[Image: Pedro Cambra]

Hotter than Barcelona was the headline on the front of the Observer a few days before I flew to Catalonia. My brother emailed: “The Spanish love to strike. You might have to wait an hour for a bus from the airport.” I waited an hour, no bus arrived but I hung on, reading Bolaño before a brilliant, Miro-blue sky. The Spanish were on strike because Mariano Rajoy’s government, which came to power last November, want to combat the highest unemployment rate in the European Union by making it easier for businesses to fire staff. ‘But more broadly,’ I told myself, ‘the Spanish are striking so that they don’t end up like us, a cowed, indifferent people, resigned to the dismantling of the welfare state by a government with no mandate.’ Waiting was my gesture of solidarity. 
 
After another hour, I agreed to share a cab with a businessman from Manchester. We talked about the coalition. He’d never voted Conservative, he said, but he found it hard to hate David Cameron. “I almost miss Thatcher. At least then there was somebody you could aim your anger at.” The businessman was not the first person who I have heard say this. There’s a complacency about it which reminds me of Christopher Hitchens remarking that he was glad Thatcher came to power in 1979 because “she made things more interesting.” I remembered the work about the miners’ strike in Jeremy Deller’s Joy In People exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, in particular a haunting self-portrait of a yellow-eyed young offender, titled ‘I Am A Miner’s Son’. I thought too of the descriptions of bones crunching under police brutality and the terrible sense of loss in David Peace’s GB84. If the businessman from Manchester caught a train across the Penines, he would find communities who don’t miss Thatcher because they are still living with the consequences of her policies. It’s a failure, feeling nostalgic for other peoples’ misery.
 
The cab stopped on a side street off La Rambla, the closest the driver could get to the Placa de Catalunya where I was supposed to meet my brother in an hour. I said goodbye to the businessman, walked up La Rambla which was full of buoyant demonstrators, whistling, drumming, leafleting. Lean teenagers who wore Catalan flags as capes were superheroes of the political future, fathers carried toddlers on their shoulders, young mums and grandmothers waved at the hovering helicopter. Everybody wore large stickers which either said 29M (General Strike of March 29) or showed a pair of scissors with a red line through, plastered to their lapels or thighs like backstage passes. But there was no backstage here, everything was open, up front and without hierarchy. I’d been in the country two hours, I don’t speak a word of Spanish or Catalan so I couldn’t read the banners, but the sight of a Greek flag weaving through the crowd reminded me that resistance to austerity is an international cause. 
 
North of Catalunya, down a side street, I ducked under a half-closed shutter to get coffee and read Bolaño. Two men sat the bar, drinking beer, holding hands, policemen and demonstrators alike drifted in for takeaway coffee, there was tolerance and generosity between those who were striking and those who weren’t. I misunderstood a sign and managed to walk in to the Ladies. I backed out, apologising, my backpack bumping the walls. 
 
On the Passeig de Gracia, a choir were performing on a stage, two to a microphone, some members of the large, attentive audience raised their fists in a salute of solidarity. It was a moving spectacle and sound but then a bang went up and young protesters ran up the street. This happened sporadically and the protesters were always young, squealing, excited like children at the beach, running from breaking waves. I followed the map I’d scrawled, down the Passeige de Gracia where the big high-street stores were closed. On a large Mango ad, somebody had drawn black lines in Kate Moss’ lipstick. I counted three Beatles t-shirts, one which read: John Lennon Working Class Hero. The windows of the Bank of Barcelona had been sprayed with red anarchy As. Gawky girls stepped forward from a large, amused crowd, pressed camera phones to the glass and waved at the security guards in the lobby. On the steps, a pile of embers, presided over by a masked, stick-wielding youth, reminded me of a Joseph Beuys sculpture, a well-judged symbol of ruin, waste. 
 
A broad cross-section of Barcelonans had come out to protest reforms which affect everybody. There was a palpable combination of playfulness and potency about the occasion. One irony of protest since 2008, has been that as resistance has become more direct, the message has become subtler and there’s an intellectual agility about this movement that is, to me at least, a revelation. Occupy is accused of lacking coherence but, by eschewing leadership, they have challenged the notion of hierarchy that underpins most organisations and which, for the most part, even those on the left take for granted. If, as Eliot said, “Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important,” Occupy have shown that one person needn’t be considered more important than another for an organisation to be effective.
 
I was disappointed to realise that allusions to ash heaps were accidental and that what I was looking at on the bank steps was merely the remains of a non-figurative fire. This altered the temper of 29M, it ceased to be a celebration of what it wanted to protect and became an attack on what it opposed. As the definition of the protest shifted, so did the mood. The demographic narrowed as the sun went down, loud bangs and running crowds became bigger, more frequent, disparate cries replaced squeals, urgency buried revelry. I could no longer follow my map, I ran with those who covered their mouths with scarves and banners. My clothes felt damp, my eyes streamed behind my sunglasses. When I wiped them, I made out a line of thrashing batons advancing up the street. 
 
Police had closed the Placa de Catalunya. “I don’t want to get arrested in a country where I don’t speak the language,” I told my brother when I phoned to arrange another meeting point. I turned on to a road where a bin was on fire while up above, the comfortable observed from the balconies of plush apartments, some amused, perturbed, others, such as a large, elderly man whose thin, white hair flowed in the breeze, shouting encouragement. Blue vans arrived, shield-wielding police spilled out, charging; helicopters swarmed, the noise of their blades joining the sirens, smashing glass, screaming. Every street was blocked by fires. There was a pattern: three police vans would drive past the blaze as protesters hurled stones and bottles with impressive accuracy, then another five or six vans would follow, screech to a halt and police would leap out, swinging, firing blanks in to the firmament.
 
Watching news footage of protests in southern European cities over the last year, it’s been shocking to see police beating those who simply want to protect their livelihoods. The use of rubber bullets in the event of more London riots has been discussed but the closest I’d previously got to a policeman at a demo was outside Cardiff jail in 2001. We were there to protest on behalf of a group of asylum seekers who were being held among category A prisoners. A British Asian officer discreetly shook my hand, saying: “I’m really proud of what you have done this morning.” I’d never seen anything to compare with what was happening in Barcelona but I still felt like I was only a witness. Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t afraid. When the police began to aim their guns at us, I assumed the bullets were rubber. There was no time to be shocked or scared but I was running out of streets. Whenever I reached a fireless, police-less place, it was like standing on a sandbank while the tide comes in around you. 
 
My brother suggested we meet at the metro on Universitat. The square was open, cool, buttressed by a beautiful church, but police soon channeled people my way. Somebody started a fire on the road and three blue vans swung around the bend. Debris was hurled and, every time a bottle, stone or sign connected, I winced because I knew the responses would become increasingly disproportionate. Protesters fled as the biggest fleet of vans yet arrived. I froze as fifty-odd armed police ran towards me. I was happy to look unworldly, lost, unserious. I saw a Japanese family taking cover behind a large plastic sign, a tourist map I believe, near the metro entrance. Police took aim, I put my hands over my head, ducked, squeezed in behind the sign the way you might push your way on to a crowded commuter train. 
 
As in a duel out of Turgenev, I heard bullets whizzing by. I dared to look up but saw no soft, black darts in the oily air, just grey sky. I thought: “I never thought that in my lifetime I would have to do this. The world has changed.” When the firing ceased, we peeled around the map and met advancing police, still aiming their guns across the square. I don’t think I raised my hands but there was a pause: a round-faced policeman with a big jaw like one of Miro’s peasants roared what I understood to mean “Go!” I ran down the steps in to the metro station as shooting resumed. Later, I heard no outraged talk of brutality. Some people said they had gone to work as usual while others apologised, telling me I’d chosen the wrong week to visit. The only person who told me he was proud to strike was the Welshman who runs the fish and chip shop on the La Rambla del Raval. 
 
The metro was gloomy, enclosed and I thought about how if the police came down here they might be more violent and indiscriminate. Kids were hiding in a photo booth, all gates were open, like blasted saloon doors and staff were waving everybody through. I stood at the perimeter for a few tense minutes when, at least in my head and my racing heart, we waited to see if police would descend the steps. “Wrong day to visit Barcelona,” I said to a Japanese man who had hidden behind the map with me. “Yeah.” When the atmosphere loosed, I had another banal thought: for the first time, I knew what is to need a drink.     
 
“Is it ok to come up?” I felt stupid, as though I’d imagined the guns and the roaring policeman when I saw my brother waiting for me in the middle of Universitat, his Afro bouncing as he uploaded photos of burning bins. He laughed when I described hiding behind the map, laughed when I suggested he put out his spliff. “Relax. This happens all the time.” As we negotiated a route to his flat, he told me that the police had come to the bar where he cooks and ordered them to close. In the hour since then, my brother had, he claimed, drunk six beers. He photographed an elderly man remonstrating with a group of youths in front of a burning skip, uploaded his images to the internet, as did many people, and I wondered whether this was out of imperative or awe. My brother put his phone away when we came to a side street where a man was lying on the floor, being beaten by a policeman. Batons look soft from a distance, flexible on impact, but they aren’t and it was surreal and barbaric, speculating while a few yards away blows connected. I couldn’t do anything about it and I didn’t try. The policeman went on, his arm scything through the air, down, down, down on his victim. 
 
Next day, in the still, white Fundacio Joan Miro, I sat above the city, trying to write down what had happened. My hand shook, due to the alcohol I’d consumed in the bars of Barceloneta and the Gothic Quarter post-protest. There it felt like an ordinary Thursday evening, as it immediately had once we got away from the main squares and walked through working-class neighbourhoods where the sons of immigrants played football in the street. In living-room size bars, Catalans watched sport on portable televisions while in hipper establishments, heavily-tattooed staff mixed cocktails and heated nacho sauce. A Scottish stag party asked my brother where they could buy blow and he told them. I wanted to write nothing more than a plot summary but I was perturbed by my lack of specificity, my failure to pick individuals from crowds, to find colour and impact amongst numbers and slogans. I went on taking notes because I didn’t want my experience of 29M to become anecdotal. “I’ll be able to say,” I overheard an English tourist remark, “that on my birthday I got caught up in a riot in Barcelona.” That was what I didn’t want, what I was writing against, and yet, even now, I feel myself typing instead of writing. The world has changed. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Liu is a writer and journalist. He lives in North London where he is at work on a novel and a collection of autobiographical essays

I have, for some time, been collecting strange texts, in particular those unsettling artefacts which describe fantastic events in such a way as to seem more account than story. I thrill to the shock of the uncanny they give rise to, though I’m aware most are, in all likelihood, mere fictions designed to evoke precisely that shudder. Occasionally, though, I happen across one which cannot easily be dismissed as fabrication. This is the tale of one such text and the terrible events it gave rise to.

In 2004, a friend of mine, Martin Camblin, a scholar of Early Modern English drama, was sent to examine some annotations a private collector had discovered in a copy of the third quarto of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, which, or so the collector thought, provided new information pertaining to the authorship of the 1602 additions to the play. In fact, the marginalia were clearly a much later forgery and of little interest. However, Martin did find, tucked into the book, folded into quarters, something that intrigued him: a handbill advertising what sounded a bizarre spectacle:

Handbills advertising similar freakish attractions at sixteenth and seventeenth century London fairs being commonplace, the collector had considered the flyer of little interest, an insignificant document used as a bookmark, had not even opened it out. Martin, though, was fascinated by the genre and unfolded the handbill to examine it more closely. In doing so, he discovered, on the back, a short text:

The collector merely shrugged when Martin pointed out the odd note, dismissed it as ‘doggerel’. Martin, horribly fascinated, asked the collector if he would be prepared to part with the handbill, and he agreed to do so, for a modest sum.

Intrigued by his find, Martin, for a few months, spent much of his spare time in research, hoping to discover something to cast light on the dark enigma. At some point during this period, knowing my interest in such things, he showed me the handbill, asked my opinion of it. I told him that, though the handbill itself was certainly real, I thought the note faked. He enquired why; I pointed out how neat the hand was. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘But you’ve no imagination. I find that utterly chilling.’

Martin’s investigations into the strange handbill turned up nothing. But then, in late 2006, entirely by chance, while researching witch trials in early Jacobean London, he found the following account in a handwritten newssheet of September 1608:

Today ſaw the Triall of a young Woman for Witchery and Black Murder. The defendant, Rachael Camlet, of Highgate, pleaded Innocence at her Arraignement, but the Opinione of the Court was of her Guilt, and ſhe was Convicted and Sentenced to be Burnt.
   Witnesses related to the Court that Rachael was founde, in Januarie this Year, by a Neighboure, who, hearing a Deviliſh Tumulte, entered the Houſe of Rachael’s Husbande, Walter Camlet, a Mercere. The Neighboure found Rachael in the Library of that Houſe, inſenſible, weltering in the bloode of her Husbande, Walter, and of their three Servantes. The Neighboure, ſtricken with horror at what he ſaw, called for aſsiſtance. Others were alſo diſtreſsed. There weere cleare Signs of Witchery and foulneſs and the Murders were moſt vile.
   Rachael was taken to the Village Lock-up, for her Incarceration. When ſhe came againe to herſelf, ſhe raved about murderous Goode Folke. The manie who ſaw her in her cell ſpoke of Diabolic Poſseſsion.
   At the Triall the Court was told, by Walter’s Mother, Marjorie Camlet, how Rachael had committed Adulterie with a fallen Prieſt, during one of her Husbande’s long trade voyages, and got with child. Walter, a compaſsionate Man, returning to finde his Wife ſwolt, did not caſt her out, but let her ſtay on with him, at his Houſe. After the birth, during Rachael’s Confinemente, the Child was given to an Orphanage, and Walter, a goode man, ſuffered his wife to ſtaye on with him.
   Theere was one who ſpoke in defenſe of Rachael, a Mary Pepperhill, friend of the accuſed, a looſe woman certainly, and mayhap another Witch. She ſtated ſhe had been at the Froſt Faire on the Thames with Rachael the weeke before the murders, and that they had ſeene a Faerie Child theere, and that Rachael had become excited, certaine the Changeling was in ſooth the Child her Husband had taken from her, and ſworn to get it back. She thought Rachael had acted on this Oathe, and that the Charlatans ſhewing the Changeling might be behinde the Murders. Mary’s teſtimony was diſcredited though, by her railing againſt the virtuous Walter and Marjorie, whom ſhe called Inceſtuous.
   The Court did not pauſe before declaring Rachael’s Guilte.
   A curiouſe Appendix was provided by Locals of Highgate. It was tolde how Something was Wrong with the Houſe of Camlet after theſe Happenings, Something moſt Dreadful and Weirde, with the Proportions or the Shadowes, and no man could abide the place. Hence, in March, it was burn’d to the grounde by diſtract Villagers.

For some time after discovering the newssheet, Martin continued his enquiries. He learnt nothing further, as far as I’m aware.

In the summer of 2007, I lost contact with Martin. I learnt, during the winter of that year, from mutual friends, that no one had seen or heard from him for some months, not even his family or long-term girlfriend, Ruth. Then, on the 13th March, 2008, during a hailstorm, I happened to look out the window and saw him, outside my building, huddled beneath an old oak. I went to the front door of the block, called him over, took him up to my flat. He told me he’d been waiting for me, then began raving about ‘the Folk’ and eldritch terrors, said he was going to destroy ‘the cursed handbill’. I asked him if, instead, he would be prepared to sell it to me. A look of cunning fleeted across his face and he agreed, naming a small sum.

He went away, returning about an hour later with the flyer and a sheet of feint-ruled paper on which he had copied out the account from the newssheet. I paid him, and he left again. The next day, he rang me and, frantic, snivelling, begged me to burn the handbill. When I asked him why I should, he abruptly hung up.

Three weeks after that desperate ’phone call, Ruth and her parents were found, in her flat, brutally slain. Martin could not be located, was the main suspect in the killings. After his research field became known, the press troped the scene of the killings as the bloody climax of a Jacobean revenge tragedy. I don’t, therefore, know how many of the reported details were exaggerated or partially invented – the eyes scooped from their sockets, the breasts hacked off, the genitals mutilated, the tongues torn out at the root – but certainly the victims died gruesomely.

Two days later, Martin came to my building again. This time he pressed the buzzer for my flat. Wary, I did not let him in, but spoke to him on the intercom. He pleaded with me. I was the only one, he said, who knew the truth, that he wasn’t a killer, that it was the Fair Folk who’d turned Ruth’s flat into a gory shambles. He bitterly cursed the day he discovered the handbill; it was his investigations, he claimed, that had drawn the Folk’s notice.

‘They meant no particular malice, though,’ he whined, then stifled a frenzied laugh. ‘They were just revelling, were encouraged by our screams.’

The police had frozen his bank account; he asked if he could borrow some money.

I went downstairs, opened the front door to my apartment block. Seeing him huddled, cowering, in the porch, I was shocked: he looked ravaged, feral. I took him to a cash machine, got out some money for him. Baring his teeth in thanks, he took it from me, then turned, loped away. I never saw him again.

There are two brief epilogues to this tale. In the summer of 2009, I was involved in a project studying the earliest ‘corantos’, or printed newssheets, circulated in Britain. In one, from May 1621, I found the following brief item:

Two Men were beaten to Death in Februarie this Year, by the vexed folk of the Citie of Norwich for Charlatanrie. The Offenſe was the diſplaying of a Changeling, which was but an ordinary Human Infant thieved from an Orphanage that they made to appear to ſpeak by a kind of caſting of the voice, perhaps related to the Gaſtromancie or Ventriloquie of Witches. This Deception they had been practiſing for manie years.

Then, about four months later, ascending the escalator at Southwark underground station, I found a folded piece of paper in the pocket of my overcoat, put there, I suppose, by someone under the cover of the press of the crowd on the tube. On it was scrawled the following verse:

We rend your flesh, we are the Fay,
We break your bones, we are the Fay,
We spill your blood, we are the Fay,
You are the Fey, you are our prey.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Timothy J. Jarvis is a writer and academic who currently lives and works in London. He has had short fiction published in New Writing 13, a British Council anthology, American speculative fiction collection, Leviathan 4: Cities, and in Prospect Magazine. He maintains a blog of antic found texts at treatisesondust.wordpress.com.

Michael Lynch is a deep groove philosopher. He keeps us all wondering about truth. He writes cool books about it to help us, such as Truth as One and Many, True To Life: Why Truth Matters, The Nature of Truth, Truth and Realism co-edited with Patrick Greenough and Perspectives on the Philosophy of William P. Alston. How do we decide what to do if one person thinks there are no better sources of facts than science and someone else doesn’t? He thinks about democracy and the space of reasons and deception and the value of reasons. He narrows his eyes when thinking about the forces of reaction. He worries that without agreed principles of evidence and rationality we can’t agree of the facts and if you can’t do that you can’t agree what to do in the face of the facts. So he thinks we need to get this sorted out? Which makes him an engaged philosopher. He has no problem with burning his armchair so long what comes out of the smoke is handled right.

