise) and that human beings only learn anything through their ability to transgress thresholds of pain. In many respects Plowart appears in this theoretical novel to be a mediaeval figure, almost a mystic, a man who wishes to go beyond what presently exists: but always with a totally different morality to that of liberal-humanism (quiescent or otherwise). This is why Allsop - together with other journalists of similar views - reacted so violently against this novel: in that it completely contradicted their own beliefs, based as they were on soi-disant Enlightenment values. For, in all honesty, Plowart does not believe in the right to life, in humanist ethics, in opposition to slavery, in the belief that the weak are morally best, that women are superior to men, that sentimentality is a form of grace, that corporal punishment is wrong, that human beings are racially equal, that people do not wish to be dominated, that destruction is ‘evil’ (as a principle of life) and that human freedom is anything other than a conceit to be used by those of a higher power. In other words, Plowart is an ‘inhumanist’, an antihumanist - although not in a crude political sense. (Even this is not entirely true for Hopkins does not dwell on political matters straightforwardly - or in any other way - with the exception of a few vague phrases about the populist New Britain League). When we describe Hopkins’s character in this manner we mean - at least ethically speaking - that he is a mythical being who is closer to the spirit of Aleister Crowley than the contemporary Archbishop of Canterbury: at least as was depicted in Crowley’s novels such as The Moonchild and The Diary of a Drug Fiend. For Plowart is - in a purely normative manner - a ‘left-hand occultist’ or social magician: an ‘amoralist’ and an anti-Christian; a new Assyrian; a man who believes in a religion older than Christianity, when the latter is controversially dismissed as a humanist creed, the weak-kneed religion of those unfit for life. In spirit, however, this is closer to the Plato of The Laws - rather than the lucidity of The Republic. In any event, it is a ‘sadic’ faith (a doctrine beyond liberal-humanist and Christian morality) which sees war as the crucible of human meaning: and conflict/death as a state of ‘liberation’ in relation to preconceived notions of being. For Plowart preaches a ‘pessimistic’ ideology of force and challenge. He believes in the manipulation of mass emotion (i.e. the use of contemporary fear and sentiment) primarily through the persuasive utilisation of superior cultural energy. Basically, then, he stands for the values that animated European revolutionary regimes from the 1920s to the 1940s - i.e. the ‘dictatorships’ that were defeated by Britain and her Allies in the last war. Hence the fact that there was such a furious reaction to this novel - i.e. to a metapolitical enquiry; a philosophical speculation - undertaken in 1957, which was after all only a few years after the war itself had ended. But these events have now passed into history.

In this respect Colin Wilson misunderstands the book in his otherwise interesting introduction to the novel’s second edition in the 1980s - particularly when he speaks of it as a mystical travelogue. For, in actuality, this novel is an exercise in psycho-history before it has been written. It is a fusion of Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out (its Sabbatesque revelations) with an imaginary autobiography - an auto-hagiography, even - of the young Enoch Powell.

In this sense Bill Hopkins’s The Divine and the Decay - his greatest literary achievement - stands revealed as a Bildungsroman of the anti-Left; a premonitory explosion; a lightening-flash which reveals a terra incognita; an intrusion into the Zeitgeist; a ‘storm of steel’ against liberal evasion. There follows an interview with the author of this incendiary novel.

JB: Were you an angry young man?

BH: Very much. I think everybody was very angry and frustrated during the 1950s and from the end of the war onwards actually. The whole country was in a state of stagnation, everything was pointless and meaningless. It was as though someone had stuck a vast syringe into the arm of the nation and all the energy had been withdrawn from it. We were all in limbo. The whole country had come to a standstill in a way that’s very difficult for people who weren’t born then to recall. The war seemed pointless to all of us. There was no feeling that ‘we’d triumphed over evil’ at all. The evil was that England was bankrupt, lost, directionless, purposeless. The wrong people occupied all the positions of influence. And the wrong people were masquerading as left-wingers, which I found just as objectionable.

JB: Can you talk more specifically about what you and your fellow ‘Angry Young Men’ were trying to achieve?

BH: Well, The Divine and the Decay mustn’t be seen as an ordinary novel. It was written as an inflammatory document to inspire and act as a catalyst, and for a while I thought it was going to. I certainly didn’t write it as a normal novel. I meant it almost as a manifesto.

JB: So you weren’t simply trying to change the view of literature but society in a political sense as well?

BH: I was trying to change the reason for literature, the role and the gravitas of literature, into something nobler than it was at that time. You must remember that literature in the 1950s was dominated by very dormant figures who belonged really to the 1930s: Spender, Auden, Isherwood, Eliot. All relatively effete, degenerate and hopeless voices. But also literature like that was totally disconnected from all the engines of society politically. It was very dilettante. Society was static, so the novel was intended to fuse literature to society and to change both literature and society into something much more dynamic than it was. I wanted Britain to become great again.

JB: Why?

BH: I thought - and still do - that the British are the greatest people in history exceeding even the Greeks and that Britain is the cradle of most of the miracles that make the world today. And can become so again. It’s a very, very strange, unique and peerless people and I’m very proud to be a member of it.

JB: Which writers did you admire?

BH: Above all others, Dostoievsky. Shaw very much. Wilde, in another sense entirely. H.G. Wells as a determinist and a scientist. Conrad, of course. Kipling very, very much; I identified with his empire-building, his imperialism and his respect for other races. Those are the great lights of my time.

JB: Reading the writers of the 1950s, there seems to be a great feeling of doom, a great urgency to change direction, discover a new politics, even a new religion. Was this a symptom of the times - a response, perhaps to the nuclear threat - or do you feel this remains the position today?

BH: I think it was very much a symptom of that time. I think the nuclear threat was ever-present, on everyone’s mind. Is it very different from to-day? The difference today from then was that today the endwarfment of the individual is more complete, the sense of impotence and insignificance is more total. At that time there was a great deal of feeling that the individual could become significant again if he could acquire heroic independence. That was the big difference. To-day people are much more vanquished. They’re borne along on the flood much more today than they were then. It seems a paradox but there was more hope then than there is to-day.

JB: It does seem a paradox.

BH: Well, computerisation and robotisation and everything else has taken man, through technology, to a further crossroads, I think, and it’s accelerating. And society is becoming much more global. Don’t forget that in the 1950s nationalism was a view that we had from our birth. Hence the wars. To-day I think you’d find it very difficult to start a war without a very elaborate rationale that would be acceptable to a majority.

JB: Do you think we’re moving away from nationalistic viewpoints?

BH: I think we are becoming more rootless and we don’t know our place in the world any more and that’s contributing to a feeling of impotence and insignificance. People haven’t the limited view that was part of the blindness of the 1950s. But it also gave them a passion about their own place of birth and upbringing and culture which is disappearing. They’re two different worlds, so different that it seems scarcely conceivable that they’re only separated by fifty years.

JB: You wrote in 1957 that a “writer’s duty is to urge forward society towards fuller responsibility, and that a writer must take upon himself the duties of the visionary, the evangelist, the social leader and the teacher in the absence of other candidates.” You wrote that a writer’s task is to discover the escape route to progress. Yet after The Divine and the Decay you ceased to write, or at least to publish.

BH: I don’t think the public realise the extent of censorship in a so-called democracy - which of course is mythical. There’s never been a democracy in the world and it’s still the only word we use. But a propos my own situation, when The Divine and the Decay came out, it was seen widely by the left-wing as one of the most dangerous things. Here was a right-wing thinker - right-wing in the sense of not being left-wing - who is speaking to millions and that’s very dangerous. Don’t forget we had platforms in every major newspaper, on a daily basis. They were all reporting us, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, you name it. So we were very dangerous in the sense that hitherto in society you kept radicals, left or right, on Speakers’ Corner and suddenly a group of wild young people were attempting to destabilise society; and in that sense it was very dangerous because it had never happened in literature before. There was no precedent for it. What went on behind the scenes was this. I was recruited to MacGibbon & Kee by Tom Maschler, who after he got me on contract departed for Jonathan Cape. I was left on at MacGibbon & Kee, which was owned by Howard Samuel, one of the Samuel brothers who owned great tracts of the West End. Howard Samuel, my publisher, was the left wing one, and he supported The New Statesman, The Nation and, even more militantly, the magazine Tribune. These journals were all set to work attacking me ferociously as one of the authors of their owner and with his consent. MacGibbon & Kee found me an enormous threat and hated the book but under contract they had to publish it. But they limited the publication. They didn’t sell the translation rights to any other country in the world, they limited the circulation and they pulped. I know that because I had many hundreds of letters coming to me from people going into bookshops and finding that they couldn’t get a copy of The Divine and the Decay, nor was it being supplied. I couldn’t prove it, but I knew it had been pulped which of course makes it so rare today. It should have been printed in a minimum of at least 20,000 copies, but it wasn’t. The truth emerged when I went into the publishers and asked why they weren’t printing more and I was told that they thoroughly disapproved of the book politically. They wouldn’t release me from contract so I could go to another publisher and they would make great difficulties about publishing any more of my work. So in one fell stroke, I was made a prisoner. Held on contract, I couldn’t offer my work to anyone else, otherwise I’d be pursued and they wouldn’t release me. They would neither publish another book nor release me. They kept me hostage; and that was the left wing who were going on so much about the dangers of fascism. They exercised the most vicious, nastiest form of censorship that I have ever come across.

JB: Presumably they don’t still hold you hostage?

BH: No. I’m free. I’ve got my book back.

JB: Why have you published nothing since, in the last 37 years?

BH: Because it’s time to go that one or two steps further. Plays, much more than novels, because my sort of novel simply doesn’t go today.

JB: Are you writing plays?

BH: Yes. I’m working on a quartet of plays for theatre which is nearly complete. I can’t say any more about that at the moment. But, yes.

JB: In your essay in Declarations in 1957, where you were talking about the writer’s viewpoint, you wrote: “I predict that within the next two or three decades we will see the end of pure rationalism as the foundation of our thinking.” Do you see any signs that this is happening?

BH: Very much so. This huge upsurge of interest in mysticism, in the psychic, in the occult are all symptoms of the fact that rationality as we know it - and I illustrated it with 1+2=3, which is a syllogism, a fallacy, it’s 1+1+1=3 - that rationality encloses a domain that’s a very small fragment of what’s emerging as a continent of new data, of unrealised worlds. DNA for instance is already taking us into fields beyond rationality and we’re trying to find the fingerprints of so many things which we’ve loosely in the past called genetic. We’ve got to create hypotheses where there is no rationality to govern those hypotheses and we’ve got to, from those leaps through hypotheses, establish bridgeheads into terra incognita and link back to the rational. Otherwise we can’t go as fast as we could if we were to leap beyond rationality. When we say irrationalism, that rings of certain echoes which are emotional and spiritual and so forth, which are quite dubious. But rationality at the moment isn’t enough and we’ve got to use everything we can to break through to further realms of thinking. That’s what I really meant there. I can encapsulate it in the sense that what we know isn’t enough. We’ve got to know more, therefore we’ve got to take enormous risks in terms of intellectual courage by throwing our minds into domains which could well be called insane. And art brut as its called, Outsider Art, is a perfect example.

JB: In The Divine and the Decay, the protagonist, Plowart, describes himself as the “greatest man of our time”, which I take in the sense of a Nietszchean superman or superhero, to whom normal rules don’t apply. But, following the analogy, if the ends justify the means - and Plowart commits murder in pursuit of his goal - how can we be sure that our actions will have the result that we intend? Doesn’t history rather show the opposite - that we know nothing of the future, that, as Shaw had it, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”?

BH: We can’t look back to history as a reference to show that something is necessarily so. You can do that in law through precedents but that’s as artificial an invention as mathematics. If the right people commit acts or take a course of action, it surely will be determined by them having a diagrammatic understanding of what the outcome of that or those actions will be. They’re not actions which are haphazard or should be - or would be, I think. So, the ends justify the means. Well, I don’t quite know why that’s ever been in doubt. We don’t quibble if that method is used by someone like Pasteur, experimenting on himself, or the Curies, but we do in terms of the Lenins, the Stalins, and the Hitlers. So I would say that under laboratory conditions we endorse that principle. Outside the laboratory we say the wide world is a very different place and humanism dictates that we draw back from any other cruelty than cruelty to oneself. But all the world operates on natural cruelty so that’s a wonderful example of hypocrisy. As soon as anything matters, it becomes a combat - love, business, snobbery; everything is a form of mental cruelty. So I would say that if one governs and understands all this and comes out with the final law that we should all live and let live, that’s insufficient. There will always be people hurt.

JB: Would you describe yourself as a humanist?

BH: I believe in humanity. But I believe that human beings have to be warriors.

JB: Why?

BH: We have to soldier on. We have to understand that life is not fair. It’s not equitable. It’s not something that everyone can be happy with and what we’ve got to do is think in terms of the advancement of the species, that above all else.

JB: In The Divine and the Decay, Plowart escapes from England to a small, socially incestuous island where magical or seemingly magical events occur. This echoes or anticipates some of the themes of John Fowles’s novel, The Magus. Was there something about Britain in the 1950s that made islands and events that, let us say, defied the prevailing orthodoxies of scientific materialism seem especially attractive to writers?

BH: I can’t answer for Fowles. But for my own part it gave me a hermetically enclosed, magnifying, echoing chamber, which was a metaphor for the world, really. All the putrid decaying people on it were reflections of that. How degenerate they were, how trivial they were, how unabsorbed they were over the prospects of humanity as a species. All these things were, to me, perfect examples of what I could portray as the world. I mean, here was a man who didn’t belong, who was the ‘Outsider’, who was en passant.

JB: Was there also, at the back of your mind, the idea that this might be a metaphor for the world after a nuclear holocaust?

BH: No. Because I’ve always had a great belief that the nuclear war wouldn’t happen. I don’t know of any species that has a literal death wish. Even the lemmings don’t.

JB: Do you, or did you, see yourself as an outsider?

BH: Yes, in many ways I did. And yet I was more of an insider than any of the ‘Angry Young Men’.

JB: When you speak of the ‘Angry Young Men’ which other writers come to mind?

BH: John Osborne, Lindsay Anderson. His film If has been very undervalued. Kingsley Amis, in the sense that he was very subversive and mocking. You couldn’t call him an angry young man but you couldn’t certainly call him a peaceful young man either. John Wain was doing the same thing, and John Braine - how to raise yourself up the ladder, the social ladder, which was unfair. They all felt that they’d been deprived of social advantages and they had decided that they wanted a society where everyone had equal advantages, which of course, came from left- wing thinking and I suppose radical liberal thinking too. And even I believe that everyone should have equal education, equal chances. So does Colin Wilson. But of course, we believe you invent yourself and the others did see themselves as maimed or damaged by the system. Who else? You want more names? Most of them are gone. Alexander Trocchi killed himself with a syringe. There were quite a few that fell by the wayside.

JB: So it would not be unreasonable to see the ‘Angry Young Men’ as almost a form of social protest, a protest by the non-privileged?

BH: Well, it was a protest by most of them, but Colin and I were really affirming rallying calls and a positive advance for society, we weren’t too interested in the bad things that you protest against. We were simply calling on people who had extra energy and vitality to break through to a further point. But not, you know, kicking other people as it were. If you’re a fast runner you really don’t have to worry too much about the people you say are hogging the racetrack. You just run faster and surpass them.

JB: Were there any concrete ways in which the ‘Angry Young Men’ were a group? Did you meet?

BH: Yes. We all knew each other and I think we were trying most of all to re-energise society. We were all protesting against dead thinking, for the need to become much more vital. That’s what the ‘Angry Young Men’ were really for. They were trying to break the stagnation of that decade and, in doing so, I think that they completely changed communication. I don’t think the pop movement or the pop world could have happened without us; or most of the other big social explosions. We were the thin end of the wedge.

JB: Do you see yourselves, with hindsight anyway, as precursors of the 1960s?

BH: Very much so. Very much so.

JB: John Lennon’s ‘working class hero’?

BH: Yes. In the way that we changed novels, plays, cinema, singing, acting. Yes. Undoubtedly. Historically we did. We were the catalyst and we paid a dear price for it.

JB: Can you amplify that?

