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

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.

Heller og Vonnegut - interview i playboy.

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.

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."

Licens

Hvad siger reglerne?
januar 1, 2007

På familieadvokatens hjemmeside gives nogle praktiske oplysninger:

Du har ikke pligt til at lade kontrollen komme indenfor:

Licenskontoret kan ikke komme ind i en beboelse for at se, om der er tv, – selv ikke med fogedens bistand.

Du har ikke pligt til at lukke DR ind.

Oplysningen er dog 2 år gammel.

På liberator kan man finde følgende:

Nu kan det jo være, at det er en rigtig tungnem Licens Lars, du har haft stående og palaverende udenfor din dør. Måske er han også en rigtig hidsigprop. Han ringer nu til politiet og fortæller harmdirrende og bedende om den forfærdelige ting, han lige har oplevet.

Politiet meddeler så denne tungnemme Licens Lars, at det er de fuldkommen ligeglade med, og at han i øvrigt gerne må holde op med at optage deres tid med den slags ligegyldigheder. Politiet ved nemlig godt, at de heller ikke kan gøre en snus ved det. Politiet har ikke adkomst til hjemmet på grundlag af en sag om
tv-licens.

Dertil skal der bruges en dommerkendelse.

Til det med dommerkendelsen er der kun én ting at sige … der kan ikke googles et eneste eksempel på, at en dommer har gidet give en kendelse til at undersøge en borger for, hvorvidt denne har et tv-apparat.

Der er ganske vist beskrevet ét eksempel på en dommerkendelse; men da havde borgeren truet Licens Lars med et gevær, og politiet kom med en dommerkendelse for at se geværet, der dog i mellemtiden var forsvundet – case closed.

Hovedprincippet er at nægte over for Danmarks Radio at man har TV, også selvom begge parter er overbeviste om at man har det. Som retstilstanden er idag, får de ikke adgang til boligen. Mht internetforbindelsen er det nok mere speget. Pt skal hastigheden på forbindelsen være over en vis størrelse, for at man regner det for muligt at tage signalerne. Spørgsmålet er så om internetudbyderen medvirker til at kontrollere borgeren for DR. Endnu er totalitarismen dog ikke kommet dertil, og man skal altså bare benægte overfor DR at man har en licenspligtig forbindelse, hvis man skulle blive spurgt.

DRs egen Spørg og Svar kan i øvrigt findes HER

Se evt. også piratgruppens debat

Opfordringen herfra er selvfølgelig at nægte at betale en skid.

Nicky hager og undersøgende journalistik.

En lille gennemgang af Nicky Hager om hvordan han skrev bogen the secret power.

Don’t assume that secretive organisations are impenetrable

Many people have asked how I uncovered information about Echelon. They are experiences I think are worth sharing. The starting point for my research was finding out the names and job titles of all the staff within the New Zealand electronic intelligence agency. The breakthrough came when I realised that all their names had been hidden within public service staff lists, scattered through pages and pages of military staff. Because hardly anyone knew even of the organisation’s existence, they presumably thought the names would never be noticed.

By obtaining other lists of military staff that were compiled without the spies, and subtracting one list from the other, I was left with a near-perfect list of the hundreds of people inside the spy agency; and many more who had worked there in the past. Comparing this list to other public service lists gave me general job titles for all these people. Combined with some early leaks, I was gradually able to construct the entire top-secret organisational plan from relatively open sources. The job then began of identifying people in the various sections willing to talk.

People have varied reasons for deciding to leak information. There is, for instance, simply the relief of talking to someone who knows about their work after years of never being able to tell even their wives or husbands what they have done at work all day. But the main reason in this case was the officers’ concerns that an important area of government activity had been too secret for too long, both from the public and Parliament. Some people felt strongly about intelligence activities they regarded as immoral or not in the country’s interests. I decided who might be willing to talk to me, seeking people from all the various compartmentalised sections I wanted to study, and then quietly approached them. I am still surprised that most of the people I approached were prepared to talk to me, resulting in hundreds of pages of interview notes about the high-tech spy systems they operate.

Once the information had started, it poured in. It became known within the spy agencies that I was reearching them – new staff were warned about me in security briefings although they had no idea how much I had learnt or that I was writing a book – but, if anything, this seemed to help the leaks. For a long time I felt a slight thrill when I put my hand in my postbox in case I found secret papers left anonymously inside.

Some information came because ‘high security’ can be more about impressions than reality. For example, the spy bosses must surely have wondered why I repeatedly requested the latest copies of the agency’s internal newsletters, when they always released them with every meanful word blacked out. These people are our government’s chief advisors on security issues, but what they never realised was that by holding the photocopied newsletters up to my desk light I could, with care, read virtually everything – all the details of new or refocussed sections, staff changes, overseas postings and so on – that had been deleted.

High security at the agency’s most secret spying facility, the Waihopai station, was also more impression than reality. Despite electric fences, sensors and razor wire, I went there several times while writing the book and later was able to take a television documentary crew inside, where they filmed the Echelon equipment in the main operations room and even the titles of Intelsat (International Satellite Organisation) manuals on the desks (which confirmed the facility’s role spying on ordinary public telecommunications networks).

While there was very secret information I could only learn from insiders, a lot of the information came from careful fieldwork (such as observing changes over the years in various Echelon stations around the world as telecommunications technology changed) and collating snippets of information from unclassified documents and news reports. Various of the inside sources were friends of friends of friends who I located simply by asking around widely. Don’t assume that secretive organisations are impenetrable. There is important research work waiting to be done on many subjects in every country.