This image was stolen from Chopper Dave’s blog, this is not safe, do not use your lathe like this.

The following is an interview with Percival Everett, author of fifteen published books (2 short story collections, a novella, and 12 novels) as well as two more to come in the next twelve months (a short story collection and a novel).  He lives on a small farm just west of Los Angeles, with his wife Francessa, two step-children, and a bevy of animals.  He is currently a professor at the University of Southern California.

“I watch television.  Of course I also closely examine my dogs’ shit to make sure they don’t have worms.”

Dan:

Thank you very much for taking the time to do this interview – I know they are not one of your favorite things to do.

Percival:

Sure thing.

Dan:

Your book jackets list a great deal of past endeavors in terms of work – sheep-ranch hand, musician, and teacher among them.  Obviously writing falls onto that list as well.  You also recently published an excellent essay in the March/April 2003 issue of Speakeasy regarding just how difficult writing a novel is – claiming it to be the hardest work you’ve ever done.  Of all of the jobs or working you’ve done in your past, which have you enjoyed the most, and why? Which have you enjoyed the least, and why?

Percival:

I didn’t much like castrating bulls.

Dan:

No explanation needed there.  The saxophone appears frequently throughout your work.  As stated above you’ve worked as a musician, but I believe I’ve read somewhere that you play piano.  Is there a reason you’ve chosen to infuse your work with the music of the saxophone more often than piano (which is includedwonderfully via Bud Powell in “Suder.”)?

Percival:

I play guitar.  I used to be fairly good.  I’m a sloppy pianist.

Dan:

Your first novel, “Suder,” is filled with almost over the top humor.  You didn’t really go that far again until your novella, “Grand Canyon, Inc.” (and at times ”God’s Country”) and at times the work in between has been referred to as terse.  Do you believe that those who would make such comments are missing out on a great deal of funny material within those other works? There seems to be very subtle, and dark humor throughout all of your work – even “Cutting Lisa” has some laugh out loud writing.

Percival:

Some things are funny, some things aren’t.  I don’t try to be funny; that never works. The saddest and most serious things are often best exposed and explored with humor.  Humor is a sneaky thing.

Dan:

Your second novel, “Walk Me to the Distance,” led to a made for television movie titled “Follow Your Heart.” Did you have any involvement with that movie (beyond selling them the film rights to your novel)?  Did you watch it?  If so, what were your thoughts as to the way they were true to the vision you had when you wrote the book?

Percival:

I haven’t watched it all the way through.  It sucks. But it’s not my movie.  Instead of having a veteran of the War in Vietnam, NBC made the main character a tortured returnee from the ‘conflict’ in Panama.  You get the idea.

Dan:

Have any of your other works been optioned for film? Are any in the works as far as you know?

Percival:

Yes.  Nothing’s coming soon.

Dan:

Through the actions, and even some comments, of your characters, I gather you are not a big fan of television in general?

Percival:

I watch television.  Of course I also closely examine my dogs’ shit to make sure they don’t have worms.

Dan:

Your third novel, “Cutting Lisa,” is a taut, thrilling read.  Many of your novels fall into the 160 to 200 page range.  This makes them very easy to read in a single sitting (as does the writing and stories themselves).  Is this at all a thought in your head while you’re writing them, or do you just write until the story is done?

Percival:

Novels are as long as they need to be.  Any longer and it’s just padding or, worse, a writer falling in love with her or his own voice.  I like economy.

Dan:

You then published “Weather and Women Treat Me Fair,” a collection of short stories.  When you are working on a novel, and an idea for a short story comes to you, what do you do?  Set the novel aside and write the story?  Jot the shell of an idea for the story down somewhere and return to it later?

Percival:

Stories happen.

Dan:

The next book, “Zulus,” is commonly lumped into the category of Science Fiction, even getting you an author page on some SF Internet sites.  I found it to be more apocalyptic than science fiction – it reminded me of novels like Paul Auster’s “In the Country of Last Things,” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”  While there isn’t always a great deal of happiness in the lives of your characters, this novel takes that to an extreme.  Is your view of our future really that bleak?

Percival:

Yes.  But I don’t consider it bleak.  The planet will continue on.

Dan:

In “Zulus,” unless it is spoken in dialogue, the protagonists’ name is always read as Alice Achitophel and never just Alice.  Did you have a reason for this?

Percival:

Yes.

Dan:

Okay.  That brings up the question of character names – do you feel that they need to have any specific meaning?   Where do you come up with names for your characters?

Percival:

Sometimes names can do some work.  Sometimes I’m just having fun.

Dan:

You allow your love of animals to show up in your work – there’s an elephant named Renoir in “Suder,” sheep and horses in “Walk Me to the Distance,” and more horses and a mule in some of the other western based novels you’ve written.  You also have horses in the photo on “Zulus” and your mule (Thelonius Monk) on the jacket photo for “Glyph.”  What sort of animals do you currently have on your farm?  Do they all have names of artists of some sort?  What is it about animals that you enjoy sharing your time with?

Percival:

We have mules, horses, donkeys, dogs and a cat. My crow flew the coop. I like them because they are smartest people I know.

Dan:

I imagine having so many large animals keeps you very busy on your property – cleaning up after them, upkeep of stables and that sort of thing?

Percival:

Yep.

Dan:

My wife will hate seeing this question, as I’m sure she’s explained it to me before, but what exactly is the difference between a mule and a donkey?

Percival:

A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse.

Dan:

Do you prefer one breed of horse over the rest, and if so, why?

Percival:

I prefer mules because they’re as smart as dogs.

Dan:

Do you think it is your propensity to laborious work as well as writing that has led you to include having a kink in the shoulder of so many of your characters? Through my reading of your work, characters such as Alice Achitophel (“Zulus”), Mr. Lowe (“Walk Me to the Distance”), Lucien Bradley (short story ‘Wash’ from ”Big Picture”), and others all feel, or try to work out kinks in their shoulder.

Percival:

Ouch.

Dan:

Your next work was “For Her Dark Skin,” a re-working of the story of Medea.  A little less than a decade later you would produce “Frenzy,” a re-telling of the story of Dionysos.  Was it at all your hope that your readers might be led towards reading more of the source material after reading your versions?  Or perhaps was this a way for you to share what you love with an interest of your wife (a Professor of Ancient History at UC Riverside)?

Percival:

The shared interest is a bonus.  I had these novels planned for a long time.

Dan:

After this body of work, you churned out “The One That Got Away,” a children’s book.  What inspired you to write a book for children?  Did you know the illustrator, Dirk Zimmer, prior to working on the book?  Were you happy with his illustrations for your words?

Percival:

Babysitting.  Dirk Zimmer’s illustrations make the book.

Dan:

What has been described as your absurdist western, “God’s Country,” was published next.  Though there were a couple of references to race in “Suder,” and the story of Medea via “For Her Dark Skin” also touches upon it, “God’s Country” is the first of your works that seems to have a higher level of concentration in regards to race, and how members of a race view those of other races differently.  As a Black author, you have the expectation thrown at you that within your work, the element of race will be prevalent.  You’ve commented in the past that being a Black male in America has obviously helped influence your art.  You’ve also noticed that a White writer like a John Updike has obviously had his views formed by being a White male in America, but his work isn’t commented upon as such.  Did you intentionally avoid race as a topic in your earlier work to bring this issue to a front?

Percival:

Race comes up where it does.  I don’t wake up thinking about it.  And I hope you don’t.  Black people don’t sit around their dinner tables defining themselves in terms of white people, no matter how much George Bush and the Republican Guard or good liberals want tothink they do.

Dan:

In “God’s Country,” you create some words to show the dialect that is being spoken by Curt Marder, the buffoonish White protagonist.  An example is his version of suicide, being sewercide.  What are your thoughts on using such dialect in your writing? Should an author use such dialogue and creative spelling for all words that such a character would butcher, or just on occasion, to remind the reader of the manner the character is speaking?

Percival:

Whatever works.

Dan:

In 1996/97, you had three books published by Graywolf Press.  The short story collection “Big Picture,” and the novels “Frenzy,” and “Watershed.”  These were followed up by your 1999 novel “Glyph,” also published by Graywolf Press.  I believe that this was the first time since your second and third books that you were published by the same publisher more than once.  Do you consider yourself an author a publisher would have a difficult time working with?

Percival:

My first three books were with the same editor.  I’ve have done six with another.  I follow editors, not publishing houses.  I love literature and want to make my work good.  Editors can help with that, not presses.

Dan:

One of the stories in “Big Picture” was published in Callaloo as ‘Bull Does Nothing.’  In the story collection, you changed the name to ‘Turned Out.’ What caused the change in name?

Percival:

I liked the second one better.

Dan:

I was surprised to see how few of the stories (only three of the nine) had been previously published in literary journals.  Do you not send your stories out for individual publication, or do you have a large pile of rejection notices floating around (the hazard of the writing life)?

Percival:

I send stories out when some one asks for it.

Dan:

One of the themes that pops up frequently in “Big Picture,” that follows up on similar ideas in earlier novels such as “Suder,” “Zulus” and “Walk Me to the Distance,” is that of self-discovery.  Many of your characters go through a journey of sorts to gain this. Do you believe that you yourself are going through any self-discovery through your writings?

Percival:

I hope so.  If not I might as well quit.

Dan:

Does your early studying of Philosophy affect your writing?

Percival:

Of course.

Dan:

Somewhere around this time, you began having a book titled “The Body of Martin Aguilera” credited to you. While I’ve been able to find an ISBN number for the title – I have not been able to find proof of any copies in existence, nor any reviews.  Did this book actually get published?

Percival:

The book was published by Owl Creek Press.  Same press and editor as For Her Dark Skin.

Dan:

“Watershed,” the story of a hydrologist getting involved in a struggle over Native American Treaty rights has you going back and forth between the protagonists current life, his recent love life, his youth, and various tracts from actual Native American Treaties.  It is remarkably well blended – the various sections regarding Robert Hawke’s youth helping to explain why he would get involved, etc.  Did you write this book in the manner that it appears, or did you write the different aspects of his life separately and then choose how the blend the story?

Percival:

I don’t remember.  Wouldn’t tell you if I did.

Dan:

I also understand that you did a self-imposed studying of hydrology in order to properly get into Robert’s head.  How important do you feel such research is, and do you find yourself ever falling into enjoying the research a little too much, and not getting back to the writing?

Percival:

Research is everything.  You have to know enough to make it seem you didn’t have to do research.

Dan:

Robert is also a fly-fisherman.  He makes his own flies, as does a character in one of the short stories in “Big Picture.”  Is this something that you enjoy in your spare time?

Percival:

Yes.

Dan:

“Glyph,” a wildly inventive novel seems to have both a main plot, and then many wanderings through the protagonist’s mind in terms of literary theory.  While the plot alone should hold the attention of a reader – did you at all worry that the theory deconstruction might lose readers to the point of not skipping up to the main story again?

Percival:

I don’t think about the reader.

Dan:

I’ve read that you still consider this your finest work.  Why is that?

Percival:

It’s closest to my sense of humor; it was easiest for me.  My finest?  That’s not for me to say.

Dan:

Next came your novella, “Grand Canyon, Inc.”  Did you intend this to be a novella when you sat down to write it?

Percival:

Yes.

Dan:

Around that same time, you had seven poems published in the Spring 2001 issue of Cyclops Press.  Has poetry been something you’ve been writing all along, or was this a one-shot?

Percival:

I can’t write a poem to save my life.  I wrote the anatomical poems for Glyph, because the character wrote them.  They’re political poems.

Dan:

Your latest novel, “Erasure,” has been highly praised, and probably brought more attention to your work than any other work.  Based on the work itself, how ironic (or just plain sad) is it to walk into a Borders or Barnes & Noble and find it within the African-American Fiction shelves?

Percival:

To be fair, Barnes and Noble hasn’t done that.  Still I won’t go into one because it’s a chain.  Borders should be ashamed.  But I really don’t think or care much about that.  I often don’t like the weather, but hey.

Dan:

In a similar question – how close were you to taking the Stagg R. Lee approach and accepting Doubleday’s offer to begin their African-American imprint (Harlem Moon) with “Erasure”?

Percival:

Close enough.  I couldn’t bring myself to harm the Hurston/Wright Foundation.

Dan:

While writing the novel, were you at all afraid that the story within the novel, ‘My Pafology,’ was done too well?  It really was a quick and good read.

Percival:

No.

Dan:

This novel also has you doing something for the first time – creating a character extremely similar to yourself.  A Black author frequently accused of not being black enough, one who has written novels based on Greek gods, etc.  It seems a really odd move for an author who has stayed in the shadows of his work for nearly twenty years now.  At any point did you consider drastically changing things to avoid this situation?

Percival:

One has to be awfully literal-minded to really confuse the character with me.  It’s a novel.

Dan:

During your writing career, you have also taught on the university level at various institutions.  Do you find that this stimulates your work?

Percival:

Yes.  Hey, I get paid to sit in a room with smart young people; what can be bad about that?

Dan:

I see that you will be a fiction instructor at the Hassayaupa Institute for Creative Writing this summer. How do you differ your teaching style when you only have somebody for three to seven days and not a full term?

Percival:

You don’t bust somebody up in a week.  I’m always taken by the fact that anyone chooses to attend a workshop instead of going to tennis camp or Club Med.

Dan:

What benefits do you see for yourself when you attend/teach at one of these writing conferences?

Percival:

I always learn something.

Dan:

Is there a reason you’re not much of a smiler in your jacket photos?

Percival:

Who’s not smiling?

Dan:

In his book on writing (“Narrative Design”), Madison Smartt Bell uses your story, “Hear That Long Train Moan.”  Have you read his comments and notes, and if so, what is your assessment of them?

Percival:

Yes.  Madison’s a smart guy.  I didn’t I meant half of what he attributes to me, but I’ll claim it.

Dan:

He felt the story was an allegory for both God’s creation of the world, and an author’s creation of his/her work.  Do you feel any sort of godlike nature in having the ability to successfully create a work such as the novels or stories you’ve written?

Percival:

No.  Why would I think about something like that?

Dan:

You also paint, and in some of the short stories in “Big Picture,” have a character named Michael who is an artist.  He goes through a meltdown when one of his paintings is to be sold, wishing to keep it for himself.  Do you see this as a drawback of sorts for artists who work in the form of sculpture and paint? In order to share their work, they have to relinquish it, as opposed to authors, or musicians, who can keep their work with them, while sharing it.

Percival:

No.  Paint is expensive.  I need to sell one (or all) to paint for more paint.

Dan:

What do your readers have to look forward to in the near future?

Percival:

A new novel and a new collection of stories in spring 2004.

Dan:

Finally, if you were a character in “Fahrenheit 451,” what work(s) would you memorize for posterity?

Percival:

Too many.  They’d have to burn me instead.

Dan:

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer these questions, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate it.

Percival:

Sure thing.

MY BELIEFS

RENZO NOVATORE

(1920)

GOD: The creation of a sick fantasy. Inhabitant of senile and impotent brains. Companion and comforter of rancid spirits born to slavery. A pill for constipated minds. Marxism for the faint of heart.

HUMANITY: An abstract word with a negative connotation, long on power, short on truth. An obscene mask painted on the mean face of a shrewd vulgarian for the purpose of dominating the multitude of sentimentalist idiots and imbeciles.

COUNTRY: Penal servitude for the semi-intelligent, a cowshed of imbecility. A Circe who transforms her adoring fans into dogs and pigs. A prostitute for the master, a pimp of the foreigner. Child-eater, parent- slanderer and scoffer at heroes.

FAMILY: The denial of love, life and liberty.

SOCIALISM: Discipline, discipline; obedience, obedience; slavery and ignorance, pregnant with authority. A bourgeois body grotesquely fattened by a vulgar christian creature. A medley of fetishism, sectarianism and cowardice.

ORGANIZATIONS,            LEGISLATIVE            BODIES            AND UNIONS: Churches for the powerless. Pawnshops for the stingy and weak. Many join to live parasitically off the backs of their card-carrying simpleton colleagues. Some join to become spies. Others, the most sincere, join to end up in jail from where they can observe the mean-spiritedness of all the rest.

SOLIDARITY: The macabre altar used by capable comedians of all sort to display their priestly talent for reciting masses. The beneficiaries pay nothing less than 100% humiliation.

FRIENDSHIP: Fortunate are those who have drunk from its chalice without having their souls offended or poisoned. If one such person exists, I urge them to send me their photograph. I’m sure to look upon the face of an idiot.

LOVE: Deception of the flesh and damage to the spirit. Disease of the soul, atrophy of the brain, weakening of the heart, corruption of the senses, poetic lies from which one gets ferociously inebriated two or three times a day in order to consume this precious but stupid life more quickly. And yet I would prefer to die of love. It’s the only swindler, after Judas, that can kill with a kiss.

MAN: A filthy paste of servitude, tyranny, fetishism, fear, vanity and ignorance. The greatest offense one can commit against an ass is to call it a man.

WOMAN: The most brutal of enslaved beasts. The greatest victim shuffling on earth. And, after man, the most responsible for her problems. I’d be curious to know what goes through her mind when I kiss her.

Primitive green

G Sampath

Sunday, December 20, 2009 1:00 IST

John Zerzan first shot into celebrity philosopher status in 1995 after the New York Times featured him in 1995 as a supporter of the Unabomber’s anti-technology doctrine. He has since become a leading light of the primitivist movement in the US. In an exclusive interview with DNA, he explains why modern civilization is fundamentally anti-human, ‘green’ technology is ‘psycho’ and Stone Age is the way to go.

American philosopher John Zerzan’s thesis is simple: civilization is pathological, and needs to be dismantled. Zerzan’s radical critique of civilization, laid out in books such as Elements Of Refusal (1988), Future Primitive (1994), and Running On Emptiness (2002) draws on anthropological research to argue that domestication of nature and domestication of humans go hand in hand. And this is accomplished primarily through technology. According to him, the dystopia of the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix trilogy is already here: the technological-industrial ‘machine’ is already running the world, a world where individual humans are but insignificant little cogs with barely any autonomy. No single human being – neither the most powerful politician, nor the most powerful businessman – has the power to rein in the system. They necessarily have to follow the inexorable logic of what has been unleashed. He believes that the climate change summit in Copenhagen is a joke, and environmentalists are too superficial in their critiques to make a difference. In an exclusive interview, the California-based Zerzan, who was in Mumbai recently for a lecture tour, talks about why going back to the primitivism of the Stone Age is the only meaningful ‘green’ alternative.