BH: Well, you only have to look at the history of John Osborne and Colin Wilson and Lindsay Anderson to see the damage that was done. All his life, after the ‘Angry Young Men’, Lindsay Anderson was trying to get finance for further films and never really managed it. John Osborne was attacked more and more venomously with each play, so he never emerged as a playwright that people looked at as a playwright. He was always someone you hated and was a demon figure, wasn’t he? And Colin Wilson too. That changed his career.

JB: Do you feel that others reaped the rewards?

BH: Oh yes. They always do. And I think that’s good.

JB: The next literary generation, the Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie generation, weren’t trying to change society. They were writing in a way that one probably couldn’t have written in the 1950s without being regarded as a radical writer, but they certainly were not radical revolutionaries.

BH: Yes absolutely. They were accepted. Society had changed and they were accepted and I think in that sense the ‘Angry Young Men’ were very necessary as catalysts, don’t you? I think we served our purpose.

JB: You had an effect, certainly.

BH: In ant colonies they have soldier ants and they rush forward to any danger and they’re killed in their thousands but they’ve stopped the threat and they’ve changed the direction of the ant colony. So we were used, I suppose, as warrior ants by the Zeitgeist. And certainly I think that if everyone had known what was going to happen, and we didn’t, I think most of them wouldn’t have gone in to battle. I think it certainly accounts for the fact that today half the ‘Angry Young Men’ are dead. It put a tremendous stress on them all.

JB: Yes, it’s difficult to escape from such a very firm bracketing together. Perhaps no one really escaped from it. Perhaps Kingsley Amis?

BH: Yes, he kept his distance. But then he did pay a terrible price with alcoholism; and he did move much further to the Right and moved into the Garrick and made that into his enclosed world. There were effects. John Braine became from a left winger a Tory, didn’t he? And a Catholic and an alcoholic - and that killed him. All showed signs of stress. Except me. But I walked away owing to the fact that my way was totally blocked

JB: What did you do?

BH: I built an empire in antiques and antiquities. I built an empire and made a fortune.

JB: Do you regret the fact that your way was blocked?

BH: No. I don’t think that you can regret anything in life. I think you have to accept what is. Don’t forget, my father was my precursor. He was famous and he was rendered destitute and he ended up dead with everything in ruins. So I knew that there were consequences. From the very beginning I knew. In fact I warned Colin Wilson that he was about to be assassinated before Religion and the Rebel and Ritual in the Dark came out. It was all so predictable and my feeling was if no-one will examine my case, what had happened to me in terms of my publishers and what I was faced with and no one defended me - even people like Iris Murdoch - to hell with literature. I’m now going to look after Bill Hopkins and make him self-sufficient. I’m never going to be dependent on people again; publishers, a public that doesn’t notice what’s going on and accepts what’s being given to them. I felt very scornful about the whole situation!

JB: You mention Iris Murdoch. One very obvious element among the ‘Angry Young Men’ was that they were men. That was a line back to Nietszche with his Superman. There was also a line back to the idea of the outsider, started by Camus and developed by your friend Colin Wilson. It was a very male dominated literary and intellectual scene. Probably the greatest single intellectual change in the last 40 years has been the advent of feminism, the advance of feminine values and their effect on literature and the world of the intellect. Do you have any comment on that?

BH: Well, of course, that had already started very much in the 1950s and earlier, with Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Simone de Beauvoir in Paris, The Second Sex.

JB: She was linked to Sartre.

BH: Yes, but she was a very independent woman. I mean, Sartre was attacking me as a fascist and Simone de Beauvoir’s lover, Nelson Algren, was a great champion of my book. So her lover, Nelson Algren, was championing me and her regular man, Sartre, was attacking me as a fascist and her position was independent. She was an alternative voice. Simone de Beauvoir certainly wasn’t in thraldom to Sartre intellectually at all. In fact I think that she felt sorry for him in many ways. She pitied him in many respects and that came out very much in that goodbye, that last account of Sartre’s dying.

JB: Nevertheless, at the end of The Divine and the Decay Plowart and Claremont are thrust into the sea and it’s the male who survives, seemingly miraculously yet not miraculously, through an effort of will.

BH: And imagination. And vision.

JB: And the female who perishes. The female who sacrifices herself.

BH: Yes. Well, of course, Claremont was occupying a very, very wrong position. She was defending what is instead of powers that could be.

JB: You wrote in Declarations of your disdain for “improbable love yarns closing upon chaste kisses” and the single sex scene in The Divine and the Decay presents sex as a perfunctory, loveless, almost utilitarian expression of carnal desire. Do you see sex as purely part of the instinct for survival?

BH: Yes. The drive to copulation is so basic to us all, it dominates everything. We mask it by words like love but the fact of the matter is that true love emasculates the drive to copulation. There is a perception of women as whores or goddesses. The goddess principle which has been propagated in all the advertisements in films and television emasculates men. They can’t believe that they can rip the knickers off Audrey Hepburn and mate. They have to adore; by adoring they invoke the contempt of the woman who certainly doesn’t want to be adored. All she sets out to do is to attract those who will penetrate her and impregnate. So women, by overdoing the show business attractiveness with cosmetics and lingerie and what not, often complain that they attract men that they don’t want. They want barbarians. Part of the motivation of the ‘Angry Young Men’ was their sex famine, their anger.

JB: Towards?

BH: The fact that they were sexually deprived. They all had the idea of blue stockings, of wonderful cool Lady Bretts – you know, of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises - Lady Bretts, who were cool sophisticated aristocrats. They would never drop their silken panties for them and that enraged them. I didn’t subscribe to that of course, because one knows it’s all show business. I never had any social anger nor sexual anger. I think, in that sense, when you said ‘Were you an outsider?’ I said ‘yes’, but also no; yes in the sense that society to me was full of such victims, needless victims, men and women, but no in the sense that I knew that there was no personal animus towards me and everyone was a ‘victim’ in their different ways. I mean old David Milford Haven, whom I knew well was a typical example, and David Astor, Jonathan Guinness - they were all ‘victims’. Everyone’s a victim in England. In America they’re not. In England if you’re not born with a title and with wealth, then you have an inferiority complex from the beginning. As soon as you’ve got a duke you’re inferior by definition. He’s a victim, despite being a duke, to the monarchy. The pyramid.

JB: Is this something you’d like to see changed?

BH: The monarchy is a victim of its succession. The whole thing always struck me as a kind of diddle and a doddle so I could never be passionate about any of that.

JB: Would you like to see the class system abolished?

BH: Very much, but I’m afraid it’s raised in people’s own minds. I’ll give you an example. John Braine, who wrote Room at the Top, was an absolute militant against the class system It was something that enraged him enormously and he wrote splenetic articles in The New Statesman about it. But when I took him to meet David Milford Haven, he found out of course about his title and that he was the Queen’s best man. All of a sudden a terrible quivering and a shaking of his teacup on the saucer revealed exactly the class system of this country.

JB: You’ve emphasised your Britishness, your belief in the superiority of the British race and stated that you’re very much a British writer. I would suggest however that you were the least British, the least parochial and most cosmopolitan of the ‘Angry Young Men’; the one most in tune with international ideas.

BH: It’s only possible to become international when you have such firm ground under you. I don’t mean physical ground. I mean history. When I use the word compost that’s about it. It’s all the mess, the blood, the gore and the entrails of centuries.

JB: There is a lot of ambivalence in your attitude towards England and Britain.

BH: I’m showing the flag. The Britain I’m talking about is here as it is for all true British men and women.

JB: Inside your head?

BH: Yes. And it shouts at the real Britain, ‘Grow up, be this and how dare you be tardy’. So it’s always been my attitude that I’ve told the English what they should do in poetry, in journalism, in novels and now in plays and that’s what I’ll die doing. I’m both parochial and international, but I can only be international when I’m sure of my identity. And I’m not interested in Bill Hopkins. I’m interested in another representative for the British people. That’s all. I’m part of the compost. D’you see what I mean? Nietszche: “Not me, not me, the wind that blows through me”. That’s entirely my attitude in life. And I can’t see any other way of living. We’ve been put on the earth as kind of Manchurian candidates and if society is hostile then we’ve got to be more deterministic and do battle. It’s forced on us. We certainly don’t crumple like victims. So that’s my arrival as one of the ‘Angry Young Men’ and I would have been saying this to you exactly in my twenties. Never changed. All I’ve done has been to improve my thinking and facilitate my survival materially and live. You know, there won’t be many of us left soon, Jonathan. There won’t be many of us left.

JB: You were instrumental, I understand, in the launch of Penthouse.

BH: Yes, well that was very important. As the editor of the first number, I recruited Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley and many others who were considered to be heavyweights by the establishment to subscribe to a magazine that was showing pubic hair for the first time. And although I didn’t believe in sex as titillation, I did know that it was necessary as another battering ram.

JB: I think Penthouse can be seen as a battering ram, but also as something sleazy and unpleasant.

BH: It wasn’t sleazy. We used the most beautiful girls.

JB: Even hypocritical.

BH: It was an attack on hypocrisy! Penthouse penetrated to the foundations. Don’t forget the lavatory, the bedroom and the drawing room, traditionally in England, had been completely different worlds. Penthouse united them for the first time.

JB: We still see this hypocrisy about sex that Penthouse supposedly ended. It seems to be livelier than ever today, with politicians.

BH: Yes, but they’re all ending up at the Old Bailey. I mean, cheque book journalism has exposed the poor sods as they’ve never been exposed before.

JB: But the hypocrisy still has to be deep rooted to allow it to happen.

BH: Well, more and more it’s becoming the joke of the world isn’t it, really? Hilarious. But England has always been like that and Penthouse opened a lot of oubliettes that need to be opened up. I used to go to the Duchess of Westminster’s parties and people used to come up to me and say, ‘hey, you know, awful people, the press, always writing these lies’, and distancing themselves. What they didn’t realise is that I’d been on the news-desk taking their tips. If I’d really been an angry young man, I’d have written chapter and verse. I could have demolished most of them. They were all drawing money for feeding stories in about their friends. The magistrates were sending the prostitutes and the pimps and the perverts to prison and they were part of the active circle. There are a number of Englands, a number of Englands.

JB: What interests me and I think what interests you, is the hypocrisy.

BH: I’d go further, to pity.

JB: For whom?

BH: The hypocrites. ‘In sunshine and shadow.’

JB: You don’t seem angry at all.

BH: I never was. I’m passionate, but not angry. I’m passionate about the need for change. I’m passionate about the need for understanding. I’m passionate about the need for vision.

JB: Is there not a conflict between the views you’ve expressed and your own feelings?

BH: I look at it detachedly, as I do with everything. It seems to me that you can’t theorise about violence without being perfectly in tune with using violence yourself. And one of my ideals has always been based on the cultured thug: the Byronic.

JB: The Krays ?

BH: Yes. Well, you know the Krays were very, very respectful to me and anyone else in the Arts. So was Rachman, who was my landlord. I owed him rent for months and he didn’t care. All he wanted was to sit in on conversations of mine. I think you have to accept the fact that unless you can fight you mustn’t just take an ivory tower position. And that’s one of the things about Plowart which I was very keen on representing. I mean Isherwood and Auden and Spender and Eliot were all whimpering and whingeing about being so highly sensitive and I view that with total contempt.

JB: Yes. There is a very obvious contrast between the ‘Angry Young Men’ and the previous generation.

BH: Yes. Mind you, I did sympathise with them. But I knew that when the war came, it had to be logical that Auden and Isherwood fled to New York. It was absolutely logical. And that Spender was a pacifist and was in the fire brigade. They all identified with death and themselves dying, you know, it was the menace to narcissism.

JB: There’s the example of Firbank.

BH: Yes. And all the fin de siècle boys. I mean, what finished poor Oscar Wilde was that he didn’t even imagine a world like that in jail. The poor butterfly just found it so horrible that he never wrote another word after. And I certainly didn’t want that to happen to intellectuals and writers. I thought that we had to go through the abattoirs. It was a necessary process. So Plowart, The Divine and the Decay was really that sort of manifesto.

JB: Yet there’s this terrific irony that if Plowart really is going to survive, he’s going to survive because the hunchback has managed to save him. The man that he was trying to save from the ridicule of the other people on the island.

BH: Plowart believed. His contempt for other people was based on the fact that he thought that they could all change. They could all invent themselves anew. That was part of his cruelty, to expect them to be able to change. That they couldn’t, like Claremont, was beyond his comprehension. Because he’d changed himself. Why couldn’t they? And that was the reason that he’d taken the side of this awful man who was to later drop him the life-belt at the beginning of the novel.

JB: Do you think that he recognised the debt ?

BH: No. I think it was an affinity, as I remember, an affinity unrealised. I think one of the inspirations for me on that was Goethe’s Elective Affinities. You know this business when you go into a crowded room and there’s only one or two people you can even glance at and you know they’re relevant to you. All the rest are irrelevant and you’ve never been able to explain in a satisfactory sense why this is so; what this mental compass means. But you know it infallibly and you talk to these one or two and you leave, there’s nothing else there. I think it was the same with that fellow, dropping his lifebelt. He couldn’t be Plowart but he would be if he could.

JB: He was an ‘Outsider’?

BH: There are an enormous number of encodements in that novel. To me it’s still not a novel, it’s a Bildungsroman, a novel of ideas and it works on so many different levels.

JB: What do you think of the state of the novel today? Are there any contemporary writers you admire?

BH: No, because cowardice is endemic with people. And it takes a great deal to be able to create without and in spite of an audience. Unless you can do that the audience will never respect you. You have to have the authority to be able to take them through the labyrinth to magic. And today all literature is bound up with domesticity, what’s credible, what people can identify with from their own experiences, which are very limited. So the novel is largely extinct. It’s lost its magic. It’s become, in embroidery terms, petit point. And if that’s so then we’re looking at the demise of literature in the form of the novel. Unless it’s got magic, unless you can open the cover and be swept up into something that’s totally unpredictable, that leads you to an unknown point, there’s no point in reading.

JB: Have you read John Fowles’s miscegenatory novel The Magus?

BH: Yes. I was very struck by its ambitions and by its successes; but more, ultimately, by its failure. I regard it as a failure. But it was a very splendid failure. I think he re-worked it too much so he lost the spontaneity and the drive. He didn’t have the courage to do it in a whoosh, as I did, which he should have done. But then, we were doing it from different positions.

JB: He wrote The Collector in a ‘whoosh’.

BH: And that was a much more accomplished novel, although it didn’t have the breadth and the span of The Magus. I’m certainly not ashamed to be a fellow writer of his. Certainly not. I wouldn’t say that of Rushdie or Martin Amis, or Kingsley Amis or John Wain. Even John Osborne, for whom I feel enormous contempt, though I salute his courage.

JB: Why contempt?

BH: He was so full of bile and venom and blindness and smallness, pettiness, minginess, stinginess - all behind it all. A weird, weird mix to make a Fury. I don’t think I ever spoke to him before I fell into a position of patronising him, talking down, because he wouldn’t allow one to be an equal. I suppose you know that in one of his books he refers to me as an altar boy, do you?

JB: No.

BH: Yes. No, I think Fowles stands out. To him I would apply the word ‘noble’. He’s a noble man. And when he dies I shall certainly doff my cap.

JB: The greatest literary accomplishment in England since the war?

BH: No. I think The Divine and the Decay will be rated by posterity much higher and rightly. For a number of reasons. The attack was loftier. It did break the boundaries with much more of a crack than did The Magus. He was an obliquist in that novel, if I can refer to his strategy and practice and I was really an over-the-top attacker from the front. That’s what makes me unique, I think. Frankly it’s a Bildungsroman which the Chinese, the Russians, the Germans, all the intellectual nations recognise. I don’t think they’ll recognise The Magus. But an enormous achievement within the confines of our society’s hypocrisy.

JB: It’s very big in America.

BH: Yes, Anglo-Saxon. But he would never be big in Russia, or China, or with the Germans because they’re much more cerebral, really. So I think he would be more successful - he’d be respected much more in England than I would be. I think - it’s always final judgements, you never know - but the fact that mine is expanding out to the world right now, forty years later, despite all the handicaps it was given - being pulped and being restricted and being ridiculed and demonised and everything else. I think that’s very interesting, in the sense that most novels are almost certainly dead, however much their ideas are lauded within a smaller and smaller time span.

JB: I thought the only bad passage in The Divine and the Decay was the dream sequence on the boat, in the opening chapter. It made little sense.