3:AM: When did you decide to become a philosopher and why? Has being a philosopher lived up to your expectations?
 
Michael Lynch: I am the youngest in a big family. My sisters are writers and artists, my brother a psychologist and a painter. So I always sort of expected to be an artist of some kind. And I guess I still think of myself as one. For me philosophy has always been as essentially creative discipline, always drawing and re-drawing the boundaries of the possible. That’s what drew me to it from the get go. I remember sitting in a philosophy course in college at 8:30 in the morning, listening to a lecture on Descartes, and thinking I had stumbled onto the secret language of the world. And while I admit that I sometimes weary of the whirligig of academic life, I still have that first sense of finding my creative home. Here’s a simpler way of putting it: I couldn’t stop thinking about this stuff if I tried.
 
3:AM: It might seem obvious to some people, but to others the question of ‘what is truth?’ doesn’t seem quite as important as it once did. Why do you think this is such an important question, not just for philosophy but for the rest of us?
 
ML: During the Bush administration, Ron Susskind famously reported that one of Bush’s top advisors (probably Karl Rove) sneered that the administration’s critics were continuing to live in the “reality-based community”. That was a mistake, he said, because “we are an empire now, we create our own reality”. This is a telling remark. It illustrates not only what was wrong with that administration but why truth is so important a concept – and not just for philosophers. When we ignore the difference between what those in power say is true and what is true, we risk not only losing our rights, but the ability to even give ourselves any critical voice. So that is why thinking about truth matters - because the truth matters.
 
3:AM: You have spent a great deal of your time figuring out what truth is. This is one of the big questions, the kind of question the folk expect their philosophy departments to be thinking about. There are a whole bunch of positions contemporary philosophers take towards this subject so I wondered whether it would be good if you could give a quick overview of the landscape before asking you where we’d find you. So can you say something about what the variations are, for example, monism and pluralism and relativism, functionalist and alethic and folk theories, realist and anti-realist theories, correspondence, coherence, deflationism and so on. Where do we find the most pressing work taking place these days?
 
ML: Traditionally, philosophers have always thought that truth had a single essence. Call this monism about truth. The oldest monist view, traceable perhaps to Aristotle, is that beliefs are true when they correspond to the world. On this way of looking at things, beliefs and sentences are like maps - they are accurate or true when they represent the world as it is. An alternative view, not as old, but not new either, is that beliefs are true when they hang together – when they form a coherent narrative as it were. This may have started with Hegel. Call it the coherence theory: truths don’t need to fit the world; they need to fit each other.
 
In more recent years, many of us who work on truth for a living have given up on monism of either type. The newly dominant view is that truth has no nature at all. Views of this sort are often labeled deflationary – they deflate the pretensions of the traditional theories. Pluralism about truth, on the other hand, rejects monism not because truth has no nature, but because it has more than one. According to this idea, both of the major traditional views of truth are right in their way, they just over-generalized (William James thought this was the compulsive habit of philosophers – a great generalization if there ever was one!) Some of our beliefs are like maps. Beliefs about our immediate environment, when we are lucky, do represent how things are in that environment. But many of our beliefs are not like that, but they can still be true. They can be true because it is possible for them to fit extremely coherent narratives. Moral and political beliefs for example, can be correct or off-base. But they don’t picture a world completely independent of us.
 
Your other question was about what questions are particularly pressing right now in truth theory. There are four I think. One concerns the value of truth, why it matters. The second concerns whether its nature is one, many or none (the points I just talked about). The third concerns the logical paradoxes, a prime example being the liar. Consider a sentence that says, in effect “I’m false”. Is it true or false? Both? Neither? Meaningless? Each answer has been tried, and each has its costs. And the fourth concerns the relationship between all these questions. A particularly open and interesting issue - one of the many to which my colleague JC Beall has contributed - is the extent to which our logical theories of truth, arrived at after grappling with the paradoxes, should change our metaphysical theories about truth - and vice versa. The answer I suspect is “yes” but the “how” is still a work in progress.

3:AM: So your position in Truth as One and Many about truth is one that begins with rejecting that if a proposition is true it must be true in the same way. You say that truth is a functional property that can be made manifest in more than one way. So can you say something more about how this works?
 
ML: I’m a pluralist; I think that there is more than one kind of truth. Truth, in this sense, is many. But what do all these kinds of truth have in common - what makes them all kinds of truth? Pluralists have different answers to this question (Crispin Wright has a different answer for example). In my view, they all share a common job or function.
 
The basic idea is that a belief’s being true consists in its having a particular job in our cognitive economy. Just as one person can sort the mail one day, and another person can perform that function on another day, one feature can perform the truth-function for some kinds of beliefs and another feature for other kinds of beliefs. So correspondence or representational properties do the truth-job for certain kinds of belief. A type of supercoherence may do it for others.
 
The underlying idea here - that some of the concepts and properties that interest us philosophically are functional properties - is not unusual. It is familiar in the philosophy of mind – thanks to the work of Hilary Putnam and David Lewis, among others. Part of what I’m doing is pointing out that, with a little metaphysical work, we can apply it to basic concepts like truth too.

3:AM: So why do you think this is better than rivals?

ML: One way to judge philosophical theories is by the work they do, the problems they help to solve, and by this standard, a functionalist version of pluralism about truth comes off pretty well. Here’s an example. There is a longstanding problem with explaining how some kinds of propositions can be true. At least some propositions about what is right or wrong, for example, seem capable of being true. Most of believe, for example, that slavering is wrong, and to believe it is to believe that it is true. Yet that proposition doesn’t seem to represent any part or feature of the natural world. We don’t find moral rightness in the lab, so to speak. This observation has led philosophers to say some crazy things: like maybe there aren’t any truths about what is wrong or right, for example, or maybe they really do map the world but the non-natural or supernatural world.
 
Pluralism allows us a way out: we can say, with common sense, that some propositions are true, but they aren’t all true in the same way. Not all propositions have to represent the world in order to be true.
 
3:AM: Yes, so an interesting theory of truth that also appeals to some is not that truth has a single nature (which is possibly the account that most folk might hold) but that it has no nature at all. These are labeled ‘deflationary’ theories of truth. Can you say something about these and why you feel that your theory is superior?
 
ML: We live in somewhat curious times for truth theory. Business is booming – lots of books being written, dissertations written etc. Yet the prevailing view about truth is that there is not much to say about it. I find that pretty strange. It’s sort of like if those paid to think about the nature of poetry or art or architecture spent a lot of time talking about the fact that there is not much to say about it.
 
The most basic reason I deny deflationism is that such theories rob us of a theoretically useful tool. If deflationism were true, then we could know a priori that we don’t need to appeal to truth in order to explain anything philosophically interesting, like content, or meaning or the norms of belief. After all, if truth has no nature, if there are no facts about it over and above the equivalence principle (the idea that, it is true that p if and only if p) then we can hardly appeal to the nature of truth to explain anything else. (In other words, we can’t say: well, since truth is like this, then it follows that property x is like that).
 
I think this type of explanatory pessimism is far too hasty. We may well need to appeal to truth, and the properties that manifest it, to give a satisfactory explanation of these things. Indeed, for some cases, like the case of how the content of our mental states get determined, I think the issue is going to hang on yet to be worked out theories in cognitive science. So I think it is too early to judge whether we should be deflationary pessimists.
 
What I like about functionalism is that it agrees with the deflationists that our ordinary concept of truth is pretty simple: you understand truth if you understand its job, and that job may not be complicated. But it allows us to appeal to the varying nature (the underlying properties that manifest truth or do the truth-job) to help us explain knowledge, meaning and so on.

 
3:AM: The theory as you present it is a framework for further investigation I think. So questions might be raised about whether it is a framework that inevitably presupposes consistency with other philosophical positions that are not purely about the nature of truth. So is this approach consistent with those philosophers who have realist inclinations, for example? Can you say something about this worry and how you answer it? I guess this is a general question about the scope of your theory and the notion of ‘super-coherence.’
 
ML: That’s exactly right: functionalism about truth is something of a meta-theory of truth. It tells you that truth is a functional property that can be manifested in more than one way. One can agree with that and still disagree with my own views about how truth is or isn’t manifested in particular domains of inquiry.
 
Now “realism” is one of those words in philosophy, like “naturalism” that gets thrown around a lot. But I’m certainly not opposed to realism in most of the interesting senses. Indeed, one might say my over-all view requires it. Here’s a way of illustrating this: As I said above, I’m inclined to think that in some domains, like the domain of morality, that truth isn’t a matter of corresponding to the world. Whether a moral proposition is true depends, roughly speaking, on whether it would cohere without defeat with the other moral and non-moral truths. But I don’t think that view would make sense across the board. For one thing the truths about what coheres with what can’t be a matter of coherence.

3:AM: I guess linked to the last question is how well your approach can accommodate science and maths. I presume you would want to do this. If, for example, a naturalist philosopher is left out in the cold then this would prove a difficulty for your approach I suppose. Or is there room for your theory to winnow out philosophical positions that don’t cohere? Can you say something about this?
 
ML: I have always thought that the two hardest test cases for any theory of truth are morals and mathematics. I’ve got a theory of moral truth more or less. But I still don’t have a settled view on mathematical truth. (So I still have some job security). But nothing about functionalism itself precludes holding some version of high church Platonism about mathematical truth, although I myself am not deeply attracted to that view. If I were to have to go with a theory, it would probably be something like structuralism but luckily no one is yet holding a gun to my head.
 
3:AM: The collection you edited with Patrick Greenough, Truth and Realism was largely papers from a conference at which Timothy Williamson presented his (in)famous ‘must do better’ talk which is the last chapter of his own book, The Philosophy of Philosophy. He was critical of the variety of approaches to truth that were current, and thought that many were too imprecise to be good philosophy. Was Williamson right?
 
ML: Well yes and no; it is hard to say precisely (ahem). Yes: we must always strive to do better, and be as precise as the subject matter merits. No: because, as that remark indicates, not all theories of truth are constructed for the same explanatory purpose. They all want to tell the truth about truth, as it were, but they do so with other goals in mind as well. Some are concerned with the logical paradoxes, some with the metaphysical nature of truth, and some are more interested in the semantics of the English predicate “true”. Each of these explanatory goals have merit, but they may bring with them different requirements on what counts as “precision”. Good philosophy, like good art or good science, gets done in a variety of ways. Surely the history of philosophy illustrates this fact.
 
That said, Patrick and I have often regretted not having that particular session – and the firestorm of discussion and debate - taped. Tim’s brilliant presentation and the various responses by Williams, Rorty etc. amounted to some exceedingly good philosophical theatre. Now days of course it would have been all put on Facebook five minutes after it happened.
 
3AM: You’re interested in the history of philosophy and co-wrote a book with Heather Battaly on a figure who to most people is pretty obscure, William Alston. He looks pretty dry on the cover. Why is this guy fascinating?
 
ML: William Alston was a philosopher’s philosopher. He is often associated with traditional views: In epistemology, he revitalized foundationalism, in truth-theory, realism, and he was one of the most influential philosophers of religion around. But the thing that always fascinated me about Bill is that if you scratched the surface of his views, radical notions teemed beneath the surface. One of Bill’s last (and most overlooked) books argues that there really is no such thing as “epistemic justification”, and philosophers should just give up trying to define it. Instead, we should just acknowledge there is a plurality of features a belief can have that make it good from the epistemic point of view. And those features are the ones we should care about. That’s a sort of pluralism, and there it is no surprise I suppose that it resonates with me.
 
I’m proud to say that Bill was also my friend and mentor (a distinction I share with many others, including Al Plantinga, Bob Audi, Heather Battaly, Alessandra Tanesini, etc.). We never agreed on that much, but he was amazingly encouraging of those with whom he disagreed. He died in 2009, but I find I’m arguing with him still.

3:AM: So your new book In Praise of Reason takes on those who are skeptical about the role of reason. Why do you think reason need defending?
 
ML: I think that there are two things that need defending: the value and efficacy of reason-giving in a democratic culture, and the idea that the sorts of reasons we should give are those that emerge from broadly scientific methods of inquiry.
 
One of the most pervasive sources of skepticism about reason and its value in our culture is the thought that at the end of the day, reasons always give way to something else, something arbitrary. How many times have you heard someone say: even science comes down to faith - that reasons must always hit bedrock after which there is nothing else to say? This is a very old idea, and there is more than a grain of truth to it. But that doesn’t mean it is completely right either. It encourages the worse sort of dogmatism and conservatism in my view.

 
3:AM: So this is very much an argument that links democracy with the ‘space of reasons’ isn’t it? Can you explain how you make this link?
 
ML: Absolutely. Democracy is, or should be, to use Sellars’ ringing phrase, a space of reasons. Democratic politics isn’t war by other means. In a properly functioning liberal democracy, mutual deliberation proceeds through the exchange of public reasons – reasons that can be assessed by the common point of view. And here we encounter what I think is a very deep and overlooked problem. In order to even have a common point of view we have to have a shared set of epistemic principles – principles that tell us what methods and sources of belief to trust. Without those shared principles, policy disagreements stall out. After all, if we can’t agree on the best methods for identifying the facts, we won’t be able to agree on what the facts are, and if we can’t agree about what the facts are, we will hardly be able to agree on what to do in light of the facts. We won’t be able to agree on policy.
 
This is just the situation in the US. We live in isolated bubbles of information pulled from different sources that only reinforce our prejudices. No wonder that political action grinds to a halt. Increasingly we lack the common principles of rationality that would allow us to engage in meaningful dialogue.
 
3:AM: The argument that we need to be more reasonable in order to combat prevailing prejudices and irrationalities is likely to resonate with many people. Dogmatic conservativism is a real enemy. But what do you say to a threat coming from those who find evidence that the role of reason in agency is less powerful than might be expected. So we find experimenters in cognitive science and psychology finding that when people tell us why they acted as they did what sound like cogent reasons are merely post hoc rationalizations in order to avoid cognitive dissonance. So Peter Carruthers and Eric Schwitzgebel, for example, seem to have lots of evidence that suggest that the powers of reason are pretty feeble, and reasoned agency is less secure than we like to think.  This kind of argument is the sort that Nietzschean naturalists launched against Kantians but you defend what Anthony Gottlieb has called ‘the Enlightenments’ best idea.’ So what do you say to this threat?
 
ML: I think some of these conclusions are overblown (if not always by the people you mentioned). But it is certainly something I talk about in the book, in part because it has received so much attention. The funny thing is, we don’t really need a study, do we, to know that our reasons for our actions are often post hoc rationalizations. Nor do we need much more evidence than we already have for the obvious fact that many people make their political and economic decisions just as much or more on emotional or intuitive considerations. In short, I certainly don’t dispute that reasons are often not as efficacious in our decision-making as we’d like to tell the world they are.
 
But do we have evidence to think that reasons can’t be efficacious? Or even that they never actually are? I know of no studies that show that. Nor do I think it is plausible, in part because the more radical view, were anyone to hold it, would appear to be self-undermining. How do you make a scientific argument for the conclusion that no scientific argument ever convinces anyone?
 
There is of course a ton of really interesting work being done on the relation between intuition, reason and emotion. In my own view, this work does explode the Platonic myth that reason is and should be the master of the mind. But I also think that we should be just as suspicious of the idea that reason is a simple slave to passion, as Hume sometimes seemed to think. The truth must lie somewhere in between.
 
3:AM: Linked to this is what you feel about the work of experimental philosophy and its relevance for your arguments. Would you change your mind if there was evidence that skepticism about reason was a better description of what people actually do than yours?
 
ML: Nope. The reason is that I think that lots of folks (not everyone, but lots) actually are skeptical about reason. I want to convince them not to be. That said, I’ve come around on experimental philosophy. Like most of us who are comfortable in their armchairs, I confess to being initially skeptical. But I now think there is value in much of this data—we just need to be careful about explaining that value.
 
What experimental philosophy can tell us is what folks think about stuff. It can tell us therefore about the scope of “common sense” on certain philosophical topics. And what’s disturbing (and interesting) is that that may turn out to be different than what we eggheads thought it was. Yet what x-phi can’t tell us, or so I believe, is what we should think about the relevant topics. That’s the job of the philosopher: not just to describe the world, but to change our thinking about it. Sometimes the proposed change can be radical (think Peter Singer or Graham Priest) sometimes it can be a matter of suggesting that we systemize our thought, make it more coherent in one direction or another (think Davidson or Rawls). Philosophy in either case is revisionary; it builds.
 
3:AM: Recently I was talking to a non-philosopher and I was surprised that she thought that most philosophers were dogmatic and conservative and she then linked this perspective to their belief in the objectivity of truth and couldn’t believe that a politics of the left could be defended from such a position. That’s why she liked French philosophers (honest!). So what would you say about this and its inference of reactionary politics linked with objectivity, on the one hand, and left politics being linked with relativism of a French kind (probably Derrida) on the other. It made me realise that something that might be supposed to be neutral regarding ones politics, like a theory of truth, is often supposed to be part of a much wider discourse. Is this something you’re aware of? It seems to be the source of some of the difficulties and bad reputation that some Anglo/American philosophy has acquired. I sense that someone like Richard Rorty felt something like this. What do you think?
 
ML: People like me who grew up intellectually in the nineties were soaked with the idea that those on the left must reject the idea of objective truth. That was a mistake, and one that, as I noted above, the Bush years in the US made us learn the hard way. The fact is that we on the progressive left have done ourselves a terrible disservice by rejecting the concept of objective truth – if only because it is hard to stand up for your opinions if you think they are no more true than anyone else’s.
 
This was something that at the end of his life, Richard Rorty and I went around about it in several venues. In his view, talk of truth is just like talk of God. It is a metaphysical crux, and one that should be abandoned. I see it differently. I think that giving up on objective truth is giving in to those who would like to convince us that there is no difference between what is right and what they say is right, between lies and reality. It is not just a metaphysical mistake. It is a political one.
 
Having said that, it is unfortunate that so many philosophers tend to think that pluralism is inconsistent with objectivity. That is a mistake too, and it gives us a bad name. There can be more than one true story of the world. That just doesn’t mean that every story is equally true.
 
3:AM: Linked to that last point, do you agree that the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy is a phony one? Where do you situate yourself? What are the big questions that are going to be pressing on philosophers’ brows in the next decade?
 
ML: Yes and no. Looked at from the vantage point of inquiry, philosophers should be without borders. In my view there is no deep and philosophically interesting divide between “analytic” and “continental” philosophers in the way there is between say “nominalists” and “realists” about numbers or between utilitarians and Kantians in moral theory.
 
Nor is there much a methodological divide either (not all “analytic” philosophers are doing “linguistic philosophy” and not all “continental” philosophers are doing phenomenology or deconstruction). But there is a sociological divide that these unhappy terms can be used to pick out, and we can’t ignore it.
 
