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10 déc. 2016

Drei Tage,
und


meeting thomas bernhard



  



Drei Tage
5,6,7 juin 1970
von Ferry Radax

 

 

  /

A Translation of "Drei Tage" by Thomas Bernhard:

 

Three Days

Day No. 1

…my first impressions, on my way to register at the elementary school, on the very first day of first grade…my route took me past a butcher’s shop, and on its open doors there were hooks, hammers, knives hanging in rows, all very nicely organized, on the one hand bloody, on the other hand glaringly white and tidy, slaughtering-gun apparatuses…then the sound of the horses, as they quite suddenly slump to the ground, those enormous bellies that are swelling, collapsing, bones, pus, blood…then from the butcher’s a couple of flights of stairs up to the cemetery, a hall for lying in state, a tomb…I still cannot quite recall my first day of school, a pale youth in the hall for lying in state, a cheese-maker’ s son…and from there, my heart pounding, to the classroom…a young schoolmistress. 
My grandmother, who always took me with her, by the way—in the morning I would walk through the cemetery on my own, in the afternoon she would go with me into the charnel-houses—would lift me up, say: “Look there’s another woman laid out.”  People who were dead and nothing else…And this is of considerable significance for everybody…and one can draw conclusions about everything from it…
Childhood is just one piece of music after another, of course they’re all non-classical pieces.  For example: in 1944 in Traunstein I had a rather long walk to school.  My grandparents lived [just] outside the city limits, hence four kilometers from the school.  And halfway to the school [there was] a thicket, I don’t know what else.  And every time I walked past it, a woman would jump out and scream: “I’ll get your grandfather packed off to Dachau yet.”
In 1945 another story, another piece of music, perhaps a twelve-tone composition.  A friend of my brother, who was seven years old, I was fourteen, stuck his hand into the barrel of a bazooka, and he was completely blown to bits.  The place is called Vachendorf.  And I go with my brother to the funeral there on our bicycle.  And so I can just barely get my feet past the top tube, and he is sitting on top, in front on the handlebars.[1]  Along the way we pick flowers.  But halfway to the site of the funeral a young man suddenly jumps out of the woods, pulls my brother and me off the bike, tears up the flowers, and stomps the bike flat—in other words starting with the spokes, then he cuts the handlebars to pieces, then he ruins the mudguards, then he boxes my ears, then he throws my brother into the creek.  And it all struck me as so--I don’t know whether he was a Pole or a Czech…it was quite remarkable.  And we sat there on the bank of the creek and cried and went back on foot, and so there was no more talk about the funeral.  And then when we got home we told this remarkable story.  And there’s an entire series of stories just like it.
Two serviceable schools, naturally: loneliness, apartness, remoteness on the one hand, then continuous mistrust on the other, mistrust arising out of loneliness, apartness, remoteness.  And that was when I was still just a child…
My mother gave me away.  In Holland, in Rotterdam, I was shunted off into the care of a woman on a fishing-sloop for a year.  My mother visited me every three, four weeks.  I don’t believe she thought very much of me at the time.  Then of course the situation changed completely.  I was a year old, we moved toVienna, but there was still the mistrust, which by then had become permanent, when I met my grandfather, who actually loved me, just as I actually loved him.  Then those walks with him—this is all in my books, and those characters, male characters, each and every one of them is my maternal grandfather…but besides my grandfather each and every person was…you’re alone.  You can develop only when you’re alone, you always will be alone, your consciousness of the fact that you can’t come up with anything on your own…Everything else is a delusion, is dubious.  Nothing ever changes…
In your years of study, you are completely alone.  You have a bench-mate at school and are alone.  You talk to other people, you are alone.  You have opinions, other people’s opinions, your own opinions, you are always alone.  And when you write a book, or books if you are like me, you are even more alone. 
Making yourself understood is impossible, there’s no such thing as doing that.  Out of solitude, out of aloneness grows an even more intense aloneness, apartness.  Eventually you change scenes at ever-briefer intervals.  You believe that ever-larger cities—your small home town is no longer enough for you, Vienna is no longer enough, London is no longer enough.  You’re forced to go to another continent, you try going here and there, speaking foreign languages—is Brussels perchance the right place?  Is it perchance Rome?  And you travel to every place in the world and you are always alone with yourself and with your ever-more abominable work.  You go back to your native country, you withdraw back into your farmhouse, you shut the doors, if you are like me—and this is often for days at a time—you stay shut up indoors and then your sole pleasure and on the other hand your ever-increasing source of delight is your work.  Which is sentences, words, that you build up.  Basically it’s like a model train, you put one thing after another, it’s a musical procedure.  It’s of a predetermined height, sometimes it gets as high as four, five storeys—you build it up—you can see through the whole thing, and you throw it together like a child.  But all the time you’re thinking you’re not so bad at this after all, somewhere on your body a tumor is growing, a tumor that you recognize as a new job of work, as a new novel, and that keeps getting bigger and bigger.  So basically isn’t a book just a malignant tumor, a cancerous tumor?  You have it taken out in an operation, and you don’t quite realize that its metastases have spread throughout your body and that a cure is no longer possible.  And itnaturally keeps getting stronger and worse, and there’s no cure and no way of going back.
The people that came before me, my ancestors, were marvelous human beings.  It is certainly no accident that I’m suddenly thinking of them on this ice-cold bench.  They were everything at one time or another: filthy rich, dirt poor, criminals, monsters, almost all of them were perverse in some way, happy, well-traveled...
Most of them at some point suddenly up and killed themselves, and especially the ones who everyone had assumed would never dream of terminating their lives with a gunshot or a jump.  One of them jumped into a light-shaft, another one put a bullet in his head, a third simply drove his car into the river… And thinking back on all these people is as horrifying as it is pleasant.  It’s like when you’re sitting in a theater, and the curtain rises, and right away the people you see up on stage are divided into goodies and baddies—and not only into good and bad characters, but rather into good and bad actors.  And I have to say, it’s an absolute delight to watch this play from time to time, time after time.