Your work has been described as ‘anti-civilisational’. Are you seriously against civilisation? Of course. Anti-civilisational thought draws attention to the nightmare that’s unfolding right now. It asks some basic questions that haven’t been asked. It tries to change the subject away from the manoeuvring on the surface of dominant systems, in favour of going to the roots of it, and posing alternative directions, alternative projects, on a very basic level. I mean, here we are, as a species, and we can’t breathe the air. What more do you have to say?

You mean you’re being literal when you say we have to go back to the Stone Age? Absolutely, otherwise it’s just talk. We have to dismantle this whole mess, and start thinking practically, start regaining the skills we once had as people on this planet. We’re just becoming more and more dependant on technology, which drains everything away – it drains community away, it really drains experience away, it drains meaning away.

So how does one get back to the primitive way of life? The first step is to have a chance to raise questions like these – beyond the fraud of politics and parties and bullshit that never really challenge anything but only guarantee that things get worse, by avoiding the primary stuff. Nothing’s ever going to change unless there is a chance for people to become engaged on a level of discussion that is meaningful, that really does question this path of technology-led ‘progress’, and why we are on this path, and what drives this.

So what brought us to this path in the first place? I would say it goes all the way back to division of labour, domestication, and the rise of symbolic culture.

What about division of labour? It is with division of labour, and the consequent growth of inequality and estrangement from the earth and from each other that you see, coincidentally or not, the emergence of symbolic culture. Symbolic culture dates back to before domestication and agriculture, but it established the ground for domestication to occur. The rise of division of labour in primitive society also marks the beginning of stratified society, and it appears to emerge fairly suddenly in the Upper Paleolithic era [45,000 to 10,000 years ago] just before domestication.

Without symbolic culture and language, would we be still be human? Well, if you define it that way! Today ‘being human’ means, very symbolic, if not totally symbolic, although that’s been pushed back, too. It was thought that about 60,000 years ago, you had homo sapiens sapiens [the modern humans]. But today the consensus is they appeared 200,000 years ago. Here we’re already moving back out of the symbolic, which is interesting, as it has implications.

What kind of implications? For example, we define intelligence as our skill in manipulating symbols, but that’s not the only way, and why do we define it that way? Because ours is a fully symbolic culture, and to get around in it and achieve things in it, you have to do these things: you have to know the math and everything else. But in a world where you don’t have that, intelligence means something else, and there is obviously intelligence before the symbolic. Given that we weren’t symbolic a million years ago, and Thomas Wynn and other anthropologists say we had the same level of cognitive development then as we do today, it certainly wasn’t applied to symbolic projects or symbolic culture – there is no evidence whatsoever that early humans applied their intelligence to symbolic projects. So how can you say we’re not human unless we’re symbolic?

All that is great and grand about humans, would they have been possible without symbolic culture? That’s just the dominant way of looking at it. For example, if you look at art, religion and so forth as compensations and consolations for what is lost in modern civilisation, then it doesn’t seem so fabulous any more. In fact, its giving us less and less I think.

What is this thing that you say we have lost in modern civilisation? Community is one thing, and sharing. That’s the text book orthodoxy of pre-historic human society: their number one value was sharing: food sharing, and anti-hierarchy. And you see that in a few – there are more than a few here in India – forager societies that still exist. These are things that we have lost. Take community: there is no community. Today it’s just mass society – people dispersed and isolated and stressed out and relying on drugs more and more and that’s why communal values are disappearing. Because if you don’t have community, where will the communal values come from? That’s why things are falling apart.

That’s quite possibly the reason why early humans didn’t want to change things. They didn’t want to change the existing technology: the stone tools, for example. When the archaeologists now say that for a million years they didn’t change it despite having the intelligence to do so, what explains that? But then, if you’ve got a good thing, why change it?

But isn’t the rise of civilization just a natural expression and progression of human nature? Well, if you want to talk about human nature – and people who are having a good time are always bringing that up – well, what’s the human nature? That which obtained for a million years, or the last 9,000 years? One is a second of time, compared to the existence of homo sapiens.

What about the Hobbesian view of human nature – that without culture, life would be nasty, brutish and short? The Hobbesian view has been discredited completely. Any Anthropology I course tells you that. It’s the textbook thing: among primitive humans, there was no organised violence, there was sharing, women were not objectified, people worked very, very little, people actually lived longer than was thought. The American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’ book Stone Age Economics (1974) is the single best single source of information on the original affluent society: people’s needs were met, they were not poor, even if they don’t earn anything, but we – our needs are never met even though we fill up the place with stuff.

Then why did Hobbes’ view gain such wide currency? Because it suited the system perfectly. It’s the basic ideology for civilization. In fact, people have been told this all along from the very first cities, the walled cities: don’t go out there, you’ll die, nature’s wild, and it’s a good thing you are here, with the army and the temples to protect you. And that’s what we’re told right now, you can’t leave -people are scared. When this all collapses, people with no skills, no orientation to the earth, they won’t last. But I think people feel it. In the US, there is a great deal of anxiety and fearfulness – even if it’s not allowed to be articulated publicly – over the question of, could this all collapse? More people think it’s a matter of when than if.

Many believe sustainable or green technology can save us from impending ecological collapse. I just saw a billboard on my way here, it was for steel. It said, “We make green steel” and “we’re contributing to the ecosystem” or something like that. I mean, how insane is that? A f***ing steel mill is green?! That’s just outrageously psycho! Here, as in the US, with all this talk about ‘sustainable’, and ‘green’ – the idea is that if you keep using those words, you are trying to tell people, “Well, actually that’s okay, we’re thinking about it, we’re concerned, we’re working on it” – all that shit. Well, its just lies. You just keep on greasing the wheels with it, and hoping people will go along with it, a little while longer.

What are your thoughts on the Copenhagen summit? Its cosmetic stuff, but they won’t get even that out of it, because the rich nations are blocking it. More than a decade after the Kyoto accord, things have not only gotten worse, they have become worse than they had imagined it would in terms of the speed of change.

Many believe that technology’s benefits outweigh its drawbacks, like medical science, for example. If you were to become ill, would you not go to a hospital? Sure, I’m not going to say, oh no, I won’t go to a hospital. I don’t have a choice – what am I going to do? But we’re just trapped in it, and we’re just supposed to forget that it is technology that has created nearly all the diseases in the first place. So they say more technology will solve our problems, and you know, and its just getting worse, it’s not getting better. Medical technology is the strongest case that can be made; but the simple fact is that it all depends on industry – depends on the factories, and the mines -all your surgical equipment and monitors and what not – obvious as that is, it’s always left out of the discussion. If there is a discussion, it is carefully limited to how do we best use technology?

So, are we living in a culture of denial? Oh yeah, massive denial, I don’t know how to compare countries, but the US certainly is on top of the list. But it is an enforced denial too: if people can’t even think about an alternative, then what are you left with? You don’t want to see how bad things are, don’t want to meditate on how bad its going to be for your kids, in a matter of a few years. It’s a protective thing, it’s not healthy, but it’s understandable, as it helps you cope with the system.

But isn’t technology essentially neutral? Technology has values embedded in it. By technology, I mean systems of technology, as opposed to tools. There is a certain distancing in modern technology, a certain coldness, a certain kind of standardization, inflexibility, and dependence on experts is another of its values. But with a simple tool, you can more easily imagine a state of rough equality, where people are not dependant on experts. That’s the best way to read society: look at its technology, and you can tell what its dominant value is.

To take an example, in Indian urban society at least, cell phone technology has really taken off in recent times. What does it say about this society, according to you? Well, instead of the face-to-face, we trade it for getting to be on the phone, all the time, often over nothing. Yes, we can talk to friends a thousand miles away, but we don’t know our neighbours, we don’t even want to know our neighbours, we’re trained to seal ourselves off, and the technology helps us that way; we screen out everything, and pretend we are really in touch with people, when we’re more isolated than ever. That’s an easy measurement – how many people live alone, how many have fewer friends, do people visit each other less? – there is an entire sociological list of things. And that’s what you get in the techno culture. So there are certainly values there with mobile phone technology, not to mention the value of the likelihood of getting brain cancer, and poisoning the earth when they go into the land.

You don’t just stop with technology. You say that human reason itself is not value-neutral.
The Frankfurt School of thinkers came up with that, about instrumental reason. Reason isn’t value-free. It could be a reason that pretends it’s objective and scientific but it’s actually inclined toward being a tool of domination. It’s just an abstraction to say, ‘reason’. You need to ask what kind of reason it is.

How is non-instrumental reason different from instrumental reason? Non-instrumental reason has an awareness of what the dominant reason, if you will, is really involved in, what is its project. We don’t look at the hidden assumptions all that often. For example, we take domestication for granted, and it’s nothing but more control and more domination at deeper levels, colonising nature at deeper levels. For instance, GM foods and cloning and nanotechnology – they drive domestication even more, down to the molecular or atomic level. But if I weren’t operating in the sphere of domestication, I wouldn’t be using reason as an instrument here, because, why would you want to control nature? Pre-domestication, you take what nature gives, and that’s great, you don’t devise all these ways to fence it off, and breed what you want, and try to figure out new levels of control.But this is the logic today, and it’s certainly not value-free.

People would argue that all this technology and domestication and mastery over nature are necessary to feed an expanding population. Well, various leftists, including Noam Chomsky, say that too, except that the unnaturally high population is related to the civilisation project. That’s when the population started going up. Overpopulation is a symptom more than anything else. Population would start going down if you unplug things like domestication.

But is it really possible to do that today? To unplug technology and the mindset it has created? Well, it’s not like pulling the plug, or let’s do this tomorrow. It could not happen that way, as the population is very high. But you could go in that direction, start figuring out the way to undo it, as a conscious project. That would be more appealing than the prospect of all these people in entire blocs who will starve to death when the power goes out, because they don’t have any skills, and then there could be food riots and then what? It’s not a pretty picture. I think the responsible way is to think through that and start getting equipped, and turning that around. Chomsky and other people call us genocidists. Well, if anybody is genocidist, quite frankly, it’s them, because they don’t want to have any discussion of things like this. And it’s weird that they aren’t more concerned than they are about all these millions of people in megalopolises all around the world – they are screwed if there is a crash. Nobody is allowed to think about it or even put it out there.

How can any such change come about unless there is change in policy at the level of the state and government, where all key decisions get made? No, that’s a dead end, that’s the trap of the system. They want us to keep playing that shit, you know, keep on voting, which really means, vote for the slightly less awful person than the other. That guarantees that we’re stuck in this shit. No, no, that can’t be the answer, that just enables, legitimizes, and reproduces the lie of democracy. If we keep on doing that, then there really is no hope. The first and easiest thing is to drop out of that – don’t vote, don’t play the game the system sets up for us to play.

So you say the state has to be kept out of it? Completely. You can’t get rid of civilization by recourse to the state. You can look at it historically: when and why does the state appear? Or cities, or any institution, starting from division of labour and domestication. The state and all those things are part of the prison that holds it together.

What do you think of work? This is another thing Marshall Sahlins pointed out: the more symbolic culture there is, the more work there is. And it’s true. We are working more and more, I mean, what happened to the promise of technology? None of these things have worked out the way the way they were proclaimed. Now, in the US, if you take a couple, they are both working; often each is working more jobs than one; all stressed out, they’ve got no time for their kids, and all the rest of it.

Is there a way of organising life that does not revolve around production and consumption? Production and consumption is the paradigm of a mass society: mass production means mass consumption which means mass culture, which means mass media, mass everything, and the ‘massified’ world, becomes less healthy. That’s not the way to go, and I think that’s a reasonable statement.

How was your meeting with the Unabomber? I visited him when he was in county jail in Sacramento. We have the same ideas, but not the same tactics. The media are always trying to say, you agree with the Unabomber, don’t you?!! But yes, the thesis that technology is autonomous and decides pretty much what happens is true. It’s even truer especially when we let it go without even treating it as an issue.

So, what really happened to Al Columbia? Simple, really—he created some comics, for Fantagraphics, did illustration work for the likes of The New York Times, collaborated on with folks like Archer Prewitt, recorded some music, and did design work on The Postal Service’s 2003 debut, Give Up. Oh, and he also recently launched a Website, just in case you’re have some trouble keeping track of all that.

Al Columbia has kept fairly busy for the past two decades, though many people seemingly have some difficulty accepting this fact, judging from the enigmatic air that seems to surround his works in the online community. Maybe it’s dark nature of much of his work—evidenced most recently by the strips that comprise his new book, Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days. Perhaps it’s the artist’s self-describe concentration problem, which has hampered his ambitions of creating longer works.

Columbia can’t say for sure how the notion initially arose, though he’s more than happy to discuss the subject—and nearly anything else, for that matter, including his music, meditation, and his thoughts on Top Shelf’s upcoming re-release of Eddie Campbell’s Alec stories.

Are you doing a lot of interviews, these days?

I did one, but not really. But I guess I’ll do them as they come. Not yet, anyway.

Are people not really asking, yet? Or are you choosy?

I think it’s more a case of your being only the second person to e-mail me. I guess it’s the early stages of it.

Do you think people might consider you difficult to approach about some things?

Possibly, yeah, because I don’t really get asked to do a lot of these. I never really have, either. Which I guess could either be a good or bad thing. I don’t really know. I’ve noticed that. I don’t really understand why, but I think people might have a difficulty approaching me, sure.

There was that whole long running thread on The Comics Journal message board—you seem to almost have this air of mystery about you, at least on Internet.

[Laughs] Yeah, sure. I’ve heard people say that. I’m not sure why. It’s a big mystery to me.

Do you think it might stem from the fact that you don’t put out a book every year?

Possibly. I guess so. I guess for most people, their primary goal as a cartoonist is to publish their work. And certainly that’s the case for me, but in all honesty, it’s kind of been a matter sticking to one thing. I have enormous difficulty sticking to one thing, but all of those vignettes in [Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days] were all attempts make a full-fledged comic and do things right—to put out comics regularly. But it just never really happened that way for me. After a while, I just stopped caring about publishing at all. I just figured I would, eventually. I guess when I loved something enough.

Short of making a film, there are few art forms that require as much concentration for as long as a comic book.

I’m always amazed, and hats off to anyone who can do it regularly and do amazing stuff. I’m really always impressed by that. I just don’t have the concentration. I’m hopelessly distracted all the time. It’s weird, there’s such a silence that occurs when you cartoon. It’s almost like a meditation. Sometimes that can be a strange place to be, so I tend to like to have as many distractions as possible when I’m doing it. just a sort of light fuzz of radio and television. Just to get rid of that strange feeling that occurs. Anyone who can just draw all of the time, I’m amazed by, and I know some people who do, and can’t understand it.

I used to do it all of the time, too, but now I can’t remember doing it [laughs]. Now I don’t really draw, so I don’t know what it’s like to do it all of the time.

Do you just not enjoy the process the way you used to?

No, I just really have to like it a lot. And it’s got to eat at me first, and then I’ll sit down and work on it. But I used to just work every day for hours and hours and hours, and that’s all I really did. Now I don’t so much. I don’t have the focus like in used to. So I have to be more focused about when I’m going to sit down and draw a comic, because it produces such strange feelings. At least in me. I know some people really like that quiet and meditation. But to me it gets eerie, and I just want to get out of there.

Do feel yourself entering that space most of the times that you draw?

Yeah. These days, sure. It’s a full process of just doing a little bit here and a little bit there. It gets to be, at some point, after about four hours or so, I’m in an eerie place. I have to get back to normal. I go spend time with people. I think it could be because I drew so much for so long. I had to step back, or was forced to by something unseen.

Aside from that word “eerie,” that state you’re describing is the sort of thing people invest a lot of time and money into achieving—that meditative mind state.

Right, right. It has its flipsides, I guess. At least for me. I guess I do other forms of meditation. I work in other mediums. I’m always working on something, but I find I complete other things a lot easier. I wrap them up, and I’m done. Comics are such commitment. It’s a little concept that can take you a year. You’re working on the same idea for a really long time.

Comics and writing in generally, you’re sort of like a boy detective. You can go down all of these avenues. Comics you can really start to hallucinate. It’s almost like you’re watching something happen. It’s like watching a movie, and it can be heart-breaking when that gets snatched away and you can’t get back to. You just kind of put it aside. It’s little windows, and I’ve only been lucky enough to sustain that for a few times with regards to publishing. I can’t imagine ever devoting that amount of time to a comic again. Although you never know.

Are there too many places to go, when you sit down to write a story?

Yeah. You just end up with so many ideas you just don’t know what to pick from. Or you’ve got to find some way to put them all in. it’s a weird thing—you just never know where to start, I suppose. You can keep backing up. You’re just constantly rearranging chapters, and it can end up this bizarre mess.

Now that the book is out in the world, do you feel happy with the final product?

Yeah, I am, actually. It all came together quite unexpectedly. It was an easy, fun experience, putting it together—well, not easy. Sequencing the pages took like five or six months. And the heavy lifting, the editing, that was the hard work. But in the end, it went off in a cool way. It felt right. And then I saw the book and I was happy with it—or as happy as I could be, I suppose.

Given how incomplete much of the material is in the book, do you feel like it reads like a cohesive work?

Um, I wouldn’t say—certainly there’s no narrative to the book. I think it’s one of those things that’s more stream of consciousness. There’s no structural narrative. And if there is—if people are getting that out of it, that was entirely unintentional. If there’s some primal or subconscious narrative to it—or a historical vibe—that was produced, I would say, almost accidentally. I just really wanted to find some interesting way to glue these pieces together. So I just started with page one and then just moved on to what seemed like the next one—it’s almost like recording layers or a mixtape. That’s all I did.

It just presents glimpses into the lives of these characters. I guess if it forms a bigger picture, then great.

How much do you know about the lives of these two characters?

Well, you know, funny enough—I suppose when first started drawing Pim & Francie, I just drew it as a goof, to draw my girlfriend and I at the time. I was just trying to draw us at characters. A lot of it was the spirit at the time. It was a girl I was with for a very long time. we have a child together. Francie, I suppose, has always been based on her, and the boy character would have, in some ways, been based on me. But they became their own characters at some point, I guess. They’re just kind of automatically there. So it just started as this fun kind of goofing on my girlfriend and I and our relationship. And then it just kind of grew from there. But some of it’s kind of autobiographical, I guess.