What marks the divide is much a matter of which books you were brought up to read as much as anything else: whether for example your graduate program privileged Husserl over Frege or Derrida over Quine. And then there is a matter of style too, (which is not the same as method). Marked that way, I’m an analytic philosopher no question. But the questions I’m interested in are questions that many “continental” philosophers are interested in too.
 
What’s going to be big in philosophy? That’s a dangerous question—like asking what is going to be big in the stock market. (“Plastics” said the guy to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. “Plastics”). But I’m a risk taker as much as the next guy, so here goes. One issue I think that philosophy is ripe to return to is the nature of the imagination. This was a question that fascinated the heroes of old, but it hasn’t been central recently (although folks like Tamar Gendler and Tim Williamson have started us down the path again). What is the relation between imagination and knowledge? They are often seen as opposites, but I think that is a mistake. What we imagine can give us knowledge too.
 
I think the problems of knowledge and reason will continue to be important. The virtual age is changing how we think about both. Most of what we know (or think we know) now is via search engine. As a result, knowledge more than ever relies on testimony, on “book-learning”. But testimony can classically be terribly unreliable. So what does the fact that we can’t seem to rely on it mean for what we know - and for what knowledge is? I don’t think we’ve fully grappled with that fact yet, and so far I think philosophers have been ignoring it – which is a problem, for all sorts of reasons.
 
3:AM: So have there been any books, art, or films that have been enlightening to you outside philosophy?
 
ML: Tons. Here’s one. I was in Rome recently and spent a lot of time looking at some early and lesser-known (at least to me) pieces by the Bernini. What struck me is that he was not afraid of the curve. Philosophers shouldn’t be either.
 
3:AM: And finally, for the seekers of truth here at 3:AM, can you recommend five top books, other than your own which of course we’ll all be ordering straight away, that will be mind blowing for the non-philosophically-trained but smart reader?

ML: First: Reason, Truth and History by Hilary Putnam. I’ve been rereading for the 10th time and still find it separates my brain from the rest of my body (in a good way).

Second: The Reliability of Sense Perception by William P. Alston. This tiny little book deserves to be a classic (and in some circles is). It argues that we have no non-circular way of proving that our senses are reliable. That seems like a pretty powerful skeptical argument, no? Alston thought it showed something else. Read it to find out what.

Third: Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. As Quine said, the Humean condition is the human condition.
 
Fourth: Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. I disagree with much of what he says, but he has the problem nailed. And no matter what he (and everyone else) might have said: this is a man who took philosophy seriously.
 
Fifth: Game of Thrones. Loved it. (And all the other books in that series too). So sue me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Over the weekend, the Studs Terkel Memorial Bridge in Chicago was rededicated. It’s a run-down dingy bridge built in 1904 - eight years older than Studs. It’s one of many events that are taking place around the city to celebrate his 100th birthday this Wednesday.

Before the event, organizers sold copies of his books in a nearby tent (it was cloudy, windy and raining during the ceremony). They also sold a map of Chicago with places of interest related to Studs Terkel marked.

The bridge is Division Street when it crosses the Chicago River at Goose Island. There are thousands of those brown street signs around the city called vanity street signs that commemorate great Chicagoans. The Studs Terkel bridge was dedicated 20 years ago, when Studs was in his early 80s. He was confused about the dedication, but accepted it. The street sign was put up crudely and a few days later it was gone, never to be replaced. So for many years, people have driven or walked over it not knowing it was the Studs Terkel bridge.

On the sidewalk outside, people carried signs with pictures of Studs on them and people honked their horns in support. Illinois Governor Pat Quinn was supposed to speak, but couldn’t, but he did issue a proclamation about the ceremony, read by state senator Pat McGuire (Joliet, pictured on the right in the green shirt).

U. S. Congressman Mike Quigley (Illinois 5th district) also spoke, as did city alderman Peter Waguespack (above)

The re-dedication began and ended with a raucous performance by Mucca Pazza. The city council has also decided to tear down and replace the bridge, and there has been a contest to design a replacement bridge.

The event began with Chris Walz (above) singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and ended with him leading the crowd in “This Land is Your Land.”

(photos by the author)

[This is part of a series on the complete works of Studs Terkel, in honor of his hundredth birthday on May 16th of this year. The last book was And They All Sang.]

By 2007, Studs’ normally robust health had deteriorated. He had open-heart surgery in 2005 at the age of 93, and had gotten less and less mobile. His hearing was mostly gone. His longtime transcriber and assistant Sydney Lewis had moved to Massachusetts to work for Atlantic Public Media.

André Schiffrin sensed Studs would go soon, and asked Lewis to help him write one last book - his memoir. In the end, it became Touch and Go.

Studs’ previous effort to look at his life, Talking to Myself, was really a book of memory, much like Hard Times or The Good War, except instead of a collective memory, it was just his. And Studs always had a conversation going, even if it was with just himself. His memories were oddly connected, and Studs thought fast, and it reads like he tried talking as fast as his thoughts, but he could only talk so fast.

With Touch and Go, Sydney Lewis was largely in the driver’s seat. She records and transcribes what Studs says faithfully, but keeps him focused on certain events and ideas long enough that he can talk about them in-depth and not segue into something else.

Studs, in the prologue, notes the irony of writing a book about himself - having been celebrated for having celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated people. He imagines some of his fore-bearers, and how they approached work similar to his, such as Henry Mayhew, who told the lives of ordinary people in mid-nineteenth century London. Another is Zora Neal Hurston, one of the greats of African-American literature who started as a folklorist and anthropologist. During the depression she interviewed former slaves and sharecroppers about their life-stories for the WPA Writers Project (who Studs also worked for). Like in Talking to Myself, Studs notes his odd relationship with the tape recorder, saying one other person was so enamored with the device as he: Richard Nixon.

Studs goes more in detail in this book about his parents. His father was often bed-ridden, and while they were still living in New York, he had a mistress named Theodosia Goodman, who he calls Natacha Rambova (Rudolph Valentino’s wife) to match with his fantasy of her. Studs, as a seven year old kid delighted in her company, and she delighted in his, tussling his hair and giving him a chocolate soda. His mother was the dominating force in the family. When they ran the Wells Grand, which was inhabited by union men and “self-made” men who argued fiercely about everything, she could tussle with the best of them. She was tough on everyone, everyone that is but Studs. He always felt bad that he was the favorite, and was coddled as much as he was.

Studs also pays tribute to his two older brothers. Meyer, the intellectual, who passed on his love of Shakespeare and reading. These are further cemented by Studs’ teachers in school. Ben, the dreamer, who took Studs to the Dreamland Ballroom and while he chased women, Studs fell in love with jazz.

Studs talks a little more about his time at the University of Chicago. He applied to be a fingerprint specialist at the FBI when he graduated. He was accepted, but was later rejected by J. Edgar Hoover after an interview with an unknown professor who noted how different and unlike everyone else he was. Studs ended up getting a job with the Federal Emergency Relief Agency (FERA).

He also tells more stories about Studs’ Place, The Wax Museum, his first radio show. He has one chapter devoted to Henry Wallace, the progressive Vice-President and Secretary of Agriculture under FDR who ran for President in 1948. Studs worked for his campaign. Wallace was accused of being a communist (and was even endorsed by the Communist Party USA), and many of his campaign staff, including Studs, were thought guilty by association.

Studs closes the book with a chapter on technology. About the tape recorder, but more about the larger power of technology. Technology can improve our lives greatly - advances in medical technology allowed Studs to live many decades after his brothers. But he still worries about how technology can harm us. When Studs passed away, his friend and colleague Bill Moyers replayed a bit from a documentary he had done with Studs where the two of them traveled across America by train, and talked to the folks on the train. When Moyers asked him what he most feared, Studs said “I’m worried about what Einstein was worried about and if he’s scared, I’m scared. He said, ‘We’ve taken such a leap in weaponry and technology and science. Unless we take that same leap as far as understanding one another in this society and in the world, we’re in for a catastrophe.’”

He has much of the same concern in the last chapter echoing Einstein’s concerns about the atomic bomb. In a separate interview, he told Amy Goodman that Albert Einstein is both the hero and the villain of the book. That Einstein was “a man from the future who came to us too soon…Out of Einstein’s mind came all these thoughts that led eventually to some of the advances in medicine, but also led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” He contrasts Einstein’s view of humanity - that we must all work together for a better world - with the view of Ayn Rand. Studs had interviewed Rand’s biographer Barbara Branden some years before, and Branden summarized Rand’s hero as “the man who lives for his own sake against the collectivist, who places self above others.”

Studs asks if we have learned from the Great Depression that we’re all in this together. In some ways, that’s the message Studs had wanted people to take away from all of his books - that we’re all in this together, even the uncelebrated people. And the uncelebrated every-day person, be it the union man, the white-collar worker or the woman in the housing project has a voice. And it counts.

The book ends with William Sloan Coffin’s prayer, which Studs, an agnostic, often closed his public speaking events with.

Oh Lord, as we leave this university, let these be young men and young women for whom the complexity of issues only served their zeal to deal with them; young men and young women who alleviated pain by sharing it; and young men and young women who were always willing to risk something big for something good. So that we may have in the world a little more truth, a little more justice, a little more beauty than would have been there, had we not loved the world enough to quarrel with it for what it is not but still can be. Oh God, take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, and take our hearts and set them on fire. Amen.

[Next: Studs' final book, P. S.: Further thoughts from a lifetime of listening.]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert O’Connor is a journalist, writer, adventurer and a few dozen other things (including a Co-Editor of 3:AM). His stuff has appeared in the Twin Cities Daily Planet, Hot Press, KFAI and a few other places. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Tom McCarthy in conversation with Marita Gluzberg. * Dylan Trigg on disorientation and uncanniness. * Roland Barthes: myths we don’t outgrow. * 1977: the Queen’s punk jubilee. * Palettes of famous painters. * Three early short films by Peter Greenaway. * Black and white pictures of life inside the Chelsea Hotel. * Stiv Bators interview, 1986 (video). * Henry Miller in Paris, 1969. * In Paris with Malcolm McLaren. * Tin House on the Paris Book Club at Le Carmen. More here. * Paris’s iconic Village Voice Bookshop, which opened in 1982, is to close down. * Where to find a vintage photo booth in Paris. * Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (1923). * The Late Walter Benjamin. * Antiphilosophy. * Vintage lesbian pulp fiction. * Heidi Julavits on The Believer. * An intriduction to Italian neo-realism. * Sid Vicious in Norway. * Portlandia. * Will Self on transvaginal probes. * Will Self on his own “Kafka’s Wound“. * Nicholas Lezard on sex and punishment. * Borges’s Norton Lectures, 1967-8. * Literature: cupcake or cure? * Jenni Fagan on being pregnant. * A review of Ivan Vladislavic’s The Loss Library. * Cooking an ink-black calamari risotto with Einstürzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld. * Climbing Up tights. * Anders Petersen’s photographs of London’s Soho. * Tim Adams on the William Utermohlen retrospective: “A nurse who loved Utermohlen’s work encouraged him to keep working, to try to draw Alzheimer’s from the inside”. * Some of Adrian Sherwood’s best dub productions. * Steve Mitchelmore reviews Knausgaard’s A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven. * Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Reticence. * Jacques Lacan, 1972 (video). * Flowchart: what is weird fiction? * Death in the age of Facebook. * Dante’s Circles of Hell in Lego. * A documentary about Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood in Las Vegas, 1973. * Portraits by Man Ray [see Lee Miller above].

What more can be asked of a poet than that they maintain their own sense of integrity towards what they deem poetic? It follows then if the poet who does maintain a writing life of such commitment is a thinker of originality and insight, and that they maintain this commitment across a lifetime, then their work will have a life far beyond them. All the more so if they do so with an affability that belies their skill, and a determination that proves them to be enduring and oblivious to all that might come before the actual poetry itself. For a lifetime of writing, Charles Simic has been one of world’s most engaging and singular poets. He has exerted such an influence over so many and for so long, he has almost come to define an era. His voice is sure, utterly recognisable, both profound and humble, both grounded and flighted, both incisive and witty - he has straddled labels and definitions, as he has the continents of North America and Europe. Never has his own work been occluded by his translations but his lifetime of service to European poetry has fundamentally shaped the perception of Serbian, and Balkan, poetry in the English speaking world at large. He is an immense presence in US poetry and inarguably one of the most important poets of the late 20th century. For edition 90 of the Maintenant series, Charles Simic.

3:AM: It seems you have often been asked to recount a sense of your identity through your nationality, and its dualism between your life in America and your childhood in Serbia. Inevitably, this question of nationality may be somewhat irrelevant, it simply is, but its invocation does involve a consistent calling back to your youth, and those experiences which have shaped your life. Do you feel that poetry has been a necessary medium for you? in which you have explored your nationality as a Serb, and your experiences in Belgrade as a child?

Charles Simic: It has been a necessary medium, but writing it and always in English was not a deliberate decision. It just happened that way. Inevitably, over the years I wrote many poems about my childhood, but
nothing ever about being a Serb. Like my parents, I thought of myself as a Yugoslav, told everybody I was one for many years when they inquired, and only after 1990, when all the awful things were happening there and people wanted to know to what ethnic group I belonged, told them to their shock and disappointment that I’m a Serb.

3:AM: How has your relationship with Serbia shifted in the years since your departure over 60 years ago? You visited in the 70s and 80s I believe, have you visited often since the end of Balkan conflicts a decade ago?

CS: I have returned to Serbia only four times. In 1972, 1982, 2006 and last May, nevertheless I stayed in touch because I kept translating Serbian poetry (as well as everybody else’s in former Yugoslavia), and got to know a number of poets really well, but I saw them mostly in Europe or United States.

Once the carnage started in 1990, I began to write for opposition papers in Serbia and in papers abroad about Milosevic and Serbian nationalism and did so on fairly regular bases until he was overthrown and since then less frequently. Many Serbs are still pissed off about things I said about
them, but this stormy relationship nevertheless drew me closer to them.

3:AM: You have offered a great service to poetry by bringing Vasko Popa, Aleksandar Ristovic, Ivan Lalić, Tomaž Šalamun, Radmila Lazic and many others into English, and to shine a light on poets who have, in many cases, become a fundamental part of European poetry and its history. Did the work of these poets issue a sense a responsibility onto you, or did you, and do you, seek out new work, to engage yourself with the language in question, Serbian especially?

CS: When I read a poem I love, I have to translate it, so I can show it to my American poet friends. That’s how it usually starts. Poetry from small languages is very rarely known internationally, and this struck me as an awful injustice, since these poets you mention are world class So, yes, that was also a part of it.

3:AM: So many of those poets are so different - Popa and Lalic for example, two giants in the modern Balkan tradition, one returning the language of disjunction and dream to the roots of folk, the other supine and effortlessly lofty. In part, have you exercised a personal taste, albeit a wide taste, in choosing those you have translated?

CS: I like very different kinds of poems, always have. Popa came out of French Surrealism and Lalic out of Baudelaire, Rilke and Holderlin, so translating them I deepened my understanding of these poets too who were their sources. Plus, I knew them both very well and learned even more from conversations with them about poetry. I think they were both, as different as they were as poets, an influence on me when I was young.

3:AM: Often people speak of your place as a bridge between traditions in Europe and the US, but perhaps offers a generalisation too far. Certainly it seems true that you have navigated away from debates about traditional / avant-garde and followed what it is your own voice in poetry. Though you might not conceive it as a deliberate act, do you think you have become a link between continents as well as poetic methodologies?

CS: This is something I never think about. When I’m writing, I’m as oblivious as a dog digging a hole in the ground with his paws. There may be a bone there or nothing at all, but while I’m doing it… that is all I know. After decades of reading and listening to debates about tradition versus avant-garde, I’m frankly bored. Good poetry has been written in all sorts of ways since the days of Rimbaud as everyone ought to admit. If someone can get away today by writing poems that sound like Byron or Emily Dickinson, poems that one can’t stop reading, let’s not worry about what the disciples of Gertrude Stein will say.

3:AM: I’d like to discuss your thoughts on contemporary Serbian poetry and whether it is something bound within a dualism of the old / traditional and new / innovative?

CS: Yes, it is. Younger poets have a pretty good idea what is being written in Europe and United States.
That dualism is not inevitable, it is healthy. Mixture of traditions is what one discovers wherever
poetry is strong.

3:AM: And is this true of Balkan poetry in general? It does seem there are figures emerging past the millennium who resemble wholly unique talents as poets, who are inclusion, pan-European, emboldened by the repeated political errors (if not horrors) of their youth.

CS: I can’t speak of Balkan poetry in general, but I suspect that you are right. A the same time, a number of people have noticed that since everybody reads everybody else, the once distinct national poetries have grown more alike, except, of course, for those unique voices you mention.

3:AM: My feeling is that if your poetry stands for anything it is an advocation of groundedness, of humour or a readiness of humble irony as a profound measure of expression, that there is an almost ethical edge to your work in its insistence poetry is not a religion of expression or a source of metaphysical meaning. How far do you think this may be true?

CS: A poem for me has to be grounded in reality, even a poem in which the imagination runs wild and the world appears upside-down as if seen between one’s legs. However, I wouldn’t exclude attempts at metaphysical meaning, in fact, I wouldn’t exclude anything that exists or that pops into someone’s head. As for “religion of expression,” that always gave me a good laugh. The poet sitting in front of an altar bent over a blank page lying on a table, every time he writes something the congregation breaks into prayer thanking God he gave us a genius like him. Not for me.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
SJ Fowler is the author of three poetry collections, Red Museum (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2011), Fights (Veer books 2011) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA 2011). He has received commissions from the Tate Online, the Southbank centre, the London Sinfonietta and Mercy and he is the UK poetry editor of Lyrikline and 3:AM. He is a full time employee of the British Museum and a Phd student at the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, University of London.

GHOST CINEMA

You return less often,
Unknown girl,
Return for a spell
As if you’ve left something behind
You’ve been given
Little time to look for
In a huge room lit so poorly
I can’t even be sure you are there.

O fading memory!
The sound of a calliope drifting
One summer evening.
The fairgrounds across the river
Like a birthday cake
With lots of burning candles,
And our two somber faces
Reflected in the same window.

Two strangers hired at a drunken party
To appear in a film
Being shot that night,
Strip for the camera
And act like sweethearts
On a bare mattress laid out for their use
On a warehouse floor
Under the bright spotlights.

Standing afterwards
With their foreheads touching
As if about to be hung
By a single rope
From the high ceiling,
Then stepping away,
Dressing with eyes averted,
And going their separate ways
In the first light of dawn.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Simic (b. 1938) was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He emigrated to the United States with his family in 1949, settled in Chicago, and attended the University of Chicago. He served briefly in the army before completing his B.A. at New York University. Simic’s work has won numerous awards, among them the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and, simultaneously, the Wallace Stevens Award and appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate. He taught English and creative writing for over thirty years at the University of New Hampshire.