Day No. 2

The difficult thing is getting started.  For a stupid person that isn’t difficult at all, indeed, he doesn’t even know what difficulty is.  He makes children or makes books, he makes one child, one book—child after child and book after book.  He’s quite indifferent to everything, indeed, he doesn’t even think about anything.  The stupid person doesn’t know what difficultly is, he gets up, washes, steps out into the street, gets run over, is squashed to a pulp, it’s all the same to him.  There are brute resistances right from the start, probably always have been.  Resistance, what is resistance?  Resistance is material.  The brain requires resistance.  While it’s accumulating resistances, it has material, resistance?  Resistances.  Resistance when you look out the window, resistance when you’ve got a letter to write—you don’t want any of this, youreceive a letter, again a resistance.  You chuck the whole thing into the trash, nevertheless you do eventually answer the letter.  You go out into the street, you buy something, you drink a beer, you find it all tedious, this is all a resistance.  You fall ill, you check into a hospital, things get difficult—again resistance.  Suddenly terminal illnesses crop up, vanish, stick to you—resistances, naturally.  You read books—resistances.  You don’t want to have anything to do with books, you don’t want have anything to do even with thoughts, you don’t want to have anything to do with language or words, or sentences, you don’t want to have anything to do with stories—you pretty much don’t want to have anything to do with anything.  Nevertheless, you go to sleep, you wake up.  The consequence of going to sleep is waking up, the consequence of waking up is getting up.  You must get up, stand up, take a stand against all resistances.  You must step out of your bedroom, the paper rises to the surface, sentences rise to the surface, really only the same sentences over and over…you have no idea where from…uniformity, right?  Out of which new resistances emerge, while you’re noticing all that.  You want nothing but to go to sleep, to know nothing more about it.  Then suddenly pleasure drops back in…

Why the darkness?  Why this ever-unchanging darkness in my books?  That’s easy to explain:
In my books everything is artificial, in other words, all the characters, events, occurrences, take place on a stage, as in a play, and the area around the stage is totally dark.  Characters entering on to a stage, into a stageplay, in a playhouse, are in virtue of their sharper outlines more distinctly recognizable than when they appear in natural lighting as they do in the prose we are most accustomed to.  In darkness everything becomes clear.  And so it’s not only like this with the images, with the pictorial element, but also with thelanguage.  You have to picture the pages of a book as being completely darkened.  The word lights up and from this illumination it receives its clarity or hyperclarity.  This is all stage machinery that I have been using from the beginning.  And when you open one of my texts, it’s like this: you should imagine that you’reat the theater, when you turn the first page you make the curtain rise, the title appears, total darkness—slowly from out of the background, out of the darkness, words emerge, words that slowly metamorphose into incidents involving a nature that is both internal and external, words that metamorphose into a nature of this sort with especial clarity precisely on account of their artificiality.

I don’t know what sort of person people picture a writer as, but any such picture is bound to be wrong…As far as I’m concerned I am not a writer, I am somebody who writes…on the other hand you receive these letters from Germany or wherever, from provincial towns, from fairly big cities or from broadcasters or certain collective enterprises…you show up there…and you’re presented as this tragic, downbeat poet, and that sticks so long that you are represented as such a person in critical plaudits, in pseudoscientific screeds.  Word then gets around that this is an author, a writer, who is to be classified as such and such, and his books are downbeat, his characters are downbeat, and his landscape is downbeat, and so—the person who’s sitting before us is also downbeat.  Plaudits like that pretty much reduce you to some downbeat clod in a black suit…Well, of course, I am considered a so-called serious writer, the way Béla Bartók is considered a serious composer, and my reputation is spreading…but basically it’s a really lousy reputation…it positivelydiscomfits me.  On the other hand, I naturally am not a light-hearted author, I’m no storyteller, I basically loathe stories.  I am a story-destroyer, I am the epitome of a story-destroyer.  In my work, whenever any sort of portent of a story appears, or I see any sort of suspicion of a story surfacing from behind a massif of prose, I shoot it down.  It’s the same way with sentences, I practically revel in nipping in the bud sentences that even possibly might come to term.  On the other hand…

I’m happiest when I’m alone.
Basically that is an ideal situation.
Even my house is really just a giant prison.
I quite like that; walls that are as blank as possible.  They’re blank and bleak.  It has quite a salutary effect on my work.  The books, or whatever it is I write, are like the house I live in.
Occasionally the individual chapters in a book strike me as being like the individual rooms in this house.  The walls are alive—right?  So—the pages are like walls, and that’s enough.  You have only to stare at them intensively.  When you’re staring at a white wall, you realize that it actually isn’t white, isn’t blank.  
When you’re alone for a long time, when you’ve gotten used to being alone, when you’re schooled in loneliness, you discover more and more things in all the places where for normal people there’s nothing.  On the wall you discover fissures, tiny cracks, irregularities, invasive insects.  There is a colossal amount of movement on the walls. 
In point of fact, there’s absolutely no difference between walls and the pages of a book.

People outside find my way of life monotonous.
Everyone around me lives a much more exciting, or if not exactly a more exciting, at least a more interesting life…
For me the life of my neighbors, who pursue very simple, manual vocations, is—my next-door neighbor is a farmer, catty-cornered to me lives a paper-maker, right next door to him a carpenter, farther afield in the neighborhood nothing but paper-makers, artisans, farmers—I find that interesting…as each of these strikes me as an occupation that, even if it’s being performed a hundred thousand times in exactly the same way each time, takes place as an event, is new each and every time… my own life, my own occupation, my own day, strike me as monotonous, unvarying, inconsequential.

The thing I find most terrifying is writing prose…it’s pretty much the most difficult thing for me…And the moment I realized this and became conscious of it, I swore to myself that from then on I would do nothing but write prose.  Of course I could have done something completely different.  I have studied many other disciplines, but none of them are terrifying.  For example, I took drawing lessons at a very young age, and I probably would have made a halfway decent draughtsman, it would have come quite easily to me.  I studied music, and it came quite easily to me, playing instruments, making music, in other words, composing.  There was a time when I thought I was destined to become a conductor.  I studied the aesthetics of music and one instrument after another, and because I found it all too easy, I gave it all up.  Then I wanted to become an actor or a director or a dramaturg.  That lasted for a while, and then I started finding it very constraining.  It was really stressful, I acted in a lot of plays, mainly in comic roles, put on some productions…I also attended a business school, which means there was a time when I thought, why not, I could just as easily become a businessman, I was attracted enough by the idea to start getting trained along that path…

And from quite an early age I—right on through to the age of seventeen, eighteen, I hated nothing as much as I did books…I lived at my grandfather’s house, and he wrote, and there was a huge library there, and to have to be around those books all the time, to have to walk through that library, was for me simply horrible…and probably…why actually did I ever start writing…why do I write books?  Out of a sudden opposition to myself, and to that situation—because for me resistances, as I said earlier, mean everything…I craved resistance on just such a colossal scale, and that is why I write prose…