Given the ambiguity of the characters, do you think they might not have translated into a graphic novel, had you sat down and set out to write one?

Possibly, yeah. I wouldn’t know now. You never know. A friend of mine basically convinced me that these pieces would look really neat appearing the way that they did. He’s a really good friend and he’s a really great artist and he convinced me that the pieces would look good like that. he said, “I know you want to finish that, but you should just go this way with it.” I got into it, and I really loved it.

I don’t know if that answers your question. I guess I should say that I don’t really know. I have yet to finish a Pim & Francie story, really.

So, when you working on the pieces that were included in the book, you already knew that they wouldn’t be completed?

No, no. at the time, all of those pieces were meant to be completed. I really wanted to make a comic book out of each and every one of those. I just didn’t have the patience to stick to one thing. I suppose I’d get really excited about another idea. I was just rapidly going through a lot of ideas, instead of just sticking to one. It bugged me out, too. I really wanted to put out a comic. But after a while, I just really stopped caring. I stopped caring about publishing any of it. it didn’t matter. But most of the efforts were intended to be comics.

Do you like the raw look of the uncompleted pencils in the book?

Yeah, I do now. It took me a while to come around to liking that. It took a few years, and gradually I came to prefer it almost. It just seemed a bit cooler. I liked it. it just seemed like it stopped at the right point. And whenever I tried to finish one, it just seemed like I was ruining it. They aged well, I guess.

Do you feel like your new found appreciation for that aesthetic is going to affect your art, moving forward?

No, no. Well, I don’t know. I never know what’s going to happen. it might encourage me to finish something now, expand upon the idea. It could encourage me to go the other way, though. The book just kind of happened. It was a weird thing that just kind of came together. I never expected it to end up the way it did. So I don’t know if I could ever repeat the process or even try. It’s just kind of its own thing.

Do you feel like you’ve effectively closed the book on Pim and Francie?

No, I’ll probably still work on them. Like I said, you never know—I may finish something, someday. It’s kind of a slow process. But effectively I suppose so, yeah. For all intents and purposes. For a while, anyway.

In the materials that accompany the book, Fantagraphics made a big point of not referring to Pim & Francie as a sketchbook. Was that at your insistence?

I don’t believe so. I think we all just sort of realized that it was a unique thing, because a lot of them aren’t sketches, really. We didn’t know what the hell it was, really. I didn’t know if anyone would get it or like it. but I knew it wasn’t a sketchbook. It doesn’t seem to be one to me. They seem more like—while unfinished, they still seem fairly finished to me.

I think it would be an insult to people who don’t really sketch too well. Because I don’t really sketch. If I put a sketchbook together, it sure wouldn’t look like that. I don’t remember if that was a conscious decision on our part or just kind of like, “oh, this is neat, how the hell do we talk about this?” I think it was more that we just didn’t know how to describe it ourselves.

People are calling a lot of things “sketchbooks” these days. They put out all of those Crumb sketchbooks and the two books by Chris Ware. It’s a pretty tenuous line at this point.

I suppose so. Those are amazing sketchbooks. That’s what I mean. The Chris Ware sketchbooks are amazing. I couldn’t produce a sketchbook like that in a million years. I just can’t understand how he does those amazing drawings. And the purity of it is really cool. Again, I guess I just don’t have that kind of patience. That’s a lot of drawing.

Pim & Francie is a bit of a disturbing book. Are you ever surprised at what comes out when you sit down to draw?

Well, general thoughts will disturb me, sure. And sometimes drawing them will disturb me even more. I’ll tell myself I don’t need to do it, because it gives me strange feelings or makes me feel bad about my life. I get kind of superstitious. “if I draw this, maybe something bad will happen.” there’s a lot of that with Pim & Francie. I remember yanking out a lot because I felt like I might go too far or make something weird happen. I will say that. That was a real big thing with me while doing a lot of those pieces—just getting freaked out that I might make something bad happen. Not every single case, though.

Do you have any specific examples of something that caused you to pull the reigns back in?

I suppose anything involving the Francie character. Pim can get chopped up all day long—but even there it got a little weird, because it felt too close to something personal. But it was also this protective feeling over the Francie character. But again, they kind of take on their own lives, and at a certain point, there’s a vibe where it’s okay to chop them up and you know nothing bad’s going to happen. but certain narrative moments seem too creepily real. So I guess I stopped working on them and backed off a little.

So it was always this back and forth—a push and pull with that spooky vibe all the time. not so much these days, but I guess I was a little more superstitious about that stuff.

Is it the fact that they’re based on real people?

Yeah. I don’t know the exact chemical percentage. They’re kind of their own thing, but at the same time based on real events and real moments.

So there’s a fear that, if it closely mimics someone’s life, then reality might imitate art?

Yeah, definitely. There is a point where, for me it starts to feel a bit strange. I really do admire people who do autobiographical comics. It’s really tough to and stick to, without your life becoming completely surreal. And I think that’s the allure of it. your actual life does become a lot like what you’re drawing. You can’t tell the difference sometimes, I suppose. It’s very strange. Everything becomes material.

But I can definitely understand the need to do autobiographical work—or at least the want to, for a short period of time. You don’t have to do it forever. But at some point it is fun to do.

Does the fact that you’re starting with surreal material, does it add to or take away surreality from the experience, when connected with your real life?

I does reflect everything more surreally, I suppose, in some way. but there are ways to soften the edges of reality through the cartoon. It’s obvious far more surreal as cartoon characters. But doing the cartooning and getting into those worlds for me over a period of time, now and again confusing or world. It’s not like every time you draw it’s a weird experience, but it can get like that. I suppose everyone’s experienced that.

The strips draw heavily from classic Max Fleischer-era cartoons, but there are a lot of non-cartoony side effects in there. The one I keep coming back to is the one where they’re jitterbugging. He throws her up in the air and she snaps her neck and lands in a pool of her own blood. He has to dispose of the body. It’s not very “cartoony.”

That’s very much based on a real fear I had of somehow causing the death of someone I love. I guess there is a certain consequence to some of it. I guess in some ways, if I really wanted to be weird, I could say they were biblical. Little biblical moments. Little timeless tales or something.

I’ve always liked books like The Martian Chronicles, where it’s all of these stories all in the same weird little world. non-linear stories. I guess in some ways I’m glad that I didn’t finish all of these pieces. In some ways I’m glad about the way it came out in the end.

So you do feel that there’s a cohesive world at play here?

Sure, yeah. I guess these are little dreams or glimpses into the world. there’s something going on with the sequencing. But if anything, i guess it’s just a glimpse into the world. that world can be expanded upon, but I guess it’s up to me to actually finish a piece. I would love to do a full Pim & Francie comic, and maybe some day I will, because there’s a much bigger world than what’s in those pages. I would love to still work on it, but not as frenzied and crazy as I used to.

When you’re putting a book out there arranged in a certain way, you’re really opening it up for people to read into it.

Absolutely, yeah. I suppose so. But that wasn’t a major intent. I was kind of surprised that so much of that occurred. When people read it, I looked at it differently. I looked at it differently based on certain reactions from friends. Things I never thought were in there. People seem to be getting something personal—at least I’ve noticed that with friends. There’s some sort of an emotional core that’s struck through the book. I wouldn’t have been able to plan that, though. I’m not that smart. I just tried to put the pages in order. Whatever resonated, resonated.

But yeah, I’ve heard a few people say that it makes your imagination take things off in different directions. I guess that’s neat. That’s cool.

Now that you’ve had the proper distance from Pim & Francie, are you discovering things in the book that you didn’t initially intend to be in there?

No. I’ve had these pages so long and I’ve seen them so many times that I just look at the book and see printing errors. It’s definitely going to take a long time before I can pick it up and enjoy it on any level. I’m just looking at all of the technical aspects of the production at this point. I haven’t really been able to ingest it at all, at this point. It’s impossible.

Do you think the things that others have read into it will ultimately affect your own feelings about the characters?

Um, no. probably not. I don’t know, actually. It’s hard to say. Maybe. Maybe on reflecting on a certain theme or adding to it, they’ll give me a really good idea or something. You never know. That’s what’s interesting. They could help sharpen an idea that was already there that I didn’t see that clearly. It’s possible. It depends on how much attention I pay to all that. There is a big story I’ve written for the characters, over the years, and I supposed there are details—or subtleties that can be sharpened up. I don’t know.

Has the girfriend—or maybe ex-girlfriend—who inspired the Francie character seen the book?

Oh yeah. Yeah. We’re no longer a couple, but we’re still really good friends—we have a child together. She loves it. She thinks it’s great. And she was, in a lot of ways, a big part of it. Her spirit really does run through it really strongly. The one thing I did notice, looking through it, is that the Pim character is always following her. She’s always the one marching forward. That was the one thing I noticed that I never noticed actually doing the book.

What’s next for you?

Right now I’m working on all kinds of stuff. I’m doing short films and building sound for those right now. I am working on a Pim and Francie, but I just get a panel done every few days. It’s a short process of drawing, but it seems to be getting done, slowly but surely, which is a novel idea. Just keeping the pace with that. We’ll see what happens. It’ll be a good winter, I know that. it seems like we’re heading into a good winter, in terms of working and drawing and stuff.

Are you past the point where you feel able to collaborate with people on work?

No. I collaborate all the time with people. I’m constantly working on something with somebody in different ways.

Are there certain projects that you just can’t hand over to other people?

In terms of publishing?

In terms of, say, an unfinished Pim and Francie strip.

Oh, probably not with the Pim and Francie stuff. I couldn’t imagine somebody else drawing them. I guess there is a lot I couldn’t let out of my sight, yeah. Right now, anyway. I’m working on a few stories. I find these stories that I’ve written that might fit a certain cartoonist’s style. It’s not something I would ever draw, but it’s something I want to see done, so I’m working with a few cartoonists on what’s almost a picture book. Strange little children’s stuff. But I guess the Pim and Francie stuff is nearer and dearer to my heart. I can’t imagine letting someone else do that. it would feel too weird.

Who are you working with on those picture books?

Jeremy Smith, he’s a cartoonist who lives in Texas. And I’m working with Jonathan Adams of City Cyclops. I believe he and I will finish a project at some point.

He posted a really interesting interaction on his blog.

Oh yeah, that was fun. It was like three years ago, we mentioned that we were doing this thing.

Was that a play on this idea that you have trouble finishing works?

Sure, yeah. And he knows me pretty well. Yeah, I guess it’s truer than I’d like it to be, maybe [laughs].

People no doubt piece information together about you based on what they find online. Do you think anyone took that seriously?

That’s the funniest thing, that anyone would think it wasn’t a joke. It’s all a mystery. People are funny, I guess.

Do you enjoy having something of an enigmatic presence?

Well, you know, from day to day, I don’t feel very enigmatic. Everyone who know me knows pretty well. I don’t really walk around being Mr. Mysterious. Just the opposite, actually. I’d prefer a little more mystery in my life. I guess I can’t get deep enough underground, at some points. I want to dig a hole under my house. Just get a real basement going, and chill out under there. I don’t know if I enjoy it or not—it doesn’t really manifest itself for me. I hear about it, and just get kind of annoyed about it.

So you don’t follow the message board stuff?

Not religiously, but it is something that you dip your head into, every now and again. You just kind of see where it goes. Sometimes it can be kind of weirdly infuriating. It can be weird and strange. “How dare they?” But in other cases you just learn to laugh about it. But if it’s there and it’s about you, it can be hard not to look. But actually there’s a lot of stuff good and bad that I just don’t pay attention to.

What are your thoughts on the rerelease of Eddie Campbell’s [Alec]?

Oh, I don’t really care. It’s Eddie Campbell, you know? It’s his book. It’s his thing. I don’t really think about it much.

Did it affect you when it first came out?

No, not really. I don’t really care. I mean, it doesn’t really affect my every day life. It’s not like, “oh my god, Eddie Campbell put me in his book.” I don’t care—it’s Eddie Campbell. What do I care? It might affect me if I actually knew the guy. I might be offended. But it’s kind of hilarious.

Did you read it? Did you like it as a book?

Yeah, it’s good. I don’t know. I mean, in some ways it was funny. I liked it about as much as I like anything. I’m really terrible at watching movies and reading books—I don’t pay too much attention to anything. I just don’t have the attention span.

Is music still a big part of your life?

Yeah, in a very unpredictable way. You never know when you’re going to record something. You just do it, and if it seems cool, you play it for people. But it’s this part of my life that I’ve been doing. I’ve been doing it forever. I kind of can’t not do it.

–Brian Heater

Religion for Radicals:
An Interview with Terry Eagleton
by Nathan Schneider

Literary critic Terry Eagleton discusses his new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, which argues that “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens “buy their rejection of religion on the cheap.”  He believes that, in these controversies, politics has been an unacknowledged elephant in the room.

Nathan Schneider: Rather than focusing on “believers” or “atheists,” which are typically the categories that we hear about in the new atheist debates, you write about “a version of the Christian gospel relevant to radicals and humanists.”  Who are these people?  Why do you choose to address them?

Terry Eagleton: I wanted to move the arguments beyond the usual, rather narrow circuits in order to bring out the political implications of these arguments about God, which hasn’t been done enough.  We need to put these arguments in a much wider context.  To that extent, in my view, radicals and humanists certainly should be in on the arguments, regardless of what they think about God.  The arguments aren’t just about God or just about religion.

NS: Are you urging people to go to church, or to read the Bible, or simply to acknowledge the historical connections between, say, Marxism and Christianity?

TE: I’m certainly not urging them to go to church.  I’m urging them, I suppose, to read the Bible because it’s very relevant to radical political concerns.  In many ways, I agree with someone like Christopher Hitchens that most religion is fairly hideous and purely ideological.  But I think that Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are gravely one-sided about the issue.  There are other potentials in the gospel and in the Christian tradition which are, or should be, of great interest to radicals, and radicals haven’t sufficiently recognized that.  I’m not trying to convert anybody, but I am trying to show them that there is something here which is in a certain interpretation far more radical than most of the mainstream political discourses that we hear at the moment.

NS: You’re a literary scholar, and you’re talking about religion.  Is religion literature?  Are you proposing that religion become a resource for politics to draw from in the same way as any other literary canon might be?

TE: No, not at all.  I think the whole movement to see religion as literature is a way of diffusing its radical content.  It’s actually a way of evading certain rather unpleasant realities that it insists on confronting us with.  One of the things that happened in the 19th century was that culture — literary and other kinds of culture — tried to stand in for religion, and there was a lot of talk about religion as poetry and religion as myth.  That was an attempt to shy away from some of the more uncomfortable challenges of religion when taken rather more seriously.

NS: And those are the political challenges?

TE: Largely.  Or, if you like, the ethical-political.  They were forgotten, or sidelined, and Christianity in particular became a piece of poetry or a piece of mythology.  There’s a lot of poetry and mythology in the Bible, to be sure, but it interacts with other kinds of elements, and that’s what I was stressing.

NS: Do you think that these traditions need to be radically reinterpreted for the modern, secular world?  Thomas Aquinas is mentioned in your book, but so are — perhaps even more — Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.  Is the religion you’re defending closer to that of the medieval scholastics or to these more recent figures?

TE: I think that the Christian gospel always stands in need of contemporary reinterpretation.  Theologians have to determine what kind of discourse, what contemporary way of talking, can best articulate its particular concerns.  There should be controversy and debate.  While Marx and Freud and others are relevant to the contemporary interpretation of Christianity, that doesn’t mean one rejects tradition and simply concentrates on the present.  The present is made out of tradition and out of history.  What I’m offering in my book is what I take to be — although it’s couched very often in terms of Marx or Freud or radicalism in general — a fairly traditional interpretation of scripture.

NS: Though of course the Christianity you present doesn’t sound like a lot of the Christianity one hears in the public sphere, especially in the United States.

TE: I think partly that’s because a lot the authentic meanings of the New Testament have become ideologized or mythologized away.  Religion has become a very comfortable ideology for a dollar-worshipping culture.  The scandal of the New Testament — the fact that it backs what America calls the losers, that it thinks the dispossessed will inherit the kingdom of God before the respectable bourgeois — all of that has been replaced, particularly in the States, by an idolatrous version.  I’m presently at a university campus where we proudly proclaim the slogan “God, Country, and Notre Dame.”  I think they have to be told, and indeed I have told them, that God actually takes little interest in countries.  Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless.  He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way.  He slips out of your grasp if you try to do so.  His concern is with universal humanity, not with one particular section of it.  Such ideologies make it very hard to get a traditional version of Christianity across.

NS: There are so many competing claims for supernatural revelation; some people say they adjudicate truth by the Bible, or by papal authority.  How do you know one reliable supernatural tradition from another?

TE: Well, you have to argue about it on the basis of reason, and evidence, and analysis, and historical research.  In that sense, theology is like any other intellectual discipline.  You don’t know intuitively, and you certainly can’t claim to know dogmatically.  You can’t simply, in a sectarian way, assert one tradition over another.  I don’t think there’s any one template, any one set of guidelines, which will magically identity the correct view.  Theology, like any other intellectual discipline, is a potentially endless process of argument.  But that’s not to say that anything goes.

NS: One thing that stood out to me was your reassertion of liberation theology, which, for instance, the current pope repudiated when he was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  He was concerned that hope for a worldly liberation through revolution would become a substitute for spiritual liberation through Christ.

TE: It would certainly be a big mistake to identify any particular human society with the kingdom of God.  If any liberation theology were doing that, then it would be properly rebuked.  I don’t think that’s why the pope is averse to it; he’s averse to it anyway because of its politics.  It would be a grave mistake to think that we’re talking about the difference between a material revolution and a spiritual one.  That would be the kind of gnosticism, or dualism, which Judaism and Christianity challenge.  A socialist revolution is quite as spiritual as the fight for the kingdom of God is material.

NS: Do you consider yourself a Christian per se, or a person who happens to like and be inspired by Christianity?

TE: I don’t think the pope will consider me a Christian.  I was brought up, of course, a Catholic.  I suppose it was fortunate that around the time of the Vatican Council I encountered, just when I might have rejected a lot of it, a very challenging version of Christianity.  I felt there was no need to reject it on political and intellectual grounds, because it was highly relevant and sophisticated and engaging.  In a sense one doesn’t have much choice about these things.  What I find is that heritage very deeply influences my work, and probably has more so over the last few years.  Quite what my relation to it now is is hard to say.  But that’s just a historical dilemma, a matter of how to understand oneself historically.