BH: Well, I had to occupy that and in theatre in Elizabethan times they used the soliloquy. You know, speeches like “to be or not to be” are nothing more than how to cover a time lapse. Now, I couldn’t use a soliloquy so I had to use the device of a dream and use the irrationality of the dream; but what I had to do was to keep the readers with me through this interval as I was going forward. It was all calculated and that was one of the cards I had to spin and that was a losing card, I knew that. So, you’re absolutely right. If the circumstances had been different, if I had been writing in another century I would have done another thing and that’s all I can comment about that. We’re all bound in some ways to the conventions of our time and those are the death knells because if you’re dated that’s where you date. As Les Girls was dated by the girls wearing cloche hats in the 1920s, so you’re dated by such devices.

JB: It’s a novel that’s certainly dated less than most. I mean as long as French windows exist you won’t be seriously dated.

BH: I’m not sure, I’m not sure. You see, it’s a funny position I’m in. I met a chap the other day, Alan Deitweiler; he was the boyfriend, ‘gay’, of Alan Reynolds. Have you ever heard of him? He conducted great intellectual cells of writers in the 1950s and he picked them up everywhere. He gathered a big salon of all the promising young men. He invited me to his Christmas party and I was the only one really who rejected him. I went to one of his parties and I thought it was quack humanism. I showed my contempt and never showed up again; while Colin Wilson and Stuart Holroyd both kept going every Sunday to his place. And Alan Deitweiler, when I met him recently for the first time under other circumstances, said, “Oh yes, you’re the only one Alan Reynolds said would ever last to posterity of all the ‘Angry Young Men’.” And I was very astonished considering that I would have thought he would have hated me in return and rubbished me. And Alan Deitweiler wouldn’t lie so that astonished me too. So I think he was an arch-humanist, Alan Reynolds, very famous in intellectual circles of the 1950s. You probably don’t know him because I don’t think he published. He was just a personality. He’s dead now, but everyone knew of him in the 1950s.

JB: The book has a timeless quality.

BH: I think you’ll outlive me Jonathan, so you’ll see for yourself whether it will last. I don’t know.

JB: No-one ever knows.

BH: No, you never know, you never know. That’s the whole thing about literature, you cast a message in a bottle on the water. I’m not sure that I really care about posterity. One half of me because I think it’s whether we can reinvent ourselves as a people and re-inherit our momentum. The other half of me, cast in nostalgia, in the past, I happily join The Divine and the Decay to all that. I’m quite proud to belong to that and the ‘Angry Young Men’. It’s history isn’t it?

2010-09-03T08:58:00.000-07:00

Mickey Spillane er krimi forfatter og opfinder af detektive Mike Hammer. Han er af speciel interesse for mig af grunden jeg ikke rigtig kan komme ind på. Men interessen centrerer sig omkring den koldekrig, hans pragmatiske tilgang til forfatter gerningen 'i'm a writer not a author'. Hans ærlighed består i ligefremhed, handling og en moral, der næsten er skæbne bestemt, igen Ligefrem og direkte. Han er temmelig indvolveret i det ideologiske skisma, mellem øst og vest, men ærligheden forhindre ham i at blive ideolog, han er individualist. Det er i det mindste et minimum for at være en god forfatter at man er det.
I sig selv er interviewet ganske fedt.

Interviewed by Michael Carlson
Mickey Spillane

The best part about interviewing Mickey Spillane is the fun he appears to be having...I likened it to a cowboy trying to saddle a wily old mustang that refuses to be broken and knows all the cowboy tricks. Mickey holds little back, and he is so animated with stories you soon realise that one of the keys to his success is his genuine interest in people. He's the kind of person who would fit in anywhere.

There are a number of stories he asked be off the record, and a couple of them then popped up a few nights later during his Guardian Lecture, but I've kept to his request. I've also had to leave out Mickey's instructions on how to kiss a duck's tail without ruffling the feathers, mostly because there's no way I can describe it in prose. Mickey's persona is that of a tough guy who doesn't really care about his art, but as this interview makes clear, good story telling grows from understanding people, and Spillane has a PhD in people...

I'll brown nose you right from the start...

Oh I'm an old pro, you won't get away with that...

...I told my mother I was interviewing Mickey Spillane and she said 'You make sure you tell him I named you after Mike Hammer, because she was 19 and reading I The Jury while she was pregnant and decided she liked the name Michael

I got a kid named Mike...jeez, the names they gave ME. My father was Catholic, my mother was Protestant, and because of that I got Christened in both churches, so I've got all these names...but my Dad always called me Mick. My mother called me Babe, and Babe is not a nice name for a guy, unless you're Babe Ruth

A lot of writers don't write under their given names

Yeah most of them. People are always surprised to find out my name is Spillane!

I was the first one probably in writing to use a nickname, Mickey, and it stuck. You see, in all my titles I used to use the personal pronoun: I The Jury, Kiss Me, Deadly, My Gun is Quick, Vengeance is Mine... I ran out of pronouns! THEY stuck, they were important to use...it gives you a personal introduction. Now I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am. Authors want their names down in history; I want to keep the smoke coming out of the chimney.

[We discuss the failed attempt by Robinson Publishers to bring out a Spillane omnibus to coincide with his visit - the first he's heard of it]

I like British publishers...when we were making a movie over here, Corgi books wanted to reprint...I did a lot of novelettes for magazines, and they put two novelettes together and you've almost got a novel, so they did that, and then my US publishers bought them from England. It's like a lot of movie stars, they never made in the the US, they came to Europe and they made it big.

Why are your books out of print in the States?

I'll tell you why. They have these corporate turnovers and they say 'I think he's old and passe' but they never look at the sales! On top of that they never look at all the other things that're going on...I'm 82 years old, wherever I go everybody knows me, but here's why...I'm a merchandiser, I'm not just a writer, I stay in every avenue you can think of. For 19 years I was doing the Miller Beer ads, in front of the public every day, we made Miller Lite the second largest selling beer in the world and everybody said 'no one'll drink that stuff'. We had a group of great sports guys, who were better known now, from the ads, than they were in the sports world. Then there's a corporate takeover, and we're not part of their group, so they discontinue the ads and wheee (makes noise of bomb falling) sales crash...

With all the young, pulp fictions about has the market passed by Mike Hammer?

No, no ones forgotten him, he's still on TV. Now we made the Guinness book of records, Mike Hammer has been on three different times with the same actor Stacy Keach, playing the same role. Now they're getting ready to go back for movies, and he's saying, 'I'm too old' and he is! You think John Wayne had hair?

I saw Keach do Hamlet, oh, it must be 30 years ago...

Sir Cedric Hardwicke, remember him? I met him with Victor Saville and he says, (imitating posh English accent) 'I always wanted to play Mike Hammer' and I say 'you can't, cause you have no hair' and he says 'hair? You can buy hair anywhere!'

This is true, you know. But the way he says it!

How many writers get to play their own characters in movies?

I had a better time playing my own character in the beer ads, I'm with "the Doll", Lee Meredith. We're the same size, but I made her wear high heels so she'd be taller than me. Every time I'm walking through the airport people go "where's the Doll?' We haven't done that for 12 years, but people still know the characters. I was with Lee walking down Broadway and the big crowds are gathering, and we can't cross the street, and finally a cop comes up and gets us across the street and on the other side it's the same thing again "hey, it's the Doll!", and I says "Lee, we're not out of it yet, we're still in there...and on top of this, I wrote another book...let me tell you what this feels like, you'll be the only one who knows...you get an old guy working for Ford Motor Company, he was there when they made the Model T and Model A and big V8s and he's still there, and he's a real smart guy, and finally, he's up in the front of the thing, Henry Ford you know, and all these guys are saying get rid of the old guy, give him the watch, get him out of here, so he goes out and he starts his own motor company and they cant get rid of him...and it's funny, cause now I'm getting all these crazy awards...I got this Grand Master Award from the Crime Writers and I said, 'you know, the only reason you guys never gave me this before is I never belonged to your club, that's why.' Then they gave me this Brasher Doubloon in Europe...Hurricane Hugo hit me, and took away all my stuff, wheee...I don't need more stuff...

I'm going to write my last Mike Hammer novel...I used to write fast, but I can't now, my rear end gets tired...I can't put in 12 hours a day sitting in a chair

You wrote I, the Jury very quickly

In 9 days. It was either 9 or 19...

You knew it was going to be a huge hit?

I knew a couple of things...during the war years they came out with reprints of all the Dumas novels, Moby Dick, for the servicement, and I saw this and believe me I'm a very sharp merchandiser, and I say this is the new marketplace for writing, original paperback books. Now at that time you had to go through hardback. So I wrote I THE JURY and turned it in to EP Dutton, it had been rejected by four different publishers, saying no no this is too violent, too dirty...and it was picked up by Roscoe Fawcett, Fawcett Publications, and he was a distributor, doing comic books, but he saw the potential and he went to New American Library, which was Signet Books, and he said 'if you print this book I'll distrubute it'. Now they cant get distribution, so it's a win-win thing for them, but they have to get it published in hardback, so they go to Dutton and say if you print this, we'll do the paperback, so now it's win-win-win, and they offer me $250 and I say no, I need a thousand dollars to build a house in Newburgh, so I get a $1,000 advance, which was unheard of. So Roscoe ordered a million copies, and THAT was unheard of! So somebody in his outfit says, oh that wasn't what he meant, he must've meant a quarter million. So they bring out a quarter of a million at the wrong time, cause books sell great at Christmas time, but my book came out between Christmas and New Year, which is death, and it went straight to the top, because it was word of mouth, and it's sold out and Fawcett says get the rest of them out, and the guy says there aren't any more and Roscoe says whaddaya mean, I ordered a million, and a guy got fired!

And then you took a long time on your next book and that was rejected...

The Twisted Thing, yeah, that was rejected...editors are funny, they were still old time editors and they didn't like this new-style stuff...there's too much sex, too much violence...but actually, it's a true story, the story it was based on was true...and when I finally turned it in...wow, it went right to the top. I held it for 18 years, they were desperate for something new...finally I said, yeah, how about this one. (Laughs) I got one like that now. I turned a book into Dutton, not a Mike Hammer, and they're holding because the editor doesn't like it. I don't care what the editor likes or dislikes, I care what the people like. I don't want that editor to tell me what the people want.

Before that you'd written comic books for Martin Goodman

Oh yeah, I was one of the first guys writing comic books, I wrote Captain America, with guys like Stan Lee, who became famous later on with Marvel Comics. Stan could write on three typewriters at once! I wrote the Human Torch, Submariner. I worked my way down. I started off at the high level, in the slick magazines, but they didn't use my name, they used house names. Anyway, then I went downhill to the pulps, then downhill further to the comics. I went downhill class-wise, but I went uphill, money-wise! I was making more money in the comics. I wrote the original Mike Hammer as a comic, Mike Danger.

[After the first boom in Hammer novels, Spillane wrote one story for Manhunt, a men's magazine]

Lemme tell you how that happened. I had this story I'd written for Colliers, but the editor there was a woman, and she said, 'as long as I'm editor here there'll never be a story by Mickey Spillane here' so I turned in a short-short, which they bought, and St. John, the editor of Manhunt, came up on day and asked me about the story I wrote for Colliers and he said 'I'd be interested in buying that from you.' Now I wasn't thinking fast enough, cause they've always got more than one check already written in their pockets, but that story didn't take me long to write, and he said, 'would you accept $25,000 for it' and I said sure, and he pulls this check out.

That was a lot of money then

Sure...but he published it in four installments, and that made Manhunt magazine.

I saw this photo of you signing a contract with Victor Saville and...

Victor Saville was bad news because he wanted money just to do one big picture. I'd sold millions but he wanted to make The Chalice, which fell on its face with a deadly thud, and he could've made the biggest hit in the world with I,the Jury Instead he gets this slob writer called Harry Essex, who last I heard was making porno films, and he rooned everything, I mean, everything's stupid. Imagine this guy hits Mike Hammer over the head with a wooden coathanger and knocks him out. You hit Mike Hammer over the head with a wooden coathanger, he'll beat the crap out of you.

You went to see it and...

Yeah, I hadda walk out of it...

And the audience reaction was...

Awful. Biff Elliott walks out and says 'I'm Mike Hammer' and someone goes 'Dat's Mike Hammah?' He was a good actor, a good friend, but he's left-handed with a Boston accent. Saville's lawyer saw him do live TV in New York, he won a prize, says, 'aw I got the right guy to play Hammer'. I had the right guy, Jack Stang, a real cop, only he couldn't act.

When I saw that picture of you, with Saville, you look like a young Ted Williams signing his first baseball contract with the Red Sox...There's an image of the way American men used to want to be...but is that all gone now?

Yeah, it's strange. It's not all gone, certain things keep cropping up in our business. Stephen King. Now I'm not crazy about him, but he's a great a writer.

He's got a market, he fulfils that market, no one says Henry Ford's a bad car maker, he was a great car maker. Cadillacs are different than Fords, but you don't say people are bad...Hemingway hated me. I sold 200 million books, and he didn't. Of course most of mine sold for 25 cents, but still...you look at all this stuff with a grain of salt. You say, why all this nonsense? I know an awful lot of Hollywood people, who are so self-important, I can't understand it. My father was a good Irish saloon-keeper, my mother always said to him, 'Jack, how come you know everybody here' and he'd say, 'because I say hello'. I'm just like that, I've always been that way. I'm at a party once, with Hy Gardner, the columnist, and I wind up sitting between Salvador Dali and Jimmy Durante, and they're talking to each other in something like English, and neither one understands a word the other's saying, so I'm in the middle, interpreting...I was an only child...my Dad was the easiest guy in the world to retire, me, I can't retire, I've got no money (laughs) I've gotta keep writing. But where's the next step, where do you go? But at my age, you start to get tired. You're not full of piss and vinegar. The vinegar's all gone (laughs) It's a strange thing, it happens to me...they make up these easy schedules and I say, don't take it easy, I'm here to work.

What about writing another children's book?

I wrote those books as an exercise, they sold, they won the Junior Literary Guild Award, which made all the guys who write kids books very aggravated, 'how can you win that award?', but you know what that does, it gets you into all the school libraries, which is a lot of sales. I've got one more kids book which I haven't sold yet, I've got it at home, it's all finished, maybe I'll sell it over here...

The biggest book in Britain right now is a children's book...

Really? Do you read those things? No? Well, The Day the Sea Rolled Back, now where I live on the beach they've got this strange thing, every five, ten years, a combination of wind, tide, rotation of the earth, whatever it is, but at low tide it goes way offshore. So the kids can go under the fishing piers and find lead, and whatever's dropped off. They're all excited. So what I did was take a thing that really happens, and extend it, so it goes back, like ten miles...and this could possibly happen it like that big tide in Nova Scotia, you can't run fast enough.

It seems like you collect a lot of facts in case they might come in handy

But I don't research anything. If I need something, I'll invent it.

Mike Hammer was sort of a one-man cold war...

Yeah...

And when the cold war ended...

Yeah, I got out...

...did you get the feeling Mike Hammer was right all the time?

See, heroes never die. John Wayne isn't dead, Elvis isn't dead. Otherwise you don't have a hero. You can't kill a hero. That's why I never let him get older.

He doesn't get older, but does it change with the world...

Remember the elephant says, 'if only I knew then what I know now'. So now when I write about Mike Hammer, he looks at a girl, he KNOWS now...you know what, he's got all this information about age, that would be me, but he's still a young guy, he can use that.

Would he still put Velda on a pedastal?

Oh yeah. People still come up to me and say 'she walked towards me, her hips waving a happy hello', things I wrote. They remember this stuff. "On some people skin is skin, on you it's an opportunity to dine"

Opportunity to dine. Have you read the Hannibal Lecter books?

I liked Hannibal, but I don't know how they're gonna make a movie out of it.

They oughta leave it right like it is. But violence isn't like it used to be. Sex isn't like it used to be either...I've got a great line I use. I get asked it all the time, someone comes up and says 'how could Mike Hammer have possibly shot that naked broad right in it belly button'? I say 'he missed'. (Laughs)

He shot high?