Perhaps it’s because by the age of eighteen I was an inmate of a hospital, I had been laid up there, for a year, and there I received what I believe even today is still called extreme unction.  Then I was in a sanatorium, for several straight months I was laid up there in the mountains.  The whole time I had as my view the same mountain.  I was lying in a simple plank-bed, with a gray coverlet, with a single coarse woolen blanket, and outdoors throughout the autumn and the winter, day and night.  Out of sheer boredom, because you simply can’t lie there opposite a single mountain uninterruptedly—I mean, of course I wasn’t able to move about—I happened to start writing…That was probably the motive and the cause.  And out of this boredom and what with the solitude and that mountain, which is called the Heukareck, and towers over Schwarzach St. Veit, a real six-thousand footer…when for months on end you’re looking at it, and it’s always the same…it never changes, because it’s on the shady side, then you either go mad or you start to write.  And so I simply picked up a pen and some paper and just jotted down some notes for myself and overcame my hatred of books and writing and pencils and pens by writing, and that is undoubtedly the cause of all the vexation I’m dealing with now.

Basically I would like nothing more than to be left in peace.  This is very exacting, and with the passage of time I’ve ceased even to be interested in changes in the outside world.  Of course they’re always the same things over and over.  Other people will have to deal with them.  I am interested only in my own procedures, and I can be quite ruthless.  And it’s all the same, it makes no difference to me whether I’m in my farmhouse or in some city, be it Brussels or Vienna or Salzburg…whether everything is falling to pieces around me or getting even more ridiculous than it already is or not…I find all that pretty much meaningless, and it doesn’t get me anywhere I haven’t already been to, at the very least it gets me back to myself…and once I’m there…


Day No. 3

Yes…intercourse with philosophy, with written texts is extremely dangerous…for me especially…I sometimes beat about the bush for hours, days, weeks on end…I don’t want to have any contact with anyone…I don’t want to have anything to do with anything.
On the other hand, it happens that the authors I deem most important are my greatest adversaries or enemies.  You’re constantly sparring with the very people you’ve already surrendered to completely.  And I have surrendered to Musil, Pavese, Ezra Pound…there is of course nothing lyrical about them, they areabsolute prose.
There are quite simply sentences, a landscape, that is built up in a few words in Pavese’s diary, one of Lermontov’s rough drafts, naturally Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, basically all Russians…I’ve pretty much never taken any interest in any of the French, apart from Valéry…Valéry’s Monsieur Teste—that’s a book that’s been thoroughly thumbed through…and I’m always having to pick up a new copy, because it’s always going kaput on me, because it’s been read to death, to shreds.   
Henry James—I’m constantly sparring with him.  It’s a bitter foeship…and it’s always in flux.  Most of the time you think you cut quite a ridiculous figure alongside these people, but when you think that you can’t work…but little by little you gather your strength…you become stronger than the lot of them…and you can crush them…you can hoist yourself above Virginia Woolf or Forester, and then I have to write And on the whole comparison is the art that one must try to master.  It is the only school that has anything of any significance to teach and that gets you ahead or anywhere you’ve never been to.  Nothing integral can be suffered to exist, you’ve got to chop it to pieces.  Anything that’s been done well, that’s beautiful, grows more and more questionable.  Moreover of course you’ve got to break off at the most unexpected point possible along the way…So it’s even wrong to write a so-called chapter properly all the way to the end.  And the biggest mistake is when an author writes a book all the way to the end.  And in your relations with other people it is actually quite a good thing if you suddenly break off the connection.

Melancholy is quite a beautiful condition.  I fall into it quite easily and quite readily.  Not too often or pretty much never when I’m in the country, where I work, but right away in the city…For me there is no more beautiful place than Vienna and the melancholy that I feel in the city and have always felt…there are the people there whom I’ve known for two decades, and who are melancholy…there are the Viennese streets.  There’s the atmosphere of that city, the city of studies, quite naturally.  There are the ever-unchanging sentences that people there utter to me, probably the same ones that I utter to those people, a marvelous prerequisite for melancholy.  You sit anywhere in a park, for hours on end, in a café, for hours on end—melancholy.  There are the young writers of yesteryear, who are no longer young.  Suddenly you see one who is no longer a young person, he’s pretending to be a young person—probably just as I pretend to be a young person but am no longer a young person.  And it intensifies over time, but it becomes quite beautiful.
I quite enjoy going to the cemeteries in Vienna, to the Döbling cemetery right around the corner from me or to the cemetery at Neustift am Walde, and I really revel in the inscriptions, in the names I recognize from earlier visits.  Melancholy, when you walk into a shop: the same sales-girl, whose movements twenty years ago were so incredibly brisk, is now really slow.  She slowly fills the bag with sugar.  It’s with a completely different movement that she picks up the money, shuts the cash drawer…the bell on the door makes the same sound, but it’s melancholy.  And this condition can last for weeks.  And I think perhaps for me melancholy, this constant self-administration of melancholy in tablet form, is the ideal or the only effective medicine…

There is always the non-existent conversation with my brother, the non-existent conversation with my mother.  There’s the equally non-existent conversation with my father.  There’s the non-existent conversation with the past, which itself no longer exists, which will never exist again.  There’s the conversation with long, non-existent sentences.  There’s the dialogue with non-existent nature, intercourse with concepts that are non-concepts, that never could be concepts.  Intercourse with conceptlessness, cluelessness.  There’s intercourse with a subject-matter that is unremittingly imperfect.  The conversation with material that doesn’t answer back.  There’s the absolute soundlessness that ruins everything, theabsolute despair from which you can no longer extricate yourself.  There’s the imaginary prospect that you have built for yourself in order to be able to keep only imagining it.  There’s the attempt to brush up against objects that dissolve the moment you think you could have touched them.  There’s intercourse with actualities that turn out to be shams.  There’s the attempt to piece back   together a period of time that was never unified.  There’s always the same groping in your imagination towards a representation of things that by its very nature must prove false.  There’s your identification with things that have emerged out of sentences, and you know neither anything about sentences nor anything about things, and time and again you know pretty much nothing at all.   That is of course the quotidian element, from which you must distance yourself.  You have had to leave behind everything, not to shut the door behind you but slam it shut and walk away.  And everything time and again has had soundlessly to vanish from a single path and by its own agency.  You have had to go from the first darkness, that is, has ultimately become, totally impossible to master in a lifetime, into the other, the second, the conclusive darkness, and as far as possible, impetuously and, without any tergiversating, without any philosophical hair-splitting, to try to reach it, simply to enter it…and perchance by closing your eyes to anticipate the darkness, and to open your eyes again only then, when you have attained the certainty of being absolutely in the darkness, in the conclusive darkness.








