Participatroy Video

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.

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.

Shirley Jackson og wikipedia.

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."

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.

Chaitin - Chaitin! Chaitin!

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/

Bill Hopkins.

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?

I believe that what most people want and need is a unified system for all their work and records, not a bunch of separate "applications." This means the management of versions and copies and their variations, built of tracked small pieces with their origins known-- not big lumps with their origins lost (files as we know them today). This means juggling and managing vast amounts of fine-grained information-- thousands of items-- in multiple contexts. An item should only need to be entered once, and become available in all its contexts at any time. And all the contexts of an item should be simultaneously visible.

Øhm jeg har ikke rettet det nedenfor stående... og jeg gider fanme heller ikke.
Det her er en note til ted nelson ... jeg tror hans ambition skal omformes noget, for jeg tror ganske enkelt det er et intrinsisk problem, at computeren bliver rodet. At danne platformen helt fra bunden, eller udefra ind, i en eller anden samlende process - hvor der opnås total gennemsigtighed - er for det første ikke muligt af praktiske grunde. Det ville kræve at man kunne tage hensyn til fremtiden allerede, have foregrebet den, mens virkeligheden er, at den udvikle sig med forskellige ryk og ganske enkelt ikke er opdaget før den er det. For det andet er det ikke muligt, fordi det er en systematisk sandhed, at funktioner fungere som et lukket system, i hvert fald altid på visse punkter. Dette er et formelt problem.
Dette er ikke døden for Nelsons tanker. At det er svært at tænke fremtiden behøver ikke, at vi ikke skal det og computeren har vitterlig ikke opfyldt sit litterære potentiale, for den står vitterlig i en anden situation for os, end noget der er kommet før den, den folder en masse problemer som fx har behersket filosofien ind i sig. Forestillingen om at tænkningen kunne blive funktionel via skriften har altid behersket filosofien. Forestillingen var, at man igennem skriften kunne transportere sandheder, tænkningen ud blandt mennesker. Skriften var her i centrum som kommunikationsmiddel, det var den som fungerede som hovedmediator, både fra hovedet til skriften og fra skriften ud til de andre hoveder. Som kommunikations middel har skriften især en fejl, den er ikke selv en funktion, den skrives og læses, men bogstaverne ligger stille. På den måde etableres der et misforhold mellem skriftens mål og det man gør når man læser. Lad os forestille os en filosofibog der handler om virkelighedens stat, dvs om den rigtige statsindretning, men læsningen er ikke skabelsen eller visionen om staten. Læsningen bliver en mediator og det at blive god til at læse en bog og forstå dens skrift er ikke det samme som at blive god til at lave stater, ensige det rent faktisk at skabe stater. Skriften kan ikke fungere, den sætter tanken i et alt for bestemt forhold, i forhold til en bestemt art og der ligger et enormt problem og venter, hvordan skal man bruge det læste, dette er virkelig en anden lærdom end det at lærer at læse.
Computeren er et svar på dette skriftens problem, det at tænke, skabe noget kan nu blive funktionelt og kodet. Men i forhold til Ted Nelson må vi påpege, at computeren ikke er det totale skrive apparat som han forventede. Skabelsens problem forbliver der, forholdene mellem forskellige funktioner eksistere stadig. Det computeren udpeger er, skriftens, kodens forhold når den fungere, sættes materielt i spil og dermed kan udspille reele forhold iblandt os, hvor den ikke kun siger noget meningsfuldt, men agere meningsfuldt. Et program der kan øge demokratiet siger ikke nødvendigvis eksplicit hvad demokrati er, den er forskellige forhold, strukturer der samler forskellige funktioner, ord og kategorier og sætte dem i formelle spil med hinanden. I romantikken var der en forløber for videnskaben, som lød på, at gud havde skrevet verden i matematik, at enhver del af naturen var guds skrift, at dens love var guds måde at virke på osv. Gud var altså istand til at skrive verden. Videnskaben kan i nogen forstand ses i et metaforisk forhold til denne forestilling. Den har overtaget, ikke guds ideen, men ideen om, at finde hans skrift, den skrift som naturen er skrevet med. Meningen bag er ikke problemet, det er droppet, men søgende efter skriften er blevet intensiveret og systematiseret. Det ultimative mål er altså at komme til at skrive verden eller hvad, som gud, som en, som enhed. Men der når vi aldrig til, sådan fungere ingen skrift, sådan er der ingen skrift der kan virke. Computeren illustere dette for os, den fungere i høj grad decentralt, de enkelte programmer er ikke gennemsigtige for hinanden, de fungere ind ad til og de programmer som skal systematisere dem har store kategoriseringens problemer, ganske enkelt fordi de er uden for.