Dignity, Michael Rosen, Harvard University Press 2012
 
Dignity can mean top rank and high status. It’s a snob term. It can mean a way of behaving, often in a manly, stuffed-shirt manner that asks for respect but sometimes deserves mockery.  It can be used to designate our place in the universe. Roman Catholics put us above animals but below angels. It can mean what is of ultimate value in humanity. People are stewards of their ultimate meaning to secular Kantians as well as Catholic theologians.
 
Germany takes dignity so seriously it is written into their constitution. The United Nations too. But Steven Pinker and Ruth Macklin think that dignity is stupid. Pinker complains that it is morally inert and ‘squishy.’ It adds nothing to the concept of autonomy and is used by reactionary forces to stop scientific research. Catholics used to use dignity to defend unequal rights. Since 1988 they use it to defend equal rights. The Catholic unenlightened argument against abortion is a result of this more enlightened theology. Germany banned dwarf-throwing as a violation of dignity against the wishes of a dwarf. Preservation of dignity has overridden more important values at times in German law. The secular version of dignity defended by Korsgaard out of Kant gives traction to arguments about euthanasia and elected suicides that the religious version opposes. Rosen gives the history of all this in swift, sharp prose. He suggests that the idea of dignity is complex not stupid.
 
Rosen ranks dignity as having a middling moral priority. Murder is worse than indignity, but indignity is nevertheless immoral in certain circumstances. Abu Ghraib is non-trivially morally repulsive and not just distasteful. Rosen is careful in arguing for a position that allows for such a distinction. Dignity survives his analysis and historical narration but not fully intact. Secular and theological underpinnings are erased.
 
The book has a shocking ending. Rosen adopts a radical stance because considerations of dignity and the subtle errors of the religious and secular defenders of dignity suggests that no less extreme view is available. Rosen takes a refreshingly modest stance towards his extreme conclusion. His downbeat style belies his controversial finale.
 
What is his shocking conclusion?  He takes up the challenge of a moral landscape labeled by Joseph Raz as humanistic. In The Morality of Freedom Raz writes: ‘To simplify discussion I will endorse right away the humanistic principle which claims that the explanation and justification of the goodness or badness of anything derives ultimately from it contribution, actual or possible, to human life and dignity.’ The Razian humanistic principle is the view that whatever is morally good is good because people benefit.
 
Utilitarianism is an obvious example of this. But Kant also fits, as what practical reason does is ensure that we benefit from the rational choice we make. People are ends in themselves, not means, and so this secular holiness within is what we pay our respects to when making moral decisions. Catholicism also appeals to this sense of the holiness of humanity, albeit from a non-secular justificatory metaphysics. A Platonic idea of timeless personified ideal value justifies the religious perspective.
 
Rosen finds the notion of the inviolable holiness of humanity dubious if it requires the truth-makers on offer in Kantian and theological accounts. Religious and Kantian metaphysics he finds uncompelling in themselves, but if shorn of such underpinnings, what can recommend the fact of anything like a holiness in humanity? Usually the absence of anything that makes a claim true cancels the right of anyone to make such a claim.
 
Rosen’s shocking conclusion is that he ploughs on beyond this generally accepted prohibition. He finds value in taking humanity as an ultimate value even in the absence of its truthmaker. The strangeness of this claim matches the strangeness of common practice. Rosen considers the common practice of honouring the dignity of the dead. If Raz is right, then we must answer the question: who benefits from such practice? Certainly not the dead, for how could a dead person care about anything? If there is no answer then from the Razian perspective the rituals are empty.
 
We can brood further. Lars von Trier’s trippy Melancholia presents characters just before the whole of human existence ends. Imagining that we are absolutely alone in the universe and the giant planet Melancholia is about to destroy earth, the film imagines the absolute end of everything. So how should we react in such a situation? Does everything become meaningless? We follow the two sisters – Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Claire who thrives in the world, and Kirsten Dunst’s Justine, who is a melancholic who has throughout her life assumed life to be but a sequence of empty rituals. Yet Justine finds significance in her life and those with her as the world ends. The beauty of the film is ‘on the edge of plastic’ according to the director. Justin finds genuine value in her life and activities as everything ends forever and no sense can be made of this from Raz’s humanistic principle recommending only things that benefit humans.
 
Von Trier says, ‘If there’s some value beyond rituals, that’s fine. The ritual is like a film. There has to be something in the film. And the film’s plot is the ritual that leads us to what’s inside. And if there’s something inside and beyond, I can relate to the ritual. But if the rituals are empty, that is: if its no longer fun to get Christmas presents or see the joy of the kids, then the whole ritual about dragging a tree inside the living room becomes empty… Is the emperor wearing any clothes at all? Is there a content? And there isn’t. That’s what Justine sees every time she looks at that fucking wedding… She has submitted to a ritual without meaning.’ Where is dignity? is what Justine is asking. She is longing for true value. In this film we imagine a situation where all human benefit ends forever.  
 
If we answer by drawing on a Razian humanistic principle we become absurd. Rosen narrows his eyes and bites the bullet. He expels the Razian humanistic principle as the ground of dignity and value. Justine restores her sister and child to a state of ultimate value as everything ends. Expressing the human as an ultimate value can benefit no one in this vivid context. But Rosen argues that Justine is not absurd. Rather, attempts to find values elsewhere is the absurd response. Justine finds meaning in herself even as everything ends because if she hadn’t then she would contradict the sort of creature we are. Like Cassirer of old, who attempts to resurrect value after mythic language is no longer available, Rosen refuses to buckle to skepticism about value even in the face of the absolute end.
 
He writes, ‘Our duty to respect the dignity of humanity is – on this I agree with Kant – fundamentally a duty toward ourselves. By which I mean, not that we are benefited when we observe our duties, but that our duties are so deep a part of us that we could not be the people that we are without having them. In failing to respect the humanity of others we actually undermine humanity in ourselves.’ At first this might seem like a faith agenda, one that is ultimately irrational. But Rosen’s is a complex assertion.
 
Rosen denies that respecting dignity is a fundamental right: ‘The worst of what the Nazi state did to the Jews was not the humiliation of herding them into cattle trucks and forcing them to live in conditions of unimaginable squalor; it was to murder them.’ So it is not the highest ranking moral value. But he denies that it is always morally trivial.
 
But how does Rosen’s dignity survive the scrutiny of skeptics who wonder what can justify making humanity ultimate? Once the metaphysics of a religious theology or of a Kantian noumenal universe are removed what’s left over? Nice nihilists like Alex Rosenberg and others argue that speaking about there being any sort of ‘inviolate holiness’ to humanity is merely backwash talk from discarded metaphysical commitments. Schwitzgebel might growl about being in the grip of systematic ignorance about our own thoughts and advise splintered skepticism all over. We shouldn’t trust compelling intuitions. Bracing in his naturalistic zeal, Rosenberg says that the nihilism of modernity might be supposed to be a threat to our moral well-being were it not for the naturalistic fact that we are selected to be social, cooperative and so forth. We don’t have any nihilistic dilemma of choice because we have the basic hard wiring that enables good social living. Churchland’s social brain thesis supports this.
 
Rosenberg is bracing but Rosen is refined. He takes science seriously. He dismisses arguments from theology and Kantian metaphysics because they lead to unlikely conclusions. Yet the Abu Graib images strike him as being more than revolting. The humiliation they depict seems immoral. The violation of dignity in the images needs explaining, not explaining away. Von Trier’s scientist commits suicide when he realises everything is ending. But Rosen articulates Justine’s case. To treat ourselves as ends is who we are. How?
 
Perhaps I take him to be working in the same strangely fecund space of paradox and illusion as the killer philosopher of language Roy Sorensen is. Sorensen argues that many of the commitments of competent language use, competent perception, competent cognitive computation produce bi-products. He takes the naturalistic claims of evolutionary theory seriously. A colour spectrum gives the impression of borderless transition from red to orange. Modularity of mind explains that one computation attends to the whole spectrum and identifies change, another makes micro-comparisons between adjacent colour patches and identifies continuity. Insularity of modules means that the brain both identifies change and continuity simultaneously. The perceptual contradiction results in a visual illusion that survives knowing its cause. The response is hardwired.
 
Hardwired anomalous effects extend beyond perception. Vagueness is explained by Sorensen in terms of commitments to bivalence that clash with other a priori commitments in language. Any attempt to identify the last second of youth is doomed because any adjacent second strikes the competent language user as equally justified. The identity strikes us as tautologous. Sorensen puts this down to a priori habits of rounding off. The selected-for tolerance of inexactitude brings benefits of computational speed and expressive power at the cost of commitment to an infinite number of a priori analytical falsehoods. The vague borderline case of youth is unknowable because there is no fact we can imagine that would make any identified second the true one. There is no violation of classical logic but there is an absence of a truthmaker. Sorensen thinks the shock of this news should be dialed down once we consider evolution and our diddy place in the vastness of nature. Sorensen thinks fallibility is what we ought to expect. Knowledge is spotty and distributes unevenly and belies the heroic bathos of tidiness and universal accessibility assumed by non-fallibilists. Knowledge is our knowledge and like our evolved selves is a pretty jimcrack affair of ad hoc improvisations cobbled together over vast time.
 
I wonder about Rosen’s commitments and detect an underlying but suppressed Sorensen’s strategy. Rosen makes dignity a bi-product of moral thinking. It is metaphysically inert but normatively persuasive. More, it is normatively compelling in the same way that norms of language use are. He can therefore bypass theological and Kantian systems. Justification is supposedly required because there would be no constraints without such reasons. But the facts supporting those reasons are too dubious. Rosen is undeterred. A bi-product of having social brains as we do is a commitment to morality and a bi-product of that is the idea of dignity, the inherent holy value of humanity. So respect for the dignity of humanity is unavoidable because it is a side effect of morality, which itself is a bi-product of being a creature evolved for social life. Dignity is an a priori commitment. This makes it resilient to counterexamples. Paradoxically, naturalistic science and philosophy that erodes belief in theological or Kantian underpinnings provides the explanation for why it survives their absence.
 
Stephen Jay Gould discussed spandrels. These were the roughly triangular spaces between the left or right exterior curves of an arch and the rectangular framework surrounding it that were formed in medieval architecture. They were the unintended beautiful bi-products of an engineering solution. That they were unintended bi-products doesn’t trivialise their important aesthetic contribution to the meaning of the architecture even though they are purposeless. But it is a reason for ending enquiries into their original teleology. Bivalence is a spandrel of propositional attitudes for Sorensen. Dignity is morality’s spandrel. Morality is the spandrel of social life. They are unintended bi-products of engineering solutions formed in Churchland’s social brain.
 
Rosen has shown dignity has some kind of a serious moral role, whilst at the same time showing that it can’t justify as much as Catholics and Kantians want it to. It has a dramatic parasitical quality, so that it seems tangible and magnificent but also often foolhardy and empty. It is a value that appears powerful but often is less than it seems. Rosen’s brilliant book gives us dignity’s history and a cunningly disguised radical ending that might even accommodate my Sorensenian musings. Even if it doesn’t, Rosen’s narrative illuminates a subject that as he notes himself has eluded serious analysis for too long.
 
Bob Dylan recorded the weird song ‘Dignity’ in a 1989 session recording for the album Oh Mercy but it never appeared there. The song captures the sense of dignity’s elusiveness, its chthonic, vampiric quality that Rosen narrates, in one image where a ‘drinkin man listens to the voice he hears, in a crowded room full of covered up mirrors.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.
 

Although it is already old, considering hauntology as either genre, aesthetic or zeitgeist is problematic; and is so for precisely all of the reasons that it claims to be each of these things. As nostalgia for lost futures or mourning for utopia, it falls into for the exact problems of utopianism that lead to its initial loss. It is also these problems that hauntology was developed to overcome, so its reduction precisely to them is somewhat ironic, if not cause for yet another mourning. Thus through exploring the way in which hauntology has been co-opted by the over-theoretisation of music, and indeed art more generally, in such a way that repeats these problems, I will also show the way for a return to hauntology as a solution to these problems and the affirmation of a more radical thinking for the future.

This path will also necessitate a return to the origin of the word hauntology in the work of Jacques Derrida; an origin that has often been maligned and marginalised in the subsequent use of the term — a parricide that foreshadows the return of the betrayed father. The necessary key to approaching Derrida and the nature of hauntology can be found in Simon Critchley’s observation that “Derrida will tirelessly insist, the closure is not the end and he persistently places himself against any and all apocalyptic discourses on the end (whether the end of man, the end of philosophy, or the end of history)” (1). It is in light of this opposition to all ends that hauntology should be considered. Included amongst the ends Derrida opposes is the very idea of utopia or any utopianism. Indeed, in thinking the closure without end, Derrida is also thinking of a new image of the future, one that is not watched over by the idea of utopia. Utopias are always destined to fail, as their name suggests they are literally no-places, which can never be. This is the problem with the future in general, if it is always considered as some specific thing that will arrive at some point in the future then it is never possible; these futures always collapse into the now and the to come always remains out of reach, always lost in advance.

Hauntology as aesthetics is firmly rooted in the idea of nostalgia as a disruption of time. The lines from Derrida that are quoted to support this interpretation of hauntology are Hamlet’s “the time is out of joint,” which serves as a refrain throughout Specters of Marx, and, rather curiously, the only mention of nostalgia in the whole book: “The spectral rumor now resonates, it invades everything: the spirit of the ’sublime’ and the spirit of ‘nostalgia’ cross all borders” (2). Mark Fisher identifies the dyschronia of the time out of joint as the crucial feature of hauntology (3). Through this, the past invades, or haunts, the present with its return and in this disjuncture makes possible a new aesthetic that is hauntology. The form that this takes is nostalgia, not as repetition of forms of the past, but instead a return of the ideas, images and ideals of a past age, which now grate and creak against the joints of the present.

Unsurprisingly, the main features of this aesthetic are sampling in music and appropriation in the visual arts. By emphasizing the anachronisms of these samples and appropriations, mainly through the maintenance of the distance from their origin and the decay that occupies that distance: as crackles and scratches, or faded colours and images that become almost literally ghostly. Instead of mere repetition, this distance provides a sense of loss and mourning, making the present the future of that past, and in turn providing the possibility of another future for the present, a new utopia. This is why past images of the future, such as the fetishisation of the BBCs Radiophonic workshop, become so prevalent in this form of hauntology. Taken out of their original historical context these images become ideals, which in turn once again grate against their contemporary settings, which is where the supposed haunting of hauntology appears, and revitalizes the potential for a utopianism for the present age. As Adam Harper concludes his discussion of hauntology: “Hauntological art is a present-day construction that illustrates the present’s problems as it approaches the future” (4).

Hauntology as Derrida defines it, is also obsessed with the remains of both the past and the future, but as they remain, or, as they maintain themselves now (maintenant in French is literally ‘now’), neither as something lost nor as something to come. But this also reveals the problem with hauntology defined as either nostalgia for the future or a lost utopianism. The definite future of utopianism already in advance hides behind the past and opens itself up to the possibility of nostalgia. This is as the grammatical form of the future anterior, where the future is considered as something already complete, that can now be looked back upon and referred to; and thus operates in the same mode as the past. Remembered in advance and fully accounted for, always to only ever slip away as it slides backwards into the future.

Derrida’s hauntology is forged in his opposition to ends, specifically to the end of history declared in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism and the supposed triumph of ‘liberal democracy,’ or as it is better known, capitalism. A cultural dead end, where all that is possible is “the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history” (5). This is the double-edged sword that gives rise to both nostalgia as pastiche and retrospection, and also the musicological definition of hauntology as nostalgia for the lost future. Rather than dealing with the fundamental problems raised by the end of history, the musicological sense of hauntology merely pushes any possible confrontation to yet another new end deferred once again into another future. In doing so it also falls prey to the problems that both support and motivate the end of history. By repeating these problems it will now be possible to see Derrida’s conception of hauntology as a solution to these very problems.

To frame this debate, let us commence by repeating the end of history. Not the one which took place in 1989, but nearly two centuries before in 1806: as Napoleon rode through the streets of Jena following his famous victory, and Hegel, the great thinker of historicity, looked out his window and saw in Napoleon, as he wrote to a friend “the spirit of the world,” or, another triumph of freedom and another end of history. If we read this moment with Maurice Blanchot in it we find “Lie and truth: for as Hegel wrote to another friend, the French pillaged and ransacked his home. But Hegel knew how to distinguish the empirical and the essential” (6). Here, Blanchot reveals the stakes for both the end of history and the hauntology that Derrida will later develop: the empirical and the essential.

Specters of Marx is Derrida’s deconstruction and critique of the theory of the end of history, specifically in its 1989 guise developed by Francis Fukuyama. Derrida’s attack on Fukuyama is as scathing as it is simple: that through a sleight of hand, Fukuyama willfully confuses the empirical and the essential in order to make his argument work, slipping between the two as required to advance his argument. The end of history is proven by the empirical event of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but this itself is an essential historical truth that cannot be disproved by pointing to the empirical evidence that freedom (be that liberal democracy or the free market) has not yet extended across the entire globe. This is just an empirical accident that will eventually be rectified once the essential truth of the end of history is fully realised.

The ridiculousness of Fukuyama’s argument made readily apparent by this rather simple deconstruction, there is no need for Derrida to develop his logic of hauntology at all in order to confront the end of history. It is somewhat telling then that he does. He writes:

As for this sleight-of-hand trick between history and nature, between historical empiricity and teleological transcendentaility, between the supposed empirical reality of the event and the absolute ideality of the liberal telos, it can only be undone on the basis of a new thinking or a new experience of the event, and of another logic of its relation to the phantomatic (7).

There is something deeper than merely the end of history going on here. Hauntology is part of Derrida’s wider critique of ends in general, the possibilities of the future and the closure of metaphysics. Before delving into this reconfigured futural event and its phantasmatic logic, the question of hauntological aesthetics or genre must be addressed.

What is immediately obvious is that this musicological account of hauntology, as well as repeating the paradoxes of the future it supposedly mourns for, also repeats the same mistake as Fukuyama and fails to remember the difference between the empirical and the essential. Thus reducing hauntology to a set of empirical characteristics of genre or aesthetic and missing its essential rethinking of the very categories of essential, empirical, event, and the future itself. These two failures are most likely connected; for in falling into the trap of repeating an anachronistic desire for a future that is lost, this form of hauntology misses the essential nature of this future as always-already lost.

Doing so demands an entirely new logic, and this is perhaps the only sort of newness that hauntology engages with, not new in the sense of to-come, but a new logic of temporality and futurity. This logic is not specific to hauntology and Derrida has explored it elsewhere under the names of “aporetology or aporetography” (8) and organised around the aporia — the contradiction or puzzle that cannot be moved beyond. Importantly, the aporia rethinks the problematics of before and beyond, as Derrida writes: “the partitioning among multiple figures of the aporia does not oppose figures to each other, but instead installs the haunting of one in the other” (9). This has consequences for the specifically temporal interpretation of hauntology as the “time out of joint” commonly referenced in Specters of Marx.