[1] Many thanks to Flowerville for help with this sentence.



Source: Thomas Bernhard. Der Italiener (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), pp. 78-90.   This book comprises Bernhard's screenplay to Der Italiener, a film directed by Ferry Radax; a fragment--also entitled Der Italiener--upon which the screenplay is based; the above texta modified transcript of a monologue delivered by Bernhard in an another film directed by Radax; and a brief afterword by Bernhard.  A complete translation of the book in PDF format is available here.

 Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2013 by Douglas Robertson

31 déc. 2015

Gilbert Sorrentino Interview

The Oulipo has come into focus in the past ten years. What is your own interest in this group concerned mainly with formalism? Under The Shadow seems to point in that direction of structures and constraints.
GS: I've always been interested in the formal, despite the fact that the word "formalism" as it is now used to describe a certain kind of mummified poetry, is not what I have in mind. My sense of the formal is that of a structure or series of structures that can, if one is lucky enough, generate "content," or, if you please, the wholeness of the work itself. Almost all of my books are written under the influence of some sort of preconceived constraint or set of rules. Some of these are loose and flexible, like the time scheme in Steelwork, and others are quite rigorous, like the alphabetical framework in Misterioso. My interest in Oulipo dates back maybe 10 years or so, when I became aware of what they were up to - I had, quite mistakenly, thought it a group somewhat involved with surrealism. But their concern with formal structures as permissive of and conducive to compositional freedom was right up my alley. Under the Shadow has a structure based upon the drawings done for Raymond Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions D'Afrique by H. A. Zo, drawings that, incidentally, have nothing to do with the text, but which, oddly enough, make a text of their own, a fragmented and discontinuous one, but a text nonetheless. Under the Shadow is Zo's "story" as it can be pulled out of his pedestrian but really haunting drawings.

In the wake of the media overload and the Joycean overlap, how does art compete with popular culture? What is exactly the position of novel writing in such a cultural situation?
GS: I think that art has always existed with, if not competed with popular culture. When the court was reading "The Canterbury Tales," the illiterates in the street were singing folk tales and watching jugglers and clowns and God knows what. It's always been this way and probably always will be--the novel has somehow been posited for us as a kind of "mass item" and if it sells only 1500 copies is seen as a failure. I don't know if that's even a reasonably intelligent way of thinking. A novel, even a lousy novel, can't command the audience of the least successful TV sitcom, and yet such a form is "supposed to." Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary form, and was, for a brief moment only, wide-ranging in its sociocultural influence. For the most part, it has always been an acquired taste and it asks a good deal from its audience. Our great contemporary problem is in separating that which is really serious from that which is either frivolously and fashionably "radical" and that which is a kind of literary analogy to the Letterman show. It's not that there is pop culture around, it's that so few people can see the difference between it and the high culture, if you will. Morton Feldman is not Stephen Sondheim. The latter is a wonderful what-he-is, but he is not what-he-is-not. To pretend that he is is to insult Feldman and embarrass Sondheim, to enact a process of homogenization that is something like pretending that David Mamet, say, breathes the same air as Samuel Beckett. People used to understand, it seems to me, that there is, at any given time, a handful of superb writers or painters or whatever--and then there are all the rest. Nothing wrong with that. But it now makes people very uncomfortable, very edgy, as if the very idea of a Matisse or a Charles Ives or a Thelonious Monk is an affront to the notion of "ain't everything just great!" We have the spectacle, then, of perfectly nice, respectable, harmless writers, etc., being accorded the status of important artists. I saw, for instance, maybe a year ago or so, a long piece in The New York Times on the writers who worked on some hero-with-guns movie. Essentially a pleasant bunch of middle-class professionals, with the aspirations of, I'd guess, very successful cardiac surgeons. Workmen, in a sense, who do what they're told to make a very good living. Not a shred of imaginative power left in them. But the piece dealt with them in the same way that the paper deals with Sharon Stone, Leonard Bernstein, Mark Rothko, Merce Cunningham, etc., etc. It's sort of all swell! My point, if I haven't yet made it, is that while it's all right to think of something as delicious as Dallas or Dynasty as, well, delicious, it's not a good idea to confuse them with Jean Genet. Essentially, the novelist, the serious novelist, should do what he can do and simply forgo the idea of a substantial audience.

Do the ideas of William S. Burroughs translate into literature, or are they just tools for popular culture?
GS: Burroughs has translated his ideas into his own literature, but they seem to stop there. As far as Burroughs and pop culture go, I really have no clear idea of how they mesh or how one influences the other. Burroughs is a legitimate artist, but he is not as good as his admirers think and he is nowhere near as bad as the people who have never read him believe. Of course, Naked Lunch, is the text that most people read, while the rest of Burroughs more or less languishes, even though his trilogy, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express are his best books. But Naked Lunch appeals to the juvenile mind that wants to think of it as the crazy work of a really crazy guy full of smack and writing in a daze--Burroughs as Rimbaud on heroin! Then there's the school that thinks of Naked Lunch as a "satire" on authoritarianism and the state. But the text of Naked Lunch presents the reader with a classic aporia: it does not quite mean to say what we mean it to say. There is something vaguely "insincere" about it. By that I mean that Naked Lunch sends a number of conflicting messages, the most salient of which can be phrased--simplistically and reductively, I grant you--"Oh, how terrifying and horrible and impossible to tolerate is this destructive addiction to heroin ... you dumb squares!" So the referential function of the text works one way and metalingual function another. Naked Lunch, however,succeeds because of this conflict, i.e., Burroughs as good as tells the reader that the latter is in the hands of a con man, he is a mark. And what is the role of a mark? To believe the con, to think himself, as a matter of fact, superior to the con. That's precisely how he gets conned. The ideal specimen of the reader revealed as a mark is seen in the biography of Burroughs by Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw. You can see Morgan figuratively handing over his money.

What is your impression of the term "postmodernism?"