NS: When you talk about it being beyond choice — I’ve been interested to see how Richard Dawkins calls himself a “post-Christian atheist” and talks about celebrating Christmas.

TE: I think, actually, he’s a pre-Christian atheist, because he never understood what Christianity is about in the first place!  That would be rather like Madonna calling herself post-Marxist.  You’d have to read him first to be post-him.  As I’ve said before, I think that Dawkins in particular makes such crass mistakes about the kind of claims that Christianity is making.  A lot of the time, he’s either banging at an open door or he’s shooting at a straw target.

NS: You say he emphasizes a “propositional” account of religious faith above a “performative” one.  But how far can one go believing in God performatively, through political acts, before it becomes a proposition?

TE: All performatives imply propositions.  There’s no point in my operating a performative like, say, promising, or cursing, unless I have certain beliefs about the nature of reality: that there is indeed such an institution as promising, that I am able to perform it, and so on.  The performative and the propositional work into each other.  But it is a typically positivist kind of mistake to begin with the propositional, just as it would be for someone trying to analyze a literary text, which is basically a performance.  Somebody who didn’t grasp that would be making a root-and-branch mistake about the kind of thing being confronted.  These new atheists, and, indeed, the great majority of believers, have been conned rather falsely into a positivist or dogmatic theology, into believing that religion consists in signing on for a set of propositions.

NS: Are there political reasons behind this mistake?

TE: Dawkins and I were recently asked to write articles for the front page of the Wall Street Journal, if you can believe it.  I don’t know what the rationale behind this is, or even if it will come off.  I said that I would do so, provided that my last sentence would be, “Jesus Christ would never have been given a column in the Wall Street Journal.”  It is indicative of the strangeness and intensity of this debate that it crops up in the most peculiar places.  It crops up at the very temples of Mammon.  But, you see, I think that’s because these people really do think it’s just about a set of ideas, of propositions.  That’s a pretty comfortable debate.  But the point I try to make when I enter on these forums is that it’s not just that.  It has a strong political subtext.

NS: Back to issues of faith and reason — your position reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould’s model of “non-overlapping magisteria.” Gould himself was not a believer, though he wrote about religion and science, and sometimes he has been accused of having a position that is only possible if you’re not really taking belief seriously.

TE: I think that Gould was right in that particular position.  What is interesting is why it makes people like Dawkins so nervous.  They misinterpret that position to mean that theology doesn’t have to conform to the rules and demands of reason.  Then theologians can say anything they like.  They don’t have to produce evidence, and they don’t have to engage in reasonable argument.  They’re now released from the tenets of science.  Traditionally, this is the Christian heresy known as fideism.  But all kinds of rationalities, theology included, have been non-scientific for a very long time and yet still have to conform to the procedures of reason.  The new atheists think this because they falsely identify the rules of reason with the rules of scientific reason.  Therefore if something is outside the purview of science, it follows for them that it is outside the purview of reason itself.  But that’s a false way of arguing.  Dawkins won’t entertain either the idea that faith must engage reason or that the very idea of what rationality is is to be debated.

NS: The atheists have promoted themselves by wearing big red “A”s on their t-shirts and calling themselves “brights.”  Is there a counter-movement you’d like to begin?  What would you put on the t-shirt?

TE: Rather than simply man the barricades on either side, I’d like to step back and see what’s happening here.  That sort of gesture has to be understood in terms of an American society in which a relatively small coterie of self-consciously enlightened atheists or agnostics are indeed confronted with a massively ideologized religion, which in many respects is very ugly indeed.  What I think is wrong, and what I think is rationalistic, is to cast the argument in terms of intelligence.  It may be that a lot of people who believe that they’re going to be rapt up into heaven are fairly dim creatures.  On the other hand, Europe is full of dim agnostics.  It is a rationalist error to think that your opponents are simply stupid.  That betrays what’s wrong with this particular kind of new atheism: it casts the arguments largely in intellectual and propositional terms and doesn’t see that a great deal else is involved here.

NS: Do you think that it’s an accident that the most successful of the new atheists, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, come with English accents?

TE: No.  England is a very agnostic society.  It looks with amazement on the behavior of many Americans as far as religion goes.  America, of course, is in all kinds of ways out of line.  It’s still an enormously metaphysical and religious society, while the typical advanced capitalist culture is pretty skeptical.  Advanced capitalist societies do not normally call upon their citizens to believe very much, as long as they roll out of bed and do their work.  They are pretty post-metaphysical.  In a sense, Britain is a post-metaphysical society.  A very small minority of people go to church.  Religion is not part of a public and political discourse in anything like the way it is in the States.  The States is peculiar because it is, on the one hand, the most rampantly capitalist society in history and, on the other, deeply, deeply metaphysical.  Really, those two things are inherently at odds.  Markets are relativizing, pragmatizing, and secularizing.  But to prop them up, to defend them, and to legitimate them, you may need some much more absolute values.  That may be why there are a lot of psycho-spiritual stockbrokers around.

This interview was first published in The Immanent Frame on 17 September 2009; it is reproduced here for educational purposes.

Here is the blurb from verso on his latest book:

The Leading literary theorist dissected in interview

Terry Eagleton occupies a unique position in the English-speaking world today. He is not only a productive literary theorist, but also a novelist and playwright. He remains a committed socialist deeply hostile to the zeitgeist. Over the last forty years his public interventions have enlivened an otherwise bland and conformist culture. His pen, as many colleagues in the academy—including Harold Bloom, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha—have learnt, is merciless and unsparing. As a critic Eagleton has not shied away from confronting the high priests of native conformity as highlighted by his coruscating polemic against Martin Amis on the issue of civil liberties and religion.

This comprehensive volume of interviews covers both his life and the development of his thought and politics. Lively and insightful, they will appeal not only to those with an interest in Eagleton himself, but to all those interested in the evolution of radical politics, modernism, cultural theory, the history of ideas, sociology, semantic inquiry and the state of Marxist theory.

“Second to none among cultural critics writing in the English language today.” — Guardian

“A combative, fiercely articulate and witty Marxist literary critic.” — The Nation

“Eagleton is informative, witty and wise.” — Times Higher Education Supplement

“That dreadful Terry Eagleton.” — Prince Charles

Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester. His other publications include Walter Benjamin,Literary Theory: An Introduction, The Function of Criticism, Criticism and Ideology, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Figures of Dissent and Ideology: An Introduction. He is also a dramatist, and his plays have been collected inSaint Oscar and Other Plays; in addition, he has written the filmscript forWittgenstein and the novel Saints and Scholars.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

In Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem

Hans Ulrich Obrist: I just visited Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, who have written an appeal to Barack Obama. What would your appeal and/or advice be to Obama?

Raoul Vaneigem: I refuse to cultivate any relationship whatsoever with people of power. I agree with the Zapatistas from Chiapas who want nothing to do with either the state or its masters, the multinational mafias. I call for civil disobedience so that local communities can form, coordinate, and begin self-producing natural power, a more natural form of farming, and public services that are finally liberated from the scams of government by the Left or the Right. On the other hand, I welcome the appeal by Chamoiseau, Glissant, and their friends for the creation of an existence in which the poetry of a life rediscovered will put an end to the deadly stranglehold of the commodity.

HUO: Could we talk about your beginnings? How did your participation in situationism begin, and what was your fundamental contribution? At the outset of your relationship with the SI, there was the figure of Henri Lefebvre. What did he mean to you at the time? Why did you decide to send him poetic essays?

RV: I would first like to clarify that situationism is an ideology that the situationists were unanimous in rejecting. The term “situationist” was ever only a token of identification. Its particularity kept us from being mistaken for the throngs of ideologues. I have nothing in common with the spectacular recuperation of a project that, in my case, has remained revolutionary throughout. My participation in a group that has now disappeared was an important moment in my personal evolution, an evolution I have personally pressed on with in the spirit of the situationist project at its most revolutionary. My own radicality absolves me from any label. I grew up in an environment in which our fighting spirit was fueled by working class consciousness and a rather festive conception of existence. I found Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life captivating. When La Somme et le reste [The Sum and the Remainder] was published, I sent him an essay of sorts on “poetry and revolution” that was an attempt to unify radical concepts, Lettrist language, music, and film imagery by crediting them all with the common virtue of making the people’s blood boil. Lefebvre kindly responded by putting me in touch with Guy Debord who immediately invited me to Paris. The two of us had very different temperaments, but we would agree over a period of nearly ten years on the need to bring consumer society to an end and to found a new society on the principle of self-management, where life supersedes survival and the existential angst that it generates.

HUO: Which situationist projects remain unrealized?

RV: Psychogeography, the construction of situations, the superseding of predatory behavior. The radicality, which, notwithstanding some lapses, never ceased to motivate us, remains a source of inspiration to this day. Its effects are just beginning to manifest themselves in the autonomous groups that are now coming to grips with the collapse of financial capitalism.

HUO: The Situationist International defined the situationist as someone who commits her- or himself to the construction of situations. What were those situations for you, concretely? How would you define the situationist project in 2009?

RV: By its very style of living and thinking, our group was already sketching out a situation, like a beachhead active within enemy territory. The military metaphor is questionable, but it does convey our will to liberate daily life from the control and stranglehold of an economy based on the profitable exploitation of man. We formed a “group-at-risk” that was conscious of the hostility of the dominant world, of the need for radical rupture, and of the danger of giving in to the paranoia typical of minds under siege. By showing its limits and its weaknesses, the situationist experience can also be seen as a critical meditation on the new type of society sketched out by the Paris Commune, by the Makhnovist movement and the Republic of Councils wiped out by Lenin and Trotsky, by the libertarian communities in Spain later smashed by the Communist Party. The situationist project is not about what happens once consumer society is rejected and a genuinely human society has emerged. Rather, it illuminates now how lifestyle can supersede survival, predatory behavior, power, trade and the death-reflex.

HUO: You and Guy Debord are the main protagonists of the situationist movement. How do you see Debord’s role and your role?

RV: Not as roles. That is precisely what situationism in its most ridiculous version aims at: reducing us to cardboard cut-outs that it can then set up against one another according to the spectacle’s standard operating procedure. I am simply the spokesman, among others, of a radical consciousness. I just do what I can to see that resistance to market exploitation is transformed into an offensive of life, and that an art of living sweeps away the ruins of oppression.

HUO: What were your reasons for resigning from the group?

RV: Following the occupation movements of May 1968, we knew that some recuperation was afoot. We were familiar with the mechanisms of alienation that would falsify our ideas and fit them neatly into the cultural puzzle. It became clear to us, during the last conference in Venice, that we had failed to shatter those mechanisms, that in fact they were shattering us from the inside. The group was crumbling, the Venice conference was demonstrating its increasing uselessness, and the only answers put forward were commensurate with the self-parody we had fallen into. Dissension intensified to the point of paranoid denunciation: of betrayals of radicality, of breaches of revolutionary spirit, of dereliction of conscience. Those times of catharsis and anathema are now long past, and it might be useful to examine how it is that we sowed the seeds of failure for which the group ended up paying such a heavy price. The shipwreck, however, did not indiscriminately sweep away to the shores of oblivion all of us who participated in the adventure. The group vanished in such a way as to allow the individuals to either consolidate their radicality, disown it, or lapse into the imposture of radicalism. I have attempted to analyze our experimental adventure in Entre le deuil du monde et la joie de vivre [Between Mourning the World and Exuberant Life].

HUO: You have written a lot on life, not survival. What is the difference?

RV: Survival is budgeted life. The system of exploitation of nature and man, starting in the Middle Neolithic with intensive farming, caused an involution in which creativity—a quality specific to humans—was supplanted by work, by the production of a covetous power. Creative life, as had begun to unfold during the Paleolithic, declined and gave way to a brutish struggle for subsistence. From then on, predation, which defines animal behavior, became the generator of all economic mechanisms.

HUO: Today, more than forty years after May ‘68, how do you feel life and society have evolved?

RV: We are witnessing the collapse of financial capitalism. This was easily predictable. Even among economists, where one finds even more idiots than in the political sphere, a number had been sounding the alarm for a decade or so. Our situation is paradoxical: never in Europe have the forces of repression been so weakened, yet never have the exploited masses been so passive. Still, insurrectional consciousness always sleeps with one eye open. The arrogance, incompetence, and powerlessness of the governing classes will eventually rouse it from its slumber, as will the progression in hearts and minds of what was most radical about May 1968.

HUO: Your new book takes us on a trip “between mourning the world and exuberant life.” You revisit May ‘68. What is left of May ‘68? Has it all been appropriated?

RV: Even if we are today seeing recycled ideologies and old religious infirmities being patched up in a hurry and tossed out to feed a general despair, which our ruling wheelers and dealers cash in on, they cannot conceal for long the shift in civilization revealed by May 1968. The break with patriarchal values is final. We are moving toward the end of the exploitation of nature, of work, of trade, of predation, of separation from the self, of sacrifice, of guilt, of the forsaking of happiness, of the fetishizing of money, of power, of hierarchy, of contempt for and fear of women, of the misleading of children, of intellectual dominion, of military and police despotism, of religions, of ideologies, of repression and the deadly resolutions of psychic tensions. This is not a fact I am describing, but an ongoing process that simply requires from us increased vigilance, awareness, and solidarity with life. We have to reground ourselves in order to rebuild—on human foundations—a world that has been ruined by the inhumanity of the cult of the commodity.

HUO: What do you think of the current moment, in 2009? Jean-Pierre Page has just published Penser l’après crise [Thinking the After-Crisis]. For him, everything must be reinvented. He says that a new world is emerging now in which the attempt to establish a US-led globalization has been aborted.

RV: The agrarian economy of the Ancien Régime was a fossilized form that was shattered by the emerging free-trade economy, from the 1789 revolution on. Similarly, the stock-dabbling speculative capitalism whose debacle we now witness is about to give way to a capitalism reenergized by the production of non-polluting natural power, the return to use value, organic farming, a hastily patched-up public sector, and a hypocritical moralization of trade. The future belongs to self-managed communities that produce indispensable goods and services for all (natural power, biodiversity, education, health centers, transport, metal and textile production . . .). The idea is to produce for us, for our own use—that is to say, no longer in order to sell them—goods that we are currently forced to buy at market prices even though they were conceived and manufactured by workers. It is time to break with the laws of a political racketeering that is designing, together with its own bankruptcy, that of our existence.

HUO: Is this a war of a new kind, as Page claims? An economic Third World War?

RV: We are at war, yes, but this is not an economic war. It is a world war against the economy. Against the economy that for thousands of years has been based on the exploitation of nature and man. And against a patched-up capitalism that will try to save its skin by investing in natural power and making us pay the high price for that which—once the new means of production are created—will be free as the wind, the sun, and the energy of plants and soil. If we do not exit economic reality and create a human reality in its place, we will once again allow market barbarism to live on.

HUO: In his book Making Globalization Work, Joseph Stiglitz argues for a reorganization of globalization along the lines of greater justice, in order to shrink global imbalances. What do you think of globalization? How does one get rid of profit as motive and pursue well-being instead? How does one escape from the growth imperative?

RV: The moralization of profit is an illusion and a fraud. There must be a decisive break with an economic system that has consistently spread ruin and destruction while pretending, amidst constant destitution, to deliver a most hypothetical well-being. Human relations must supersede and cancel out commercial relations. Civil disobedience means disregarding the decisions of a government that embezzles from its citizens to support the embezzlements of financial capitalism. Why pay taxes to the bankster-state, taxes vainly used to try to plug the sinkhole of corruption, when we could allocate them instead to the self-management of free power networks in every local community? The direct democracy of self-managed councils has every right to ignore the decrees of corrupt parliamentary democracy. Civil disobedience towards a state that is plundering us is a right. It is up to us to capitalize on this epochal shift to create communities where desire for life overwhelms the tyranny of money and power. We need concern ourselves neither with government debt, which covers up a massive defrauding of the public interest, nor with that contrivance of profit they call “growth.” From now on, the aim of local communities should be to produce for themselves and by themselves all goods of social value, meeting the needs of all—authentic needs, that is, not needs prefabricated by consumerist propaganda.

HUO: Edouard Glissant distinguishes between globality and globalization. Globalization eradicates differences and homogenizes, while globality is a global dialogue that produces differences. What do you think of his notion of globality?

RV: For me, it should mean acting locally and globally through a federation of communities in which our pork-barreling, corrupt parliamentary democracy is made obsolete by direct democracy. Local councils will be set up to take measures in favor of the environment and the daily lives of everyone. The situationists have called this “creating situations that rule out any backtracking.”

HUO: Might the current miscarriages of globalization have the same dangerous effects as the miscarriages of the previous globalization from the ‘30s? You have written that what was already intolerable in ‘68 when the economy was booming is even more intolerable today. Do you think the current economic despair might push the new generations to rebel?

RV: The crisis of the ‘30s was an economic crisis. What we are facing today is an implosion of the economy as a management system. It is the collapse of market civilization and the emergence of human civilization. The current turmoil signals a deep shift: the reference points of the old patriarchal world are vanishing. Percolating instead, still just barely and confusedly, are the early markers of a lifestyle that is genuinely human, an alliance with nature that puts an end to its exploitation, rape, and plundering. The worst would be the unawareness of life, the absence of sentient intelligence, violence without conscience. Nothing is more profitable to the racketeering mafias than chaos, despair, suicidal rebellion, and the nihilism that is spread by mercenary greed, in which money, even devalued in a panic, remains the only value.

_{▴ still from} if… _{(1968), directed by Lindsay Anderson.}

HUO: In his book Utopistics, Immanuel Wallerstein claims that our world system is undergoing a structural crisis. He predicts it will take another twenty to fifty years for a more democratic and egalitarian system to replace it. He believes that the future belongs to “demarketized,” free-of-charge institutions (on the model, say, of public libraries). So we must oppose the marketization of water and air.1 What is your view?

RV: I do not know how long the current transformation will take (hopefully not too long, as I would like to witness it). But I have no doubt that this new alliance with the forces of life and nature will disseminate equality and freeness. We must go beyond our natural indignation at profit’s appropriation of our water, air, soil, environment, plants, animals. We must establish collectives that are capable of managing natural resources for the benefit of human interests, not market interests. This process of reappropriation that I foresee has a name: self-management, an experience attempted many times in hostile historical contexts. At this point, given the implosion of consumer society, it appears to be the only solution from both an individual and social point of view.