No, I just said he missed. I didn't say one thing wrong, there's nothing dirty about that...THEY were the dirty ones. There was another there, this girl is giving Mike information, and he's opening a suitcase, and she wants him to look at her. She's just given him this big piece of information and she says "MIKE!!!,' and she's taken this housecoat and spread it open and she's naked and he says 'my beautiful blonde had a brunette base'. Interesting. Only place you see a beautiful blonde is you go to Sweden or someplace. She might've had her roots showing, but everybody's got another thought. But these are the little things that work their way into a story.

Speaking of opening boxes, Kiss Me Deadly is the best regarded of the Hammer films, but you've said before you don't like it

I dont like any of them, because they don't read the books. In Kiss Me Deadly my story is better than his story. Anthony Quinn played in The Lond Wait and he didn't read the book either. I said 'read the book' and he did and he came back and said 'Why'd they make it that way?" They did because it's Hollywood. Everybody wants their name on the screen. I played in a movie called Ring of Fear with Clyde Beatty and Pat O'Brien. I'd watched Clyde Beatty since I was a kid, he was a great act, and you know, Devil Dogs of the Air, O'Brien and Cagney, great things. And now, in the middle of the shooting the agents came to me and asked who's gonna be first in the credits, and I said I don't care, put me last, and that took me right out of the way. It put me in the middle, so I said, we should leave Clyde on top cause it's his picture. That was some movie. This was where I got the Jag. The guy wrote and directed the picture had problems, but John Wayne who produced it, never gave up on his friends. Duke was having a bad time, going through a divorce, and they needed to fix the script. So they're thinking who could do it, and someone says, Spillane's a writer, he could do it. Now I'm playing ME in the picture, for pete's sake. They called me up in Newburgh on Wednesday, I'm already back home across the country, and said come back and fix it. So I took my Wagner records, flew West, and worked Friday, Saturday, Sunday. They set me up in a beautiful hotel suite, and I worked. So I'm sitting there Sunday, all done, having a cold beer and listening to "The Ring" and in comes Andy McLaughlan, Victor's son. He says, 'how you doing?' and I tell him I'm all done and he thinks I mean I'm done for the day because it's Sunday, and I say "I'm finished' and he says "whaddaya mean you're finished, you just got here!" So I hand him the pages, and he's reading and going "wow, wow,wow" and he calls Duke and Bob Fellows and says we got it. He goes out in the street and says to this woman 'you wanna make a hundred bucks?" and the guy she's with nearly slugs him, but he was looking for typists! So they type up their pages, and they left me alone. So I go home. A few days later, they're going to go to Phoenix to shoot, and they can't find me. They call all the bars, the police stations, the whore houses, nothing. So they say try him at hime and Bob says, 'he wouldn't be at home'. But I was. So they get me out there to Phoenix and make the picture. And they wanta pay me for the script but I won't take nothing for that, it was a favour. But Duke says, 'he was looking at those Jags in the lot next to the Cock and Bull'. One night, I'm back in Newburgh, it's snowing, and out in front of my house is this beautiful Jag with a red ribbon around it, and a note that says 'Thanks, Duke'. People see that car now, I had a guy saying 'who makes those?' I said, that car's older than you are!

Let's talk about your influences. I know Carroll John Daly must've been a big one

Oh he was a great writer for the pulps...Tyne Daly from Cagney and Lacey, she's his niece you know, but Daly was a great story writer, but he couldn't write long books. He was my favourite, and after I was a big writer I wrote a fan letter to John, saying how much I admired him when I was young, and wanted to write like him, and how I thought of Race Williams when I created Mike Hammer, and I got a letter back from his agent saying they were gonna sue me for stealing his character! So I got in touch with John and he was angry, this was his first fan letter in years! and he fired his agent!

What about Chandler? There's that famous scene where Marlowe throws what's pretty obviously a Mike Hammer book into the garbage

I know. I think it's pretty stupid. Did I tell you the Hemingway story?

No

Hemingway hated me. I outsell him and he was steamed. One day he wrote a story for Bluebook berating me. So I'm going on a big TV show in Chicago and I don't get it, that's sour grapes...I mean if you can't say something nice about someone why say anything at all? So I go on this show and the host says 'did you see what Hemingway said about you in Bluebook?' and I say "Hemingway who?"

That killed him.

Not literally?

Oh boy no. Every summer I went down to Florida on treasure hunts, and there's this great restaurant called the Chesapeake and they had a picture of Hemingway behind the bar. So one day the owner asks if she could have a picture of me to put up there, and she puts one there. One day Hemingway comes in and sees my picture and says 'what's he doing next to me? Either take his down or take mine down, so they took his down and he never came back to that restaurant. (Laughs) I don't like to tell that story cause you're talking about a dead guy can't defend himself...but he was a great reporter, but he got carried away with all the other stuff, the bullfighting...I'm always on the side of the bull, I hope the bull blows the hell out of that crazy guy in the clown suit out there. I don't like to see animals hurt, not deliberately. If they're putting the bull out there, don't stick the things in him first.

But you can kill off lots of people...

That's different, it's a fair fight...I saw a bull once, charge a bison eating in a field. And the bison just drops his head, the bull hits in and BOOM, he's out, and the bison goes back to eating. I went to college out there, in Fort Hayes, Kansas, where they filmed Dancing with Wolves. I used to love to watch the bison. One day an old male died, and the rest, they stood around him, and they did this for two, three days, no one could get to the body out. Finally it's was as if they decided, OK, you people can come get the body out. It was amazing. It always surprises me, how animals seem to have an instinctive knowledge...now what am I talking about dead bulls for?

You were raised a Catholic, right?

No I wasn't raised either one (Catholic or Protestant). I'm one of the Jehovahs Witnesses.

You joined in the fifties?

You don't join that, you have to be a witness. Witnessing is an active word.

The word apocalyptic keeps coming up in criticism of your work. Do you believe in the second coming?

The word coming is a misnomer. The word used is parousia in Greek, and it means 'presence'. Take President Clinton. Do you know him? No. But you feel his presence, all the taxes he lays on you. We feel his presence because we have to live under his direction. So when these things were asked of Jesus they asked 'what will be the sign of your presence, and the end of the system of things...now that was translated in the King James Bible as the end of the world. Now the word 'world' and the word 'earth' are two different things...the Bible says the earth abides forever. It's the simplicity of it, religion has turned everything inside out! Someone says how'd you like to be able to live forever? You say, oh boy would I liketa live forever, there's so many things I'd like to do, I used to be able to pass a football with either hand, now I can't throw from here to the wall...there's so many things...I think the best time for me was around 35...but if you're not a wise guy you can put up with those things...I know too many guys my age, they walk around, like they're crippled. I try to stay in good physical shape, I don't smoke, I don't drink...I'll have a beer once in a while. People say,' you have a beer, you're a Jehovah's Witness...but the Bible doesn't proclaim against drinking, it proclaims against drunkenness...anyway, someone says how'd you like to live forever...we know what death is, you can kick a dead dog, it won't bite you...but Jesus makes the greatest remark I think it's so funny nobody pays any attention, he says 'this means everlasting life', and they say what, 'you gotta stand on your head, you gotta pay knowledge, what', and he says it's taking in knowledge of you, the only true God, and that's so easy...I get so excited about this, I'll keep talking to you like this if you don't say that's enough, but this is why people think you're a nut, they say, don't people turn you down, I say 'they don't turn me down, they turn God down'. That's why people can't stop drinking, do drugs, that's why the world's the way it is...do you know a stable country in the world?

Iceland?

Where I live in South Carolina, it's stable, but it's so crooked...the local sherrif, he says 'you're the only guy I trust, cause you don't vote for anybody...

Was it simpler back when you were writing I the Jury, was it different then?

No, the field changes. When I started the paperback market, there were only a few good writers, now the market's loaded...you don't know which one to take.

The women have a great thing going for them now, and they're making use of things, like there's a bunch of gay women who write great stuff, very masculine stuff, and I like their work, but you can see where they put in their petitions towards being gay, which is all right but it doesn't make for a great role model...

Mike Hammer is always putting his petition forward for what we used to call the American Way

It's a black and white painting

Everything's black and white, commies are bad...

Now hear this!

But what if it were today and the American Way is a series of crooked presidents...what happens to Mike Hammer then?

That's demoralizing...then how can you do this...there was a piece in our local paper the other day about girls, 12, 13, in school, they're practicing oral sex. And when someone tells them to stop they say, 'what's wrong, the President does it'.

This comes out in the paper, a big deal. This guy has no sense of shame. I can't get over how many of the vets voted for him, he's a draft dodger. You understand the Kennedys, everybody says 'they're good Irish boys' but the phoniness of it all.

And that poor Kennedy boy who crashed. I'm a pilot, I got 11,000 hours, I was a big fighter pilot during the war, I just passed my physical...they hate it, I'm over 80, they don't want guys over 80 flying, anyway, he had what, less than 100 hours? All the pilots I know knew what happened to him, he spun out, and he couldn't drop his stick...you what we say about this guy, 'he ruined a damn good airplane'. And took people with him.

Maybe the difference is Mike Hammer's been in war

You remember Audie Murphy, the most decorated American solider, became an actor in Westerns? A cop told me, he stopped a car on 101 in California, and Audie comes out of his car, dark, middle of the night, with a rifle, and I saw his eyes, he looked nuts, and before he could do anything I say "hey Audie, how're you doing" and stuck out my hand, and he stopped, and then stuck out his hand". He said it was like looking at death's eyes, and he was a sweet looking guy, like a little kid, but Audie'd been shot so many times

Coming out of the war there were more guys like that than people think, they'd all faced that

Yeah, I was like that. In 45 when we got out it was a different scene. We weren't the same people. I'm a pussy cat. I write about that stuff, but I dont want to mess around with all that nonsense. You change as you get older, but, how much older am I gonna get? I buy a new dog, I gotta make sure I live to be 100. It sounds silly, but it's true. I talk to you about these things, these are only little incidents, actually they're little anecdotes

You've got millions of them, I bet

Yeah but I don't ever think about them You ask me a question, they pop in my mind

Did you ever write anything in the Hammer books to specifically answer criticisms?

I don't pay any attention to them. Those guys, they get free books and then they try to tear you down. Critics themselves, they used to tear me up. One time I had the whole New York Times bestseller list, then the Godfather came along, pushed me out...here's something funny, Hy Gardner gave me this...at one point I was the fifth most translated writer in world. Ahead of me were Lenin, Gorky, Tolstoy, and Jules Verne. (Laughs) It doesn't mean anything, but it's a funny thing to bring up. One day this little prissy guy, I'm at a tea party, if you can picture me at a tea party, and this guy comes up to me and says 'what a horrible commentary on the reading habits on Americans to think that you have seven of the top ten bestsellers of all time" and I looked at him at I said "You're lucky I don't write three more books".

Do you do a lot of reading?

I read all the time...I read a lot of history books.

Who do you like in crime writing?

I really like Max Allan Collins...he's a great researcher...his Nate Heller books on the Lindbergh story, and on the Cermak assassination are both excellent, and the new one, on Amelia Earhardt is great. I say "Max, you're writing is so good, but you research too much! You could write more if you just invented it! But I like the guy...we're strange buddies (Laughs)

Why strange?

I'll tell ya, when I worked with Shirley Eaton (in The Girl Hunters) or with Lee Meredith, these were two girls who gave everything, they made things look good for you. Why, for the sake of making yourself look good, destroy a picture. And that's how Max is, he doesn't try to take anybody down, and it's nice to know that people like that are still around. It's like when you're doing an interview and you say this is off the record...well, if you wanta go off the record, you shouldn't say it, but sometimes it fits in with what you're trying to tell the guy...now I don't care anymore. That interview in the Guardian, he did it tongue in cheek and the headline, (The Hardest Jehovah's Witness in the World) he wouldn't know what he was fooling with...

Well, he wouldn't have written the headline

I don't give a lot of crappy stuff out, they want to know something, hey, I'll tell you. I don't know of anything I hold back (laughs)

Well, you're tough to pin down

I'll tell you, I've been in the National Enquirer four times and they've never said anything bad about me yet (laughs)

But you must know exactly what interviewers will be asking

Oh sure, I give them leading answers so they'll ask me questions I want to answer. I'll tell you what gets people aggravated. I've done literally thousands of TV shows, and you get on a show with people, with actors, and they're terrible, unless they've got a script in their hand they don't know what to do, they don't know how to sit still, and all of a sudden you're walking away with the show and they don't know what to do! They don't understand, if they'd only stop the nonsense and just talk! You know who the nicest guy I ever met in the acting field was? Basil Rathbone. He was the neatest fellow around, nice, kind, considerate...he always played villains, exccept for Sherlock Holmes. He had the perfect sneer.

Who would've been the best guy to play Mike Hammer?

Jack Stang, if he could act. He was a tough Marine. He went into one Japanese island in the Pacific, with 240 men, he was one of four came out. ((We look at pictures of Stang's screen test, which Mickey wrote)) That's Jonathan Winters, the comedian, playing the corpse. And that's me...jeez, did I ever look like that!

I always wanted to have Mike Mazurki play Hammer....too bad he couldn't act. Remember when Dick Powell played Marlowe? Well Mike Mazurki is playing Moose Malloy, a big guy, he's 6-6, and Chandler said he wore this outlandish plaid jacket, 'it was so big it had golf balls for buttons'. Comes time to make the movie, they didn't use that line! He was big enough. It was like hitting Hammer over the head with a coathanger.

Sometimes things that mean so much in a book get lost on the screen

When Harry Essex wrote I the Jury, there's a shot from a .38, hits a brick wall.

Biff Elliott picks it up, it's in perfect condition, he says 'it's a .38' I say "Biff, you were in the Army, you know that bullet'd be flat!' He says 'It didn't make any difference'.

It's like the 'Magic Bullet'

Yeah, exactly. I remember when I'm playing Hammer. I'm 46 years old, I'm in good shape, the director says to me "can you run?" I say 'yeah, what's happened?"

He says 'can you run'? I say sure. So we do the scene, and I ran away from the camera. Roy Rowland says 'what're you doing!" I said 'tell me what you want, don't say 'can you run'." We made that picture in Britain. Did you know Billy Hill?

No, I haven't been here that long

Well, this is going back 35 years. Billy Hill was the Al Capone of London. The other guy was Jack Spot, actually his name was Jack Comma, he changed it to a period. Billy Hill had a big war record, he terrorized Europe! Second day I was here Jack Spot comes into the Rembrandt Hotel where I was staying, and they had all these hall porters, and they're all going crazy, and we're telling stories.

Anyway, he left, and up comes this guy in a bowler hat and raincoat, and he says, sucking a pencil tip, 'tell me sir, did you recently entertain a guest named Mr. Jack Spot?' And I say 'yes' and he sucks the pencil again, makes a note, and says 'would you mind giving me the gist of the conversation, sir?' I said, 'sure, he wanted to know about all the hoods in New York'. So he left, and all the hall porters are saying 'he's from Scotland Yard, this like out of the movies'.

Now next day, I'm the only guy who drinks water, and I'm drinking ice water and this guy walks up, Billy Hill, and he comes up and says 'Hey Mick, how ya doing, my name is Billy Hill'. Now this is before Benny Hill, even, and the hall porters are shaking, no one will look him in the eye. And we know a couple of guys in common in New York, and he says 'I'd like to go out and watch a movie being made' and I say 'Sure, come out, be my guest'. Next day he comes out to the old set in Elstree, and I didn't tell the assistant director, who was a fuss-budget, and I'm showing Billy around, introducing him to Shirley Eaton, and the AD says 'who's that on my set, I'm going to throw him off', and someone says to him, 'that's Billy Hill' and he melted, aaagh, because he knew Billy heard him. So he disappeared. So he's trying to hide, and finally Billy turns around and glares at him, and he almost dies!

Now Billy asked if there was anything he could do for me, and we had this awful Spanish gun for Mike Hammer, so I asked him if he knew where we could find a .45, and next day he shows up on the set with a gunny sack, and he says "I got your pieces for you, where should I put them?' and he dumps about two dozen .45s there, and ammo, and the prop boy nearly hit the roof, "those are REAL GUNS". Bob Fellows the producer, knew this, but he didn't pay any attention, he just got them registered. The paperwork was incredible.

A .45's important isn't it?