GS: It's a really imprecise term, despite the work of Lyotard, Jameson, Guattari, etc., etc. I tend to think of it as an extension of the problems of unresolvability, indeterminacy and fragmentation proffered in the texts of high modernism. What is more "postmodern" than Finnegans Wake or Watt or At Swim-Two-Birds? Yet they are all arguably modern texts. Borrowings, quotations, inter- and intratextualities, references, collage, fragmentation, indeterminacies, ambiguities--they're all present in these texts. Yet they are all present in "postmodern" texts as well. One can't even mention irony, since modernist texts are full of it and some postmodern texts, like Creeley's late prose, reveal no irony at all. Maybe a better term would be late-late modernism, or contemporary modernism. You know that you're in terminological trouble when you hear clothing styles being described as "postmodern" and movie reviewers blather about "deconstruction" when you realize that they mean satire.

Why were the elements of Black Mountain available to writers in the 1950s and not now? I don't want to suggest the notion of "the good old days" which just blurs the actuality, but were there stronger talents in that time, or has economics ruined the state of today's art?
GS: Hard to answer this question. I was on a panel a little while ago with Robert Creeley, and we were both being asked versions of your question. Apparently, young people are enormously interested in "how things were" in the Fifties. Creeley said something much to the point, to the effect that we all took art very seriously in those days, we were absolutely committed. He's right, of course, there was a sense then among young artists that we were writing for our lives--but maybe more importantly, there was a really drab "establishment" in place at that time--artistic and social and political--and young artists felt, rightly or wrongly, that they were destroying it, "deforming the ideogram," as Jakobson says.

Experimental writing has been undermined by lazy readers and corporate tendencies of editors and publishers. How accurate is the previous statement?
GS: Absolutely accurate. But it's always been absolutely accurate. Joyce, Pound, and Williams commanded the smallest of audiences and were shunned by what we now think of as "major" publishing houses. Publishers have always been craven when the odds are not in their favor, it's just enhanced nowadays because there is so much money to be made if the publisher can hit the shit machine. What is most surprising to me is the number of--what can I call them?-- "absent" books published. These are books that have no literary merit, no spirit of aesthetic adventure, no rough but interesting formal design, and--this is most important--no chance of commercial success! That's what is so amazing to me--not the number of Judith Krantz-like novels published, nor the Calvin Trillin-Garrison Keillor warm and wise and witty and wonderful malarkey, but the novels that just lie there: life and love in a small town in Northern California, sexual awakening in a Baptist family in Pennsylvania--daughter flees to Greenwich Village, meets bum who makes her pregnant, discovers feminism--and on and on. Were I running these houses, I'd can all these editors in a minute. If they can't make millions, would be my thinking, I'll be God damned if they're going to put out excrement that will only break even, i.e., if we want to break even, I'd say, let's publish BOOKS. But, of course, the chances are that the people who own these houses would not know a book if it buggered them.

Mulligan Stew is a parody of several literary cultures. Can this process have any meaning for readers who don't understand what's going on before their eyes? Can this sort of book still be written today?
GS: A parody only works if the reader or viewer is aware of the model that is being parodied. Sure, a book like this can be written today, but since there seem to be fewer readers, there will be fewer people who get the parody. Literature feeds on itself and people have to learn to read if they want to be readers. You can only learn to read by reading, but you can read only if you've learn how.

How has your writing process changed? Since you moved to California in 1982, have you mellowed out and become an ornament of the university?
GS: I work the same way that I've always worked, or so I think, that is, I try to set aside a certain amount of time each day, if I can manage it, to write in. I'd like very much to be an "ornament of the university" by which I assume you mean that I would be a kind of sage and wondrous presence on campus, teaching no classes, advising no students, reading no papers, but more or less there as resident Old Artist. Unfortunately, it's not the case. Stanford requires the same teaching load to be borne by everybody, scholar, artist, or nitwit, so that's too bad. But I still have enough time to work. As for mellowing out, as you put it, California--at least the Bay Area--is so utterly antithetical to me that I find myself, at all times, struggling against its cuteness, its apathy, its general air of paralysis, its relentless small-townishness, so that it's hard to imagine being mellowed out while in the throes of battle. I don't quite know what it is about the place but the entire Bay Area, with the source of infection being, of course, that citadel of provincialism, San Francisco, has the air of an amateur stage production set in sinister natural surroundings. I had a student some time ago who said that the sun out here gave her the creeps. I'd agree, but with elaboration, that is, the sun shining on a street crafts-exhibition, complete with wine and local "performers." Now that is hell on earth.

How does music influence you as a writer? You have made many references to jazz and classical music. Are you a musician yourself?
GS: It doesn't influence me at all, that is, any references to music in my work are just that, references, and my work is not musically structured in any way. I'm not a musician, but have fooled around, emphasis on the "fooled," with the tenor saxophone when I was in my late teens, and I have been a listener to jazz since I was 14. Classical music came later. It's hard for me to make any kind of useful remarks about music in other writers' work, although it is quite clearly an important structural element of Zukofsky's A.

How do you see the relation of high art to popular culture? Does Mulligan Stew have any relevance for a society where literature doesn't influence the culture?
GS: I think I've more or less answered this already. They are both quite certainly present, and, as such, can be seen and talked about and so on and so forth. But it is bad news to confuse one with the another or to think that to know about one is to know about the other. If you only know the British poets of the 18th century and you've never watched TV, you don't "see" certain things in the culture of the society--and if you have memorized lines from lots of movies and you've never read The Iliad you are lacking in general education as a Western person. That is just that. As far as Mulligan Stew goes, its relevance to this essentially letterless society is the relevance of any and all literature to this society. Of course, "society" is a catchall word and includes everybody, the whole shebang, that is, the ill-educated person in the famous "inner city" (what a phrase, and how it indicates the contempt in which city living is and was held by the pitiful suburbs!) is no more distant from literature than a professor of electrical engineering, say, or a corporate attorney. Literature is there for those who want it and for those who don't want it there are dozen of substitutes. That is simply life, as they say, and there's no use wringing one's hands about it. The greatest problem, if it is a problem at all in this huge amusement park in which we live, is that the so-called educated stratum of society comprises people who are not in possession of the same materials, so that Mulligan Stew may not speak at all to people who are highly educated in one specific field--for instance, I cannot imagine it being read by Michael Milken, although I could very wrong. But I don't think I'd be wrong to say that it would not be read by Teddy Kennedy or Newt Gingrich or Jack Kevorkian or the chief of marketing at Coca-cola.