The out of jointness is not the opposition of the present to either the part or the future of indeed a mere disordering of these temporal modes. Derrida specifically warns against this: “A spectral moment, a moment that no longer belongs to time, if one understands by this word the linking of modalized presents (past present, actual present: ‘now,’ future present) … Furtive and untimely, the apparition of the specter does not belong to that time” (10). As a result, hauntology in its Derridean formulation counters the criticism put forward by James Bridle, that “it deals with the problem of the future by going back to the past” (11) and that it needs to be opposed by the radically new. This reiteration of the standard modal temporalities of past, present and future is both symptomatic of the problems of an aesthetic interpretation of hauntology and at the same time, the very problem that Derrida is confronting with his concept of hauntology.

It is as the rethinking of the new experience of the event that the relation between hauntology and its homophone ontology becomes important. Hauntology rethinks temporality itself, abandoning the progression from the past to the present and the future anterior. The specific end of history is only a manifestation of the deeper problems of ends themselves, temporality and the future, and it is through addressing this essential ontological problem that the path out of the end of history can be found. Along with the necessary rethinking of the sublime and history that this requires (12).

Hauntology as an aesthetic admirably attempts to confront this problem, but as a descriptive mode of critique it unfortunately can never escape the empirical and deal with the essential. Not directly anyway. Heidegger claimed that the danger of technology was not in the machines themselves but the way it mysteriously hides its own essence, and that this hiding makes the question of the essence of technology all the more pertinent (13). Likewise, the reminders of the remains of lost temporalities that scatter the present landscape of the end of history can also begin to ask the question of the temporality of ends that lead to this landscape. The answer lies not in repeating lost gestures, methods and sounds or calling for a failed utopianism, but in rethinking the very possibility of the lostness of that temporality itself. The musical genre of hauntology calls into question the ontological status of time at the end of history, but not by moving beyond that end into a new future, rather through the repetition of the impossibility of such a movement. Hiding the impossibility of the future behind an impossible striving for the future makes its impossibility all the more apparent.

(1) S. Critchley, ‘Derrida: The reader.’ in Cardozo Law Review, Vol 27:2, 2005. p. 557.

(2) J. Derrida, P. Kamuf (trans.), Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York: Routledge Classics, 2006). p. 169.

(3) M. Fisher, (2006) ‘Phonograph Blues.’

(4) A. Harper (2009) ‘Hauntology: The Past Inside The Present.’

(5) F. Fukuyama, ‘The End Of History’, in The National Interest. Summer 1989. p. 18.

(6) M. Blanchot, ‘The Instant of my Death.’ in, J. Derrida, M. Blanchot & E. Rottenberg (trans.), The Instant of my Death & Demeure. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). p. 7.

(7) J. Derrida, Specters of Marx. p. 86.

(8) J. Derrida, T. Dutoit (trans.), Aporias: Dying — Awaiting (One Another at) the “Limits of Truth” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). p. 15.

(9) J. Derrida, Aporias. p. 20.

(10) J. Derrida, Specters of Marx. p. xix.

(11) J. Bridle, ‘Hauntological Futures.’

(12) This is precisely the problem that I address in my forthcoming book Nuclear Futurism (Winchester, Zer0 Books, 2012).

(13) M. Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in, M. Heidegger, D. F. Krell (ed.), Basic Writings Revised and Expanded Edition. (San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993). p. 333.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Liam Sprod was born in England before the possibility of nuclear war prompted his parents to relocate to Hobart, Australia. He currently lives in Stockholm where he works as a philosopher, editor and writer, and collaborates with artist Linda Persson within the spaces between art and philosophy. His forthcoming book Nuclear Futurism: The Work of Art in the Age of Remainderless Destruction is published by Zero Books and will be released in late 2012.

This morning he woke up at 7.40am. He reset his alarm and woke up at 7.50am. He reset his alarm and woke up at 8.00am. He lay awake in the gloom, trying to keep his eyes open. He fell asleep again, briefly, and woke up at 8.05am. He stayed still and waited until he felt hungry. Then he got out of bed, pulled on some old socks, a pair of unclean trousers draped over his dresser and the same shirt he had been wearing for the last three days.

He found a bowl from the cupboard and poured cereal and milk in, and ate in silence, occasionally turning the page of a magazine. He turned the pages quite slowly. When he had finished he went upstairs and took a piss, came downstairs and took a few swigs of orange juice. ‘1 of your 5 a day’ the juice carton said. Then he left the house.

He wandered down the streets, quite empty, and quite damp. The winter sun was weak and low, but it glinted off the wet pavements and illuminated the houses on the left side of the street in a way that pleased him. He came to the park, steam rising off the dewy grass, and walked through. The sky above was blue and clear, the trees leafless, the ground either the very dark brown of rotted and swept leaves of last autumn, or the green of the grass. Everything felt like it was from a single photo; the pallet of the world’s colours felt too restrained to him. The sky seemed to be just one shade of blue, the grass looked like it had been spray-painted on and the browns and greys of the tarmac and mud all looked the same. The low sun shone down on it all.

He used the children’s play area as a shortcut. He swung the yellow gate and noticed the perimeter railings once he was someway inside: yellow-blue-red-yellow-blue-red-yellow-blue-red, all the way around. For some reason this fact scared him a little, and he hurried on, came to the blue gate on the other side, swung that too, and was out of the park a few moments later.

His hands were cold and he dug them in his pockets. His face was buffeted by the chill wind and a few strands of hair that had escaped from underneath his hat danced in the breeze. He moved his fingers up and tucked them away, because he did not feel much like dancing. He tensed his stomach muscles almost involuntarily. He accidently scuffed his shoe on a stone. He saw someone he vaguely recognised and they both found interest in the uneven pavement as they passed. His nose ran and he sniffed. He came by the main road and the cars were too loud for him. The passing lorries became boisterous sticky children in a waiting room. The trucks were crying out for sweets, and the cars were smashed milk bottles on a Sunday morning. They all annoyed him. The aeroplane above him sounded very far away.

As he reached his destination he smoothed down his shirt, scratched some dried mud off the front of his jeans and tucked his hat in his back pocket. His fingers were a comb, his saliva a moisturiser for the dry patches of his face. He slowed his pace the closer he came. There were a row of Victorian houses to his right. He knocked on a door. He waited some time, taking the opportunity to admire the faded facade of the house, once so grand. He saw Christmas through the window, and birthdays and holidays and death. He knocked again. The door opened immediately after his second knock and he went inside.

This house was totally bare inside, almost to a disturbing degree. The walls neither had stains nor pictures, scratches nor posters. He dragged a hand along one wall as he walked. The texture felt smooth and forgettable. He felt not dust or dirt or residue. He came to the end of a corridor and pushed on a door that had been left ajar. It did not creak as it moved as he expected it to. There was a drum kit in the centre of the room, and two cheese plants, opposite from each other in the corners. He sighed a little, not an exasperated sigh, and sat down at the stool behind the drum kit. He picked up a pair of sticks. He paused for a second, adjusted his position on the seat while his feet found the pedals. He felt the cold metal rim of the snare with his thumb. He scratched his neck, and the back of his head. Then he began to play. He started off slowly and played a steady undulating beat for over thirty minutes. Then he began to pick up the pace.

He became very angry and very calm because he let the anger flow through him into the music of the drums. The drums said what he felt. The snare told of the sick and poor. The cymbals crashed for the rising seas. The steady bass drum pounded like the feet of a million refugees. The toms beat for him, for his desires and dreams. The ice melted and the seas rose. The hot sun beat down on some parts of the earth while it rained constantly on others. In the south the harsh heat made the crops wilt, and so did the people. They were starving. They all headed north. In the north the people were drowning. Fields were under ten feet of water, stalks of corn and hay floated along in the current. The people fled to the south in ramshackle boats, or over higher ground. The people met in the middle and fought and died and still the sun beat down and the rain fell. But it wasn’t apocalyptic. The winds blew the corpses away, the currents dragged them into the deep; the sun melted their bones into dust. The earth reclaimed them. The drums said all these things better than any man could say them. Eventually his feelings passed. The drums just played the rhythms of his body, his breathing, his heart. This calmed him. Then he reluctantly stopped. And then he started home.

On the way home he passed many pretty girls. They all looked away as he passed them, and he stopped trying to catch their eye after a time. He did not go through the park, but skirted round it this time, although this made his walk longer. It was a little after two in the afternoon. There was no place he needed to be. He had the time.

It was another month until he played again. In that time the days had grown a little longer, a little lighter. But it was still not spring. The sun was still low, the air still cold and the ground was still damp. At night he could hear the whole city open up to him. He felt like he could feel everyone’s breathing. He writhed with the emotions of their dreams. He heard the late night rows, smelt the perfumed bodies between clean sheets, the dirty bodies on the mattresses and all that came in between. He heard the early morning revellers return from the clubs in the centre, he smelt the booze and the chips. They all pervaded in his nostrils and ears, a million different sounds and smells, a million different people. He sensed all this because he had nothing of his own. He was empty. The smells and sounds gave him life, for a while.

He spoke not a single word for all of February. He didn’t even cough or sneeze. The only sounds that came from him at all were inorganic: his boots in the halls, a fork scratching a plate when he ate. Otherwise he could have been a Jew hiding in Nazi Germany, he was so quiet. One morning he awoke and knew it was time again. His alarm said it was 8.33am. He felt the old hunger in his stomach and he ate his breakfast and he dressed and washed and left the house before nine. The juice box said ‘not from concentrate’ in pale letters covered in the condensation the fridge had gifted them. He moved aimlessly and purposefully down the roads towards the park. The park was gloomy this morning, for no sun was shining this morning, and it was windier than it had been in the last few days. There were few people about, and he did not come near anybody.

When he got to the house, he found the door was unlocked and he did not need to knock. He retraced his footsteps down the hall, entered the room, sat at the stool, picked up the sticks, and rubbed his knees. His hands were numb and he cupped them and breathed on them as if he had the makings of a small fire cradled inside them. He felt uneasy for a few moments but the feeling passed. Dogs barked outside the window, and then stopped, and started again, more of them, only they were fainter this time. He slowly tapped out a beat with just the bass pedal for a while, and then used the sticks to sound the other instruments. The noise that came from the drums became more and more intricate, as new rhythms were blended with the old. But the noise was different this time and perhaps it was just that: noise. He felt the same unease grow around him. He tried to forget, and let his mind float off somewhere else. He began to speak to the world again.

At least, for a few minutes he did. But then he cried “the drums, the drums, where is my voice-”.

His vocal chords cracked with the exertion after a month of lying dormant. He snapped the sticks over his good leg. He took the jagged ends and plunged them into the tight skins of the snare and the bass drum and ripped them open like a lion would a gazelle’s abdomen. He knocked the cymbals over because he could not damage them much, and the resounding crash pleased him. He went over to the window and threw his broken sticks out.

“The drums”, he said again, “they say nothing at all.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher Kennerley is a final year undergraduate at the University of Leeds, reading Environmental Management. He will have a poem published in the second edition of the Velvet Label literary magazine later this year.

[This is part of a series on the complete works of Studs Terkel. The last one was his book Hope Dies Last.]

When The Spectator came out, Studs said he was working on a trilogy of interviews on the arts - The Spectator on theater, one called The Listener on music, and The Reader on books. The Reader met an unknown fate, but The Listener would be retitled And They All Sang.

In some ways, the two books are a return for Studs. His first jobs were as an actor on both the stage and radio, and in 1945 his first show, ‘Wax Museum’, was an eclectic music show. He bounced between radio, television and the stage before WFMT offered him a job he couldn’t refuse - an hour-long show every weekday in which he could do anything he wanted. Music, interviews, documentaries, anything. Studs took the offer and stayed at it for 45 years.

When the Studs Terkel Program ended in 1997, Studs donated its entire archive to the Chicago History Museum, and he went back a few years later to create The Spectator, which unlike his previous books of interviews is comprised of “celebrated people,” and most of them came from interviews done on the radio.

For most of his books, Studs would take a leave of absence from his radio show and interview the people in the books exclusively for the books. Sometimes he would travel the country looking for them, other times they were his friends right in his hometown. In both The Spectator and And They All Sang the interviews came from interviews he had done over the years on his radio show, with a few interviews done after the show ended.

And They All Sang has fewer interviews and fewer sections than The Spectator.It may have fewer interviews than any of his books. Another thing that’s different is that the first three sections are structured exactly the same way: First, interviews with the musicians, and then with an impresario of the genre.

The first section is with classical musicians, the second with jazz, and the third with blues and folk. The prelude to these sections is an interview with John Jacob Niles, sort of a combination of the three.

The classical section is the longest of the three, which makes sense since WFMT was, and is, a classical music station. And most of the interviews in it are with singers. These are the most interesting ones, since they talk about not only the musical aspects of what they do, but the theatrical aspects. How they relate to characters, convey emotions, and so forth.

They occasionally talk about other things like Marian Anderson - an African-American contralto - who tells of how her unique voice opened doors, but racism in many cases closed some of them. Her manager, Sol Hurok (who is also interviewed in the book) tried booking her at Constitution Hall, managed by the Daughters of the American Revolution. The hall had a “white performers only” policy and refused to book her. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned in protest and the organization later changed its mind.

Instrumentalists like Ravi Shankar are also interviewed. Shankar talks briefly about the Beatles and his collaboration with Sanjayit Ray for the score of the Apu trilogy (an interview with Ray appears in The Spectator.). In the foreword, Studs has an anecdote about the American pianist Garrick Ohlsson that doesn’t appear in his interview. Ohlsson won the 1970 International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw and his winning performance was broadcast on Polish state radio. When he was returning to his hotel, he was critiqued in fine detail by the hotel maid and said it was the most intimidating review he had ever encountered.

Virgil Thompson and Aaron Copeland, the great contemporary American composers talk about their friendship with each other and their learning music under the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

This section also brings some things full circle all the way back to Giants of Jazz. Reprinted in this section are interviews with Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie where they talk about various things, but also about their admiration for their fellow musicians Joe Oliver and Charlie Parker, respectively. Material from these interviews, along with one he did with Earl Hines, made their way into Giants of Jazz.

Earl Hines talks about Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and how bebop was invented in his band. Dizzy Gillespie says that he and Parker were both in awe of each other. Armstrong’s wife Lillian is also interviewed, and says that when the two of them got married, she told Louis (who up until then had been in King Oliver’s band) could no longer play second trumpet to anyone. He had to be first. Two weeks after they got married, he got a job at the Dreamland Theater on the south side. Fletcher Henderson noticed Armstrong afterwards and the rest is history.

The jazz section ends with an interview of Joe Hammond, the great producer and critic who discovered innumerable artists like Billie Holiday. Specifically, in his interview he tells of how he discovered Count Basie - he was listening to WMAQ (Chicago’s NBC affiliate) and he heard an exciting pianist he had never heard of. It couldn’t have been Earl Hines, who was out on tour, so he called his friend Lloyd Lewis at the Daily News (who owned the station at the time) and asked him who it was.

The last section includes a piece on Mahalia Jackson that originally appeared in Talking To Myself telling about her and their relationship. Thomas A. Dorsey, the father of Gospel music is also interviewed, crediting Studs with discovering Jackson. Studs feels the need to clarify that he was the first white DJ to play her for a white audience, but the truth was that by that point Jackson was well known among black audiences. She could fill stadiums by the time he played her on his show, but the audience was entirely black.

There’s a piece on Big Bill Broonzy, another good friend and colleague of Studs, that originally appeared in the first issue of Jazz: A Quarterly on American Music, which was edited by Ralph Gleason a decade before he co-founded Rolling Stone.

In the third section, on folk musicians, there’s a piece on Woody Guthrie that’s taken from the introduction Studs wrote for the book Ramblin’ Man, the Life And Times of Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray. It also includes a 1963 interview with Bob Dylan (one of his earliest) where he tells his ever changing origin story and how he came up with the song ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’.

Pete Seeger appears again and talks about his entry into the music world by way of his father, a musicologist at Harvard. Seeger appeared in Hope Dies Last and in the cassette series ‘Studs Terkel: Four Decades of Interviewing.’

And so ends the last of Studs’ oral histories. His next two works would be looking back on his own life, and the impact he’s had.

[Coming up: Studs revisits his life again in Touch and Go]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert O’Connor is a journalist, writer, adventurer and a few dozen other things (including a Co-Editor of 3:AM). His stuff has appeared in the Twin Cities Daily Planet, Hot Press, KFAI and a few other places. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The wonderful Deborah Levy interviewed on France 24 (video). *A review of The Space Between curated by Michael Bracewell. * Robert Walser’s Thirty Poems to be published by New Directions later this month. * Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren (on Mallarmé) reviewed. * László Krasznahorkai interviewed: “You will never go wrong anticipating doom in my books, anymore than you’ll go wrong in anticipating doom in ordinary life”. * Cain Todd on pornography. * The real Cape Kennedy is inside your head (based on Dylan Trigg’s 3:AM essay). * Simon Critchley: “[L]iterature for me, it’s what everything comes back to, it’s essential”. * Marcel Duchamp interviewed by the BBC, 1966. * Four Man Ray films from the 1920s. * The 10 best movie credit sequences. * Will Self on J. G. Ballard (video). * 3:AMer Richard Cabut’s Desert Island Discs. * John Peel’s record collection. * James Bridle on the commercial possibilities of fan fiction. * The sky over Europa. * Derek Jarman: Life as Art, Part 1. * 3:AM’s David Winters reviews Eli Friedlander’s Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait. * Elif Shafak on Walter Benjamin: “One doesn’t read him to feel better. One reads him to feel”. * Bauhaus: art as life. * The Emperor of Wyoming. * Jonathan Lethem and Andy Zax talk Talking Heads. * The fictitious Parisian address. * Now I wanna sniff some glue. * The myth of the suffering artist. * An extract from The Imposter: BHL in Wonderland. * Saint Etienne. * Teddy boys on the loose. * Terry Richardson’s Lady Gaga photoshoot (”Blank Generation” soundtrack).

 
Eric Olson ponders on bodies and corpses, animals and people, asks whether Jeckyll was Hyde and whether he was ever a fetus. He has written two books, The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology and What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology and is the groovy philosopher of philosophical animalism.  

3:AM: How did you become a philosopher? Were you a philosophical child, always aware of the strangeness of things?

Eric Olson: I wasn’t especially philosophical as a child. Here’s an anecdote: In the church my parents forced me to attend, I was taught that there was a god who had created the cosmos out of nothing; that this benevolent being punished unbelievers for their sins by tormenting them in hell forever; that we continue to exist in a conscious state after we die, even though maggots devour our remains; and that this being, though only one god, was yet three distinct persons. Nowadays I find most of these claims incredible. At the very least they’re dripping with disputable philosophical implications. Yet at the time I never seriously questioned them. It didn’t occur to me that anyone could question them in an intellectually responsible way, since they were confidently endorsed by all the authorities I knew of. That would have been like doubting whether the sun was really 93 million miles away, or whether it was true that my country was at war in a faraway place called Vietnam.