That's what I carry. I'm licensed to carry it. (Reaches into his back pocket))

I know you don't have a .45 back there

No, here's the licence. See my birthday, March 9th, the anniversary of the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac, Hampton Virginia, 1862. It's a South Carolina licence. It's a nice place, but too many Yankees coming down there. It was OK when I was the only one! You'd think the South won the Civil War

But it agrees with you

I'm a country boy. I hate New York. But that's where things happen, so I use it as a base for stories, I know enough about it. But I have to keep going back there.

Things change. The Blue Ribbon, that I thought'd be there forever, that's gone. The face of the city changes. The city's almost alive, you can see the movement of people from one section to another. When they took all the Els down on the East Side and let the sunlight in, everything changed. But it's too crowded, jammed up, I can't be happy there.

But if we ever have another hurricane in South Carolina, the evacuation will be jam packed. In a hurricane three things kill you, water, trees and poles falling down on you, and traffic.

Carl Hiaasen says people are arrogant, millions of them build in the path of hurricanes in Florida and then they're surprised when nature doesn't detour to avoid them

Where I am they can smell out a hurricane. My house survived Hurricane Hazel, but it didn't get past Hugo.

Tell me a little about Max's film (Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane

It's very embarassing, because everybody's saying nice things about me. These are people in the writing business, I watch it, I want to put my head down...

You expect people not to say nice things?

One day a guy from the National Enquirer comes up to do a story in Myrtle Beach, and they say, do a story about Spillane and he tells them he cant, because I dont do anything! You know, most guys get in trouble through drinking, look that that guy Willis, with Demi Moore, they're looking to get into the papers. I don't want that. What I got married, they wrote "Mickey Spillane marries daughter's girlhood chum!" Jane was a divorcee with two kids when I married her...I used to throw her out of the house when she was a little girl, now I'm saying 'I do"! How do I do this? Oh, and they said I had a secret wedding! I only had 200 people there. That's what they do to you. But I didn't do anything. I'm not gonna sue them.

Your second wife helped promote your books by posing naked on the covers

She wanted to do that. I fondly refer to her as 'the snake'. She liked the publicity, the big time, she went Hollywood, in a bad way.

You never went to Hollywood?

Me? Shoot..

Can I translate that as 'Shit'?

If you want! I go into Hollywood, do my business, and get out. That's not my lifestyle. And their lifestyle is terrible. They don't live too long. You know how old Hitler was when he died? 59?

But that wasn't natural causes!

He would've died younger in Hollywood! Erroll Flynn, 53 he was. Gee. You look at him and you say, 'what happened?" I don't want to be like that. But I don't care about posterity. I say "Now!"

Thank you Mr Spillane...

Nabokov fortsat

2010-08-25T02:00:00.000-07:00

Playboy har udgivet to af de bedste interviews jeg nogen sinde har læst. Jodorowskys interview og dette med Nabokov. Først lige lidt billeder.

Nabokov's interview. (03) Playboy [1964]

This exchange with Alvin Toffler appeared in
Playboy for January, 1964. Great trouble was taken on
both sides to achieve the illusion of a spontaneous
conversation. Actually, my contribution as printed conforms
meticulously to the answers, every word of which I had written
in longhand before having them typed for submission to Toffler
when he came to Montreux in mid-March, 1963. The present text
takes into account the order of my interviewer's questions as
well as the fact that a couple of consecutive pages of my
typescript were apparently lost in transit. Egreto perambis
doribus!

With the American publication of Lolita in 1958,
your fame and fortune mushroomed almost overnight from high
repute among the literary cognoscenti-- which you bad
enjoyed for more than 30 years-- to both acclaim and abuse as
the world-renowned author of a sensational bestseller. In the
aftermath of this cause celebre, do you ever regret
having written Lolita?

On the contrary, I shudder retrospectively when I recall
that there was a moment, in 1950, and again in 1951, when I was
on the point of burning Humbert Humbert's little black diary.
No, I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the
composition of a beautiful puzzle-- its composition and its
solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the
other, depending on the way you look. Of course she completely
eclipsed my other works-- at least those I wrote in English:
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my
short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot grudge
her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical
nymphet.

Though many readers and reviewers would disagree that
her charm is tender, few would deny that it is queer-- so much
so that when director Stanley Kubrick proposed his plan to make
a movie of Lolita, you were quoted as saying, "Of course
they'll have to change the plot. Perhaps they will make Lolita
a dwarfess. Or they will make her 16 and Humbert 26. " Though
you finally wrote the screenplay yourself, several reviewers
took the film to task for watering down the central
relationship. Were you satisfied with the final product?

I thought the movie was absolutely first-rate. The four
main actors deserve the very highest praise. Sue Lyon bringing
that breakfast tray or childishly pulling on her sweater in the
car-- these are moments of unforgettable acting and directing.
The killing of Quilty is a masterpiece, and so is the death of
Mrs. Haze. I must point out, though, that I had nothing to do
with the actual production. If I had, I might have insisted on
stressing certain things that were not stressed-- for example,
the different motels at which they stayed. All I did was write
the screenplay, a preponderating portion of which was used by
Kubrick. The "watering down," if any, did not come from my
aspergillum.

Do you feel that Lolita's twofold success has
affected your life for the better or for the worse?

I gave up teaching-- that's about all in the way of
change. Mind you, I loved teaching, I loved Cornell, I loved
composing and delivering my lectures on Russian writers and
European great books. But around 60, and especially in winter,
one begins to find hard the physical process of teaching, the
getting up at a fixed hour every other morning, the struggle
with the snow in the driveway, the march through long corridors
to the classroom, the effort of drawing on the blackboard a map
of James Joyce's Dublin or the arrangement of the semi-sleeping
car of the St. Petersburg-Moscow express in the early 1870s--
without an understanding of which neither Ulysses nor
Anna Karenin, respectively, makes sense. For some reason
my most vivid memories concern examinations. Big amphitheater
in Goldwin Smith. Exam from 8 a.m. to 10:30. About 150
students-- unwashed, unshaven young males and reasonably
well-groomed young females. A general sense of tedium and
disaster. Half-past eight. Little coughs, the clearing of
nervous throats, coming in clusters of sound, rustling of
pages. Some of the martyrs plunged in meditation, their arms
locked behind their heads. I meet a dull gaze directed at me,
seeing in me w^ith hope and hate the source of forbidden
knowledge. Girl in glasses comes up to my desk to ask:
"Professor Kafka, do you want us to say that . . . ? Or do you
want us to answer only the first part of the question?" The
great fraternity of C-minus, backbone of the nation, steadily
scribbling on. A rustle arising simultaneously, the majority
turning a page in their bluebooks, good teamwork. The shaking
of a cramped wrist, the failing ink, the deodorant that breaks
down. When I catch eyes directed at me, they are forthwith
raised to the ceiling in pious meditation. Windowpanes getting
misty. Boys peeling off sweaters. Girls chewing gum in rapid
cadence. Ten minutes, five, three, time's up.

Citing in Lolita the same kind of acid-etched
scene you've just described, many critics have called the book
a masterful satiric social commentary on America. Are they
right?

Well, I can only repeat that I have neither the intent nor
the temperament of a moral or social satirist. Whether or not
critics think that in Lolita I am ridiculing human folly
leaves me supremely indifferent. But I am annoyed when the glad
news is spread that I am ridiculing America.

But haven't you written yourself that there is "nothing
more exhilarating than American Philistine vulgarity"?

No, I did not say that. That phrase has been lifted out of
context, and, like a round, deep-sea fish, has burst in the
process. If you look up my little after-piece, "On a Book
Entitled Lolita," which I appended to the novel, you will see
that what I really said was that in regard to Philistine
vulgarity-- which I do feel is most exhilarating-- no
difference exists between American and European manners. I go
on to say that a proletarian from Chicago can be just as
Philistine as an English duke.

Many readers have concluded that the Philistinism you
seem to find the most exhilarating is that of America's sexual
mores.

Sex as an institution, sex as a general notion, sex as a
problem, sex as a platitude-- all this is something I find too
tedious for words. Let us skip sex.

Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?
Have I been what?
Subjected to psychoanalytical examination.
Why, good God?

In order to see how it is done. Some critics have felt
that your barbed comments about the fashionability of
Freudianism, as practiced by American analysts, suggest a
contempt based upon familiarity.

Bookish familiarity only. The ordeal itself is much too
silly and disgusting to be contemplated even as a joke.
Freudism and all it has tainted with its grotesque implications
and methods appears to me to be one of the vilest deceits
practiced by people on themselves and on others. I reject it
utterly, along with a few other medieval items still adored by
the ignorant, the conventional, or the very sick.

Speaking of the very sick, you suggested in Lolita
that Humbert Humbert's appetite for nymphets is the result
of an unrequited childhood love affair; in Invitation to a
Beheading you wrote about a 12-year-old girl, Emmie, who is
erotically interested in a man twice her age; and in Bend
Sinister your protagonist dreams that he is "surreptitiously
enjoying Mariette (his maid) while she sat, wincing a little,
in his lap during the rehearsal of a play in which she was
supposed to be his daughter. " Some critics, in poring over
your works for clues to your personality, have pointed to this
recurrent theme as evidence of an unwholesome preoccupation on
your part with the subject of sexual attraction between
pubescent girls and middle-aged men. Do you feel that there may
be some truth in this charge?

I think it would be more correct to say that had I not
written Lolita, readers would not have started finding
nymphets in my other works and in their own households. I find
it very amusing when a friendly, polite person says to me--
probably just in order to be friendly and polite-- "Mr.
Naborkov," or "Mr. Nabahkov," or "Mr. Nabkov" or "Mr.
Nabohkov," depending on his linguistic abilities, "I have a
little daughter who is a regular Lolita." People tend to
underestimate the power of my imagination and my capacity of
evolving serial selves in my writings. And then, of course,
there is that special type of critic, the ferrety,
human-interest fiend, the jolly vulgarian. Someone, for
instance, discovered telltale affinities between Humbert's
boyhood romance on the Riviera and my own recollections about
little Colette, with whom I built damp sand castles in Biarritz
when I was ten. Somber Humbert was, of course, thirteen and in
the throes of a pretty extravagant sexual excitement, whereas
my own romance with Colette had no trace of erotic desire and
indeed was perfectly common-place and normal. And, of course,
at nine and ten years of age, in that set, in those times, we
knew nothing whatsoever about the false facts of life that are
imparted nowadays to infants by progressive parents.

Why false?

Because the imagination of a small child-- especially a
town child-- at once distorts, stylizes, or otherwise alters
the bizarre things he is told about the busy bee, which neither
he nor his parents can distinguish from a bum-blebee, anyway.

What one critic has termed your "almost obsessive
attention to the phrasing, rhythm, cadence and connotation of
words" is evident even in the selection of names for your own
celebrated bee and bumblebee-- Lolita and Humbert Humbert. How
did they occur to you?

For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt
to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is "L". The
suffix "-ita" has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I
required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be
pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta,
with a heavy, clammy "L" and a long "o". No, the first syllable
should be as in "lollipop", the "L" liquid and delicate, the
"lee" not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of
course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress.
Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source
name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in "Dolores." My
little girl's heartrending fate had to be taken into account
together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided
her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile
diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname "Haze,"
where Irish mists blend with a German bunny-- 1 mean, a small
German hare.

You're making a word-playful reference, of course, to
the German term for rabbit-- Hase. But what inspired you
to dub Lolita's aging inamorato with such engaging redundancy?

That, too, was easy. The double rumble is, I think, very
nasty, very suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful
person. It is also a kingly name, and I did need a royal
vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble. Lends
itself also to a number of puns. And the execrable diminutive
"Hum" is on a par, socially and emotionally, with "Lo," as her
mother calls her.

Another critic has written of you that "the task of
sifting and selecting just the right succession of words from
that multilingual memory, and of arranging their many-mirrored
nuances into the proper juxtapositions, must be psychically
exhausting work. " Which of all your books, in this sense,
would you say was the most difficult to write?

Oh, Lolita, naturally. I lacked the necessary
information-- that was the initial difficulty. I did not know
any American 12-year-old girls, and I did not know America; I
had to invent America and Lolita. It had taken me some forty
years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced
by a similar task, with a lesser amount of time at my disposal.
The obtaining of such local ingredients as would allow me to
inject average "reality" into the brew of individual fancy
proved, at fifty, a much more difficult process than it had
been in the Europe of my youth.

Though born in Russia, you have lived and worked for
many years in America as well as in Europe. Do you feel any
strong sense of national identity?

I am an American writer, born in Russia and educated in
England where I studied French literature, before spending
fifteen years in Germany. I came to America in 1940 and decided
to become an American citizen, and make America my home. It so
happened that I was immediately exposed to the very best in
America, to its rich intellectual life and to its easygoing,
good-natured atmosphere. I immersed myself in its great
libraries and its Grand Canyon. I worked in the laboratories of
its zoological museums. I acquired more friends than I ever had
in Europe, My books-- old books and new ones-- found some
admirable readers. I became as stout as Cortez-- mainly because
I quit smoking and started to munch molasses candy instead,
with the result that my weight went up from my usual 140 to a
monumental and cheerful 200. In consequence, I am one-third
American-- good American flesh keeping me warm and safe.

You spent 20 years in America, and yet you never owned
a home or had a really settled establishment there. Your
friends report that you camped impermanently in motels, cabins,
furnished apartments and the rented homes of professors away on
leave. Did you feel so restless or so alien that the idea of
settling down anywhere disturbed you?

The main reason, the background reason, is, I suppose,
that nothing short of a replica of my childhood surroundings
would have satisfied me. I would never manage to match my
memories correctly-- so why trouble with hopeless
approximations? Then there are some special considerations: for
instance, the question of impetus, the habit of impetus. I
propelled myself out of Russia so vigorously, with such
indignant force, that I have been rolling on and on ever since.
True, I have rolled and lived to become that appetizing thing,
a "full professor," but at heart I have always remained a lean
"visiting lecturer." The few times I said to myself anywhere:
"Now, that's a nice spot for a permanent home," I would
immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche
carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy
by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the
earth. And finally, I don't much care for furniture, for tables
and chairs and lamps and rugs and things-- perhaps because in
my opulent childhood I was taught to regard with amused
contempt any too-earnest attachment to material wealth, which
is why I felt no regret and no bitterness when the Revolution
abolished that wealth.

You lived in Russia for twenty years, in West Europe
for 20 years, and in America for twenty years. But in 1960,
after the success of Lolita, you moved to France and
Switzerland and have not returned to the U. S. since. Does this
mean, despite your self-identification as an American writer,
that you consider your American period over?

I am living in Switzerland for purely private reasons--
family reasons and certain professional ones too, such as some
special research for a special book. I hope to return very soon
to America-- back to its library stacks and mountain passes. An
ideal arrangement would be an absolutely soundproofed flat in
New York, on a top floor-- no feet walking above, no soft music
anywhere-- and a bungalow in the Southwest. Sometimes I think
it might be fun to adorn a university again, residing and
writing there, not teaching, or at least not teaching
regularly.

Meanwhile you remain secluded-- and somewhat sedentary,
from all reports-- in your hotel suite. How do you spend your
time?

I awake around seven in winter: my alarm clock is an
Alpine chough-- big, glossy, black thing with big yellow beak--
which visits the balcony and emits a most melodious chuckle.
For a while I lie in bed mentally revising and planning things.
Around eight: shave, breakfast, enthroned meditation, and
bath-- in that order. Then I work till lunch in my study,
taking time out for a short stroll with my wife along the lake.
Practically all the famous Russian writers of the nineteenth
century have rambled here at one time or another. Zhukovski,
Gogol, Dostoevski, Tolstoy-- who courted the hotel chambermaids
to the detriment of his health-- and many Russian poets. But
then, as much could be said of Nice or Rome. We lunch around
one p.m., and I am back at my desk by half-past one and work
steadily till half-past six. Then a stroll to a newsstand for
the English papers, and dinner at seven. No work after dinner.
And bed around nine. I read till half-past eleven, and then
tussle with insomnia till one a.m. about twice a week I
have a good, long nightmare with unpleasant characters imported
from earlier dreams, appearing in more or less iterative
surroundings-- kaleidoscopic arrangements of broken
impressions, fragments of day thoughts, and irresponsible
mechanical images, utterly lacking any possible Freudian
implication or explication, but singularly akin to the
procession of changing figures that one usually sees on the
inner palpebral screen when closing one's weary eyes.