What is one to make of the success/failure of the writings of Edward Dahlberg?
GS: Dahlberg is a writer whose work cannot be tamed or reduced or assimilated. He is a subversive and destructive master of prose, who is, at his best, so good that he takes your breath away. He is also zany, goofy, loopy, misogynistic, deeply prejudiced, bitter, nasty, paranoid and absolutely unfair. He has no politics that any politician could possibly find useful, and he is a great agent of the truth that only art can purvey. He is a great American writer, astonishingly original, a virtuoso without peers, and probably much too good for us. That he is hardly known and hardly read, that he is virtually ignored by academics, that he is still rather regularly mocked and patronized by literary scum, all testifies to our unerring vulgarity as a people--our vulgarity and stupidity. The circumstances of his life turned him into a desolate, half-crazed misanthrope, but as an artist he is the very definition of integrity and purity. Ten or fifteen pages of Because I Was Flesh or Can These Bones Live is a terrific antidote to the utterly fake prose that one is liable to bump into in the pages of The New Yorker, say, that "well-written" prose of the nightmare market. He will not play ball.

Can you re-evaluate the beats? Are they nothing now but a cultural pose of rebellion?
GS: The beats can only be understood as a single manifestation, in the fifties, of the general dissatisfaction, among young, unknown artists, with the given norms of art then in ascendance. They have been distorted out of all reality by the popular media, probably because they make "good copy," but they were no less distorted at the time they emerged. Some of them did good work, some not, but that is the case with all "movements." That they were especially iconoclastic is an idea that will not wash, when one considers the remarkable innovations, the formal attacks on the norms of literature present at the time, by such writers as Olson, Creeley, O'Hara, Spicer, and so on. Strangely enough, some of the most compelling beat writers are more or less forgotten now--Ray Bremser for one, and then, of course, there is Irving Rosenthal, whose single book, long out of print and almost impossible to find, Sheeper, is perhaps the most elegant single work to emerge from that era. To talk about the beats without acknowledging these writers is to assume that the propaganda about that era is the truth about that era. This is all further complicated by the historical blurring that occurs when non-beat writers are lumped in with beat writers, when we are told that such writers as Amiri Baraka, William Burroughs, Michael McClure, even Gary Snyder, are beat writers. That's like saying that Raymond Roussel was a surrealist. Again, to understand the beats, you have understand the general cultural ferment that was going on in the arts in the fifties, the restlessness, the boredom, the unintentional comedy of an era that proffered Randall Jarrell as a very important poet and that valorized Robert Frost to the detriment of William Carlos Williams.

What is your opinion of creative writing workshops?
GS: Creative writing workshops are useful in that they tend to bring together young writers who have nobody to talk to. Otherwise, I can say only that in my own experience of them, it is rare that bad writers can be helped or that good writers could not do as well without ever seeing a workshop. Of course, bad writers can often be helped to make marketable products by sheer dint of dogged revision and the mastery of certain modes of "craft," and good writers can be so regularly assailed--by instructors, colleagues, or both and/or mature, become dejected and confused as to the quality of their writing.

Can satire still be written in the age of multi-culturalism, political correctness, and respect for women and minorities?
GS: If a writer worries about political correctness, it's probable that he won't be able to write satire, since satire, by its very nature, offends somebody or something. In our time, satire, in all media, tends to be very tame. The targets are almost always predictable--idiots of the right or left--or stars and celebrities. We are given satirical treatments of people like Madonna or Prince Charles or Teddy Kennedy or Clarence Thomas! You see the sickening spectacle of the victims of the satire laughing it up with those who satirize them--this is surely a dead giveaway that the satire has no teeth. Satire should wound, draw blood, even destroy. Some guy on Saturday Night Live, I understand, used to "satirize" George Bush, and Bush invited him to the White House! Sure, satire can indeed be written now, but the satirist must be willing to be despised and assaulted. Satire is heartless and anarchic. If it's not it's just another mode of entertainment in the great world of entertainment that the United States has become. This kind of juvenile "fun-poking" used to be the province of Mad magazine--fun for the kiddies. Now we have David Letterman "satirizing" his "guests" before they all run down to the bank en masse. On the other hand, maybe we're too far gone for satire, too corrupt, too Goddamned dumb.

Joseph McElroy and Harry Mathews seem to be writers that are the most similar to you. All of you are unclassifiable and difficult. There are no real labels for writers outside of black comedy, post-modern, or post-post schools.
GS: No comment, really. I don't much understand groupings and I don't even know if they're legitimate. I do what I feel like doing when I feel like doing it. My new book, for instance, Red The Fiend, is not only unlike anything that any of the writers you mention has done, it's not like anything that I have done. One of the very best things about being as artist is that you don't have to care about anybody's expectations. If people don't like what you've done, they can, to paraphrase Edward Dahlberg, go read another book.

Lita Hornick called you "a literary hitman" or "a Mafioso." What was that about? I am guessing that it had something to do with the situation surrounding Kulchur?
GS: I've told my side of the story in reference to Kulchur and Lita Hornick has told hers in the 1978 volume, The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History, so there's no point in rehearsing it again. I wasn't aware of the "literary hit man" or "literary mafioso" business, but the best-kept secret in America is that Italian-Americans may be insulted and maligned at will, any time, and in all strata of society, by the uneducated, the semi-educated, the highly educated and the over-educated. Italian-Americans don't, as a rule, care much, save for a few halfhearted attempts at official complaint by scattered organizations, probably because they have always viewed American society at large with a suspicious eye. Here's a society that gives lip service to children, women and the family, yet despises all these things--this is very un-Italian. It may also have to do with Italian-Americans' sense of their own past, I don't know. Italians have been around for a long time and the sense that society is, in essence, a kind of bust, permeates their lives. My father's family comes from a town in Sicily, Sciacca, that has been there since about 750 B.C. I'm not implying that this fact has anything to do with my "primary" makeup, since I'm absolutely American in every way, but such a heritage is given one in unspoken ways, and American culture seems oddly ephemeral when set against such an instance of fact. I mean to say that Italian-Americans somehow know who they are, without much to-do about it, and the Mafia gags seem, to most of them--of us--evidence of a supreme vulgarity. But Lita Hornick was not, in my recollection, what one would consider socially adept.

What is the main concern of a writer?
GS: The main concern of a writer, if you mean a writer as artist, is to make art. He must have the luxury of being permitted to do this, just as the physicist is permitted to do physics and the surgeon to operate. An artist makes things. All else that he does, in his role as an artist, is incidental, accidental, or peripheral. If he worries about being an anachronism then he should quit writing and do something else.