HUO: In your writing you have described the work imperative as an inhuman, almost animal condition. Do you consider market society to be a regression?

RV: As I mentioned above, evolution in the Paleolithic age meant the development of creativity—the distinctive trait of the human species as it breaks free from its original animality. But during the Neolithic, the osmotic relationship to nature loosened progressively, as intensive agriculture became based on looting and the exploitation of natural resources. It was also then that religion surfaced as an institution, society stratified, the reign of patriarchy began, of contempt for women, and of priests and kings with their stream of wars, destitution, and violence. Creation gave way to work, life to survival, jouissance to the animal predation that the appropriation economy confiscates, transcends, and spiritualizes. In this sense market civilization is indeed a regression in which technical progress supersedes human progress.

HUO: For you, what is a life in progress?

RV: Advancing from survival, the struggle for subsistence and predation to a new art of living, by recreating the world for the benefit of all.

HUO: My interviews often focus on the connections between art and architecture/urbanism, or literature and architecture/urbanism. Could you tell me about the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism?

RV: That was an idea more than a project. It was about the urgency of rebuilding our social fabric, so damaged by the stranglehold of the market. Such a rebuilding effort goes hand in hand with the rebuilding by individuals of their own daily existence. That is what psychogeography is really about: a passionate and critical deciphering of what in our environment needs to be destroyed, subjected to détournement, rebuilt.

HUO: In your view there is no such thing as urbanism?

RV: Urbanism is the ideological gridding and control of individuals and society by an economic system that exploits man and Earth and transforms life into a commodity. The danger in the self-built housing movement that is growing today would be to pay more attention to saving money than to the poetry of a new style of life.

HUO: How do you see cities in the year 2009? What kind of unitary urbanism for the third millennium? How do you envision the future of cities? What is your favorite city? You call Oarystis the city of desire. Oarystis takes its inspiration from the world of childhood and femininity. Nothing is static in Oarystis. John Cage once said that, like nature, “one never reaches a point of shapedness or finishedness. The situation is in constant unpredictable change.”2 Do you agree with Cage?

RV: I love wandering through Venice and Prague. I appreciate Mantua, Rome, Bologna, Barcelona, and certain districts of Paris. I care less about architecture than about how much human warmth its beauty has been capable of sustaining. Even Brussels, so devastated by real estate developers and disgraceful architects (remember that in the dialect of Brussels, “architect” is an insult), has held on to some wonderful bistros. Strolling from one to the next gives Brussels a charm that urbanism has deprived it of altogether. The Oarystis I describe is not an ideal city or a model space (all models are totalitarian). It is a clumsy and naïve rough draft for an experiment I still hope might one day be undertaken—so I agree with John Cage. This is not a diagram, but an experimental proposition that the creation of an environment is one and the same as the creation by individuals of their own future.

HUO: Is Oarystis based on natural power, like the Metabolist cities? Rem Koolhaas and I are working on a book on the Japanese Metabolists. When I read your wonderful text on Oarystis, I was reminded of that movement from the 1960s, especially the floating cities, Kikutake’s water cities. Is Oarystis a Metabolist city?

RV: When Oarystis was published, the architect Philippe Rothier and Diane Hennebert, who ran Brussels’ Architecture Museum at the time, rightly criticized me for ignoring the imaginative projects of a new generation of builders. Now that the old world is collapsing, the fusion of free natural power, self-built housing techniques, and the reinvention of sensual form is going to be decisive. So it is useful to remember that technical inventiveness must stem from the reinvention of individual and collective life. That is to say, what allows for genuine rupture and ecstatic inventiveness is self-management: the management by individuals and councils of their own lives and environment through direct democracy. Let us entrust the boundless freedoms of the imaginary to childhood and the child within us.

HUO: Several years ago I interviewed Constant on New Babylon. What were your dialogues with Constant and how do you see New Babylon today?

RV: I never met Constant, who if I am not mistaken had been expelled before my own association with the SI. New Babylon’s flaw is that it privileges technology over the formation of an individual and collective way of life—the necessary basis of any architectural concept. An architectural project only interests me if it is about the construction of daily life.

HUO: How can the city of the future contribute to biodiversity?

RV: By drawing inspiration from Alphonse Allais, by encouraging the countryside to infiltrate the city. By creating zones of organic farming, gardens, vegetable plots, and farms inside urban space. After all, there are so many bureaucratic and parasitical buildings that can’t wait to give way to fertile, pleasant land that is useful to all. Architects and squatters, build us some hanging gardens where we can go for walks, eat, and live!

HUO: Oarystis is in the form of a maze, but it is also influenced by Venice and its public piazzas. Could you tell us about the form of Oarystis?

RV: Our internal space-time is maze-like. In it, each of us is at once Theseus, Ariadne, and Minotaur. Our dérives would gain in awareness, alertness, harmony, and happiness if only external space-time could offer meanders that could conjure up the possible courses of our futures, as an analogy or echo of sorts—one that favors games of life, and prevents their inversion into games of death.

HUO: Will museums be abolished? Could you discuss the amphitheater of memory? A protestation against oblivion?

RV: The museum suffers from being a closed space in which works waste away. Painting, sculpture, music belong to the street, like the façades that contemplate us and come back to life when we greet them. Like life and love, learning is a continuous flow that enjoys the privilege of irrigating and fertilizing our sentient intelligence. Nothing is more contagious than creation. But the past also carries with it all the dross of our inhumanity. What should we do with it? A museum of horrors, of the barbarism of the past? I attempted to answer the question of the “duty of memory” in Ni pardon, ni talion [Neither Forgiveness Nor Retribution]:

Most of the great men we were brought up to worship were nothing more than cynical or sly murderers. History as taught in schools and peddled by an overflowing and hagiographic literature is a model of falsehood; to borrow a fashionable term, it is negationist. It might not deny the reality of gas chambers, it might no longer erect monuments to the glory of Stalin, Mao or Hitler, but it persists in celebrating the brutish conqueror: Alexander, called the Great—whose mentor was Aristotle, it is proudly intoned—Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon, the throngs of generals, slaughterers of peoples, petty tyrants of the city or the state, torturer–judges, Javerts of every ilk, conniving diplomats, rapists and killers contracted by religions and ideologies; so much high renown carved from baseness, wickedness, and abjection. I am not suggesting we should unpave the avenues of official history and pave the side alleys instead. We are not in need of a purged history, but of a knowledge that scoops out into broad daylight facts that have been obscured, generation after generation, by the unceasing stratification of prejudice. I am not calling for a tribunal of the mind to begin condemning a bunch of undesirables who have been bizarrely put up on pedestals and celebrated in the motley pantheons of official memory. I just want to see the list of their crimes, the mention of their victims, the recollection of those who confronted them added to the inventory of their unsavory eulogies. I am not suggesting that the name of Francisco Ferrer wipe out that of his murderer, Alfonso XIII, but that at the very least everything be known of both. How dare textbooks still cultivate any respect for Bonaparte, responsible for the death of millions, for Louis XIV, slaughterer of peasants and persecutor of Protestants and freethinkers? For Calvin, murderer of Jacques Gruet and Michel Servet and dictator of Geneva, whose citizens, in tribute to Sébastien Castellion, would one day resolve to destroy the emblems and signs of such an unworthy worship? While Spain has now toppled the effigies of Francoism and rescinded the street names imposed by fascism, we somehow tolerate, towering in the sky of Paris, that Sacré-Coeur whose execrable architecture glorifies the crushing of the Commune. In Belgium there are still avenues and monuments honoring King Leopold II, one of the most cynical criminals of the nineteenth century, whose “red rubber” policy—denounced by Mark Twain, by Roger Casement (who paid for this with his life), by Edward Dene Morel, and more recently by Adam Hochschild—has so far bothered nary a conscience. This is a not a call to blow up his statues or to chisel away the inscriptions that celebrate him. This is a call to Belgian and Congolese citizens to cleanse and disinfect public places of this stain, the stain of one of the worst sponsors of colonial savagery. Paradoxically, I do tend to believe that forgetting can be productive, when it comes to the perpetrators of inhumanity. A forgetting that does not eradicate remembering, that does not blue-pencil memory, that is not an enforceable judgment, but that proceeds rather from a spontaneous feeling of revulsion, like a last-minute pivot to avoid dog droppings on the sidewalk. Once they have been exposed for their inhumanity, I wish for the instigators of past brutalities to be buried in the shroud of their wrongs. Let the memory of the crime obliterate the memory of the criminal.3

HUO: Learning is deserting schools and going to the streets. Are streets becoming Thinkbelts? Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt used abandoned railroads for pop-up schools. What and where is learning today?

RV: Learning is permanent for all of us regardless of age. Curiosity feeds the desire to know. The call to teach stems from the pleasure of transmitting life: neither an imposition nor a power relation, it is pure gift, like life, from which it flows. Economic totalitarianism has ripped learning away from life, whose creative conscience it ought to be. We want to disseminate everywhere this poetry of knowledge that gives itself. Against school as a closed-off space (a barrack in the past, a slave market nowadays), we must invent nomadic learning.

HUO: How do you foresee the twenty-first-century university?

RV: The demise of the university: it will be liquidated by the quest for and daily practice of a universal learning of which it has always been but a pale travesty.

HUO: Could you tell me about the freeness principle (I am extremely interested in this; as a curator I have always believed museums should be free—Art for All, as Gilbert and George put it).

RV: Freeness is the only absolute weapon capable of shattering the mighty self-destruction machine set in motion by consumer society, whose implosion is still releasing, like a deadly gas, bottom-line mentality, cupidity, financial gain, profit, and predation. Museums and culture should be free, for sure, but so should public services, currently prey to the scamming multinationals and states. Free trains, buses, subways, free healthcare, free schools, free water, air, electricity, free power, all through alternative networks to be set up. As freeness spreads, new solidarity networks will eradicate the stranglehold of the commodity. This is because life is a free gift, a continuous creation that the market’s vile profiteering alone deprives us of.

HUO: Where is love in Oarystis?

RV: Everywhere. The love affair, as complex as it is simple, will serve as the building block for the new solidarity relations that sooner or later will supersede selfish calculation, competition, competitiveness, and predation, causes of our societies’ dehumanization.

HUO: Where is the city of the dead? In a forest rather than a cemetery?

RV: Yes, a forest, an auditorium in which the voices of the dead will speak amidst the lushness of nature, where life continuously creates itself anew.

HUO: Have you dreamt up other utopian cities apart from Oarystis? Or a concrete utopia in relation to the city?

RV: No, but I have not given up hope that such projects might mushroom and be realized one day, as we begin reconstructing a world devastated by the racketeering mafias.

HUO: In 1991 I founded a Robert Walser museum, a strollological museum, in Switzerland. I have always been fascinated by your notion of the stroll. Could you say something about your urban strolls with and without Debord? What about Walser’s? Have other strollologists inspired you?

RV: I hold Robert Walser in high regard, as many do. His lucidity and sense of dérive enchanted Kafka. I have always been fascinated by the long journey Hölderlin undertook following his break-up with Diotima. I admire Chatwin’s Songlines, in which he somehow manages to turn the most innocuous of walks into an intonation of the paths of fate, as though we were in the heart of the Australian bush. And I appreciate the strolls of Léon-Paul Fargue and the learning of Héron de Villefosse. My psychogeographic dérives with Guy Debord in Paris, Barcelona, Brussels, Beersel, and Antwerp were exceptional moments, combining theoretical speculation, sentient intelligence, the critical analysis of beings and places, and the pleasure of cheerful drinking. Our homeports were pleasant bistros with a warm atmosphere, havens where one was oneself because one felt in the air something of the authentic life, however fragile and short-lived. It was an identical mood that guided our wanderings through the streets, the lanes and the alleys, through the meanderings of a pleasure that our every step helped us gauge in terms of what it might take to expand and refine it just a little further. I have a feeling that the neighborhoods destroyed by the likes of Haussmann, Pompidou, and the real estate barbarians will one day be rebuilt by their inhabitants in the spirit of the joy and the life they once harbored.

HUO: What possibilities do you see for disalienation and détournement in 2009?

RV: This is a time of unprecedented chaos in material and moral conditions. Human values are going to have to compensate for the effects of the only value that has prevailed so far: money. But the implosion of financial totalitarianism means that this currency, which has so tripped us up, is now doomed to devaluation and a loss of all meaning. The absurdity of money is becoming concrete. It will gradually give way to new forms of exchange that will hasten its disappearance and lead to a gift economy.

HUO: What are the conditions for dialogue in 2009? Is there a way out of this system of isolation?

RV: Dialogue with power is neither possible nor desirable. Power has always acted unilaterally, by organizing chaos, by spreading fear, by forcing individuals and communities into selfish and blind withdrawal. As a matter of course, we will invent new solidarity networks and new intervention councils for the well-being of all of us and each of us, overriding the fiats of the state and its mafioso-political hierarchies. The voice of lived poetry will sweep away the last remaining echoes of a discourse in which words are in profit’s pay.

HUO: In your recent books you discuss your existence and temporality. The homogenizing forces of globalization homogenize time, and vice versa. How does one break with this? Could you discuss the temporality of happiness, as a notion?

RV: The productivity- and profit-based economy has implanted into lived human reality a separate reality structured by its ruling mechanisms: predation, competition and competitiveness, acquisitiveness and the struggle for power and subsistence. For thousands of years such denatured human behaviors have been deemed natural. The temporality of draining, erosion, tiredness, and decay is determined by labor, an activity that dominates and corrupts all others. The temporality of desire, love, and creation has a density that fractures the temporality of survival cadenced by work. Replacing the temporality of money will be a temporality of desire, a beyond-the-mirror, an opening to uncharted territories.

HUO: Is life ageless?

RV: I don’t claim that life is ageless. But since survival is nothing but permanent agony relieved by premature death, a renatured life that cultivates its full potential for passion and creation would surely achieve enough vitality to delay its endpoint considerably.

HUO: The Revolution of Everyday Life was a trigger for May ’68, and you have stated in other interviews that it is your key book that you are continually rewriting. Was the book an epiphany? How did it change the course of your work? What had you been doing previously?

RV: The book was prompted by an urgent need I was feeling at the time for a new perspective on the world and on myself, to pull me out of my state of survival, by means other than through suicide. This critical take on a consumer society that was corrupting and destroying life so relentlessly made me aware and conscious of my own life drive. And it became clear to me very quickly that this wasn’t a purely solipsistic project, that many readers were finding their own major concerns echoed there.

HUO: The Revolution of Everyday Life ends on an optimistic note: “We have a world of pleasures to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.”4 Are you still an optimist today?

RV: “Pessimists, what is it you were hoping for?,” Scutenaire wrote. I am neither a pessimist nor an optimist. I try to remain faithful to a principle: desire everything, expect nothing.

HUO: What is the most recent version of the book?

RV: Entre le deuil du monde et la joie de vivre [Between Mourning the World and Exuberant Life].

HUO: What book are you working on at the moment?

RV: I would love to have the resources to complete a Dictionary of Heresies, so as to clarify and correct the historical elements included in The Movement of the Free Spirit and Resistance to Christianity.

Proust Questionnaire, answered by Raoul Vaneigem

What is your main personality trait?

Laziness.

What quality do you appreciate most in a man?

Generosity coupled with human awareness of life.

What quality do you appreciate most in a woman?

Love and love of life.

What is your favorite virtue?

Creativity.

What is your main shortcoming?

My lack of self-confidence.

What is your favorite activity?

Opening myself to life so life can open in me.

What is your dream for happiness?

Realizing my desires by fulfilling those of my loved ones.

What would your greatest misfortune be?

Failing to contribute to the happiness of all.

Who would you have wished to be?

Myself, more and more alive.

Where would you like to live?

Everywhere genuine humanity prevails.

What is your favorite flower?

All of them, with a soft spot for the rose ancienne.

What is your favorite bird?

All of them, with a special fondness for the blackbird that sings in the evening.

Who are your favorite writers of prose?

Montaigne, La Boétie, Shakespeare, Diderot, Kafka, Artaud, Benjamin, Orwell, Zweig.

Who are your favorite poets?

Villon, Blake, Hölderlin, Nerval, Fourier.

Who are your male heroes in literature?

Hyperion.

Who are your female heroes in literature?

Little Kaethchen of Heilbronn.

Who are your favorite composers?

Mozart, Boccherini.

Who are your favorite painters?

Giorgione, Turner, Goya, Van Gogh.

Who are your male heroes in history?

Eloi Pruystinck, Sebastian Castellio, Edouard Carouy and André Soudy, Albert Libertad, Flores Magón, Alexandre Marius Jacob, Jan Valtin.

Who are your female heroes in history?

Olympe de Gouges, Claire Démar, Louise Michel, Qurratulain.

What are your favorite names?

Ariane, Chiara, Ariel, Tristan.

What do you hate above all else?

Voluntary servitude.

Which historical figures do you despise the most?

All tyrants, slaughterers of the people, perpetrators of human suffering and those who honor them.

Which military feat do you admire the most?

None.

Which reform do you hold in highest regard?

Those that humanize man.

Which natural talent would you have wished to have?

The ability to better disseminate the human awareness of life.

How would you like to die?

Peacefully, at the hour I choose.

What is your present state of mind?

A precarious balance between what I am and what I wish to be.

Which wrongs do you tolerate the best?

There are no wrongs, just mistakes to rectify.

What is your motto?

Desire everything, expect nothing.

HUO: The question of temporality also brings us to Proust and his questionnaire (see inset). What might your definition of happiness be in 2009?

RV: Living ever more intensely and passionately in an ever more intense world. To those who sneer at my ecstatic candor, I reply with a phrase that brings me great comfort: “The desire for an other life is that life already.”5

HUO: Do you have unrealized projects? Unrealized books, unrealized projects in fields other than writing, unrealized architectural projects?

RV: My priority is to live better and better in a world that is more and more human. I would love to build the “urban countryside” of Oarystis, but I’m not just waiting patiently, like Fourier at the Palais Royal, for some billionaire to decide to finance the project only to lose everything to the financial crash a minute later.

HUO: What about your collaborations with other artists, painters, sculptors, designers, filmmakers?

RV: I don’t collaborate with anyone. At times I have offered a few texts to artist friends, not as a commentary on their work but as a counterpoint to it. Art moves me when, in it, I can sense its own overcoming, something that goes beyond it; when it nurtures a trace of life that blossoms as a true aspiration, the intuition of a new art of living.