I wasn’t exposed to real philosophy until my first year at university. I was planning to study biology or chemistry, since those were the subjects I had enjoyed most at school. But I found my chemistry course dry and technical. Then I was required, as every first-year student was, to read Plato. To my considerable surprise, I found myself gripped. I was convinced that Plato was dead wrong on almost every point, and what’s more that I could show it beyond reasonable dispute. (The tendency for undergraduates to think they’re smarter than Plato is well known.) But I had never before come across anything that I had strong convictions about - convictions that many others didn’t share. And philosophical debate seemed to come naturally to me, which I couldn’t say about many other subjects. Before the year was out I had decided to give up science and study philosophy.

3:AM: You’ve argued for animalism. This is the view that humans are animals. You point out that a surprising number of major philosophers, both ancient and modern, have denied this. Can you say something about this?

EO: ‘Animalism’ says that each of us is a biological organism: an animal. All that sets us apart from other animals, beyond our being naked and bipedal and slow to mature, is our intelligence. That’s a big difference: psychologically and sociologically it’s an enormous gulf, even if the precise width of the gulf is a matter of controversy. But it’s not a metaphysical gulf. Fundamentally we’re all the same sort of thing: living organisms. Most of the big names in philosophy have said the opposite: we are not fundamentally the same sort of things as dogs or apes. Our bodies may be animals, but we ourselves are not. (This claim needn’t presuppose the uniqueness of the human species: there may be beings standing to canine and simian organisms as you and I stand to human organisms.)

Historically, most philosophers rejected animalism because they couldn’t see how we could be wholly material things - things made entirely of matter. They were convinced that no material thing, no matter how sophisticated, could ever produce thought. Thought could never arise out of any brute physical process. A thinking being would have to be at least partly immaterial, and so must we. This idea was dominant as late as the 1960s, when the main debate over our metaphysical nature was whether we are Cartesian immaterial substances or Humean bundles of mental events.

3:AM: Why do you think people nowadays argue against the view that we’re animals? Is it that they fear something gets lost?

EO: I think a lot of people find the view demeaning. They often state it by saying that people are ‘nothing more than animals,’ which sounds like a way of saying that we’re little different, psychologically and behaviourally, from chimpanzees and baboons. In short, our being animals would be incompatible with the better parts of human nature.  

Another common line is that according to animalism people are ‘nothing more than their bodies.’ And it really does sound absurd to say that Bertrand Russell’s body denied the existence of God, and had a famous debate about the subject with Father Copleston’s body. That can make it tempting to think:  Animals are just bodies. But we’re not just bodies - we’re conscious, intelligent beings. So how could we be animals? The reasoning is sheer sophistry, but I’m sure it’s been influential.  

I see phrases like ‘a person’s body’ as weasel words. They have a corrupting influence on philosophical thinking. The absurdity of saying that Russell’s body is thinking or conscious leads easily to the thought that the phrase ‘Russell’s body’ must be be the name of an object that is not thinking or conscious. So you have the thinking, conscious thing - Russell himself - and the material thing - Russell’s body - that doesn’t think and isn’t conscious. That’s only a whisker away from Cartesian dualism. There’s a lot of Cartesian thinking in the philosophy of personal identity, even if it’s usually more sophisticated and better disguised than this. If there’s any argument against animalism worth taking seriously, it’s that animalism conflicts with attractive claims about our persistence through time.

3:AM: I guess this takes us to your interest in personal identity. Can you explain firstly what the significance of this issue is before you give us the details of your thoughts.

EO: ‘Personal identity’ can mean many things. Most people use the phrase to mean your sense of who you are and what distinguishes you most fundamentally from other people. What philosophers mean by personal identity over time is something completely different: it’s about what it takes for us to survive or continue existing from one time to another. For example, I existed twenty years ago. What makes this the case? There were a lot of beings in existence in 1992. What makes some particular one of them, rather than one of the others, me? What is it about the way he relates to me as I am now? For that matter, what makes it the case that I existed at all back then? Why didn’t I come into existence just this morning? Similar questions arise about the future: what sorts of adventures could I survive, and what sort of thing would inevitably bring my existence to an end?

One thing that makes these questions interesting is the possibility of cases where the answer isn’t obvious. If your liver were transplanted into my abdomen, you would lose a vital organ and continue to exist (for a while) without it. The liver that was once a part of you would be assimilated into my living tissues and become a part of me. The same goes for other vital organs. But what if the surgeons were to transplant your brain into my head, taking with it all your mental contents? What would happen then? (Suppose they throw my original brain away.)

Maybe I would simply lose my own brain and get yours instead. I’d lose all the memories of my life and have them replaced with memories of your life - of conversations I never had, journeys I never made, and so on. The operation would give me all sorts of false beliefs: that I live in your house, work at your job, am the parent of your children. I’d be deluded about who I am: I’d be convinced that I was you. You, on the other hand, would lose your brain and stay behind with an empty skull. So a brain transplant would be analogous to a liver transplant.  

But most people, when they hear this story, are inclined to say that the cases are different. What would really happen is not that I got a new brain, but that you got a new body. That is, you would go with your brain: the operation would pare you down to a naked brain, then move you across the room into my skull, thereby replacing all your parts but your brain with what used to be my parts. You would look in the mirror afterwards and see my face. You would enjoy the magnificent physique of a middle-aged academic. The operation wouldn’t really be a brain transplant at all, but rather a transplant of everything but the brain. So no one would have his true beliefs and memories replaced with false ones, or be wrong about who he is.

The reason people tend to think that you would go with your transplanted brain, rather than staying behind with an empty head, is that the one who ended up with your brain would have your psychology - your mental properties. This suggests that our identity over time consists in psychological continuity: you are that future being who inherits your psychology in some direct way, and you are that past being whose psychology you have so inherited. That’s what it is for a past or future being to be you. Views of this sort - psychological-continuity views - are the orthodoxy in contemporary philosophy.

But psychological-continuity views rule out our being animals. You can’t move an animal from one head to another by transplanting its brain. The operation would simply move an organ from one animal to another. So if you were an animal and your brain were transplanted, you would just lose an organ and get an empty head. A brain transplant would be analogous to a liver transplant, contrary to psychological-continuity views.  

For that matter, every human animal starts out as an embryo with no mental properties at all, and thus no psychological continuity. The identity of an animal over time doesn’t consist in any sort of psychological continuity. If our continuing to exist from one time to another consists in psychological continuity, then we’re not animals, but something else. (What else is not so easy to say.)

3:AM: So why do you go with animalism and against psychological-continuity views? Why not accept the obvious lesson of the brain-transplant story and conclude that we’re not animals?

EO: Well, there are some seven billion human animals inhabiting the earth - the same as the number of human people. For every one of us, there is a human animal, and for every human animal (certain pathological cases aside, perhaps) there is one of us. To all appearances, those animals do all the same things that we do: eat and drink, have conversations, surf the web. How could we be anything other than those animals?

Think about what it would mean. There’s a human animal sitting in your chair and reading this now. That animal would seem to be conscious and intelligent. (It’s got your brain. What could prevent it from using that brain to think?) In fact it would seem to be psychologically indistinguishable from you. So if you were not that animal but something else, there would be two conscious, intelligent beings sitting there and reading this: an animal and a nonanimal.  

If that’s not bad enough, it’s hard to see how you could ever know which of the two beings you are. You may think you’re the nonanimal - the one that would go with its brain if that organ were transplanted. But wouldn’t the animal believe the same thing about itself, only falsely? Wouldn’t it have the same reasons for believing this as you do? But then for all you know, you might be the one making the mistake. Suppose you wonder: am I the person who would go with my transplanted brain, or the animal that would stay behind? From your point of view, both answers would be equally likely. That cuts the ground right out from under the transplant argument. The thought driving the argument was that you would go with your transplanted brain. But you could never have any reason to think this: for all you could ever know, you might be the animal that would stay behind.

Unless, despite all appearances, human animals are somehow not conscious and intelligent like we are, it’s very hard to deny that we are those animals.

3:AM: What does animalism say about personal identity over time, then?

EO: If people are animals, then personal identity over time is animal identity over time. The organism you see in the mirror is you, and you go wherever it goes. So although your sense of who you are (your ‘personal identity’ in the popular sense) may have to do with psychological continuity, your continued existence from one time to another does not.

What animal identity does consist in is a large question. It certainly has nothing to do with retaining the same matter. Your being an animal doesn’t mean that when all your matter has been replaced in the course of metabolic turnover in a few years’ time, you’ll no longer exist, and someone else will take your place. An organism is not an inert lump of matter, but a dynamic system: it survives by taking in new matter, extracting energy from it, and then expelling it. Matter flows through an organism like water through a fountain, only slower. As long as its life-sustaining functions continue, the organism still exists.

3:AM: Has the question of personal identity over time become more urgent as modern science advances to the point were we might be able to download consciousness or clone bodies with ease in some near future?

EO: There are people who believe that we will one day be able to create healthy adult human beings with blank brains, so that as age advances, we can ‘download’ our mental states into these beings, cheating death and giving ourselves perpetual youth. Variants of the story have us transferring to longer-lasting inorganic ‘bodies’ rather than artificial organisms. The story is called transhumanism.

Of course, medical technology is nowhere near the point where we could actually do any of this. It’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future. It’s pretty doubtful whether it’s even possible: whether a human brain actually has such a thing as a ‘blank’ state, for instance, or whether an inorganic being could ever be conscious or intelligent.

But even if it really is possible, we have to ask whether the result of copying your mental states to a new human being would be you. Maybe it would be nothing more than a duplicate of you, with false memories of someone else’s past and a mistaken conviction about who it is. If we copied your mental states to ten human beings at once, at most one of the ten resulting people could be you. The other nine would be deluded. Why wouldn’t all ten be deluded?

I doubt whether the result of copying your mental states to another human being could ever be you. It certainly couldn’t be if you’re an animal. You can’t move an animal from one human being to another by copying its mental states, any more than you can move a computer from one room to another by sending an electronic file. In fact it’s hard to see what sort of concrete object you could move from one organism to another just by transferring information. That is: it’s hard to see what sort of things we could be according to the transhumanists.

Another worry: as the story is always told, the ‘scanning’ procedure that reads off your mental states disperses your atoms, or at least erases your brain’s content. That makes it easier to believe that you’re the transfer recipient, because there’s no other obvious candidate for being you. But there’s no reason why the procedure has to be destructive. Suppose the machine reads off your mental states without doing you any more harm than an x-ray, then copies them to another human being as before. In that case, surely, you would stay where you are and the transfer recipient would simply be deceived into thinking that he or she was you. But your relation to that person is the same in both variants of the story: in each case she gets a copy of the mental states read off from your brain. So if that person wouldn’t be you in the case where the procedure is harmless, how could she be you in the case where the procedure erases your brain? It looks as if the ‘downloading’ procedure could never extend your life. The most it could do is make a copy of you.

It’s doubtful whether the transhumanist dream is compatible with any coherent view of personal identity over time.

3:AM: Returning to the science fiction stuff, you have argued about the possibility of computer-generated life, the idea that computers programmed in a certain way could become alive. You kind of doubt it. Can you say something about this really cool area of your work? Are there things happening today in computer science that might have changed your mind at all?

EO: What I called computer-generated life is the claim, popular in the 1990s, that programming a computer in the right way might not just simulate life (in the way that computer programs can simulate weather systems), but actually create it. The controversy was about whether the result of this programming could ever be genuine life, or only something more or less similar to it. I took a different approach. I thought: You can’t have life without living things. To create life, then, is to create living things - organisms.  

But what sort of organism could you create just by programming a computer? An organism has to be made of something. It has to have a size and a location. So what sort of stuff could a computer-generated organism be made of? Where could it be located? How big would they be? Advocates of computer-generated life - who were scientists by training and not philosophers - had made only metaphorical gestures in this direction. So I tried to answer the questions myself. I considered all the possibilities I could think of, and they were all just about incredible. Computer-generated life looks metaphysically impossible.

I have a similar suspicion about artificial intelligence. There’s been plenty of debate about whether programming a computer in the right way could produce something that counted as genuine intelligence, or only something more or less similar to it. But to create intelligence is to create an intelligent being - or else to make a previously unintelligent being intelligent. And the friends of artificial intelligence have said very little about what sort of beings they might create, or make intelligent, by programming computers. What would these things be made of? Where would they be located? I’ve never seen good answers to these questions. Computer intelligence may be no more metaphysically possible than computer-generated life.

I don’t know whether computer-generated life is still in fashion. But because my doubts have nothing to do with the sophistication of the programming, recent developments in computer science are unlikely to make any difference.

3:AM: Anyone who writes a paper called ‘Why I Have No Hands’ has got to be asked to explain himself, because it’s not exactly the kind of thing philosophers are expected to be working on. So why have you no hands, and presumably me too?

EO: Half a dozen journals refused to publish that paper. One reviewer said that although it may have some value as entertainment, it wasn’t serious philosophy. Since then it’s generated a good deal of discussion in the journals, so I think I’ve had the last laugh.

Suppose we accept that there are certain particles ‘arranged manually’, which enable me to tie my shoes and feed myself. Now we might ask: do those particles add up to or compose something bigger - a hand? Is there anything there - any material object - besides the particles? The question may sound monumentally abstruse, if not outright unintelligible. Is there really any difference between particles’ being arranged manually and their composing a hand? And if there is, why should anyone care about it? But there is a difference, and it does matter.

Suppose there really were such a thing as my hand. Then there would also be such a thing as ‘all of me but my hand’. (The wrist joint, for all its anatomical utility, has no metaphysical significance.) But this object - call it a ‘hand complement’ - would be just as conscious and intelligent as I am. (It would differ from me only by lacking a hand as a part. How could that prevent it from thinking? I could think if I lost a hand.) In that case my hand complement would be a second conscious being in addition to me. There would be two conscious beings within my skin - a hand complement and a whole human being - thinking exactly the same thoughts.  

But I’m the only thinker sitting here. More generally, there aren’t two conscious, thinking beings wherever we thought there was just one. If that’s right, then my hand complement can’t be an intelligent being. And since it would be intelligent if it existed, there can be no such thing as my hand complement. But then there can be no such thing as my hand either. And of course what goes for my hand goes equally for my legs, my heart, and so on. A variant of the argument implies that I have no head. The entire nursery-school ontology of ‘parts of the body’ goes out the window.

Maybe that sounds silly. But if it’s not true, there must be something wrong with the argument that leads to it. Are there such things as hands but no such things as hand complements? Does something prevent my hand complement from thinking? Could I actually be my hand complement, despite the fact that it’s smaller than I am? Do I share my thoughts with a vast number of other beings of different sizes? (How could I ever know which one I am?) Or does the argument’s conclusion somehow not follow from the premises, despite its seemingly impeccable logic? None of those alternatives looks any better than denying the existence of hands. At any rate, those are the options. There is no easy, comfortable position here.

3:AM: You were unsettled by Hud Hudson’s idea that a thing can have different parts in different places, his theory of ‘partism.’ You use the story of the ship of Theseus to discuss your unease. Can you say what you think the problem is with this view as I think it is a good example of the fascination of this area of philosophy and your approach.

EO: This is a technically demanding topic (some readers may want to skip ahead). Briefly, ‘partism’ is designed to solve problems like the one about hands. (Hudson doesn’t apply it in cases quite like this one, but we can ignore that.) Suppose again that there’s such a thing as my hand complement. We don’t want to say that it’s a thinking, conscious being in addition to me. Partism would enable us to say that my hand complement is me, so that there’s only one conscious being here.

But my hand is a part of me and not a part of my hand complement. How could we be the same thing? How could one thing both have and not have a hand as a part? Well, we know that a thing can have different parts at different times: if I have a bad accident at the sawmill, my hand might be a part of me today but not tomorrow. Hudson proposes that a thing can have different parts at different places. So the hand could be a part of both me and my hand complement (which are the same thing) at the place where that hand is located, and not a part of either being at some other place. What appear to be two things with different parts are in some cases just one thing, made up of more than one set of parts at once.

It’s a very clever thought. But how can we generalise it? Here’s a troublesome case: Theseus builds a ship and goes to sea. Now and then he returns to port and replaces some of the ship’s worn pieces until eventually every one of them has been exchanged. Meanwhile, the local museum has been collecting the cast-off pieces, which they manage to assemble just as they were when Theseus first set sail. So there are now two ships: the repaired ship at sea and the reconstructed ship in the museum. Which of the two is Theseus’ original ship?

If Hudson is right, we ought to be able to say that both are: the repaired ship is the reconstructed ship. Despite appearances, there’s only one ship in the story. It simply has different parts at different places. In the museum, it’s made up entirely of old pieces; at sea, it’s composed entirely of new ones. So the museum guide could point to the reconstructed hulk and say, ‘The ship you see here has been at sea for the last month and is now approaching Corsica.’  

If someone actually said this, we’d take her to be referring to the ship at sea by pointing to something else that represents it, just as she might do by pointing to a picture or a model of it. But what if she insisted that the ship in the museum and the ship at sea were literally just one ship? That would be hard even to understand, never mind believe. It seems as obvious as anything can be that there are two ships (if there are such things as ships at all), one in the museum and the other at sea. Yet according to partism her statement ought to make perfect sense.

To be fair, Hudson doesn’t think his theory applies in this case: even if my hand complement and I are one human being, the repaired ship and the reconstructed ship are two ships. But he has no account of why this is so, or of where his theory applies and where it doesn’t.

3:AM: You’re impressed by Peter van Inwagen, and clearly many of your interests seem to spin out from his Material Beings and his mereological investigations. Can you say what was the appeal of metaphysics? Was it the ‘unsettling commitments’ that you liked, the risk to ‘common sense’, the ‘making it strange’. Jason Stanley says that he likens philosophy to novel writing. Is this something you can understand?

EO: What drew me to van Inwagen’s philosophy wasn’t the strangeness of his views (He claims, for instance, that there are no material objects except elementary particles and living organisms - which neatly solves the problem of the ship of Theseus.). It was rather the way he argued for these views. His thought has a simplicity and clarity that I’ve always aspired to. When he writes about something, the mist dissolves. Everything becomes plain. And once I’ve seen it, it often seems so natural and obvious that I wonder how anyone could see things so clearly without agreeing. I’m aware, of course, that he doesn’t have this effect on everyone. But his critics rarely manage to reveal an alternative landscape of equal clarity. To my eye, they only wrap things in mist again.

Stanley’s point is that philosophy is a first-order activity and not a second-order activity. Philosophers don’t study Plato’s just because of his historical importance: that’s not philosophy, but history of ideas. We do it because we think Plato might have something to teach us about the subject. We’re doing the same thing he was doing, namely asking philosophical questions and trying to answer them. So philosophers treat Plato in the way novelists treat Dickens: as a colleague rather than as a mere object of study. That’s the sense in which philosophy is like novel writing and not like literary criticism. But you could make the same point by saying that philosophy is like physics and not like the history of science, or like polevaulting and not like the study of athletics. I doubt whether the connection between philosophy and novel writing goes much deeper than that.