You spoke of Edward Dahlberg as "clearing the ground." Attacking what needed to be attacked. In a similar way, have you felt that you've cleared the ground with your own work, and are saying what you want to say?
GS: I don't have that sort of view of my own work, and I don't know whether I've "cleared the ground" at all. I've done what I've done best I could given the circumstances granted me and although I sometimes wish that I'd been better at what I attempted to do I can't imagine doing anything other than what I've done. Donald Barthelme says in one of his stories that the function of an artist is to fail. He is, of course, right. No artist ever conceptualizes his vision and he knows that this is the fact as he begins the process of conceptualization, since the vision that serves as the impetus of the work is changed, reformed, corrupted, dissolved, and so on in the act of making the work. As the work is made, the vision is transformed, and the final work is that which has been made despite the vision. So all is really a drive against an ideal, and the artist knows this as it occurs--he fails as he works and the failure is apparent to him.

Are there any writers that you approve of?
GS: I don't much like to make lists of writers I like or dislike, but at this stage of my life I can say that the writers I like are usually writers who are nothing at all like me. And I usually say, "This writer can really write, I wonder why I don't write this way?" In the back of my mind I know that were I to write this way, I wouldn't really be writing, but exercising my intelligence in a display of self-betrayal.



by Alexander Laurence
(c) 1994






1 mai 2015

INTERVIEW WITH
ALISON AND PETER SMITHSON 
By BAYKAN GÜNAY
BG: Alison and Peter, the fifties mark a milestone, a turning point maybe in world
architecture and you played an important role as a member of Team 10. What
sort of impacts did Team 10 have from the fifties onwards?
AS: I don't honestly think I can judge that and I am not sure that anybody can. I
am very nervous of thinking too much in the past; partly because the inherited
cast of mind of the Scottish person is very conscious of the past and therefore it's
something I have, in a way, to protect myself against. And we get asked for a lot
of archival material and if it gets more than two and a half days a week that I have
to fish something out of the archives or remember something (because now we
are getting a lot of questions on the fifties, questions on the sixties are beginning)
you feel you are running a mortician's parlor: I would much prefer to just react
to what is outside, now.
BG: The reactions you put forth against CIAM's understanding of the separation
of functions, let us say emphasis on more greenery and light, rather than identity
and association, are still being advocated by many of the (I should not say schools)
but many of the recent urban design ideas. I have a certain feeling (of course, as
I insist I am a man outside the events) so looking at it from the outside, that from
the fifties on, there was a transformation in the field of architecture and urban
design and I would suggest that many of the ideas which are here now, like
traditionalism or historicism or vernacularism, I even think that Post-Modernism
in architecture, all diverge from that point onwards. Maybe in the first
instance, some principles were used with regard to space organisation but then
it also turned back even in formal architecture into imitations, etc. Maybe you
did not imitate form but at least you sort of attacked the space organisation which
was prevailing then. So would this be a wrong comment?
AS: It is very difficult to comment; we are always dealing with ideas, we try to be
forward-looking. In a way I think you are in that position yourself with your work,
concerning yourself with what is happening to Ankara and in what direction it
might go on; one should probably, while we are here, comment on the role of the
Architecture School on this really rather splendid campus because it has not only
a particular connection, but a general connection. That is, in Europe they are
training too many architects, and a number of schools are having to close and the
universities are often quite willing to lose their architecture faculties because the
students are there for a long time on campus and do not get sufficiently involved
with the other faculties. I sense that this perhaps is also happening here: we
looked at some students' work yesterday, where they were dealing with extending
the School of Architecture building and in having the existing conditions explained
to us, we found out with Charles Polonyi's help, that already the basic
ideas of the campus, the basic concept, had been compromised by the architects
themselves, never mind by any other faculty. So I would put in a plea for the
architects to get more involved on the campus. Now when I say that the architects
themselves had compromised what I saw as the basic idea: I see the campus as
laid out along a ridge with a pedestrian way running along this ridge, feeding
buildings on either side that look outwards and across the service roads which
are lower down the slope on either side, and these service roads feed car parks.
Now what has happened when I say compromised is that a car park has been
brought right up into the slope, on to the crest so that the smell of the cars is
here, whereas the original idea of the Campus was to keep the smell of the cars
down the slope, and put the pedestrian way on the crest of the ridge so that one
walked through sweet-smelling space and then went into the buildings on either
side without any fear of traffic movement and certainly without any smell from
the cars. Now, for the architects to compromise the concept is really terrible,
because by their actions they should teach. The school building is splendid, it has
marvellous spaces, it is well kept, but I think you should get that car park out of
there and down the slope where it should be, immediately off the service road,
and ask other faculties to do the same, if anybody else has also broken that basic
concept. Do you have a comment on this because I think with it being early
summer, coming from England we are very conscious of the marvellous smell on
the campus, the scent of the blossoms coming out.
PS: I was upset by the fact that in the pedagogy, the teaching of this program, the
faculty had not fed them with the fundamental organizational ideas of the
university. When you asked what the impact of Team 10 has been, you could say
that there has been a kind of seepage of the Patrick Geddes ideas into the general
consciousness, in some way using Team 10 and CIAM. That is, it is quite normal
now in a European school for the student of his own volition, on his own
initiative, to try to understand the nature of the fabric which he has been asked
to work. That is a very Geddesian idea, i.e., don't touch it till you think you
understand it. Then you don't have to continue with the existing fabric, but if you
understand it you have the right to intervene; like a doctor looks at the symptom,
then he tries to figure out why you have the symptoms, then once he thinks he
understands, that 'right to touch' is won, is earned by the understanding. Thinking,
forward, the nice thing to happen would be like the Paris Haussmann
commission to bring clean water from the hills, to provide central drainage and
cleaning systems for the drainage; that was part of the process of putting in the
boulevards, air, trees, etc.; on the surface, it was just putting in a street, a traffic
way, but it carried out all these other things. The mood of Europe is again
undoubtedly towards a more green Europe. Taking the view that the culture
grows from the bottom, that every decision that is taken about a building should
now have built into it the notion of how will it effect the immediate environment
and then the countryside, and in a way the global environment. Because if it is
true that the ozone is effected, it is not because of one industry: it is our collective
acts, each individual act; that every time you buy a refrigerator the old is on the
waste-heap. So that the consideration of building an urbanism is suddenly, I
think, in a way Patrick Geddes - continued. Talking about British heroes, the lady
that went to Skutari to help with the...
AS: Florence Deadly Nightshirt.
PS: Florence Nightingale: she invented medical statistics because they discovered
when they put the soldiers in the hospital, the ones nearest to the lavatory died
first: but that was just an observation. Then she started to build statistics, they