HUO: Could you tell me about Brussels? What does Brussels mean to you? Where do you write?

RV: I live in the country, facing a garden and woods where the rhythm of the seasons has retained its beauty. Brussels as a city has been destroyed by urbanists and architects who are paid by real estate developers. There are still a few districts suitable for nice walks. I am fond of a good dozen wonderful cafés where one can enjoy excellent artisanal beers.

HUO: Do you agree with Geremek’s view that Europe is the big concern of the twenty-first century?

RV: I am not interested in this Europe ruled by racketeering bureaucracies and corrupt democracies. And regions only interest me once they are stripped of their regionalist ideology and are experiencing self-management and direct democracy. I feel neither Belgian nor European. The only homeland is a humanity that is at long last sovereign.

HUO: You have used a lot of pseudonyms. Je est un autre [I is an other]? How do you find or choose pseudonyms? How many pseudonyms have you used? Is there a complete list?

RV: I don’t keep any kind of score. I leave it up to the inspiration of the moment. There is nothing secret about using a pseudonym. Rather, it is about creating a distance, most often in commissioned work. This allows me to have some fun while alleviating my enduring financial difficulties, which I have always refused to resolve by compromising with the world of the spectacle.

HUO: A book that has been used by many artists and architects has been your Dictionnaire de citations pour servir au divertissement et a l’intelligence du temps [Dictionary of Quotations for the Entertainment and Intelligence of Our Time]. Where did that idea come from?

RV: It was a suggestion from my friend Pierre Drachline, who works for the Cherche Midi publishing house.

HUO: You have often criticized environmental movements who try to replace existing capitalism with capitalism of a different type. What do you think of Joseph Beuys? What non-capitalist project or movement do you support?

RV: We are being “offered” biofuels on the condition we agree to transgenic rapeseed farming. Eco-tourism will accelerate the plundering of our biosphere. Windmill farms are being built without any advantage to the consumers. Those are the areas where intervention is possible. Natural resources belong to us, they are free, they must be made to serve the freedom of life. It will be up to the communities to secure their own energy and food independence so as to free themselves from the control of the multinationals and their state vassals everywhere. Claiming natural power for our use means reclaiming our own existence first. Only creativity will rid us of work.

HUO: Last but not least, Rilke wrote that wonderful little book of advice to a young poet. What would your advice be to a young philosopher-writer in 2009?

RV: To apply to his own life the creativity he displays in his work. To follow the path of the heart, of what is most alive in him.

☁

_{Translated from the French by Eric Anglès}

The Future

Terminator 2009

Judgment Days in Copenhagen By Rebecca Solnit

For Isaac Francisco Solnit, born December 17, 2009

It’s clear now that, from her immoveable titanium bangs to her chaotic approximation of human speech, Sarah Palin is a Terminator cyborg sent from the future to destroy something — but what? It could be the Republican Party she’ll ravage by herding the fundamentalists and extremists into a place where sane fiscal conservatives and swing voters can’t follow. Or maybe she was sent to destroy civilization at this crucial moment by preaching the gospel of climate-change denial, abetted by tools like the Washington Post, which ran a factually outrageous editorial by her on the subject earlier this month. No one (even her, undoubtedly) knows, but we do know that this month we all hover on the brink.

I’ve had the great Hollywood epic Terminator 2: Judgment Day on my mind ever since I watched it in a hotel room in New Orleans a few weeks ago with the Superdome visible out the window. In 1991, at the time of its release, T2 was supposedly about a terrible future; now, it seems situated in an oddly comfortable past.

What apocalypses are you nostalgic for?  The premise of the movie was that the machines we needed to worry about had not yet been invented, no less put to use: intelligent machines that would rebel against their human masters in 1997, setting off an all-out nuclear war that would get rid of the first three billion of us and lead to a campaign of extermination against the remnant of the human race scrabbling in the rubble of what had once been civilization.

By the time the film was released, the news of climate change was already filtering out. Reports like Bill McKibben’s 1989 book The End of Nature had told us that the machines that could destroy us and our world had, in fact, been invented — a long, long time ago. Almost all of us had been using them almost all the time, from the era of the steam engine and the rise of the British coal economy through the age of railroads and the dawn of petroleum extraction to the birth of the internal-combustion engine and the spread of industrial civilization across the planet.  They weren’t “intelligent” and they weren’t in revolt, nor were they led by any one super-machine.  It was the cumulative effect of all those devices pumping back into the atmosphere the carbon that plants had so kindly buried in the Earth over the last few hundred million years.

The Superdome is, of course, where thousands of New Orleanians were stranded when Katrina, the hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, broke the city’s levees and flooded the place. A maelstrom of institutional failures left people trapped in the scalding cauldron of a drowned city for five days while the world looked on aghast. It was a disaster that had been long foretold, and no one had done much to forestall it.  No one had repaired those crummy levees or bothered to create a real evacuation plan for the city — and, unlike the revolt of the machines in T2, the future actually arrived. Like climate change.

For many, it was a foretaste of our new era.  It may not be clear what role, if any, climate change played in the generation of that particular hurricane, but it is clear that, in this era, there will be, and indeed already have been, many more such calamities: the deadly freak rainstorms in Sicily, Britain, and the Philippines this fall, the increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes in the North Atlantic in recent years, as well as in the intensity of droughts, floods, heat waves, crop failures, and the displacement of populations, as well as the massive melting of glaciers and sea ice in the cold places, rising waters in the coastal ones, and oceans going acidic with devastating effects on marine life.

This is the actual nightmarish “movie” of our times.  This is what our less-than-intelligent machines have actually wrought. The World Health Organization estimates that climate change is already responsible for 150,000 deaths annually. Unchecked it will kill far more, and no one’s measuring the despair in the island nations that may disappear and among those who live in, and off of, the melting arctic. Looking at the Superdome during the commercial breaks in T2, I wondered about the apocalypses already under our belts and the bumpy road ahead.

The Governor of the State with the Uncertain Shoreline

The plot of the movie, as most of you undoubtedly recall, is that the Terminator, also played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the low-budget 1984 original, shows up again, sent back from the future 10 years after in the first epic. This time around, he’s not action-heroine Sarah Connor’s nemesis; he’s on the side of humanity, specifically of her son John Connor, the boy with the unambiguous initials who will grow up to lead the resistance to our extermination by machines.

Another more advanced Terminator is, in the meantime, also sent back from the future to destroy the messianic boy and his foulmouthed commando mom. The rest of the movie is a feast of shootouts, chases, explosions, and brilliantly plotted action. It was all surpassingly strange and compelling when I watched it, while wiped out with what was probably swine flu, a fever dream of the past’s nightmares that somehow didn’t manage to anticipate our waking hells.

Now, of course, the movie’s cyborg star is a major force in the real world.  He’s my governor, more powerful but less charismatic than in his Terminator incarnation.  Recently, he traveled to Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay to release the state’s 2009 Climate Adaptation Strategy, a 200-page document about the array of devastations the state faces and what countermeasures we can take. Early on, that document states:

“Climate change is already affecting California. Sea levels have risen by as much as seven inches along the California coast over the last century, increasing erosion and pressure on the state’s infrastructure, water supplies, and natural resources. The state has also seen increased average temperatures, more extreme hot days, fewer cold nights, a lengthening of the growing season, shifts in the water cycle with less winter precipitation falling as snow, and both snowmelt and rainwater running off sooner in the year.”

Looking to the future, the report predicted that there would be more fires, less water, loss of coastal lands, and up to $2.5 trillion of real estate put at risk by global warming. The Terminator, or governor, was on the island because, with even modest further rises in sea-level, it will disappear entirely. Hasta la vista, baby.

During the years the Bush Administration refused to do anything at all about climate change, Schwarzenegger arrived at the helm of a state that had already developed major innovations in energy efficiency and in creative price-structuring that took away power-company motives to push higher energy consumption.  California had also sought to set new standards for carbon-dioxide emissions from vehicles. The bill to do the last of these was crafted in 2002 by Fran Pavley, a newly elected state assemblywoman from Ventura County. When Obama came into office, the roadblocks were finally removed and the bill became the basis for national regulations that will make vehicles 40% more fuel-efficient by 2016. Pavley and Schwarzenegger were there at the Rose Garden signing of the regulations last May.

As Ronald Brownstein reported in the Atlantic this October:

“Ambitious new initiatives have cascaded out of Schwarzenegger’s office — including the two measures raising the renewable-power requirement on utilities, a state subsidy program to encourage the installation of electricity-generating solar panels on 1 million California roofs, and in January 2007, an executive order establishing the nation’s first ‘low-carbon fuel standard,’ which requires a reduction of at least 10 percent in the carbon emissions from transportation fuels by 2020. Schwarzenegger signed a Pavley-sponsored bill imposing the nation’s first mandatory statewide reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. The bill required the state by 2020 to roll back its emissions to the 1990 level — a reduction of about 15 percent from the current level. (By separate executive order, Schwarzenegger also committed the state to an 80 percent reduction by 2050.)”

It’d be easy to go with the Atlantic and frame the governor as a hero, but he landed in office by promising to cut vehicle taxes and has been in bed ever since with the state’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter and the world’s fifth biggest corporation, Chevron. Even the organization that sent him to Copenhagen, Climate Action Reserve, is backed by Chevron and Shell — and the oil and coal industries have been the biggest domestic roadblocks to real climate-change measures. Nonetheless, at the Copenhagen climate conference he talked about R20, the alliance of states and provinces he’s co-founded to implement climate change measures at sub-national levels. And he has suggested that climate-change deniers like Palin are “still living in the Stone Age.”

A Magnitude Shy of What Physics Demands

Think of Schwarzenegger as the hinge between the fantasy of Terminator 2 and the reality of our predicament.  Think of Obama…

Well, in T2, there’s Miles Dyson, a slender, well-spoken African-American family man who will engineer the computer technology that will create the intelligent machines that will annihilate practically everything. Sarah — Connor, not Palin — sets out to kill him, but her son shows up with his Terminator-Schwarzenegger sidekick, and they instead convince the not-so-mad scientist he’s about to do something terribly, terribly wrong. He then leads them to his workplace to destroy everything he’s ever done. When their violent erasure program sets off alarms that bring in squadrons of cops, Dyson ends up gravely wounded and holding the trigger to set off the explosion that will wipe out the technologies endangering future humanity — and himself.

Seeing this movie with its acts of self-sacrifice, now offers an occasion to ask:  when’s the last time you’ve even seen a major politician who’ll put his finger to that trigger with humanity in mind, no less simply do anything that’s bad for reelection?

What if Obama would say what he has to know, what they all have to know, that saving the planet from our slo-mo, unevenly distributed version of Judgment Day requires destroying the status quo and maybe changing everything? What if he’d just learn from Schwarzenegger that you can do quite a lot and still survive politically?

As a disgusted Bill McKibben recently put it, “Obama will propose 4% reductions in [U.S. greenhouse gas] emissions by 2020, compared with 20% for the Europeans (a number the EU said they’d raise to 30% if the U.S. would go along). Scientists, meanwhile, have made it clear that a serious offer would mean about 40% cuts by 2020. So — we’re exactly an order of magnitude shy of what the physics demands.”

Bill, a normally mild-mannered guy who was overjoyed at Obama’s election, called the president’s position “a lie inside a fib coated with spin.”

Thanks to a sudden decision earlier this month by the Environmental Protection Agency allowing the executive branch to address the issue of climate-change gases under the Clean Air Act, Obama has apparently been given superpowers to act without being completely hamstrung by a reluctant Congress. Or as the Center for Biological Diversity put it, “President Obama can lead, rather than follow, by using his power under the Clean Air Act and other laws to achieve deep and rapid greenhouse emissions reductions from major polluters.”

Will he? Probably not. After all, he’s the man who stood up in Prague last April and said: “I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” For a moment, it almost sounded as if he was going to be the action hero of our antinuclear dreams, wiping out one apocalypse that has hung over us for sixty years. And then he added that he didn’t actually expect to see the abolition of such weaponry in his lifetime, though he didn’t say why.

Now, we’re in an action movie in which the fate of the Earth is truly at stake, and the most powerful man on the planet has allowed himself to be hedged in by timidities, compromises, refusals, denials, and the murderous pressure of corporations. Those too-big-to-die corporations are the reason why the Senate is unlikely to ratify any climate-change treaty that threatens to do much of anything. Really, corporations — half-fictitious, semi-immortal behemoths endowed with human rights in the U.S. and possessed of corrosive global power — already are the ruthless cyborgs of our time.  They are, after all, actively seeking a world in which they imagine that, somehow, they will survive, even if many of us and much that we love does not. Sorry poor people, young people, Africa, sorry Arctic summer ice, you’re not too big to fail.

100,000 in the Streets Vs. Three Degrees of Heat

I wish life on this planet really were like an action movie. I wish that a handful of heroic individuals could do battle with the mightiest of forces and decisively alter the fate of the world — and then we could all go home to a planet that’s safe.  As we know, however, it’s going to be a lot more intricate and complicated than that.  There are millions, maybe billions, of players in this one, and its running time is a lot longer than the two weeks of Copenhagen or the two hours of a movie. For our heroines, we get not the commando-siren Sarah Connor, but the sturdy, ex-middle-school American government teacher and now California state senator Fran Pavley, 61.

Really, though, if there’s going to be a superhero in our world, a friendly Terminator to go up against the villains in suits and ties, it will be civil society. Even for the betterment of humankind, civil society won’t get to shoot anyone or drive a truck through a wall.  Instead, it’ll organize, educate, build, and pressure, while working to create models and alternatives. It’ll reelect Pavley and shut down Chevron.

There have already been some moments of great drama with this superhero leading the way — the civil disobedience of the Climate Ground Zero mountaintop coal campaign in Appalachia, the Climate Camps in Britain, the Kingsnorth Six climbers who blocked a coal-power-plant’s smokestack in England last October (and were exonerated by a British jury), the underwater cabinet meeting held in the Maldives this October to protest that low-lying island nation’s possible fate. All this was done in part to get people to take an interest in the fate of their planet, which is not so readily reducible to a blockbuster’s plot as we might like.

The pivotal moment just came — and went. This week in Copenhagen, the Bella Center conference, in which a new climate treaty was supposed to be negotiated, stagnated while repression around it grew furiously. It stagnated because the rich countries were unwilling to either reduce their own emissions significantly or pledge meaningful funding to help poor nations transition to greener economies. Or it stagnated because the poor countries didn’t consent to be crucified for crumbs. The United States, which just spent nearly a trillion dollars bailing out its floundering financial corporations and spends about $700 billion annually on the military, offered an obscenely inadequate $1.2 billion in aid. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged $100 billion way down the road, but only if an unlikely quantity of factors and conditions were to align beforehand.

Outside the center, the Danish police became increasingly brutal as activists from everywhere, representing the poor, developing, and most affected nations, the Arctic, small farmers, indigenous nations, and the environment demonstrated. Inside nongovernmental groups were increasingly excluded from the discussions and then from the actual space itself.  None of this prevented the conference from stalling.

On Monday, negotiators from the African nations shut down the climate talks in fury at attempts to undermine the Kyoto accords — a move designed to make the global situation worse at a meeting that was supposed to make it better. On Wednesday, hundreds of delegates inside the Bella Center protested, walking out to join the thousands already in the streets. By all reports the atmosphere was increasingly tense and repressive.

Everyone whose opinion I respect deplores what just went down in Copenhagen.  There’s an agreement of sorts, but it was achieved by Obama and a few powerful nations over the objections of the rest in violation of the way the process should have unfolded.  Worse, it contains no binding agreements to limit climate change.  The so-called agreement acknowledges that we should limit warming to two degrees Celsius, but the actual commitments, if honored, would bring the world to 3.9 degrees Celsius (seven degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.  Even two degrees, African negotiator Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping had said, “would condemn Africa to death.”  Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed pointed out that three degrees would “spell death for the Maldives and a billion people in low-lying areas.”  Three degrees, said Joss Garman of the British branch of Greenpeace, “would lead to the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, droughts across South America and Australia, and the depletion of ocean habitats.”

All that was achieved was consensus that there’s a problem and clarity about what that problem is:  the refusal of the wealthy corporations and nations to do what benefits humanity and all other species.  Money won.  Life lost.  Copenhagen is over, a battle lost despite valiant efforts, but the war continues.

The crazy thing about this moment in history is that it isn’t at all like Terminator 2, except that the Earth and our species are in terrible danger, and ruthless superhuman forces push us toward our doom. In the movie, Sarah Connor is the only human being who knows what’s coming, and she’s in an Abu Ghraib-like mental hospital for saying and doing something about it.  In our reality, anyone who cares to know what the dangers are should have no problem finding out.  Most of us have known, or should have known, for quite a long time.  Because we’ve done so little, what a decade ago was imagined as the terrible future has actually, like the Terminator, made it here ahead of time.

The learning curve for so many of us, for so many people and even nations, has been speeding up impressively.  If we had 40 years to figure it all out, we might be headed toward just the sort of victory that civil society has, in fact, achieved on so many other environmental and human-rights ideas. But there aren’t decades to spare.  It needs to happen now.  It should have happened even before the last century ended.

Even in my fever dream, with the Superdome just out the window, I couldn’t help noting the key axiom repeated in Terminator 2: “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.”

So here’s the lesson:  there are no superheroes but us.

And here’s the question:  what are you going to do about it?

Rebecca Solnit is the author, most recently, of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, a book written as a tool for preparing for the onslaught of climate-related disasters in our new anthropocene era.  She’ll continue to work with 350.org and other climate action groups such as Climate Justice Action.

Copyright 2009 Rebecca Solnit

A DAY IN WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN’S STUDIO

William T. Vollmann appears at the door just as I turn in to his driveway. It’s raining, so he helps me carry my camera bags in. I offer up a Christmas cactus and a box of tangerines. Vollmann has a Christmas cactus story, and after he first checks that I’ve locked my car, he tells it: as a child he saved one segment of a Christmas cactus, and it lived, soon to germinate in his rooftop garden.

Although Vollmann is best known for his writing, I am here to see his visual artwork. I’m prepared to talk art all day long, but with Vollmann the divide between the arts is always fluid: our conversation ranges from Noh theater to contemporary music to his novels and everything in between.