3:AM: You’ve spoken of how science and philosophy can cooperate. For some, philosophers shouldn’t be so close to science. For others, philosophy is redundant as science proceeds to explain away philosophy. So how do you face down these two contrary positions to your own?

EO: Many scientific discoveries have a direct bearing on philosophy. For example, recent work in cosmology has revived ‘design’ arguments for god’s existence. The laws of physics turn out to involve numbers that apparently could have been different - the mass of the electron, for example, or the relative strengths of the elementary forces - but which all have to fall within an extremely narrow range of values in order for life to be possible. If these things had been left to chance (supposing that makes sense), the overwhelming likelihood is that the numbers would have had values resulting in a lifeless universe. This is something that no philosopher ever imagined from the armchair. So why is the universe ‘fine tuned’ for life? One salient answer is that it was designed that way by some sort of god. To take another example, the science of colour vision has demolished volumes of a priori philosophising. Philosophers would be foolish to ignore this information.

To say that science makes philosophy redundant is to say that science can supply all the answers: all legitimate questions can be answered by the methods of the sciences. This claim is trivially self-refuting. The methods of science cannot establish whether every legitimate question can be answered by those methods. So the claim is illegitimate by its own standards. For that matter, the question of what the ‘methods of science’ actually are, or ought to be, is a philosophical question. You can ignore philosophy, or try to reform it, but you can never do away with it altogether. Any attempt to dig its grave will only be more philosophy.
 
3:AM: One of the things some critics say about contemporary philosophy is that it is too boring, technical, jargonised and distant from non-philosophers’ philosophical issues. You have spoken about how you admire a paper by Chisholm which went on and on in what seemed tedious detail until suddenly ‘as if by magic’ the answer became clear. This suggests that maybe you find critics of philosophy and how it’s done impatient. The problem isn’t philosophy but those who aren’t prepared to think hard enough. Can you say something about this whole business of how philosophy should be done and how it gets perceived by outsiders? And for you, what makes philosophy so good?

EO: Those complaints could be made about any period in the history of philosophy. Most great philosophical works are dry and technical. Think of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, or Hume’s Treatise, or anything written by Aristotle or Aquinas or Hegel. If these critics were avid readers of Aristotle and Kant, and found their major works far more exciting than anything in contemporary philosophy, they’d have a legitimate complaint. But I don’t think that’s the case. (It’s pretty hard to imagine.) I suspect that they simply find philosophy too hard. But philosophy is hard. That’s its nature. No one would expect serious works of physics or mathematics or economics (as opposed to popularisations) to be immediately accessible to intelligent readers with no training in the subject. Why should philosophy be any different?

And contemporary philosophers don’t neglect the interests of those outside the profession. It’s true that if you open the pages of a journal like Mind or Analysis you’re unlikely to find anything on the meaning of life, whether we have free will, or any other topic that ordinary people ever think about. But there’s plenty of work being done in those areas if you look for it.

I concede that academic writing is very often harder to read than it needs to be. It tends to be larded with needless technical detail and jargon. It’s interesting to ask why this is. Laziness is part of it, but the peer-review process is also to blame: it’s easier to get academic work published if it’s highly technical than if it’s simple and clear, because simplicity and clarity make it easier for reviewers to spot the weak points. But this holds for all subjects, and has nothing to do with philosophy in particular. If anything, philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition tend to write more clearly than their colleagues in many other fields.

3:AM: Experimental philosophy reverses the usual idea that the folk are muddled and philosophers will clarify the muddle. They kind of say that what the folk say isn’t what the philosophers think. Maybe the intuitions driving positions about property dualism in the philosophy of mind are dubious, they wonder, and that’s the kind of starting point for Josh Knobe and his crew. Are you interested in x phi and what they bring to the philosophical table? Are you burning your armchair?

EO: The philosophical ‘experiments’ that I’m familiar with are basically sophisticated opinion polls. This is important for those areas of philosophy that rely heavily on the opinions of ordinary people. (Philosophers call them ‘intuitions’ because that sounds more authoritative.) If you’re doing ethics, for example, you may need some premises about what it’s right or not right to do. Where do you get them? The traditional procedure is to ask yourself, your colleagues, and your students, and if you find broad agreement, you take the judgment to be correct. Philosophical opinion polling appears to cast doubt on the reliability of this procedure, suggesting that the answers people give can vary widely depending on their cultural background, the way the questions are phrased, the order in which they’re presented, and other factors not relevant to the truth of those answers.

This is all controversial and the results have been questioned. I haven’t paid much attention because I don’t put much faith in ordinary opinion. To my mind, the fact that ordinary people are inclined to say certain things when questioned about points of serious philosophical controversy is little reason to think that those sayings are true. Perhaps most people, when told the brain-transplant story, really would say that you would go with your brain rather than staying behind with an empty head. I still think they’re probably wrong, because that view has consequences that on reflection I find impossible to accept. If the polling were to show that ordinary opinion is not actually in agreement with psychological-continuity views of personal identity, I’d be interested. But I don’t think it’s where those views are weakest.

I think there’s a deeper reason for distrusting philosophical intuitions. I don’t mind going against things ordinary people can be prompted to say about philosophical issues. But I worry when I disagree with other philosophers - people who are at least as able as I am and who have thought about the matter just as deeply. In that case it would be irresponsible for me to be confident that I’ve got it right and they’re wrong. Fortunately there are points that we do agree about. No one disputes that if psychological-continuity views of personal identity are true, then we are not animals, and that it follows from this that the animal you live in, so to speak, is either not intelligent or is a second intelligent being in addition to you. The controversy is about whether these consequences are acceptable. Knowledge of what follows from what - of what the options are - is more solid than knowledge of which option is right.

3:AM: Interestingly, you seem to agree with Eric Schwitzgebel’s view of the difficulty of Indian philosophy for those trained in Western philosophy. He contrasts Indian with Chinese philosophy which he says is far more graspable. Can you say something about this and why you think this is so? Someone like Graham Priest and his work on dialetheism and Hegelians working on deviant logic might disagree and say that once classical logic is thrown aside there’s no problem.
 
EO: I can’t comment on Chinese philosophy, but I have a terrible time understanding books on Indian philosophy (or at any rate Indian metaphysics) written for Western audiences. The problem is not that the teachings conflict with standard logic. Maybe they do, but in order to know that I’d have to see their logical structure, and I’ve never got even that far. My impression is that much of the material is simply impossible to communicate to someone trained only in the Western tradition. So even if you were to spend several years of your life learning Indian philosophy from the experts, you’d have nothing to tell the rest of us. I hope this impression is false. I’d love to see a really clear book on this subject.

3:AM: And finally, can you give perhaps your top five books that the sassy crowd at 3:AM should read to get up to date with contemporary metaphysics?

EO: Richard Taylor, Metaphysics. This short book is about as accessible as philosophy gets. It covers most of the juicy topics you’d hope to find in a metaphysics book, including fatalism (which Taylor endorses) and the meaning of life.

Peter van Inwagen, Metaphysics. More careful and less provocative than Taylor, but equally fascinating.

Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen, ed., Metaphysics: 5 Questions. A book of interviews with contemporary metaphysicians.

Peter van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman, eds. Metaphysics: The Big Questions.
A large collection with something for everyone.

Hud Hudson, The Metaphysics of Hyperspace. A delightful book, though not suitable for beginners.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.
 

4. ​The Birthday Party
 
Forty lilies in forty vases, forty cakes with forty candles, forty kinds of dip and forty bruschetta, forty heart-shaped sandwiches and forty kinds of cupcake. Forty sorts of cocktail, necessary for the more than forty guests, mostly from the past fifteen years of Lily’s life, but a few from that distant childhood, those blurry university years. Everyone she knew and many she wished she didn’t. But it was too late now to take back the invitations. It was too late to regret it all.

“Forty years and forty lovers!” An old friend teased. Lily, as they all knew, had hardly been with anyone except her absent husband. But Lily laughed it off and turned around, and went to the bathroom, and wished this wasn’t happening. She had never been a birthday party kind of person. She didn’t want everyone to meet and talk and share stories about how they knew her, what they remembered. She didn’t want them all to get flashbacks to embarrassments, remind her of what she happily forgotten, and ask her what she was doing now, and how is Adrian?

Lily smiled at people as she left the room, “So great to see you!” - “Thank you for coming!” - “You look beautiful, Sandra!” - And then she locked herself in the bathroom, took a deep breath and blanked them out for a moment. But the vision of them all – her emotional attachments, beautiful friends, seeped in - a pink, swirling glow of her nearest, dearest strangers, her loveliest enemies. Maybe she was overwhelmed by all the love, or maybe new wisdom splintered the old facade, her carefully constructed fantasies, for a moment.

Lily stopped panicking, and was composing herself again, when she heard a familiar chatter, voicing her worst anxieties, and confirming the suspicion that her enemies were too close to her, and her friends weren’t even here. There were people chatting in the corridor, perhaps waiting for the bathroom, even though there was another nearby.

​”Her dress is sweet. It’s like this dress she wore at her thirtieth though. How can she have forgotten that?” A shrill Manhattan voice announces, the other side of the door.

“Well, I doubt she remembers anything from her thirtieth, Lulu.” Two old friends from Lily’s first job, at an advertising agency, it would seem - Lulu and Sara.

“I wonder if she ever works anymore?”

​More laughter. “She should never have married Adrian. Big. Mistake.”

“Sara! You are awful. Awful. How is Charlotte?”

“She’s good. She’s terrible. She went traveling.”

“Thought as much. Is my hair okay like this, or?”

“It’s perfect. Let’s go back. I want to try forty cocktails.”

“Oh stop it, Sara! You sound like Lily.”
 


Lily stayed in the bathroom until they left, too embarrassed to go out. When there was only silence, she left, and went back downstairs. She saw Rachel near the kitchen and asked, “Is Tom here yet?”

Rachel nodded a no. “He’ll probably call.”

Lily smiled and went into the kitchen, not wishing to answer Rachel’s inevitable question: “Is Dad here yet?”  - To which Lily had no answers either.
 


She picked up a glass of champagne and went back into the dazzle of her gaudy party. She tried to be calm and walked through the little crowd of fair weather friends, who were all enjoying her efforts as much as they could, and she tried to ignore the paranoia that they were laughing about her.

She scanned the room for people she wanted to see but saw only a flash of badly-fitting cocktail dresses, plumped lips and glossy, dyed hair. Good figures, bad figures, too much bragging, and moneyed smiles. For Lily it gave her a feeling that she was at the wrong birthday party. She didn’t recognize these hard, smiling faces.

But she was too used to these situations, now - these bored trysts of lovers and friends. She used to feign happiness so often that sometimes she convinced herself that she was at ease in her make-believe. But now, it slipped.

 
“Where’s Adrian?” Her friends kept asking.

“Working. He’ll be here later.” She found herself smiling. “Thank you for coming!”
 


Adrian had intended to go to Lily’s birthday party, but he had got the time wrong. He didn’t usually slip up like this; he’d been multi-tasking and deceiving flawlessly for so many years of marriage. So he hoped, when he realised his mistake, that his otherwise perfect record at not getting caught would give him some clemency. But the evening had conspired against him. The girls had got together after the party ended, and they weren’t feeling very tolerant of men. Rachel had started it, telling her mother about her mean ex-boyfriend.


“He was cheating on me and it was so obvious,” Rachel explained, “but I never thought it was happening because he just kept lying. How can you ever know what to believe?”

“One day you’ll meet someone you can trust.”

“Do you trust Dad?”

“Of course. I knew from that moment I met him that he would be there for me.”

“That’s not the same as trust.”

“I can trust him,” she insisted.

“How did you meet him again?”

“I’m tired, Rachel. I want to relax.”

“Most people like talking about how they met the love of their life.”

“Yes and most people tire of telling the same story over and over again. – I’ve told you before, we met at Trinity May Ball.”

“That’s romantic.” She didn’t sound desperately impressed. “What were you wearing?”

“Cream satin. Blue handbag.” – She didn’t mention all the other colours that had stained her by the end of the evening.

“That sounds nice.” – imagining something quite different.  “Do you still have it?”

Lily remembered it being refused by the dry cleaner a few days after that party. They said they’d never be able to remove the blood, red wine, grass stains and mascara smudges, unfortunately. They politely didn’t refer to the vomit.

“Oh, no. I lost it.” Lily said, not really lying.

“That’s a shame.”

“I know. You would have looked lovely in it.” - Hoping that her daughter had more grace than she ever did, hoping that an expensive education would make her elegant, as much as employable.

“Don’t you have pictures, though?” Rachel asked.

“Not at hand.”

“I’d love to see them.”

“Leave it, darling. Everything’s all over the place. That’s what happens when you move house every few years.”
 


Lily hadn’t told Rachel any more detail than this before, hence Rachel’s curiosity. Going to Cambridge had, as feared, made her wonder about the circumstances of her parents’ fateful encounter. They never really talked about it, and when they spoke to their old friends from that time, the impression was that Lily and Adrian had always been exactly as they were now: normal, smiling, together, not really.

Rachel could not imagine either of them being young, however. She couldn’t imagine them being free or happy, and, like those old friends they were still attached to, she couldn’t imagine them apart either. Their identity was their group of friends, and their marriage; neither Adrian nor Lily could be imagined separately. As Lily finished her champagne and kissed her goodnight, Rachel started to wonder what kept them together, and then, as she thought more about it, wondered what had drawn them together in the first place. And as her mind went blank with consequential ideas, she realised she hardly knew her parents at all.

Meanwhile, Lily tried to make her mind blanker still, to stop herself from realising that Adrian had forgotten about her. But she’d timed it all wrong, and instead of sending her to sleep, the champagne just made her cry. She wasn’t entirely sure why she was crying, when she was crying. She was just overwhelmed by something being wrong, but she didn’t know what had brought this sense of discontent. It wasn’t just the champagne, and it wasn’t because it was her birthday, and it wasn’t even because Adrian hadn’t shown up.

There was something else going on, and she knew this, had known for some time, but no matter how concerned she became about it, or how anxious, she could never understand what exactly had happened. She would sometimes dream about Adrian being another person, and with other people, speaking other languages, which she couldn’t understand. But she never knew if there was something behind these instincts, or whether it was just paranoia, because she couldn’t bring herself to ask Adrian about it. She didn’t want to know how he was – whether he thought something was wrong as well, whether he was seeing other women, whether he loved her anymore. She couldn’t risk the answers being those that would bring everything down, even if all that was really left was pretence and stamina.

And though Lily sometimes felt she didn’t know her husband, she knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t answer her questions straight anyway. His being a successful politician had mainly been due to his ability to gloss over difficult truths, to put spin on it all, to smile photogenically, and to be charming when cameras were rolling. If he could make a career out of consoling the public with careful phrases, then he could lie to his wife – especially since she wanted him to. He was in power because she wanted him there. She was being lied to because she didn’t want to brave reality. And she was submissive because she didn’t want the responsibilities that come with freedom. Maybe it was Stockholm Syndrome, or maybe she had chosen it.

So it happened again: Lily cried, as Adrian walked home from another affair. Both of them were miserable. Usually, by the time Adrian entered the front door, Lily would have composed herself, and Adrian wouldn’t look so guilty. But tonight was different. Lily kept crying. Hopeless tears turned to anger and frustration. Alcohol didn’t work but she drank it anyway.

And Adrian, as he walked, felt angry rather than apologetic. A lie is a sort of apology: Sorry for not being the right sort of reality. Sorry for not being who you want.

Adrian wasn’t feeling sorry for Lily though – just sorry for himself.

It had never, before now, occurred to Adrian that he might also lose out from being dishonest with other people – for disingenuously apologising for himself. So concerned with winning the affections of others, he forgot to think about whether he really wanted attention, and love, based on dishonesty. Did he really want popularity if it was for a person he was only pretending to be? Did he really want to be bound by his own fiction?  

For a few decades, he had discarded the idea that true love meant him being honest as well as the other person. Only very gradually, and lately, did he begin to realise that his self-interest did not benefit anyone in the end, least of all himself. It wasn’t enough anymore. It should have been, but it wasn’t.

He was not really the powerful one anymore: the pretend him was. His wife was married to another man: the fantasy version whom he’d been acting as all those years. No matter how much he got away with in private, he still had to go home to Lily, who expected another man.

On his own birthday, for instance, a few months ago, he had done everything he wanted to do, but had still ended up unhappy, paying penance for his pleasure by having to go home again at the end of it. But as he walked home this night, to another party, he entertained himself in remembering the beginning, at least:

Though Adrian always said he didn’t care about his birthday, he fell into quite a depression if it wasn’t all laid on, and Lily, Beatrice, and Sandra all knew him well enough by now to see through his faux disinterest. So it was a busy day.

​First there was breakfast in bed with Nicola, which lasted a few hours until lunch with his children, who didn’t want to be there but were well practised at pretending otherwise. Emerging from Le Caprice around three, he told his wife he was going to the gym but he went to see Sandra, who had left her husband with the children in Hyde Park to please Adrian for a while. Adrian ignored calls from Nicola, who wanted to check he wasn’t lonely on his birthday to have dinner with Beatrice (in her flat), and finally tore himself away around eleven to get back home so that his wife wouldn’t get suspicious.

​And she didn’t ask any questions – she didn’t get suspicious. Perhaps that was her present to him – or perhaps it was her punishment, he now thought. By not protesting, Lily secured his arrival back home, his continued trap. As Adrian approached the Kensington flat, he began to feel certain that she was to blame for his unhappiness after all.

​He went through to the kitchen, quite silently, and considered bringing this up with her. But then he realised it was ridiculous: he was in the same position as she was. If he brought it up – this silent power struggle, this perennial unhappiness – then he might also risk losing everything those lies were protecting.

​And it was that anxiety, he realised, pouring another Scotch, that was making him unhappy and nervous all the time. This fear simmered below his self-righteousness and anger, and threatened to smother him. He needed an outlet, a release – finding it increasingly difficult to contain his anger. But talking to Lily wasn’t going to do it.

He drank, and decided that he needed to overcome the building anxiety another way. He also needed to tell himself that he didn’t, deep down, quite like that thought of letting go. Call it a death wish: he craved destruction, of his fear, and then of himself. He wanted to break out of his own lies, and leave winning. He wanted to conquer his own anxiety, but he also wanted to give in to it. He wanted everything and nothing. That was always what sex had been for.

He went upstairs. Lily was lying in bed, had obviously been crying. Adrian hated to see her cry. Not out of guilt, exactly – but just because it seemed messy, those emotions. If she could cry about her birthday then she could cry about all of it. The semblance of calm seemed vulnerable, somehow.

“I’m sorry.” He said, practised, and tired.

She wanted him to console her, but she knew he couldn’t anymore. She felt sad for him as much as for herself. She didn’t even hate him for everything he wouldn’t tell her.