Funny that witch doctors and their patients have never
hit on that simple and absolutely satisfying explanation of
dreaming. Is it true that you write standing up, and that you
write in longhand rather than on a typewriter?

Yes. I never learned to type. I generally start the day at
a lovely old-fashioned lectern I have in my study. Later on,
when I feel gravity nibbling at my calves, I settle down in a
comfortable armchair alongside an ordinary writing desk; and
finally, when gravity begins climbing up my spine, I lie down
on a couch in a corner of my small study. It is a pleasant
solar routine. But when I was young, in my twenties and early
thirties, I would often stay all day in bed, smoking and
writing. Now things have changed. Horizontal prose,
vertical verse, and sedent scholia keep swapping qualifiers and
spoiling the alliteration.

Can you tell us something more about the actual
creative process involved in the germination of a book--
perhaps by reading a few random notes for or excerpts from a
work in progress?

Certainly not. No fetus should undergo an exploratory
operation. But I can do something else. This box contains index
cards with some notes I made at various times more or less
recently and discarded when writing Pale Fire. It's a
little batch of rejects. Help yourself. "Selene, the moon.
Selenginsk, an old town in Siberia: moon-rocket town" . . .
"Berry: the black knob on the bill of the mute swan" . . .
"Dropworm: a small caterpillar hanging on a thread" . . . "In
The New Bon Ton Magazine, volume five, 1820, page 312,
prostitutes are termed 'girls of the town' "... "Youth dreams:
forgot pants; old man dreams: forgot dentures" , . . "Student
explains that when reading a novel he likes to skip passages
'so as to get his own idea about the book and not be influenced
by the author'". . . "Naprapathy: the ugliest word in the
language."

"And after rain, on beaded wires, one bird, two birds,
three birds, and none. Muddy tires, sun" . . . "Time without
consciousness-- lower animal world; time with consciousness--
man; consciousness without time-- some still higher state" . .
. "We think not in words but in shadows of words. James Joyce's
mistake in those otherwise mar-velous mental soliloquies of his
consists in that he gives too much verbal body to thoughts" . .
. "Parody of politeness: That inimitable 'Please' -- 'Please
send me your beautiful-- ' which firms idiotically address to
themselves in printed forms meant for people ordering their
product." . . .

"Naive, nonstop, peep-peep twitter of chicks in dismal
crates late, late at night, on a desolate frost-bedimmed
station platform" . . . "The tabloid headline TORSO KILLER MAY
BEAT CHAIR might be translated: 'Celui qui tw an buste peat
bien battre une chaise" . . . "Newspaper vendor, handing me
a magazine with my story: 1 see you made the slicks.' " "Snow
falling, young father out with tiny child, nose like a pink
cherry. Why does a parent immediately say something to his or
her child if a stranger smiles at the latter? 'Sure,' said the
father to the infant's interrogatory gurgle, which had been
going on for some time, and would have been left to go on in
the quiet falling snow, had I not smiled in passing". . .
"Inter-columniation: dark-blue sky between two white columns."
. . . "Place-name in the Orkneys: Papilio" . . . "Not 1, too,
lived in Arcadia,' but 'I,' says Death, even am in Arcadia'--
legend on a shepherd's tomb (Notes and Queries, June 13,
1868, p. 561)" . . . "Marat collected butterflies" . . . "From
the aesthetic point of view, the tapeworm is certainly an
undesirable boarder. The gravid segments frequently crawl out
of a person's anal canal, sometimes in chains, and have been
reported a source of social embarrassment." (Ann. N. Y.
Acad. Sci. 48:558).

What inspires you to record and collect such
disconnected impressions and quotations?

All I know is that at a very early stage of the novel's
development I get this urge to garner bits of straw and fluff,
and eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird
visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the
eggs in it. When I remember afterwards the force that made me
jot down the correct names of things, or the inches and tints
of things, even before I actually needed the information, I am
inclined to assume that what I call, for want of a better term,
inspiration, had been already at work, mutely pointing at this
or that, having me accumulate the known materials for an
unknown structure. After the first shock of recognition-- a
sudden sense of "this is what I'm going to write"-- the
novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely in
the mind, not on paper; and to be aware of the stage it has
reached at any given moment, I do not have to be conscious of
every exact phrase. I feel a kind of gentle development, an
uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there
already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked
closer, if I stopped the machine and opened its inner
compartment; but I prefer to wait until what is loosely called
inspiration has completed the task for me. There comes a moment
when I am informed from within that the entire structure is
finished. All I have to do now is take it down in pencil or
pen. Since this entire structure, dimly illumined in one's
mind, can be compared to a painting, and since you do not have
to work gradually from left to right for its proper perception,
I may direct my flashlight at any part or particle of the
picture when setting it down in writing. I do not begin my
novel at the beginning. I do not reach chapter three before I
reach chapter four, I do not go dutifully from one page to the
next, in consecutive order; no, I pick out a bit here and a bit
there, till I have filled all the gaps on paper. This is why I
like writing my stories and novels on index cards, numbering
them later when the whole set is complete. Every card is
rewritten many times. About three cards make one typewritten
page, and when finally I feel that the conceived picture has
been copied by me as faithfully as physically possible-- a few
vacant lots always remain, alas-- then I dictate the novel to
my wife who types it out in triplicate.

In what sense do you copy "the conceived
picture" of a novel?

A creative writer must study carefully the works of his
rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn
capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given
world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of
labor, the artist should know the given world.
Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back
yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the
crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple. To
return to my lecturing days: I automatically gave low marks
when a student used the dreadful phrase "sincere and simple"--
"Flaubert writes with a style which is always simple and
sincere"-- under the impression that this was the greatest
compliment payable to prose or poetry. When I struck the phrase
out, which I did with such rage in my pencil that it ripped the
paper, the student complained that this was what teachers had
always taught him: "Art is simple, art is sincere." Someday I
must trace this vulgar absurdity to its source. A schoolmarm in
Ohio? A progressive ass in New York? Because, of course, art at
its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.

In terms of modern art, critical opinion is divided
about the sincerity or deceitfulness, simplicity or complexity,
of contemporary abstract painting. What is your own opinion?

I do not see any essential difference between abstract and
primitive art. Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we
should not generalize in these matters: it is the individual
artist that counts. But if we accept for a moment the general
notion of "modern art," then we must admit that the trouble
with it is that it is so commonplace, imitative, and academic.
Blurs and blotches have merely replaced the mass prettiness of
a hundred years ago, pictures of Italian girls, handsome
beggars, romantic ruins, and so forth. But just as among those
corny oils there might occur the work of a true artist with a
richer play of light and shade, with some original streak of
violence or tenderness, so among th" corn of primitive and
abstract art one may come across a flash of great talent. Only
talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas,
but the individual contribution.

A contribution to society?

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is
only important to the individual, and only the individual
reader is important to me. I don't give a damn for the group,
the community, the masses, and so forth. Although I do not care
for the slogan "art for art's sake"-- because unfortunately
such promoters of it as, for instance, Oscar Wilde and various
dainty poets, were in reality rank moralists and didacticists--
there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe
from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art,
only its art.

What do you want to accomplish or leave behind-- or
should this be of no concern to the writer?

Well, in this matter of accomplishment, of course, I don't
have a 35-year plan or program, but I have a fair inkling of my
literary afterlife. I have sensed certain hints, I have felt
the breeze of certain promises. No doubt there will be ups and
downs, long periods of slump. With the Devil's connivance, I
open a newspaper of 2063 and in some article on the books page
I find: "Nobody reads Nabokov or Fulmerford today." Awful
question: Who is this unfortunate Fulmerford?

While we're on the subject of self-appraisal, what do
you regard as your principal failing as a writer-- apart from
forgetability?

Lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts,
second thoughts, third thoughts; inability to express myself
properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence
in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.

You're doing rather well at the moment, if we may say
so.

It's an illusion.

Your reply might be taken as confirmation of critical
comments that you are "an incorrigible leg puller, " "a
mystificator, " and "a literary agent provocateur. " How
do you view yourself?

I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never
been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once
in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review. My second
favorite fact-- or shall I stop at one?

No, please go on.

The fact that since my youth-- 1 was 19 when I left
Russia-- my political creed has remained as bleak and
changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical to the point of
triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of
art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of
little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the
head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in
size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming
through earphones, or played in theaters.

Why no music?

I have no ear for music, a shortcoming I deplore bitterly.
When I attend a concert-- which happens about once in five
years-- 1 endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and
relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a
few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in
lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, these take
over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the
musicians. My knowledge of music is very slight; and I have a
special reason for finding my ignorance and inability so sad,
so unjust: There is a wonderful singer in my family-- my own
son. His great gifts, the rare beauty of his bass, and the
promise of a splendid career-- all this affects me deeply, and
I fee] a fool during a technical conversation among musicians.
I am perfectly aware of the many parallels between the art
forms of music and those of literature, especially in matters
of structure, but what can I do if ear and brain refuse to
cooperate? I have found a queer substitute for music in chess--
more exactly, in the composing of chess problems.

Another substitute, surely, has been your own
euphonious prose and poetry. As one of few authors who have
written with. eloquence in more than one language, how would
you characterize the textural differences between Russian and
English, in which you are regarded as equally facile?

In sheer number of words, English is far richer than
Russian. This is especially noticeable in nouns and adjectives.
A very bothersome feature that Russian presents is the dearth,
vagueness, and clumsiness of technical terms.

For example, the simple phrase "to park a car" comes out--
if translated back from the Russian-- as "to leave an
automobile standing for a long time." Russian, at least polite
Russian, is more formal than polite English. Thus, the Russian
word for "sexual"-- polovoy-- is slightly indecent and
not to be bandied around. The same applies to Russian terms
rendering various anatomical and biological notions that are
frequently and familiarly expressed in English conversation. On
the other hand, there are words rendering certain nuances of
motion and gesture and emotion in which Russian excels. Thus by
changing the head of a verb, for which one may have a dozen
different prefixes to choose from, one is able to make Russian
express extremely fine shades of duration and intensity.
English is, syntactically, an extremely flexible medium, but
Russian can be given even more subtle twists and turns.
Translating Russian into English is a little easier than
translating English into Russian, and 10 times easier than
translating English into French.

You have said you will never write another novel in
Russian. Why?

During the great, and still unsung, era of Russian
intellectual expatriation-- roughly between 1920 and 1940--
books written in Russian by emigre Russians and published by
emigre firms abroad were eagerly bought or borrowed by
emigre readers but were absolutely banned in Soviet Russia-- as
they still are (except in the case of a few dead authors such
as Kuprin and Bunin, whose heavily censored works have been
recently reprinted there), no matter the theme of the story or
poem. An emigre novel, published, say, in Paris and sold over
all free Europe, might have, in those years, a total sale of
1,000 or 2,000 copies-- that would be a best seller-- but every
copy would also pass from hand to hand and be read by at least
20 persons, and at least 50 annually if stocked by Russian
lending libraries, of which there were hundreds in West Europe
alone. The era of expatriation can be said to have ended during
World War II. Old writers died, Russian publishers also
vanished, and worst of all, the general atmosphere of exile
culture, with its splendor, and vigor, and purity, and
reverberative force, dwindled to a sprinkle of Russian-language
periodicals, anemic in talent and provincial in tone. Now to
take my own case: It was not the financial side that really
mattered; I don't think my Russian writings ever brought me
more than a few hundred dollars per year, and I am all for the
ivory tower, and for writing to please one reader alone-- one's
own self. But one also needs some reverberation, if not
response, and a moderate multiplication of one's self
throughout a country or countries; and if there be nothing but
a void around one's desk, one would expect it to be at least a
sonorous void, and not circumscribed by the walls of a padded
cell. With the passing of years I grew less and less interested
in Russia and more and more indifferent to the once-harrowing
thought that my books would remain banned there as long as my
contempt for the police state and political oppression
prevented me from entertaining the vaguest thought of return.
No, I will not write another novel in Russian, though I do
allow myself a very few short poems now and then. I wrote my
last Russian novel a quarter of a century ago. But today, in
compensation, in a spirit of justice to my little American
muse, I am doing something else. But perhaps I should not talk
about it at this early stage.

Please do.

Well, it occurred to me one day-- while I was glancing at
the varicolored spines of Lolita translations into
languages I do not read, such as Japanese, Finnish or Arabic--
that the list of unavoidable blunders in these fifteen or
twenty versions would probably make, if collected, a fatter
volume than any of them. I had checked the French translation,
which was basically very good yet would have bristled with
unavoidable errors had I not corrected them. But what could I
do with Portuguese or Hebrew or Danish? Then I imagined
something else. I imagined that in some distant future somebody
might produce a Russian version of Lolita. I trained my
inner telescope upon that particular point in the distant
future and I saw that every paragraph, pock-marked as it is
with pitfalls, could lend itself to hideous mistranslation. In
the hands of a harmful drudge, the Russian version of
Lolita would be entirely degraded and botched by vulgar
paraphrases or blunders. So I decided to translate it myself.
Up to now I have about sixty pages ready.

Are you presently at work on any new project?

Good question, as they say on the lesser screen. I have
just finished correcting the last proofs of my work on
Pushkin's Eugene Onegin-- four fat little volumes which
are to appear this year in the Bollingen Series; the actual
translation of the poem occupies a small section of volume one.
The rest of the volume and volumes two, three and four contain
copious notes on the subject. This opus owes its birth to a
casual remark my wife made in 1950-- in response to my disgust
with rhymed paraphrases of Eugene Onegin, every line of
which I had to revise for my students-- "Why don't you
translate it yourself?" This is the result. It has taken some
ten years of labor. The index alone runs to 5,000 cards in
three long shoe boxes; you see them over there on that shelf.
My translation is, of course, a literal one, a crib, a pony.
And to the fidelity of transposal I have sacrificed everything:
elegance, euphony, clarity, good taste, modern usage, and even
grammar.

In view of these admitted flaws, are you looking
forward to reading the reviews of the book?

I really don't read reviews about myself with any special
eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and
acumen-- which does happen now and then. And I never reread
them, though my wife collects the stuff, and though maybe I
shall use a spatter of the more hilarious Lolita items
to write someday a brief history of the nymphet's tribulations.
I remember, however, quite vividly, certain attacks by Russian
emigre critics who wrote about my first novels 30 years ago;
not that I was more vulnerable then, but my memory was
certainly more retentive and enterprising, and I was a reviewer
myself. In the nineteen-twenties I was clawed at by a certain
Mochulski who could never stomach my utter indifference to
organized mysticism, to religion, to the church-- any church.
There were other critics who could not forgive me for keeping
aloof from literary "movements," for not airing the
"angoisse" that they wanted poets to feel, and for not
belonging to any of those groups of poets that held sessions of
common inspiration in the back rooms of Parisian cafes. There
was also the amusing case of Georgiy lvanov, a good poet but a
scurrilous critic. I never met him or his literary wife Irina
Odoevtsev; but one day in the late nineteen-twenties or early
nineteen-thirties, at a time when I regularly reviewed books
for an emigre newspaper in Berlin, she sent me from Paris a
copy of a novel of hers with the wily inscription "Spasibo
za Korolya, damn, valeta" (thanks for King,
Queen, Knave)-- which I was free to understand as "Thanks
for writing that book," but which might also provide her with
the alibi: "Thanks for sending me your book," though I never
sent her anything. Her book proved to be pitifully
trite, and I said so in a brief and nasty review, lvanov
retaliated with a grossly personal article about me and my
stuff. The possibility of venting or distilling friendly or
unfriendly feelings through the medium of literary criticism is
what makes that art such a skewy one.

You have been quoted as saying: My pleasures are the
most intense known to man: butterfly hunting and writing. Are
they in any way comparable?