Once inside Vollmann’s studio I’m confronted with walls that are covered, salon style, with art. Just past women’s and men’s restrooms painted in rough strokes of bold color (in the restrooms hang longtime Vollmann collaborator Ken Miller’s prostitute photos) there’s a dark bedroom/library complete with Vollmann’s oft-mentioned meat-locker closet. After that an art-lined corridor where art hangs on blonde wood runners, ready to be critiqued. Over the studio entrance is a collection of Soviet propaganda posters. It appears that Vollmann’s prodigious writings are matched by his capacity to produce and collect visual art.

Inside the studio there’s art equipment everywhere, much of it looking like art itself–vintage, accordion-shaped view cameras, vacuum powered printing machines, an ultraviolet cyanotype exposure unit, darkroom trays, an enlarger, baker’s trays lined with drying prints, and a work bench as long as a strip mall parking lot.

Vollmann says everything should be displayed in the studio. “I figure, if you don’t see things, all the things that you have, all your watercolors together, your engraving tools and everything else together, you’re not going to use them all. When they’re all out there, you can get inspired and say, ‘oh, I’d like to do this right now.’”

It’s an embattled sense of art one is tempted to link to his gun collection. If it’s not used regularly, ink will dry up, watercolors will crack, wood cuts will gather dust. Vollmann has even made his workbench modular so that if he were ever forced to downsize he could take smaller pieces of it along with him.

His daughter has her own drawing space in the main room, her notes to daddy and sketches pinned up near low-lying tables. Vollmann tells me that he’s struggling with the creative parent’s dilemma, how to have the freedom of a studio, a place where his individual (often explicit) work can germinate unhampered, without shame, but also provide a place for his daughter to grow up, where her friends and their parents will feel comfortable. How would it feel to be the daughter of William T. Vollmann? The conservative parents in his area aren’t necessarily fond of his photos of prostitutes, even though in most of the photos the prostitutes are not acting particularly risqué, sometimes wearing everyday clothing, or simply posed facing the camera straight-on. Still, the subject matter is taboo. He’s a good father, he says. Having a child has been the most fulfilling part of his life. He enjoys having her around in the studio.

As an artist Vollmann is completely self-taught. He’s never taken a class in printmaking or photography. Everything he does with paper and images he’s learned about in books. A purist who never considers his audience, he makes the art for himself only; he says he doesn’t care about showing his work in galleries. His interactions with his daughter’s classmates and their families may be the only time he’s really had to weigh how his work might be perceived.

Once we’re in the studio, Vollmann shows me around, starting with a row of Oak Park photos he took while following Sacramento prostitutes. Most are platinum, but others are gum over cyanotype. I’m struck by one haunting portrait.

WTV: This is a palladium-toned printing-out-paper print, and it’s been sitting out here for a couple of years without any change, so the palladium seems to really make it pretty stable. This is gum over platinum, and this is just straight gum. The gum is really, really hard. I don’t know if you understand the process. It’s one of the first photographic processes. Basically you take Gum Arabic, with watercolor in it, and you make it photosensitive, and so it’s as permanent as the watercolor itself. Artist’s grade watercolors will last for hundreds of years, presumably. But, each time you print it, you get a very, very thin print. So you have to print over and over. So, this has about 12 or 13 printings in register on it. So you get this special kind of look to it. You can’t get great detail with gum. It’s just more of a moody thing.

TS: It looks like a ghost.

WTV: Yeah it does. And, she is a ghost. She’s dead now.

We stand in the hallway silently staring at the photo of a ghost, together admiring her strong visage. He tells me about another prostitute friend of his, a grandmother, who used his tube of Cadmium red paint as lipstick. Cadmium is used to get the most brilliant hues of red, but is a heavy metal, highly toxic, even in minute doses.

WTV: When she was posing for me here she was talking about one of her customers who was really, really nice to her and she said she didn’t know what she would do if he died. And then I was told later that she was strangled. I haven’t seen her since. But I knew her for probably about three years, and every time I would get a hotel room and I would see her, I would say, “you know, you can come in, and you can sleep here.” Sometimes she would. If I wasn’t around she would steal my cadmium red watercolor and use it for lipstick. I said, “you know, that’s kind of bad for you.” But, seeing as how she died from being strangled, well, I guess it didn’t do her any harm. Poor thing.

TS: You’ve really gotten to see a different side of prostitutes.

WTV: There’s another. This was a very, very nice woman. Usually, they say, “Oh, can you give me a little bit of money to ‘get well’ before I pose for you?” And, you know, maybe 25 percent of the time they just run away when they have the money. But, I always think, that’s ok.

So, this woman went, and got her crack, and she really wanted to share it with me. You know, she wanted to be really nice. I thought that was so generous, it was giving me the thing that she most valued.

He shows me more platinum, more gum. We look at photographs of prostitutes posing any way they want, more of the women Vollmann met in Oak Park, and then at another set of photos. There seems to be no end to Vollmann’s photo collection. He tells me that he’s working hard to make lots of prints from his–you guessed it–prodigious negative archive, taken around the world over many years.

WTV: These I’m just flattening. I just printed them yesterday. This one is 35mm. It’s from Columbia from about 1999. This is a child prostitute. I think this is her mother, the procuress. I said, “Well, how about instead of paying for sex, how about if I pay for a picture?”

We view another Columbia photo. Two besieged policeman sit apprehensively in their station.

WTV: These two police had one machine pistol between them, but they felt relatively safe in their police station because they had a picture of Christ. I will say, they didn’t really want to get in trouble with the criminals, so they tried to stay in their police stations. It was very bad for them, Terri.

I notice that Vollmann uses a medieval-looking soapstone WTV stamp as his signature, with the W on the right side, the V on the left side, and the T in the middle. At that point, Vollmann offers me some tea. Putting on some Tchaikovsky, he takes some kind of medicinal tea from a metal tin box he’d decorated with one of his etchings of a grasshopper. The incised metal is rubbed over with printer’s ink.

TS: Do you live here in the studio?

WTV: Sometimes, yeah. It all depends on my mood, but I also have a home, and I spend some time there. It’s unclear which space I’ll spend more time in, in the future.

TS: Where do you do most of your writing?

WTV: It depends on what I’m working on. I do a lot of poetry and stuff here, and if there’s some current fiction or non-fiction then I tend to work in the other house for that because it’s my preference to have no phone here. No one can reach me here at all, so I can get a lot done and have a lot of peace. But a lot of the time I need to be near the phone, so the other place, where there’s a phone, is a good place to be when I’m working on some of the books with deadlines.

I point to a door-sized table filled with hefty, upright, over-sized books, balanced like a domino rally and covered in plastic sheeting.

TS: Tell me about this.

WTV: It’s called The Book of Candles and it’s a folio. There are 10 of them. Let’s see, I started it in 1995, and I’ve finished most of them this year. I finally sent one off to my dealer [Priscilla Juvelis] and one off to the Lilly Library.

Priscilla Juvelis’s rare books site describes The Book of Candles as

A suite of eight religious and blasphemous love-poems to prostitutes . . . housed in a sailcloth-covered basswood clamshell box which the artist/author has painted, collaged with hand-painted woodblock prints, and suitably adorned with gewgaws. . . .

The woodcut image on the underside of each box is different. Four Japanese “doughnut hold” [sic] coins have been screwed in to the underside of the box to comprise protective feet. Inside each box, a narrow channel, collaged with painted paper, runs around three edges, leaving the spine side open. Within this are set two wooden corner blocks mounted with selenium-splotched flower-engraved brass plates, a strip of painted walnut engraved with a print of a female nude, two engraved beeswax candles on engraved brass supports wrapped round with brass wire. Even the brass screws of these assemblies are engraved and rubbed with oil-based ink.

On the inside of the spine are one engraved and inked aluminum plate and one engraved and inked brass plate which is signed and numbered.

Vollmann unwraps some boxes and books covered with more plastic sheeting. It’s used, he tells me, to protect the art from his leaky roof. The box is a folio edition of The Book of Candles, hand engraved on two blocks of wood. Inside a hinged door is a set of loose prints.

WTV: There are the candles that I’ve engraved. See, even the screws I’ve engraved, and these little things. Each one of these is different. I decided not to bind them, but just to present them in a box. You can flip through if you want.

TS: Do you think the sentiments in your letter, “Crabbed Cautions of a Bleeding-hearted Un-deleter,” would apply to your art too?

WTV; With the visual art, I’m probably a little more selective. Actually, you know, I do throw away. I don’t use a lot of the stuff that I write–I might keep it, but I don’t use it, necessarily. And with the visual art, often I’ll produce a print or an image, and I’ll realize it’s just not good enough.

TS: Do your works show in a gallery space before being sold?

WTV: Usually they go straight to collectors. The editions are really small, and I’m not sure that it really makes sense to have shows. I could change my mind on that, but it seems like if you do that you spend a lot of money, probably more than you’re going to get.

TS: On airfare, hotels, framing . . .

WTV: Yeah, that’s right, Terri. And, I’m not really a vain person–I couldn’t care less if people look at my stuff–I’m just happy to make it and if I can sell enough visual art and writing to get by and do more, that’s all I care about.

Vollmann takes me to his fully stocked wood engraving area where I see a block of wood covered with a breathtaking sketch of a snow-capped mountain.

WTV: Back in February or March, I spent about an hour and a half in one place, standing in the snow on top of this truck, drawing this–the mountain. Here’s a bunch of pine trees, and so on and so forth. I’ve just started engraving this sketch.

TS: Those illustrations in your novels, like in the Seven Dreams series, are they engravings?

WTV: Most of those are pen and ink drawings, but sometimes I’ll use them as masters for engravings. So, in Butterfly Stories for instance, I did a bunch of drawings, which I then made into magnesium plates that I printed by hand.

TS: Do you prefer printmaking or your drawings with pen, where you’re drawing the figure more loosely?

WTV: Well Terri, I think, probably, if I had to choose, I would choose printmaking because I love the crispness of the line, and then it’s great to watercolor afterwards. But what you gain with a print you loose in spontaneity. And with a drawing it’s really nice if someone is posing for you, and you can just go to town with a handful of watercolors. That’s very, very relaxing.

Vollmann shows me how the engraver works. It’s hooked up to a very loud air compressor, so he pulls me over to him and places some headphones over my ears. I turn off the recorder while he engraves. After the motor whirs to a stop, we take off for the island of tables in the center of the studio.

WTV: I was in Norway and did some illustrations of some of the Norse Eddas. The ancient Norse myths are best preserved in the Eddas, so they found me some professional models and cut me some Norwegian pine wood, to get it just right.

TS: Norwegian wood.

WTV: That’s right. This is one of them, the goddess, Freya. It says her name in Runes–carved backwards obviously so it’ll be right-reading–and then there were these petroglyphs that my editor showed me from the Sami people, the Laplanders. So, I did some drawings of some of those and put these ancient petroglyphs in too.

This woman [Freya in the engraving] is actually an anthropologist who was excavating some Norse stuff at the time that she modeled for me. I just drew her. This woman was like the perfect woman for it. She could actually recite some of this poem, the seeress’s sayings to Odin, you know, in Old Norse. I did a bunch of drawings of her.

We move on to a set of prints Vollmann is doing in conjunction with a book he’s writing on Japanese Noh theater. He shows me one. As I inspect a gum print of Yoroboshi, the blind priest’s song, I ask him who his favorite artists are.

WTV: I like William Blake very much.

TS: His work is really ecstatic, the blue and yellow . . .

WTV: Yeah, it’s beautiful. Absolutely. Then there are overlooked artists, like Andrew Wyeth, passed over because he wants to paint every pine needle, or every single blade of grass.

TS: I wanted to ask you about the Shostakovich passages in the “Palm Tree of Deborah” from Europe Central. I read them over and over again.

WTV: Oh, you like Shostakovich?

TS: I like Shostakovich. But I liked more the metaphors about the chromatic scale, the “transgressive harmonies of the chromatic scale.”

WTV: Oh, that was fun. Yeah. I really, really enjoy listening to Shostakovich now. It was a little hard for him to live the life he did. Actually, it took me a lot of work to get to the point where I could understand him a little bit. It wasn’t natural for me to appreciate those harmonies. I’m sure it isn’t for most people. It was a good stretch of self-improvement.

TS: Do you think that’s what people need to do when they see your work, or when they read your work, that they need to be open to the transgressive harmonies?

WTV: If they want to, but I think that if they don’t like my work, or don’t want to ever study it, or enjoy it, that’s okay with me. That doesn’t hurt my feelings.

Our time up, Vollmann asks me to shuttle him from Sacramento to Berkeley. Before we step out into the pouring rain, however, Vollmann turns the tables and asks me a question.

WTV: So, if I were going to draw you, how would you want to be drawn?

TS: I think I’d let you decide, since you’re the artist.

WTV: Oh, that sounds good.

TS: How would you want to draw me?

WTV: It depends on whether you’d want to be drawn with or without clothes.

TS: I could think about being a model. Would you pay me anything?

Driving to Berkeley through water that covers my windshield in sheets, we talk about parenting, and then about criminal justice. Vollmann is passionate about the need to have a more lenient judicial system in place; he thinks that that the overly harsh punishment of criminals–the stretching of the three-strikes law and lengthy prison stays for drug crimes–is taking away the basic rights of people who require at most a slap on the wrist for petty crimes. He tells me about the research he’s doing on a book about the court system’s response to men accused of rape.

Hydroplaning in my Cutter on Interstate 80 in a flood zone, I learn that the old standby of removing pressure from the gas and the brakes, while not attempting to steer, works wonders and impresses a veteran of foreign wars.

Before we pull in to Berkeley Vollmann tells me that, like his anti-hero from The Royal Family, he’s taken to hopping freight trains on weekends. He’s even discovered an atlas, originating in Portland, for freight train hoppers. I recommend the photo journalism of the Polaroid Kid, and he offers me the chance to be a box-car warmer, or to arrive via train on my next visit. When we reach Berkeley Vollmann says I’m a good driver, because we’re still alive. He is indeed a genius.

The subversion dialogues

Kate Braverman holds a genteel conclave with William T. Vollmann about guns, whores, whiskey, death, and other literary matters

When I moved to the Bay Area a few years ago, I gravitated to the second-hand section of Berkeley’s Black Oak Books. It’s the cult library of books you meant to read but didn’t quite get to. The first year, the novels that most astounded me were Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and the fictions of William T. Vollmann. In particular, Vollmann’s The Royal Family is a savage, glittering novel of the San Francisco underbelly of prostitutes, pimps, private detectives, and drugs written with the audacity, skill, and authority of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. But the social and psychological issues are more complex and ambiguous. Vollmann’s uncompromising antiauthoritarianism, his daring deviation from conventional narrative into literary criticism asides and essays, the sheer epic scale of the ambition, unhinged me. I felt as if I was in the presence of punk high art, renegade genius, and a contagious subversion I wanted to join.

Kate Braverman Black Oak has a wall of your books. I read your novels and short fiction and inquired about you to other writers. You have an enormous reputation as an outlaw, a recluse, and a profoundly important literary force.

William T. Vollmann I’m sure they’re all making a mistake.

KB Why would serious writers who value your work be making a mistake?

WV They’d do better to write their own. But I’m flattered that people read my books. When they buy my books, that allows me to write new ones. So I can’t complain. But the world doesn’t owe me a living. If they stopped liking my books, it wouldn’t ruin my day.

KB I’ve read Whores for Gloria and The Royal Family and — [Phone rings]

WV That’s all right. It’s always like that around here. It must just be my blue eyes. That’s why I don’t pick up the phone much.

KB Why do you have this barrage of phone calls? Writers find the phone intrusive and delete it from the environment. It’s disturbing. You have a constant phone ringing.

WV I don’t use e-mail. And people use the post less and less. So they communicate with me by phone. Everyone is used to instant contact now. People are put out if I don’t pick up the phone. But I figure they’ll live.

KB Why do you live in this particular city?

WV I’m here because this is where my wife got a job. She’s a doctor, a radiation oncologist. I would have preferred to move back to San Francisco. We have a daughter. Lisa, six years old. We’ve been here 15 years. I’m from Los Angeles originally. I lived there until I was five. I went to high school in Indiana. I spent some time in New Hampshire, Indiana, was in New York for a while, now I’m back here. I’m really from the sidewalk. I’m from everywhere. I’m just a typical rootless American. My father was a business professor.

KB Why do you deal with whores and pimps, the denizens of the Tenderloin? What is the philosophical basis for this?

WV The fundamental intellectual level of humanity has and will always be low. New technological possibilities mean more experimental things can be forgotten in new ways. There are amazing filmmakers, like the Soviet Dziga Vertov. Who knows who this guy is and who cares? Who knows or cares who Joyce was? That means people who want to write at that level, and I include myself, are only doing so because we love it. In the end, what else is there? There is no prize, including the Nobel Prize, which can compensate you for the work you put in. If it’s not a joy, you shouldn’t do it. If you don’t get published, that’s unfortunate insofar as whatever else you must do to stay alive consumes and prevents you from doing what you really must do. When I wrote Rising Up and Rising Down, it took me 23 years, and my publishers all said if you want it to see the light of day, you have to cut it. And I said no. I fully expected that it would never appear. I was fortunate that McSweeney’s agreed to publish it. Now it’s out of print.

KB Continuing to adhere to a Tolstoyan vision of the novel — its immensity, grandeur, complexity, and size — how have you been able to survive in the marketplace with an uncompromising vision completely outside of the mainstream?

WV When I write my books, I don’t care about the marketplace. My father always used to say the reason academics fight so much is because the stakes are so small. When your book is published, the stakes are so low. Whatever they pay you is not enough. Therefore, why should you compromise? In the meantime, we’re all prostitutes. Most of the prostitutes I know keep one little private thing. Some prostitutes won’t kiss. Some of them save the anus for the person they love. Or they might refuse to say “I love you” except to the person they love. Whatever it is, they keep one tiny little broken shard of their integrity. I don’t want to use the word integritybecause it sounds as if they’re doing something bad. They aren’t. They’re just living on the capital they have, which is themselves.

My own way of being a prostitute is that I let magazines damage my work in any way they care to. My strategy is this: Except in cases of severe financial need, I only accept a story that really interests me. I am sure I can write it in a way that will please me, and I can keep it in a book. Then I make money, get my expenses paid, and do it my way. I put my heart into it, and then send it to a magazine. It gets butchered, and I tell them it was excellent. They did a great job. Then they tell me how easy I am to work with. And I cash the check. Then when my book is finished, I’ll cut my royalties in half or whatever is necessary, but you better not even change a comma without consulting me. In fact, the book I’m working on now has spurious commas, and I made them remove them. So that’s my own particular way of selling out. It’s practical. I can’t say it’s noble. On the other hand, it probably doesn’t do any harm.