Lily looked at him and he knew that she felt sorry for him, which felt worse than anger. He felt as if he was disintegrating. He dumped his briefcase and jacket and got undressed and had a shower. Rage had turned to powerlessness.

When he came back into the room, Lily was asleep.

5. ​Oxford
 
Tom didn’t really enjoy his course, but he did like reading Nietzsche. He liked to interpret it as he wanted, and ignored his tutor’s suggestion that wanting to be an Ubermensch was a little naïve, elementary – clichéd, even. Both ‘Oxford material’, and really not. The cocaine didn’t help him take this good advice. It didn’t help with much.

​Really, Tom knew that uppers didn’t actually help him write essays, and that coffee would have kept him awake just as well. He knew that writing 7000 word essays was unnecessary, especially when most of it was irrelevant drivel. If he paid attention to those around him, he’d also realise that his tutors knew exactly what was going on, but Tom ignored everything that wasn’t explicitly said or explained to him, quite happily playing the fool, if it meant extending his games a little longer.

​And drugs were just a game, more than pleasure or efficiency, or any other excuse given by his friends and himself. He found it interesting to test himself and push him limits, to bend his frame and sense of self. He didn’t enjoy it in a conventional sense; he didn’t really like the sleepless nights, disapproval, anxiety, paranoia or expense. He was bored and it was simply a new playground game, an excuse to run around, in town, round girls, in words. And because he never really enjoyed drugs – in a purely sensual way – he therefore never suspected that he might actually have a problem, really be addicted. He hated the idea of that. To be at the mercy or something else was almost worse than being submissive to someone else. It was what he hated but kept falling into – his personal brawl, his love and hate.

​The more girls Tom slept with, too, the more they defined his life, his memories and his stories. He was always in control, and yet his conquests were now all the details of his life – all his days and nights and pleasure and pain, more so even than the powders he played with. He loved the idea of power but had become a slave to his subjects, more masochistic than he thought – lots in common with those girls, after all. So it didn’t take him long until he was attracted to something more painful, more long-term than those one-night stands and easily sealed heartbreaks.

 
​Tom met her by the water fountain. Claire was pale and had blonde hair cut just above her shoulders, with a natural wave, the colour of flat champagne. She smiled prettily, and that was the first thing that Tom liked about her. When he talked to her over coffee one morning, he found he also liked her voice, its softness. Then he noticed he liked the way she sat, her mannerisms – ways of holding her coffee cup and laughing. A week passed and he realised he couldn’t stop thinking about her, and, perhaps more significantly, he wasn’t thinking about anyone else. He wanted to sleep with her, but he was rarely this nervous about wanting to sleep with someone.

Over the next couple of weeks, Tom found himself pursuing Claire. He found himself nervous and unsure of himself not only when she was around him, but also just when he thought about her. He found himself making an effort to see her and impress her. He couldn’t stop it. He fell, all at once. She encouraged it.

​It was getting colder, but it was that phase of winter where needing to wrap up is still a novelty, and all the boots and coats are new and comforting, and the leaves are bright and warm. Winter is only teasing summer away in October; summer is still there somewhere.

​Tom would pull Claire closer and kiss her at the back of the lecture hall, and they’d get more coffees together, more lunches. They’d watch movies and Claire would say, “I like October but November is my favourite month,” and then they’d walk home and sleep together. He was always happy to see her; she was always happy to be undressed. Simple things like walking to lectures became something exhilarating. Waiting for classes to end had never been so perfectly torturous.

It was all waiting, then climax, seeing her more, then waiting again. Pleasure in everything. Tom embraced it when he felt it was a choice. Claire was nervous until she was his, and then she was committed. When she was committed, the nervousness became his. They took turns in building walls and shaking them down again. But it was only a Wendy house. There were only so many times it could be torn down and resurrected.
 


​They were happy in it, though, locked away from everyone else, for a time. Mostly they stayed in Claire’s room, because it was more central and meant she didn’t have to wander around in last night’s clothes so often.

​The light was always good in that room: big windows looking out at a garden, from the fourth floor. In the morning it was brightest and softest, and woke her and Tom up a little too early.  Claire made coffee for them both and Tom never wanted to get up, and Claire didn’t want to leave bed though she did want him awake. He smiled with his eyes closed, light brown hair seeming blonde in the morning light. It seemed like summer even though it was late November. The heating was high; there seemed little reason to leave the room. Lectures seemed unnecessary, more so than usual.

It was only when Claire opened the window to smoke a cigarette that they realised how cold it really was, summer no more, snow in the air. She looked over at him, shivering all of a sudden, and she knew she loved him too much already. She stubbed out her cigarette and closed the window and went over to him. Winter could be ignored a bit longer. November was only her favourite month when she was safely inside, looking out. It was only her favourite month under sheets and embraced by him, and safe from it all.
 


6. ​London
 
“That’s a nice new bike, Adrian.”  

It was his version of a mid-life crisis, his prop for it anyway, safely within party policy guidelines and public image boundaries. It was expensive, for a bike. It was good for the environment but probably bad for his health – the fumes, and all.

He coughed as he tried to lock it.

“Haven’t had a bike since Cambridge.” He replied to the secretary, who was smoking a cigarette outside. She didn’t reply or roll her eyes or say anything that might make the situation – his embarrassment – worse. She was used to working with him. She smiled, and he smiled back. He took it the wrong way, thought she was flirting. She lit another cigarette, though she didn’t really want another, and waited until he’d gone inside before returning to her desk. He thought about her in the elevator. He thought about her at his desk. He imagined the usual things.

When he was on the phone, a bit later, she looked up job vacancies elsewhere. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any jobs anywhere. Her unemployed friends wouldn’t understand her just quitting. She got on with some phone calls and files and tried to forget the tense boredom of the office. When she was irritable, she thought she just must want a cigarette, to stop thinking that she really just wanted a whole different life.

​Her best friend had just moved to Berlin, which perhaps explained today’s particular discontent. They’d always talked about doing that together – all through university. They’d both studied politics and German, and the plan was to go to Berlin after graduating – at least for a year or so. But then Marina had started panicking about the rest of her life and ever getting a job, and meeting the right man, and living the right life, and applied for a bunch of jobs. And got this one, assisting a pretty high up politician in a party she once had faith in.

​But that was getting tested, as she saw what was going on, as the Lib Dems turned a poisonous green for being mixed with the Blue. Her faith in people in general was waning, too. It was her autumn of discontent, and it was too late to book a decent holiday to escape the winter. She’d already committed to Christmas with her parents, and the rest of the time she’d be slaving over Adrian’s correspondence.

She didn’t feel like she thought she’d feel at twenty-three. She was wearing uncomfortable shoes and telling people her job was fascinating when it was really just a lot of photocopying and standing round on the Tube. It was doing what she was told, and trying not to do anything provocative. It was being watched, and trying to stay polite. It was being suspicious, and staying calm. It was thinking about wine in the evenings all day long, and wondering what Berlin was like. It was saying, “I’ll come and visit you soon,” and knowing she wouldn’t.

She had too much work. She had to look after this angry man in the next room, now shouting at his wife, apparently, on the phone. She and the intern pretended not to hear anything.

 
7. ​Oxford
 
“I’m not in the right state of mind for this.” Tom told Claire, one rainy afternoon in bed.

“For what?”

“For a relationship,” he replied.

“We’re already in one.”

She was right, and it was too late, to worry about his mental state. He was already in there, and so was she, that attractive madness of lust – the exhilarating, clichéd free fall. Fighting it was futile, if walking away was the intent. Fighting only heightened the pleasure. And so the games began. Tom had always been a little in love with game-playing, but now he had met his match; she loved it too.

The honeymoon sweetness was over with that one declaration of doubt. Tom began to go out with other people more. Claire got moodier and more flirtatious with other boys. The sex got better. Their neighbours got irritated. Nobody had really picked up that Claire and Tom were together, but now everybody knew, simply because they questioned it so often. Nothing says love like impassioned blanking and stomping around. Nothing says lust like jealous outrage.

In between the waiting, testing, teasing and provoking, there were sweet moments, though – and that was made both of them losers in the end. But both of them had a death wish, a losing streak – a wish to fail terribly, almost as if to balance out all that other winning – that tiresome accomplishment, academic, sexual and otherwise.

It just wasn’t exciting to succeed at everything. This wasn’t masochism – Tom and Claire both hated pain, really. This was finding a way to love each other, finding a way to be compassionate. It’s sometimes easier to love someone when they’re sad, especially if they’re sad about you. They seem more human, less some pretentious ideal.  

Tom had always found the opposite to be the case in the past: he looked down on girls too wrapped up in him. He hadn’t liked normal vulnerabilities, except to take advantage of. But then he hadn’t really been in love before. Now Claire’s moods and tears just drew him closer, made their connection a little more base, a little more sympathetic. They were losing together, which seemed better than winning alone. Priorities had changed.  

 
Tom was happy sometimes but he was also losing it. He had been protecting himself when he didn’t care too much about anyone else. Now Claire’s vulnerability was also his: he couldn’t trust himself any more than her. He didn’t know what would happen one day to the next because she might change plans. Her moods and whims defined each day. She made him happy, and he knew she’d make him sad; in a frenzied way, she already did. She made him feel human, base, lost: he loved that but he was scared by it too.

When he wasn’t sleeping with her, life seemed to fall apart. He ignored the bad grades and implications of tempestuous home life as long as possible, but at the back of his mind he knew it was already free fall and too late to get out.

He started needing Claire more. He started hating her for making him need her. Then they slept together and he wasn’t worried about anything. Then she was gone for a day and he forgot who he was.
“I’m not in the right mental state for this. Trust me, I’m not.”

It had put him in the wrong mental state, was what he meant. She kissed him anyway. He couldn’t pull away.
 

 
[ Read Part 1 | 2]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christiana Spens graduated from Cambridge in June (philosophy), and is the author of The Wrecking Ball (Harper Perennial 2008) and The Socialite Manifesto (Beautiful Books 2009). She is currently working on two novels, and lives in Paris. Death of a Ladies’ Man, which 3:AM Magazine, is serialising over three months is her first novella.
 

Though the Maintenant reading series has become known for promoting collaborative and experiment poetry events its original incarnation remains very much its base. That is as a platform for a group of poets visitng London from a single European nation. This past Thursday, April 27th, following poets from Romania, Norway, Iceland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Macedonia and Latvia, it was the turn of five Croatian poets to read alongside an assortment of British writers at Europe House, in Westminster.

Truly revolutionising Croatian poetics since the turn of the century this group of poets represent a generation that has refused the staid political atmosphere of post communist poetry circles, and has forced their nation to expand its scope and poetic vernacular. They have achieved unprecedented success, making Croatia a world recognised powerhouse of contemporary European poetry. Centred around the iconoclastic Poezija magazine Damir Sodan, Sonja Manojlovic, Ivan Herceg, Dorta Jagic and Tomica Bajsic constituted the core of another wonderful night of readings.

Damir Sodan

Tim Atkins

Andy Spragg

Claire Potter

Sonja Manojlovic

Ivan Herceg

Dorta Jagic

Joe Kennedy

Mark Waldron

Saradha Soobrayen

Marcus Slease

Jeff Hilson

Tomica Bajsic

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
SJ Fowler is a poet and journalist, living in London. He edits the Maintenant series of readings and interviews and is the poetry editor of 3am magazine and Lyrikline in the UK. He has had work commissioned by the Tate, the London Sinfonietta and Mercy. He is a full time employee of the British Museum and a postgraduate student at the Contemporary Centre for Poetic Research, University of London.

[This is part of a series on the complete works of Studs Terkel. The last book looked at was Will the Circle Be Unbroken?]

When Studs’ Place went off the air, Studs wasn’t told why. Thanks to a Freedom of Information request, he got a hold of his FBI file - and it was shorter than his wife’s (The FBI made 147 of the pages public in 2009) It lists his “suspicious activities,” including working for the Chicago Repertory Theater, which performed socially significant plays by guys like Eugene O’Neill and Clifford Odets. Studs also signed anti-war petitions, anti-Jim Crow petitions and pro-union petitions. He also supported Henry Wallace’s bid for the Presidency. The most disheartening parts of the file are the descriptions of him given by his professors at the University of Chicago, who note his Jewishness and how he didn’t fit with who the department wanted.

When the subject of the petitions came up, Studs was asked to sign a statement saying he was duped, and save himself a lot of trouble. “Whatdya mean,” Studs asked? “I wasn’t duped. A guy comes up to me and asks me if I’m anti-Jim Crow, damn right I am. Are you against war, damn right I am.” In later years, people would tell him about how brave he was for standing up to the McCarthyites and he would tell them he was scared stiff, he was a coward.

Studs did what he could to support the causes he believed in, much like the people in Hope Dies Last do. The people in this book have dedicated their lives to creating a better world, putting at risk their fortunes, their lives and their sacred honor. They put all of it on the line and intentionally stand up to be counted. In his books, Studs showed ordinary people standing up and being counted, and Hope Dies Last focuses on other people who do that.

The phrase comes from labor organizer Jessie De La Cruz from her interview in Coming of Age. She had organized the United Farm Workers union along with Cesar Chavez and said that even after he passed away, hope was still around. Hope for a better tomorrow, hope that their goals would be reached. Without hope, the only thing left was despair, and then death. La esperanza muera ultima.

One of the first people interviewed in the book is Congressman Dennis Kucinich. He was interviewed by Studs for American Dreams: Lost and Found and some of his story from that makes its way into the interview done here. But more has happened in the intervening 25 years. Rep. Kucinich sums up what many of the people in the book say: He cherishes the freedoms America champions. He believes they are being snuffed out due to fear, and that the best way to combat it is to be resolutely against capitulating to fear.

Studs, in interviews he did some years later, would say that Democracy is a system where “a commoner can walk up to a King and say ‘bugger off!’ And I can tell my President to bugger off!’ That is being American.” The book came out in 2003, when President George W. Bush was still quite popular. The Iraq war - a war Studs never saw finished - was about to begin.

The most hopeful day in Studs’ life was the day Germany surrendered, V-E Day. Some of the people interviewed are people who remember that day, and recall their experience as a poor person in the Depression, who rose into common cause with other Americans against the Germans and the elation of victory. But this high feeling didn’t last. Admiral Gene LaRoque was a career military man and reflects on how the country constantly went to war. It always went somewhere else to go to war, and the American people were comfortable with that. It was never the case that someone else tried invading us - we always went somewhere, to places the American people had never heard of. But they supported them anyway. And September 11th was another excuse to go somewhere else.

Studs said in interviews that he felt the “greatest generation” wasn’t the one that fought in World War II, rather it was the one that came of age in the 60s, the young people that marched in the civil rights movement and started the second-wave of the women’s movement and the gay rights movement. Some of those folks are still around fighting the good fight like Tom Hayden (one of the Chicago Seven) and Arlo Guthrie, both of whom are interviewed in the book. Guthrie says his job is to continue his father’s work, which is making people feel good about who they really are. He laments that kids today have so few options to enjoy being human, that they’re being taught that “life is bad for them,” and how we as a species have spent so much money on killing each other and so little on caring for one another.

Pete Seeger is interviewed about his Clearwater initiative to clean up the Hudson river, while another veteran of the 60s, Jerry Brown talks about what he learned when he tried his hand at the priesthood. Brown was the Governor of California for 8 years and ran three times for the Presidency. He served another 8 years as the Mayor of Oakland and is now once again the Governor of California.

September 11th, and the subsequent two wars are brought up in nearly every interview. The most often answer to it was that activists who inspire hope were more important than ever. It’s easy to succumb to despair in the wake of all the bad stuff in the world, but working for a better world and fighting for the right things keeps everyone going.

The book is dedicated to Clifford Durr and Virginia Foster Durr. Clifford was an attorney for those accused of disloyalty during the red scare and later a civil rights lawyer. Virginia Foster Durr, his wife, employed Rosa Parks as a seamstress. The two of them, along with a dozen others, helped organize the 1965 march on Selma, in which Studs participated. When the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act passed in 1964 and 1965, respectively, neither of them quit organizing. Virginia Foster Durr remained politically active up until her death in 1999 at the age of 95.

The last interview in the book is with Kathy Kelly, a peace activist who would not only go to the victims of war and help them, but also put her neck out on the line to stop war in the US. She was arrested for trespassing on a missile silo site along with Joe and Jean Gump (who were interviewed in The Great Divide shortly after Jean was sent to prison). She was handcuffed and sat on her knees. She told the soldier who was watching her that she was praying, and asked if he would join her. He did. He asked her if she was thirsty, and she was. So he took out his canteen and gave her water.

Another story Studs liked to tell in his later years was of a young couple he met while waiting for a bus, which would usually go like this:

I try making conversation with them, and note that labor day is coming up. “Back in the old days,” I’d say, “We used to march up and down State Street, ‘Solidarity Forever,’ CIO!” And the man turns to me and says “We despise unions.” Well, I’ve got myself a challenge here. And I turn to him and ask “How many hours a day do you work?” “Eight,” he says. So I say “How come you don’t work eighteen hours a day?” He does know what to say. “It’s because four men were hanged fighting to make sure you got an eight hour day.” And the bus comes and they quickly get on the bus. And I’ll bet you every weekday morning the woman looks down from their 16th-floor apartment at the bus stop and the man asks “Is that old nut down there?”

The moral of that story, according to Studs, is that it’s not their fault they didn’t know. Because nobody told them about the Haymarket affair. And that’s because we live in what Studs called “The United States of Alzheimers,” and it was something he was trying to fix with his books.

[Next: Studs does a book on music and musicians in And They All Sang, The Adventures of an Eclectic Disk Jockey]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert O’Connor is a journalist, writer, adventurer and a few dozen other things (including a Co-Editor of 3:AM). His stuff has appeared in the Twin Cities Daily Planet, Hot Press, KFAI and a few other places. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Tom McCarthy’s brilliant essay, Transmission and the Individual Remix: How Literature Works, is published as a Vintage Books eBook Original on 22 May. Here’s an extract from the blurb:

“In his novels Remainder, C, and Men in Space, McCarthy explores the theme of signals and transmission. Now, he blows the concept wide open and identifies the signals that have been repeating since the dawn of literature. He takes us back to the Greeks and the origins of literary meaning to show that information, rather than being a natural or abstract phenomenon, is always based in artificial media—in ones and zeros, dots and dashes, signals and noise. He takes us through Ovid, Rilke, Conrad, Joyce, Beckett and others to re-imagine the very idea of what a writer does, and what the act of writing is. Rather than praising individual creative genius, McCarthy re-tunes our ears to the crackle of information as it has passed through the feedback loop of literary culture.”

In other news, Tom’s “Dodgem Jockeys” appears in this month’s Believer. His third novel, C (K in German) has been shortlisted for the German Foreign Fiction Prize.

[Pic: Tom McCarthy, London, April 2012 by Andrew Gallix.]

Benjamin Myers reads from his new novel, Pig Iron.