No, they belong essentially to quite different types of
enjoyment. Neither is easy to describe to a person who has not
experienced it, and each is so obvious to the one who has that
a description would sound crude and redundant. In the case of
butterfly hunting I think I can distinguish four main elements.
First, the hope of capturing-- or the actual capturing-- of the
first specimen of a species unknown to science: this is the
dream at the back of every lepidopterist's mind, whether he be
climbing a mountain in New Guinea or crossing a bog in Maine.
Secondly, there is the capture of a very rare or very local
butterfly-- things you have gloated over in books, in obscure
scientific reviews, on the splendid plates of famous works, and
that you now see on the wing, in their natural surroundings,
among plants and minerals that acquire a mysterious magic
through the intimate association with the rarities they produce
and support, so that a given landscape lives twice: as a
delightful wilderness in its own right and as the haunt of a
certain butterfly or moth. Thirdly, there is the naturalist's
interest in disentangling the life histories of little-known
insects, in learning about their habits and structure, and in
determining their position in the scheme of classification-- a
scheme which can be sometimes pleasurably exploded in a
dazzling display of polemical fireworks when a new discovery
upsets the old scheme and confounds its obtuse champions. And
fourthly, one should not ignore the element of sport, of luck,
of brisk motion and robust achievement, of an ardent and
arduous quest ending in the silky triangle of a folded
butterfly lying on the palm of one's hand.

What about the pleasures of writing?

They correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading, the
bliss, the felicity of a phrase is shared by writer and reader:
by the satisfied writer and the grateful reader, or-- which is
the same thing-- by the artist grateful to the unknown force in
his mind that has suggested a combination of images and by the
artistic reader whom this combination satisfies.

Every good reader has enjoyed a few good books in his life
so why analyze delights that both sides know? I write mainly
for artists, fellow-artists and follow-artists. However, I
could never explain adequately to certain students in my
literature classes, the aspects of good reading-- the fact that
you read an artist's book not with your heart (the heart is a
remarkably stupid reader), and not with your brain alone, but
with your brain and spine. "Ladies and gentlemen, the tingle in
the spine really tells you what the author felt and wished you
to feel." I wonder if I shall ever measure again with happy
hands the breadth of a lectern and plunge into my notes before
the sympathetic abyss of a college audience.

What is your reaction to the mixed feelings vented by
one critic in a review which characterized you as having a fine
and original mind, but "not much trace of a generalizing
intellect, "and as "the typical artist who distrusts ideas"?

In much the same solemn spirit, certain crusty
lepidopterists have criticized my works on the classification
of butterflies, accusing me of being more interested in the
subspecies and the subgenus than in the genus and the family.
This kind of attitude is a matter of mental temperament, I
suppose. The middlebrow or the upper Philistine cannot get rid
of the furtive feeling that a book, to be great, must deal in
great ideas. Oh, I know the type, the dreary type! He likes a
good yarn spiced with social comment; he likes to recognize his
own thoughts and throes in those of the author; he wants at
least one of the characters to be the author's stooge. If
American, he has a dash of Marxist blood, and if British, he is
acutely and ridiculously class-conscious; he finds it so much
easier to write about ideas than about words; he does not
realize that perhaps the reason he does not find general ideas
in a particular writer is that the particular ideas of that
writer have not yet become general.

Dostoevski, who dealt with themes accepted by most
readers as universal in both scope and significance, is
considered one of the world's great authors. Yet you have
described him as "a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. "
Why?

Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not
all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that
most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not
as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a
slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his
tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his
sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be
endured for one moment-- by this reader anyway.

Is it true that you have called Hemingway and Conrad
"writers of books for boys"?

That's exactly what they are. Hemingway is certainly the
better of the two; he has at least a voice of his own and is
responsible for that delightful, highly artistic short story,
"The Killers." And the description of the iridescent fish and
rhythmic urination in his famous fish story is superb. But I
cannot abide Conrad's souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and
shell necklaces of romanticist cliches. In neither of those two
writers can I find anything that I would care to have written
myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile,
and the same can be said of some other beloved authors, the
pets of the common room, the consolation and support of
graduate students, such as-- but some are still alive, and I
hate to hurt living old boys while the dead ones are not yet
buried.

What did you read when you were a boy?

Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I
must have read more fiction and poetry-- English, Russian and
French-- than in any other five-year period of my life. I
relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats,
Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander
Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel,
Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was
a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large
library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages
of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman
Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top
favorites, several-- Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orezy, Conan
Doyle, and Rupert Brooke-- have lost the glamour and thrill
they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are
probably beyond change as far as I am concerned. I was never
exposed in the twenties and thirties, as so many of my coevals
have been, to the poetry of the not quite first-rate Eliot and
of definitely second-rate Pound. I read them late in the
season, around 1945, in the guest room of an American friend's
house, and not only remained completely indifferent to them,
but could not understand why anybody should bother about them.
But I suppose that they preserve some sentimental value for
such readers as discovered them at an earlier age than I did.

What are your reading habits today?

Usually I read several books at a time-- old books, new
books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything-- and when the
bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or
three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I
accumulate another pile. There are some varieties of fiction
that I never touch-- mystery stories, for instance, which I
abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called
"powerful" novel-- full of commonplace obscenities and torrents
of dialogue-- in fact, when I receive a new novel from a
hopeful publisher-- "hoping that I like the hook as much as he
does"-- 1 check first of all how much dialogue there is, and if
it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a
bang and ban it from my bed.

Are there any contemporary authors you do enjoy
reading?

I do have a few favorites-- for example, Robbe-Grillet and
Borges. How freely and gratefully one breathes in their
marvelous labyrinths! I love their lucidity of thought, the
purity and poetry, the mirage in the mirror.

Many critics feel that this description applies no less
aptly to your own prose. To what extent do you feel that prose
and poetry intermingle as art forms?

Except that I started earlier-- that's the answer to the
first part of your question. As to the second: Well, poetry, of
course, includes all creative writing; I have never been able
to see any generic difference between poetry and artistic
prose. As a matter of fact, I would be inclined to define a
good poem of any length as a concentrate of good prose, with or
without the addition of recurrent rhythm and rhyme. The magic
of prosody may improve upon w^hat we call prose by bringing out
the full flavor of meaning, but in plain prose there are also
certain rhythmic patterns, the music of precise phrasing, the
beat of thought rendered by recurrent peculiarities of idiom
and intonation. As in today's scientific classifications, there
is a lot of overlapping in our concept of poetry and prose
today. The bamboo bridge between them is the metaphor.

You have also written that poetry represents "the
mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words. "
But many feel that the "irrational" has little place in an age
when the exact knowledge of science has begun to plumb the most
profound mysteries of existence. Do you agree?

This appearance is very deceptive. It is a journalistic
illusion. In point of fact, the greater one's science, the
deeper the sense of mystery. Moreover, I don't believe that any
science today has pierced any mystery. We, as newspaper
readers, are inclined to call "science" the cleverness of an
electrician or a psychiatrist's mumbo jumbo. This, at best, is
applied science, and one of the characteristics of applied
science is that yesterday's neutron or today's truth dies
tomorrow. But even in a better sense of "science"-- as the
study of visible and palpable nature, or the poetry of pure
mathematics and pure philosophy-- the situation remains as
hopeless as ever. We shall never know the origin of life, or
the meaning of life, or the nature of space and time, or the
nature of nature, or the nature of thought.

Man's understanding of these mysteries is embodied in
his concept of a Divine Being. As a final question, do you
believe in God?

To be quite candid-- and what I am going to say now is
something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a
salutary little chill-- I know more than I can express in
words, and the little I can express would not have been
expressed, had I not known more.

NABOKOV

2010-08-25T01:43:00.000-07:00

Ja jeg har kun læst Lolita, eller havde... for nu er jeg kommet igang med Nabokov. Det startede med Look at the Harle1quins og det startede med det her citat. An extraordinary grandaunt, Baroness Bredow, born Tolstoy, amply replaced closer blood. As a child of seven og eight, already harboring the secrets of a confirmed madman, I seemed even to her (who also was far from normal) undully sulky and indolent; actually, of course, I kept daydreaming in a most outrageous fashion.
'Stop moping!' she would cry: ' Look at the Harlequins!'
'What harlequins? Where?'
'Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together - jokes, images - and you get a tripple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!'.
I did. By jove, I did. 'Look at the harlequins', s. 13.
Bogen i sig selv er ikke meget værd, ikke meget værd i forhold til hvad Nabokov virkelig kan. Jeg har en hvis fornemmelse af at han leger med sit eget rygte, eller det er sgu ikke en fornemmelse, men jeg har en fornemmelse af at han leger med mere end jeg kan se, for jeg kender ikke hans rygte særlig godt. Uanset hvad er det lidt for selvsmagende til min smag, hvis man må sige sådan noget. Det skal siges, at selve skriften, stilen, hvad fanden man end kalder det, stadig er en fornøjelse, at bogen er læseværdig, at jeg faktisk slugte den.

Men derudover er han ganske enkelt for vild... der er ikke meget andet at sige, han har på sin helt egen måde det hele. Og så skriver han på indekskort og der kan jeg følge ham. Det skal være i hånden, en computer hvor man ikke kan finde det fysisk det holder ikke rigtig for mig. Det er klart, at Nabokov går lige ind i min kilde. Han har som sagt det hele. En nørdet hobby, som, viser det sig, slet ikke er en hobby. Niks han ved noget som sine sommerfugle og er 'Videnskabsmand', som alle de glade litterære mennesker er så glade for at påpege og man må grine ha ha ha ha. For de er så fucking dumme... det lyser ud af dem at de her siger... ja ja, vi har skam en, en der virkelig ved noget... og i samme øjeblik afslører de sig selv, at de virkelig ikke har et fucking clue... for hvad er det dog virkelig at vide noget. Han har et Clue, Nabokov, Han formår sgu noget med den viden. Han har en på en gang nær og distanceret stil. Han har humor i lange baner. Han er skarp og der er ingen slinger i valsen... han fucker dig i røven og det kan stadig og samtidigt betyde ganske meget andet, men han gør det. Det er virkelighed. Ligesom hans diskusioner af denne verdens ontologiske status... han benægter vist nok eksistensen af mulige verdner, dvs. forestillingen om, at der en uendelighed af mulige verdner, hvor alle de andre muligheder vi kunne have valgt udspiller sig med lige så høj grad af ontologisk eksistens som denne - vores verden. Det bliver man jo på sin hvis meget glad for, at han gør.

http://htmlgiant.com/word-spaces/classic-word-spaces-5-vladimir-nabokov/

Kortlægning.

2010-08-25T01:38:00.000-07:00

Niklas Luhmann’s 1956 index card wiki

by Eric Franklin on December 4, 2008

I was reading the FT Weekend Magazine on a flight back from Frankfurt this weekend and came upon a fascinating closing piece about German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, and his use of index cards to map out complex series of thought. I have heard repeatedly of Vladimir Nabokov’s system of using index cards to plot his novels by exploring various juxtapositions and settling on an order for his carded prose but what I liked most about Luhmann’s system was that it was a rigorous mapping of a thought process, something I hadn’t heard of before.
6 Nabokov index cards from "Look at the Harlequins," part of the "Nabokov Under Glass" exhibit at the NY Public Library

What Luhmann did was number each card:

If an entry got the number 57/12, for example, and took up more space than one card would allow, the second card would be 57/13. But if an observation within that first card led to a separate branch of thought, the index card would get the number 57/12a – which could run on to 57/12b.

Luhmann used the index cards to map out and develop ideas, thoughts and theories. He wound up with labels as long as 21/3d26g53 – the number of a card discussing his academic rival, Jürgen Habermas.

The claim was that this numbered system of cards allowed Luhmann “to think about society in non-linear and non-hierarchical ways.” The beauty of this system is that it allowed him to link up disparate areas of thought, via a mechanism that resembled an early, and very non-communal, wiki. Whenever Luhmann needed to refer to a thought or string of logic, he could short-hand it by inserting the referring number.

I, for one, think this would be a great project for somebody to put online at some point. I’d love to see the index cards and view the hyper-links between them.

Filosofi og skabelse.

2010-05-10T01:42:00.001-07:00

I forhold til sidste post, kunne det nævnes at:
Filosofi i det hele taget i langt højere grad burde tage umuligheden af en sådan distinktion på sig. I sidste ende er alle de former for tænkninger, skrivninger, konceptuelle gennemgange osv. som filosofien gennemgår, selv handlinger. Men de forsøger stadig i forskellige forhold at diktere livet, diktere tænkningen, gøre et eller andet. Dette er ikke af det onde, men det er af det onde og desperate, hvis det faktisk ikke kan hvad det siger og det kan ikke hvad det siger, hvis det ikke forsøger. Hvis det forsøger, viser det hvor partikulært alle produktioner er og dermed afmonteres filosofiens metafysiske løgn. Den metafysiske løgn er påstanden om, at vi ved mere end vi ved. Nietzsche påpeger den hos Kant, når han siger, at Kants principper gælder for mere end de gælder, de er bredere end deres egen egentlige bestemmelse (uha Nietszche ville nok ikke bruge egentlige). Nu er det faktisk sådan, at alle vores udsagn ved mere end de selv ved, at jeg ved mere end jeg selv gør, at jeg kan sige ting til andre som er i modsætning til hvad jeg selv kan og gør, at det slet ikke er umuligt. Den metafysiske løgn er derfor ikke at den siger den ved mere end den rent faktisk selv kan, i sin egen bestemmelse, men at den ikke klargør alle de forskellige måder som denne viden gør sig gældende på. Den er en måde, den er fortsat en måde. Hvordan er den kun den ene måde? Ved at reproducere sig selv konkret, ved død og pine at holde fast i sig selv, gentage sig selv. Den siger det selv, metafysikken, at den eneste form for reduktion der findes er aktiv, dvs. en der foregår. En formel reduktion er en aktiv reduktion. Den gør det til noget bestemt som mangler ved verden og det altid noget bestemt der mangler, bestemte brikker, men de er ikke på forhånd bestemte, de bestemmes fortløbende og de bestemmer fortløbende.

Filosofien er på den måde på engang et pragmatisk princip og et kreativt princip. Det kreative ligger både i vores bestemmelsers merindhold og mangel. Men det er ikke evige mangler, de burde ikke føre os til desperation, nødvendigvis, de burde ikke fører os til at bestemme mangler i verden (med mindre der virkelig er mangler i verden), mangler ved vores egen viden, eller mangler ved hvad verden kan indeholde af viden - for det er ikke hvad metafysikken kan fortælle os. Den kan derimod fortælle os at vi hele tiden producere, at der ikke er nogen udgangspunkt eller endepunkt i nogen som helst ultimativ forstand.

Pincippet kan ikke formuleres - men det lyder nogenlunde sådan her: Jeg bestemmer noget, bestemmelsen rækker ud over mig selv, den kan forstås af andre fx (forstås anderledes, rumme mere, afsløre noget om mig, afsløre noget om verden), den kan forstå noget om verden (men jeg fortsætter ikke med hele forståelsen, jeg kunne fx med min forståelse bruge disse ord anderledes, men jeg bruger dem på den måde som jeg gør nu og for hvergang jeg skriver, kunne jeg bruge dem på en anden måde og på en hel mængde måder efterlader jeg de forskellige dele endnu mere åbne.) - men det vi gør forstås alligevel hele tiden, på den ene eller anden måde, det bliver 'rettet' til af fortsættelsen og rummene - kort sagt af virkeligheden (som jo så realistisk set ikke er noget fast men ganske forståeligt - vi kan her efterhånden tale om en Deleuziansk realisme). En realistisk virkeligheds opfattelse er en, hvor det som fungere, ikke kun fungere på en måde, men på mange måder. Forestillingen som ligger til grund for en formel systemteori er fx ret sjov her. I den kan systemer sættes op som entydige entiteter mellem hinanden. De bestemmer sig selv og deres forhold til omverden via feedback processer og dog må det siges og det påpeges for lidt, at der ikke er nogen systemer som ikke består af undersystemer. At mange systemer fungere i hinanden, at en del af et system, samtidigt er fungerende del af 5 andre, vidt forskellige systemer og at der endda kan være tale om ganske substansielle 'niveau' forskelle mht funktionen. Giver det mening, at sige at systemerne godt ved det selv? Niks, ikke entydigt, især da ikke fordi funktionerne sagtens kan fungere simultant og forudsætte hinanden for overhoved, at fungere, således, at vi ikke kan etablere et 'uden' for, eller et adskilte sted, hvor fra vi kan sige, at det gør det og det gør dat.