Citat af Hume om universiteter

On the other Hand, Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good Company. By that Means, every Thing of what we call Belles Lettres became totally barbarous, being cultivated by Men without any Taste of Life or Manners, and without that Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression, which can only be acquired by Conversation. Even Philosophy went to Wrack by this moping recluse Method of Study, and became as chimerical in her Conclusions as she was unintelligible in her Stile and Manner of Delivery. And indeed, what could be expected from Men who never consulted Experience in any of their Reasonings, or who never searched for that Experience, where alone it is to be found, in common Life and Conversation?", (Hume, of essay writing), ja og så kan vi jo næppe længere påstå at filosofiens slummer er noget vi har fundet på.

Mencken og demokrati

[D]emocracy gives [the beatification of mediocrity] a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world—that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power—which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters — which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy." H.L. Mencken.

Der er en tråd i vores historie. Store individualister og nogle af dem er antidemokratiske, eller i hvert fald skeptiske. De er meget vigtige disse mennesker, især idag, hvor det er så sjældent at møde en skeptikker, der er trods alt nok at være skeptisk omkring. Generelt kan man sige, at jeg har visse fascinationer med individualister, folk som Buckminster Fuller, Emerson, Thoreau, Sam Fuller osv. Der er en lang række af dem på denne blog. De er vigtige fordi de i sandhed er demokratiske. Det vigtige med en fyr som Mencken er at hans forbehold over for demokrati kan vise os på en ikke voldelig måde hvilke mennesker, tanker og lign der også fandtes, som også var med i demokratiet, som også virkede i det, på godt og ondt, men som i hvert fald var først og fremmest var i stand til at anderkende originalitet, særegenhed, en alternativ virkelighed, som ikke var interesseret i at smadre os ind på den lige og rette vej.
Mencken var John Fantes mentor og hjalp med at få hans romaner udgivet og mange andre ret fabelagtige forfattere. Ayn Rand var glad for ham. Han forekommmer mig at være en af de her fabelagtige modsætningsfyldte amerikanere, virkelige mennesker. I citatet ovenfor er han skeptisk over for demokratiet... men netop udfra en holdning om at demokratiet ikke er demokratisk, ikke giver os frihed, ikke hæver indsatserne, gør os frie. Demokratiet skal gøre os frie, gøre os i stand til at vælge og handle.


Vores undersøgende jornalistik kunne måske siges, ikke så meget at handle om at finde lovbrud, korruption osv. af den normale art. Vores ærinde er at skrive os ind i de demokratiske begrebs korruption, at forsøge at undersøge, skrive og sige tingende sådan, at det bliver klart, at vi er forskellige, at samfundets opgave ikke er at udligne disse, at opgaven for samfundet ikke er det gode samfund men, at folk selv kan tænke, at de selv styrer så meget af hvad de omgås som muligt. At de kan stilles til ansvar over for deres handlinger, ikke nødvendigiv med straf som følge, men for at kunne tage ansvar. I Danmark er det ånden fra middelklassen vi især ikke kan tage. Vi er middelklasse drenge, middelklasse ludere og måske er der et element af selvhad i det, men for os står det meget klart, måske fordi vi kommer derfra hvor vi kommer, at der igennem vores samfundssystemer løber uudtalte systemer som er dybt udemokratiske, som bliver klædt i klarhed, i principper men som er selvretfærdighed og afkastelse af ansvar. Når man idag taler om love, om nye love er det så og sige aldrig med demokratiske briller, de bliver kun brugt, når lovene helt eklatant overskrider helt almindelige grænser, men generelt kan man ikke sige, at de bliver vedtaget for demokratiet, for friheden, at det er den vi diskutere. Derimod fremstår det i langt højere grad som et produkt af hvad vi vil acceptere og acceptere skal her siges med skarp og skinger stemme. Et samfund skal acceptere en hel del mere end vi vil acceptere og det bør temmeligt sjældent være udgangspunktet for lovgivning. Lovsystemet er demokratisk, det skal gøre os istand til at vælge, det skal være de bedste og mest frie muligheder vi kan opstille for hinanden og det skal altid diskuteres.
systemer i Dk som er fucked på denne måde, af forvansket demokrati er: socialhjælp, retssystem, læreranstalter, det politiske system osv.