KB The literary and experimental conviction of your work coupled with the boldness of your subject matter, the vivid and unflinching depictions, suggest a serious passionate political vision and literary agenda.

WV I’m pro-death. I believe in a woman’s right to an abortion. I believe in euthanasia. I believe in anyone’s right to suicide. I believe in capital punishment. I believe in gun ownership. I believe in violent self-defense. That’s the common denominator. The left is disturbed by my belief in capital punishment, and I own weapons. My buddies who go shooting with me are appalled that I’m not a Bush supporter. I believe in freedom of choice for everybody, which entails immense risks. Often people abuse the power that comes with freedom. Either way, society pays a tremendous cost. We pay for our gun violence, and we are paying an ever more immense cost for the repressive policies of our government. I’m not just blaming Bush, either. This ridiculous war on drugs has incarcerated so many, ruined lives and made them violent. I don’t see why it’s anybody’s business if somebody uses drugs or goes to a prostitute. If someone uses drugs and thereby injures or impairs his ability to perform a public function and as a result people are injured or killed, that person should be punished. But let’s punish the person for what he’s done, not what he might do. We are all prostitutes. We all do things we would not otherwise do just to survive. None of us should be too proud. It’s good to remember that the people we see incapacitated, drunk, and lying in the streets are our brothers and sisters.

KB That sounds like religious conviction, a conventional Judeo-Christian belief system operating.

WV Whether or not there is a God, it’s good for me, personally, to be thankful for my life. Whether or not others give thanks or believe in God is irrelevant. I used to despise organized religion. But increasingly I respect its social functions and the basic minimum goodness it forces people to adhere to. I’ve been in Islamic countries where people are kind to me because Islam says they have to. I have to hand it to Islam. My neighbors next door are Catholic. They’re involved in the affairs of the church, the schools. More power to them. I don’t go to church. If there was a Jesus, he was probably not God. He was probably one of these drunk and irreverent homeless people who will say maddening, enigmatic things. You think about it later. Maybe it’s bullshit. Maybe it’s profound.

KB Your characters are compulsive womanizers. Is this autobiographical?

WV If I answered yes to that question, you might think I was a bad person. If I answered no, you might be disappointed.

KB I’m asking this because the conventional reader might think you degrade women in your writing.

WV I have many female readers. They can see that I love women. In America, so many are ashamed of the body and sexuality. What passes for feminism and a defense of gender is Puritanism in a new disguise. I get annoyed when society tells me how I must behave. I feel the need to rebel. It’s an immature and justified rage against authority. The hypocrisy, the idiocy and ignorance I hear offends me. But that element will always be there. I’m beyond being outraged or even engaged with such people. I’m involved with a certain kind of life. Be offended or not. But it’s real; it’s more real than any sort of life that denies the existence of promiscuity or drug use or poverty. I’m trying to say, this is how it is. These people are as good or as bad as everyone else. We should know one another. If you don’t want to know the other, you don’t want to know me.

KB Your depiction of the pedophile [Dan Smooth] in The Royal Family is extremely poignant. He might be the most interesting character in the novel.

WV If freedom means anything, it’s about being repulsive as well as being able to do flower paintings. I believe that we have to focus on the other. I’m not saying pedophilia is right. But I imagined someone who would be, by our culture’s standards, the most vile and repulsive character, worse than Osama bin Laden. But let’s make him wise and a guide or bridge to the Queen. And it’s through somebody like that Tyler gains entrance to the Queen. He endures humiliation and insult from Dan Smooth. That’s the price he pays. In so many ways, this novel is about degradation. One of the questions I’ve often had is, when does self-actualization end and degradation begin? What does it really mean if we’re going to try to be ourselves? We don’t want to be conformists. We don’t want to follow social conventions, but how far do we want to take that?

KB The Royal Family is also the story of two brothers. What do they represent?

WV Cain and Abel. But I decided that Cain and Abel should both have the mark of Cain. When I read the Bible, I always think Cain does the best he can, Abel does the best he can, and God is not fair. We’re never told why Cain’s sacrifices aren’t pleasing to God. Cain is jealous. Abel is smug and flawed. Yet after Cain kills Abel, God, who is so capable of killing for much less all through Deuteronomy and Leviticus, suddenly says, “I’m going to put the mark of Cain on you. And anybody who hurts you will be revenged 77-fold.” And that’s so bizarre. Evidently, Cain fulfills a purpose too. Who is God really for? It’s not clear. But if we do have the mark of Cain, the mark of prostitution, the mark of imperfection, of humiliation and failure, dirtiness and sordidness, then we all have it, whether we’re Cain or Abel. The way I try to present them goes through a number of inversions. First you think John is dimensionless and a caricature. Later, you realize John is the one who consistently tries to help his brother, Henry.

KB The Bay Area has embraced you. What do you think of the San Francisco art community?

WV I’m a loner. I love San Francisco. It’s been very sad for me to leave San Francisco. For years I wanted to return there, though now I feel differently. I have a little girl and was able to buy this house and a studio for myself, which I couldn’t have in the city. San Francisco is not only visually beautiful but is a stunning universe of separate and secret and easily discoverable worlds. The Royal Family is a love letter to San Francisco on some levels. I have an epiphany to Geary Street in The Royal Family. It’s a love song, from the ocean to downtown. I wanted to write something like that for every district, Oceanside and so forth. In the end, I decided I had already tweaked the narrative as much as I could, with the essay on bail. It belongs there. But I didn’t want to overload the book anymore.

KB If you had cut The Royal Family along commercial lines, it would have been a blow-away detective best seller.

WV What good would that have done me? Why would I want that? I have enough money to have all the whiskey and prostitutes I want and buy things for my little girl and travel. So far I even pay the mortgage on my studio and get art supplies. When I consider my books, I’m proud. Not that they’re perfect. I do a lot of rewriting. I wish I could go back and rewrite my first book, You Bright and Risen Angels; I could do a better job. But in the meantime, nobody knows as much about my books as I do. Nobody has the right but me to say which words go into my books or get deleted or edited. When I’m dying, I’ll smile, knowing I stood up for my books. If I die with more money, that wouldn’t bring a smile to my face. Unless I got better drugs or more delicious-looking nurses. You have to look on the bright side. Are my books autobiographical? Sex and drugs and love never hurt anybody. They might have killed a few people. But they didn’t hurt anyone. So the more the better. I’m not a household name, and that’s fine with me. I just did a five-week reading tour in Europe. I’ll read at the New School. I could probably read at Columbia and Yale if I wanted to. Publicists set it up. If I can get some money, that’s nice. I usually don’t. Those trips are basically time deducted from your life. If someone is buying your books, it’s a good gesture to be able to please that person. I am grateful to my readers. But I would never give readings otherwise. I don’t go to other people’s readings. If somebody wrote a good book, I’d rather sit here and read it with the music on and a glass of whiskey in my hand. Do I need any more friends? I have plenty of friends. You see how often the phone rings. The only reason to go on a reading tour is vanity or a sexual purpose. You can always get laid on those trips. But I don’t have the vanity, so that takes away half of the reasons right there.

KB Given your penchant for disappearance, who is part of the real Bill Vollmann circle?

WV My lesbian friend, Michelle. She lives here. She’s a babysitter and works at the hospital. I have a friend who works as a commercial photographer. Sometimes we take each other out for lunch. My little girl. My best friend who lives in San Francisco. He used to be a housepainter, but he got cancer. I have a pal I go shooting with. He’s Jewish. He’s in Jews with Guns. That might interest you.

KB It’s conceptually interesting. But does it have meetings? I don’t want to join anything.

WV No meetings. Anyway, those are some of my friends. I don’t have friends in the neighborhood. I’ve survived without doing the soccer-dad thing. I don’t hang out with other writers. It’s not that I’m a snob. It’s just never really worked out that way. This society makes so many demands on our time. People are used to being interrupted. But I would rather not be interrupted. If you and I were going to be friends and I saw you every now and then, that would be great. Whatever I say I’m going to do, I do. But if somebody dropped in … That’s why my studio is great. No phone. Somebody bangs on the door, and I don’t answer. It’s perfect. It doesn’t have a bed or shower yet, but I put in a 30-foot workbench. It’s got a men’s room and a women’s room. It’s got a meat locker. I had the electrician put a light in the meat locker, and he said, “What’s this for?” I said, “So when I dismember my victims, I can look at them.” He frowned. There was a long silence. Then he put the light switch in and went away. *

Kate Braverman writes poetry, short fiction, novels, and essays. Her stories have won the Raymond Carver Editor’s Choice Award and the Shell-Economist writing prize and have been included in the annual O. Henry Award and Best American Short Stories collections. Her new book, Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir, winner of the Graywolf Prize, has just been published by Graywolf Press. She lives in San Francisco. For more information please go to http://www.katebraverman.com/interview.

HERE IS THE NYT ARTICLE ABOUT HIS LATEST ‘IMPERIAL’

July 29, 2009

An Author Without Borders

By CHARLES McGRATH

HOLTVILLE, Calif. — William T. Vollmann, legendarily prolific, writes in a studio that used to be a restaurant in Sacramento. The place is surrounded by a big parking lot where he encourages homeless people to camp out. Inside he runs a one-man assembly line. His bibliography so far includes nine novels, including “Europe Central,” which won the National Book Award in 2005; three collections of stories; a seven-volume, 3,000-page history of violence; a book-length essay on poverty; and a travel book about hopping freight trains, a hobby of his even though his balance is so bad that he has to use a plastic bucket as a stepstool.

Mr. Vollmann’s newest book, “Imperial,” which comes out from the Viking Press on Thursday, costs $55 and is 1,300 pages long — so heavy, he observed recently, that if you dropped it, you’d break a toe. A companion volume, to be published next month by powerHouse Books, contains some 200 photographs he took while working on “Imperial,” for which he also wore a spy camera while trying to infiltrate a Mexican factory, and paddled in an inflatable raft down the New River in California, a rancid trench that is probably the most polluted stream in America. The water, he writes, tasted like the Salk polio vaccine.

Mr. Vollmann, who just turned 50, is a loner, a bit of a recluse, despite being married and the father of a daughter, and a throwback: a wandering, try-anything writer-journalist in the tradition of Steinbeck or Jack London. Some people think he’s a little nuts.

To research “The Rifles,” a novel partly about the 1845 Franklin expedition to the Arctic, Mr. Vollmann spent two weeks alone at the magnetic North Pole, where he suffered frostbite and permanently burned off his eyebrows when he accidentally set his sleeping bag on fire. But being eyebrowless has its advantages, he discovered more recently, while experimenting with cross-dressing to research a novel he’s now writing about the transgendered. He didn’t have to pluck his brows when getting made up.

Mr. Vollmann collects pistols and likes to shoot them. He has traveled to Thailand, Bosnia, Somalia, Russia, Afghanistan and Iraq, among other places, studying war and poverty, and has a way of picking up prostitutes just about wherever he goes. He has spent considerable time with skinheads, winos, crackheads and meth tweakers, and has ingested plenty of illegal substances himself.

“Crack,” he said recently, “is a really great drug — it’s like having three cups of coffee at once.”

“Imperial,” which is about Imperial County in California, the vast, flat and arid region in the southeastern part of the state, bordering Mexico, is an extreme Vollmann production: brilliant in places, practically unreadable in others. There are lyrical passages, and others edging over into magenta (“And change came; just as the urine of dehydrated people is turbid and dark, failing in transparency, so the evening sunlight, as if heated to exhaustion by and with itself, now lost the glaring whiteness which had characterized it since early morning, and it oozed down upon the pavement to stain it with gold”), along with scientific chapters, complete with graphs, on salinization and agricultural productivity, and 175 pages of notes. A page early on has a title warning of “Impending Aridity.”

The more interesting stuff includes chapters on narco-ballads — songs, outlawed in Mexico, celebrating drug lords — on early California history, on the Chinese-dug tunnels in Mexicali and on Mr. Vollmann’s lingering breakup with an old lover.

The book is a little like the Imperial Valley itself: pathless, fascinating, exhausting. Its two great themes are illegal immigration — the struggle of countless thousands of Mexicans to sneak into the United States through the Imperial Valley — and water, which has transformed the valley, or parts of it, from desert to seeming paradise but at great environmental cost.

Mr. Vollmann’s editors urged him to cut, he said, and he resisted: “We always go round and round. They want me to cut, and I argue, so they cut my royalties, and I agree never to write a long book again.” He acknowledged that the length of “Imperial” might cost him readers but said: “I don’t care. It seems like the important thing in life is pleasing ourselves. The world doesn’t owe me a living, and if the world doesn’t want to buy my books, that’s my problem.”

On a cloudless, sun-baked day last week Mr. Vollmann, with a characteristically bad haircut, toured some of the landscapes that had inspired him, traveling from San Diego across the border to the Mexican town of Tecate, down the mountainous, hairpin road to Mexicali and then back across the border into California, through the Imperial Valley to the Salton Sea, an enormous inland lake that is the region’s agricultural sink, so hyper-saline that it is almost toxic.

Along the way, some of the secrets of Mr. Vollmann’s method began to reveal themselves. Mr. Vollmann doesn’t drive, and his Spanish is only so-so, so he was driven, as he was for most of the 12 years it took him to write the book, by Terrie Petree, who also served as an interpreter. She learned her Spanish as a Mormon missionary in northern Spain, which also prepared her, she said, for having doors shut in her face. Mr. Vollmann sat in the passenger seat, taking in everything and peppering Ms. Petree with questions. Far from manic, he was preternaturally calm and patient, dosing himself with nothing stronger than bottled water.

Mr. Vollmann is almost excessively polite, and in conversation has a salesman’s habit of using your first name in every other sentence. He seems more innocent than worldly, driven by insatiable curiosity. In Mexicali he turned an annoying and time-consuming visit to a police station, occasioned by what appeared to be a traffic-fine shakedown, into an interview with the station’s chief of information. He also charmed a blushing secretary there and learned the name of the best taco joint in town.

In Tecate, he was so polite to Severa Piñedo Valenzuela, a woman sweeping the street, that she invited him to see her indoor garden. Her house is directly across the road from the iron fence walling off the United States border. She had never seen anyone trying to cross over, she said, and added: “They think that if they cross the border, that’s where the money is. But it’s where death is.”

On the way back to the car, Mr. Vollmann went over to the fence and peered through a gap across to a hill where a white border patrol van was parked. “At night, it looks like the Third Reich out there,” he said. “They light it up so you can see every grain of sand glowing in the dark. When we were over there, it was nothing special, but now that there’s a fence here, it feels different. It’s that crazy human thing we do about delineating things.”

He went on: “I think countries have the right to maintain their borders, but on the other hand, think of the thousands or so who have died just trying to get to the United States so they can clean toilets. It seems horrendous that they shouldn’t have a better life, especially if they’re willing to do work we aren’t.”

Mexicali is a major junction for Mexicans and Central Americans trying to cross over, and also, to judge from billboards, for Americans looking for strippers, cheap prescription drugs, plastic surgery and dental implants. It was here, Mr. Vollmann said, that he had an early insight that inspired his book.

“I used to think the Imperial Valley was hot, flat and boring,” he explained. “But I crossed over here, stayed in a hotel and realized the place was full of secrets. You’d see a building that looked run-down and boarded up, but inside it was a place of coolness, darkness, life. That seemed like such a great metaphor for this place.”

In Calexico, on the American side, Mr. Vollmann inspected the neon-looking New River, which some foolish would-be immigrants have tried to swim and which he, equally foolhardy, tried to navigate in his rubber raft. “Looking pretty good today!” he said not far from a sign warning “Agua Contaminada. No Entre.” “Doesn’t stink too much and there’s almost no foam.”

On through the valley, where the temperature reached 115 degrees, and the sun gave you a headache, Mr. Vollmann remained curious and upbeat, not even flinching at the stench from an endless feed lot. He explained his preoccupation with the marginal and downtrodden matter of factly:

“When I was a young boy, my little sister drowned, and it was essentially my fault. I was 9, and she was 6, and I was supposed to be watching. I’ve always felt guilty. It’s like I have to have sympathy for the little girl who drowned and for the little boy who failed to save her — for all the people who have screwed up.”

In Brawley he stopped for lunch with Stella Altamirano-Mendoza, who is on the board of the Imperial Irrigation District and had been his tutor in the byzantine intricacies of Imperial water politics. The stuff is so valuable, she explained, that some farmers no longer bother to farm but simply sell their water.

Near Slab City, just north of Calipatria, Mr. Vollmann stopped to pay a courtesy call on Leonard Knight, a 77-year-old local eccentric, who since 1985 has been building out of adobe an enormous, religious-theme folk-art monument called Salvation Mountain, which from a distance looks as if it had been sculptured from cake frosting.

“I sometimes think I have more ambition than brains,” Mr. Knight said, but then beamed while mentioning how many people had visited the Salvation Mountain Web site (salvationmountain.us).

As evening drew near, there was a whisper of a breeze, the shadows lengthened, greenery grew greener, and the Salton Sea almost looked beautiful, until you got up close and saw the abandoned motels and all the dead fish. “I love the desert at night,” Mr. Vollmann said. “That’s when it’s most beautiful. It feels soothing and infinite.”

The day ended with a visit to the Terrace Park Cemetery here in Holtville, where unidentified people who have died crossing the border are buried in a bare, grassless potter’s field. A danger sign warns of possible cave-ins. The graves, laid out in long, straight rows, are each marked with a brick bearing a number and the name John Doe. A few are additionally decorated with homemade wooden crosses that say “No identificado” or “No olvidado” (“not forgotten”).

Mr. Vollmann stood there quietly for a while and said, “You wonder how many are never found and never brought here,” and he added, an edge creeping into his voice: “At least they won’t be stealing our tax dollars anymore. That’s very important.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 3, 2009 
An article on July 29 about the author William T. Vollmann and his new book, “Imperial,” about Imperial County in California, and a picture caption with the article referred incompletely to the high level of salinity in the Salton Sea, a lake in Imperial and Riverside counties. Irrigation runoff is one of several factors contributing to the salinity level, not the only one.