Vores pragmatiske princip har altså ikke noget centrum. Den anden side af princippet hører til muligheden for aktiv reduktion. Vi kan fastholde agter, vi kan gentage ting og fortsætte forhold. Vi kan, hvis vi skal følge system teori metaforen, opretholde, skabe, producere og tænke systemer. Og ikke bare det, vores omverden kan det også. Det er indfangelsen af denne process filosofien i høj grad har handlet om. vi kan blive bedre til at skabe. Vi kan forstå vores omverden. Vi har gerne ville lave denne forståelse, eller muligheden derfor, til udgangspunktet for verden. Det kan vi ikke, vores forståelse er partikulær (selvom den også er mer, men som sagt partikulær betyder ikke adskilt, alene, reduceret, det betyder konkret indtagende og indtaget af virkeligheden).

Deleuze bruger maskinel samling, som navn på princippet. Maskinel er her metaforen. En fungerende enhed. Lacan forsøger i en af sine seminarer, at relatere Freuds teori til kybernetik. Han fortæller os, at enhver tid må gentænke deres tænkere eller måske nærmere deres forhold. Freud tænkte et forhold, han tænkte det med sin tids metaforer. For os er det nødvendigt at tænke det med vores. Hvad er det som er nødvendigt at tænke? Det er kodningerne og deres forhold til samlingerne. Maskinen, og her skal vi tænke os en anden slags maskine end den mest simple af slagsen, er metaforen. En funktionel enhed, som ikke kan reduceres til sin egen funktionelle enhed, fordi de stabilisere sig (hvis vi tænker på kybernetiske maskiner) i en omverden. Det vi tænker os er overskridelser af forholdet mellem natur og kunstig, mellem bevidsthed og ikke-bevidst. Freud bruger pladespillerens riller som en metafor for hukommelse og han bruger den som sådan, fordi pladen overskrider dette skel, den spiller musik, dens kode transformeres til noget væsentligt andet end riller. Kybernetiske maskiner bryder med dette rum endnu mere fundamentalt, idet de kan sættes til, at fungere i forhold til, snart sagt enhver ting, enhver omgivelse (her tales "fabric" - I am pointing to laws of complex systems that are
invariant not only to transformations of their fabric, but also of their content. It does not matter whether the system’ content is neurophysiological, automotive, social or economic."). Det første sted man kan forsøge at forstå denne gennemgående karakter af forstillingen er denne. Lad os forestille os at vi har nogle dele, en chip, nogle hjul, nogle forskellige censorer osv. med disse dele kan vi bygge en maskine og vi bygger den sådan, at den har 1-3 feedback processer. Vi bygger den sådan, at den på forskellige måder har noget hukommelse, sådat at vi kan programmere den og nu kommer pointen. Alt efter hvad vi lader sensorene fokusere på vil maskinens systemer afhænge af forskellige ting og vi kan derfor forstille os, at selve maskinen (der jo laves med nogle dele og derefter progameres) fungere i et andet rum end den selv udgør. Den fungere i et andet rum, hvis den fx er designet til at selvorganisere og dermed finder en ligevægts tilstand, så er denne tilstand, ganske vist betinget af maskinen og maskinen etablere den indadtil, men vi kan se den ud af til og dens funktionelle egenskaber som maskine er udadtil.
Grunden til at Lacan ser disse maskiner som en ny brugbar metafor er, at hvad han søger er forholdet mellem det reele og det symbolske. Hvis vi tænker over pladen er forbindelsen mellem det symbolske og det reale adskilt. Vi ser ikke forholdet vokse frem, vi spiller musikken og indspiller den derefter på en plade. Indspilningen diktere programmeringen og der er ikke noget andet sprog for kodningen end dette forhold. Det giver ikke mening, at begynde at programmere riller i pladen. Kybernetiske maskiner er anderledes. Her kan vi observere skridtet fra tilfældighed til orden, fra en real orden til en symbolsk orden. Vi kan se hvor det mystiske opstår. Lacans mest simple eksempel er 3 bit. Hvis vi har en tilfældig talrække med 1 og 0 taller og vi deler disse op i 3 bits vil der være et endeligt og overskueligt antal 3-par. Via en meget simpel afgrænsning af talrækken, opstår en intern orden, som ikke i sig selv kommer fra afgrænsningen. For Lacan er det fra dette udgangspunkt, at vi kan begynde mere specefikt at tale om ligevægtstilstande. Men især kan vi tale om dem fordi maskinen er sat ud i verden, ikke adskilt fra verden, fordi det er i disse ordner, at den faktisk kan begynde, at fungere i verden, selv tage en eller anden form for stilling.

Der er to vigtigte pointer her - den ene er, at tekniske udviklinger (maskinelle samlinger) er vores konceptuelle rum. At dette rum på engang er det samme og dog noget nyt. Lacans tanke er i hvert fald, at Freud sagde noget vitalt om psyken og os mennesker (om virkeligheden), han sagde det med sine metaforer og nu siger vi det samme igen, på en ny måde, med vores ord og det er ikke det samme længere, ikke blot det samme. Det er nødvendigt at sige det igen. Dette er vores pragmatiske pointe, det er ikke nok, fx at sige hvad man mener, man må også forestille sig, at den måde man mener det på (fx siger man mener det) er en del af den mening man producere.) Her relatere metaforene sig til hvad vi rent faktisk er istand til med de maskinelle samlinger som udgør vores virkeligheds-konceptuelle rum. Vi er istand til at tænke væsentligt længere i forhold til konkrete forhold med maskiner og deres hukommelse, end vi er med en plade. Ligeså med kommunikation. Vores forhold til kommunikation har ændret sig temmelig vitalt de sidste 5o år, da det er gået fra radio til internet. Fra radiobølger til sateliter. Fra monopol til et eller andet.

Når jeg er så interesseret i den pædagogiske skole der arbejder med konkretiseringer af læring er det fordi de forsøger at udøve denne 'historiske pointe'.

Læring ha ha ha, læring og bygning.

2010-05-10T01:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sckY7cmmkOU

En video af Gever Tulley. Hans kursus hænger selvfølgelig sammen med Papert og Logo programmering. Gennemgangen går sådan her 1) De går væk fra præfabrikerede materialer. 2) De går væk fra opskrifter. Denne udvikling er baseret på hvad der fungere, hvor de får de bedste resultater. Pointen han når frem til er, at den bedste læring er en læring hvor børn ikke kender resultatet på forhånd. Den anden pointe han kommer med, den følger direkte fra den første er; skab et meningsfuldt miljø og læring vil komme af sig selv.

Begge disse pointer har dybe metafysiske implikationer (hvis man må sige sådan noget). De handler bege om involvering i verden og de handler begge om en åbning af verden. Det som man som uddanner og tænker må forstå, hvis man vil tænke disse koncepter i forhold til hvad der foregår i skoler og undervisning i det hele taget (universitetet er åbenlyst med her og vi kan endda med rette tale om, at de er dem der mindst har forstået, især forestillingen om, at man skal have et meningsfuldt sted at lære) så må man huske på, at også de traditionelle måder at lære på, er omgang med verden. Pointen drejer sig nærmere om, at de enten ikke selv ved det, benægter det, eller forsøger at afmontere en åben verden, dvs. afmontere, at den viden der produceres går 'amok'. Modsætningen er altså ikke at disse børn lærer ved at omgås verden, det gør alle børn, modsætningen er påstanden om, at det er denne omgang med verden der rent faktisk er forudsætningen for læring og at det er godt for børn, hvis de for det første er i miljøer der hævder et levende miljø netop fordi en del, en stor og central del af videns produktion (forhold til viden) er, at skabe miljøer, skabe omgange med verden. Opskrifter, forudgivede materialer og forudgivede mål er alle sammen fine nok, men en nødvendig del af videns produktion er, at kunne skabe sådanne ting selv og det er ganske enkelt en forkert indgang til problemet hvis man forestiller sig, at de kan adskilles... eller lad os hellere sige, de adskilles ikke og netop derfor er der virkelig ingen grund til, at forsøge at adskille dem.

2010-05-06T17:16:00.000-07:00

»den virkelige rationalismes og hånd i hånd med den sande mysticismes fødsel, en rationalisme som er fri for teknokratmentalitet og en mysticisme som er fri for shamanisme og bagstræb. Måske aldrig, men man kan jo altid forsøge at forestille sig dem. Og deres virkelighed.«

Gamle REB udgivelser.

2010-04-29T04:35:00.001-07:00

Her er de tre første REB udgivelser. Der kommer snart flere.

Lovin chestnutt vs hermanspoole - Tupperware Geeks

Optaget i 2007 i The Shit Room af Lovin Chestnutt og HermansPoole... live og uncut.
http://docs.google.co/leaf?id=0B4HTMT2KyL1_OGFkNjhjYTktZGI5NS00Y2IzLTg3YjItNDRjNThlM2QwM2E4&hl=en

The Kian Liberation Sessions & Hits

Liberation sessions indspillet i Annes lejlighed under et læsegruppe, skrive gruppe møde. En spontan kærlighedserklæring til Kasper. The Hits er indspillet af Hermans og mange af dem er til hans dengang udkårne, så de er noget så sjældent som rigtige sange og så endda kærlighedssange fra REB.
DOWNLOADES HER
http://docs.google.co/leaf?id=0B4HTMT2KyL1_YWNiOWNkZGItZTA1OC00ZmY3LTk4MDgtNDhmYjFkM2RkZDA5&hl=en

Flødeskum - Listen to your Hardbeat.

Pladen er optaget under shell tanken... under stor tormult.

http://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B4HTMT2KyL1_MjljNWQyOGQtZTY2Ny00ZWI4LTg1MTUtMmNmNzAwZjRiZWIy&hl=en

Citater om Cybersyn

2010-04-24T09:26:00.000-07:00

It says a lot for the good intentions of the Government that the work I shall describe been going on in the midst of such obvious turmoil. It wanted scientific tools to help the country’ problems, and it knew that their provision would take time-perhaps long. So it may be proved. The government has so far had to work with the tools governments have used without success. It also wanted to work out the between science and the people, and that too ought to interest us all. We have moved an epoch in which the misuse of science has created a society that is already close to technocracy. The very language - the dehumanised jargon-in which powerful talk about the wars they wage, or powerful companies talk about the people they frankly makes me vomit.
I am a scientist, but to be a technocrat would put me out of business as a man. Yet I was eighteen rnonths ago, intent on creating a scientific way of governing. And here today, proud of the tools we have made. Why? Because I believe that cybernetics can do the job better than bureaucracy - and more humanely too. We must learn how to expunge technocracy, without rejecting science - because the proper use of science is really the world’ brightest hope for stable government. Some people in Chile share that view; and they reject technocracy as strongly as do I. All of us have already been misrepresented in that respect, just as the scientific work we have done has already been misrepresented as analogous to other management control systems that have failed. Both comments miss out the cybernetics, to discuss which we are here - and a subject, which for government in general,is not at all understood.(ved faktisk ikke hvem der har skrevet det, men artiklen hedder Fanfare for freedom er måske minder om Beer.)

Artiklen Fanfare for Freedom ligger som pdf et eller andet sted. Artiklen er ganske oplysende vedr. Cybersyn og kommer ret godt ned også i det tekniske. Derudover er den interesant fordi den er fra 1973 og altså dermed fra tiden omkring Cybersyn.
Her handler det selvfølgelig om et problem som er gået helt i bogen. Forholdet mellem samfund og teknologi og især spørgsmålet omkring hvorledes vi kan implementere tekniske udviklinger i vores samfundsstyring. Det er noget der kommer, som allerede er her og som der på mange måder er rigtig store muligheder for at udvikle.

The viable system model that first appeared in Brain of the Firm (1972) still
stands as one of the guiding concepts behind Beer’s work.45 It is defined as
‘ a system that survives. It coheres ; it is integral _ but it has none the less
mechanisms and opportunities to grow and learn, to evolve and to adapt. ’46
The value of the system ‘variables’ (inputs) determined the system’s resultant
‘ state’; Beer referred to the number of possible states as the system’s ‘ var-
iety ’, a direct reference to Ross Ashby’s important ‘Law of Requisite
Variety’.47 A system able to maintain all critical variables within the limits
of systemic equilibrium achieved ‘homeostasis ’, a quality desired by all
viable systems. From these principles, Beer constructed a five-tier model
for viable systems, which he based on the human neurosystem. In spite of
the model’s biological origins, Beer maintained that the abstract structure
could be applied in numerous contexts, including the firm, the economic
enterprise, the body and the state. (citatet er fra Designing Freedom, regulating a nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allendes Chile - af Eden Medina, den ligger online på hendes hjemmeside, som ligger på linket i forrige post)

Det er den første overraskelse, at systemet fra udgangspunktet bygges op udfra en model der tager udgangspunkt i biologien. Hele Medinas arbejde omkring Chile og Kybernetik er ganske spændende, fordi det handler om hvor mange steder forskningen faktisk fandt sted. Kybernetikken var måske ikke skjult, men Beers første bog om Viable systems theory hedder Brain of the Firm og er en måske ikke kun en management bog, så i hvert fald også det. Den overraskelse jeg har over biologien og dermed analogiens hovedrolle i de første begyndelser af Cybersyn forsvinder derfor, for der var vægt bagved. Beer har arbejdet med tingende før, han har implementeret sine tanker og faktisk udviklet dem imens han arbejdede med organisationelle problemer og forsøgte at løse dem. Udgangspunktet var altså en analogi. Det kunne vi lærer meget af i Dks undervisnings system og i organisations tanker idag. Analogier er noget vi udvikler i samklang med de problemer vi forsøger at løse og ikke den anden vej rundt. Se Paperts bog Mindstorm for en udvikling af denne tanke i matematik undervisningen.
Det er ufattelig centralt perspektiv for denne blog, virkeligheden og teorien er ikke adskilte, hvis de generelt og i udgangspunktet er det, sker der for det meste dårlige ting, eller ikke en skid. Måske er det netop derfor at Kybernetikken er så interesant, fordi dens felt, interdiciplinære felt voksede frem i og med et arbejde med konkrete problemer (i første omgang hvordan man får en raket til at ramme sit mål præcist - problemet blev løst via feedback processer der kunne beregne rakettens bane og forhold til mål udfra ufuldstændige data-set) og hele tiden forblev forbundet hertil. Man opfandt og tænkte med objekter.
Som sådan skal Cybersyns rolle på denne blog ses, som et eksempel på et objekt, et objekt at tænke med. Og som en litterær histoie om at tænke med objekter.

Det er en senere pointe i Medinas artikle, at ‘information without action
is waste.' - som Beer og Flores gør sig. Nu er information altid handling i en eller anden grad og det er en vital del af arbejdet her på bloggen, at udvikle et begreb, som alligevel gør det klart hvad det er de hentyder til. Citatet henviser direkte til den specefikke opgave med at finde et kommunikations system som kan binde alle ledne sammen i Cybersyn projektet. De ender med et telex system, men som det står i artiklen, fungere dette system meget lig internettet i den forstand, at det skal fungere som et "high-speed web of information exchange." Det giver generelt problemer for systemer hvis der bliver produceret en masse information som ikke bliver brugt, som ikke fungere. Distinktioner for funktioner er altså vigtige.

Stafford Beer coined and frequently used the term POSIWID (the purpose of a system is what it does) to refer to the commonly observed phenomenon that the de facto purpose of a system is often at odds with its official purpose. Beer coined the term POSIWID and used it many times in public addresses. Perhaps most forcefully in his address to the University of Valladolid, Spain in October 2001, he said "According to the cybernetician the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment or sheer ignorance of circumstances."[7] -- fra Wikipedia (selvfølgelig). Her har vi selvfølgelig en sammenhæng med Wittgenstein. Det er ikke nogen tilfældighed, Von Forster har den mange steder. Men dette er ikke det positive program, dette er en påstand man kan bruge til analyse. Man kan bruge den til at påpege ignorance og forudtagethed.

Begge artikler er virkelig oplysende og ganske smukke.

Cyber-syn

2010-04-24T07:16:00.000-07:00

Stafford Beer er muligvis tænkeren... Cybersyn var et Kybernetisk styret økonomisk system, eller i hvert fald et forsøg på det, som fungerede i Chile under Allende i ca 2 år.

her er nogle links.
http://vimeo.com/8000921
http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it/lessons.htm
http://www.cybersyn.cl/ingles/home.html
http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/edenm/publications/publications.html -- en ganske fabelagtig side, hun har,hvis hun er en kvinde, skrevet ret interesante artikler må man sige. Kan være der skulle komme en gennemgang af nogen af dem senere.