say that medical statistics started with Florence Nightingale. Well that is a classic
bit of Green thinking, isn't it? That is, it is not the will of God, you are actually
getting infected through the air. Well, why I brought that up is, she had to start,
as Patrick Geddes had to start, from the bottom, i.e., there was no previous person
who thought that way. In fact Nightingale was resisted by the medical profession,
they thought the collection of statistical information was useless, like it took two
generations about child birth, about washing the hands of the doctor delivering
babies. They would not believe that the infection was due to them. You have got
to perceive each act as having an action on the whole.
AS: And by each act you should teach and it is the acts of the members of the
staff (in parking their car where the air should be absolutely sweet) you could say
is the first act of messing up the teaching system.
PS: If the faculty had fed that piece of information in, you would have found in
the students' projects some consideration of those factors. If the car fumes are
meant to stay down the slope because the carbon monoxide is heavier than
normal air, it is logical for the car park to be below the ridge line, but also, if the
prevailing wind is this way, you would want to put the building to block the air
flow from taking the carbon monoxide on to the top. That is Green thinking, but
there is no discussion of this: you would expect these thoughts to be coming from
the young people.
PS: Because they are the potentially Green Generation, but it is very hard for
them, unless they are pointed toward it, given the examples, to understand what
we are talking about.
AS: Part of our 1950's influence was a kind of osmosis. One of the things we used
very early on, in illustrating AD essays was a mosaic of black and white
photographs, i.e., a long, scanning strip of separate, but overlapping,
photographs. Now this has become absolutely standard. You go to a students
board in Europe and you get these long scanning strips or mosaics of
photographs, either made by one person or by the year, to inform themselves
about a site. And of course it even entered into art about ten years ago, withHockney's mosaics of Polaroid pictures, and when he started this a number of
people in England said to us 'Hey, Hockney must have gotten hold of an old AD\
i.e., they recognized where it had come from, so that it is by very secret routes
these things influence, take hold and it is for other people to make the connections;
I think it is not for us to look back at history.
When you walk into a place freshly, you are able to notice things that the local
people don't notice. You are also in a position (because you are in and out and
you could say you don't have to carry the can) to say things that the local people
may feel but don't necessarily want to speak out, you know we are for keeping
our head down in our own country. It is easy just to swan in, but you hope that
by saying aloud these observations they will be creative, because you recognize
the fact that people can say things in their country and nobody takes any notice;
that it is not even a matter of inclination to keep your head down. You are invited
as a foreign visitor to say something and therefore often you can, by perhaps
saying something, release some energy or unstop a bottle-neck.
BG: As far as I understand from your talks in the last few days, I think that you
don't want to enter large theoretical frameworks but you would rather prefer to
look at things from the very essence of the events, from where things originate.
That was very much visible in Peter's lecture where he mentioned the story about
the children, that it is out of the basic needs of human beings that problems arise
and architects should in the first instance tend to solve these problems. Well, in
this respect, may I raise another question (because this disvalidates my questions
and I am simply trying to pick up new questions) what sort of differences then
shall we find for instance, between Haussmann's, operations in Paris and your
London-Road study in this respect? Again, a bit historical, sorry!
PS: My own feeling is that in terms of urbanism we have had no effect whatsoever
because four fifths of what we saw in Raci's studio was what we were rejecting
forty years ago, i.e., urbanism people making compositions of buildings in
advance; in advance of real needs, real clients, real construction. We thought that
it might be possible to invent a kind of graphics, together with documentation,
of some sort you cannot imagine, that would guide the development of an area
without prefixing forms because Raci and you keep on saying (and it is correct)
you cannot just give an architect a pre-fixed shape in a plan and say 'fit it into
that' because we know what happens; in modern times you just get a banal
building, an object. It is exceptionally difficult, you think you can make a diagram
.. just to take a simple example about real things: look at this in a Geddes way as
if it is a village. There is a big street here which does not seem to carry many
people, maybe you could make another connection; there is enough capacity; you
examine also the kind of human action. Again a simple example from the Bath
Campus...
AS: Because it is also on a ridge and you are overlooking the terrain,
PS: that the social spaces that work well, the university discovered, are where
students look out of the building and where people somehow naturally gather
and sit talking. That space on the drawings intended for social space people don't
use, it could be used as a computer area... you organically remodel. Taking that
into town-planning, your project, there is a powerful drop in the contour because
there is an old wall, therefore that if there is no longer housing, maybe this is a
place for a belvedere, a look-out place. You identify the possibility but you don't
specify how. Then the obvious thing, like when there is an underground station
that is clearly going to generate the town's pedestrian flow and therefore will
need more pavements... How do you put that over to the municipality? We have
never been able to effectively find a way. We haven't done any commissioned
urbanism since the Berlin Mehringplatz and Lutzowstrasse Competitions.
AS: You mentioned the London Road Study; it was on well-accepted theoretical
principles of one decision at a time, right/left or yes/no, and I don't think it has
been followed at all in the London ring roads or anything. It is as if in this really
practical urban theory one has had no influence at all, or rather one is influencing
the people who are still trying to fight the system. Influence may come through,
but at the moment we can't see it. And, to go back to what you said earlier about
thinking of the users, Team 10 always swung (as CIAM did) from the whole
pattern to the detail and back again. I think that it was good to use a program on
campus, and it might be a good policy to push this, to make quite a high
proportion of the projects on campus, serving the needs of the University, then
invite the other faculties to have a look, to show that you are trying to put
something in, that you are in a way trying to extend the thinking of the original
builders of the Campus. Always a response, with the original intentions in mind
and the changing patterns of use. You might even find some of the faculties then
coming to you, and say Look, our accommodation isn't quite fitting our current
pattern of use. Would you like to do a study?' then it could be put to the
administration, to perhaps in the summer holidays do some conversion work,
and I think that this input of the architecture faculty into universities is something
that really should begin to happen more. What happens at Bath?
PS: It is very difficult to keep on bringing them back to the principles on which
the Campus was originally designed, because they will say 'That is not the way
it's done now', because they are not innocent people, and know what the world
trends are, they pick up ideas and get excited by them, like anybody else does.
AS: It is consumerism and shopping.
PS: They are consuming them, and of course the urbanist is running a very long
program, isn't he? He is like a horticulturalist. He knows that the ideas won't
come to fruition for a generation and a generation on. Therefore in a way the
campus structure will only come through if it is sustained over a long period, so
that the idea becomes clearer as it goes along. And I find at Bath that I can't
produce any real influence on this process because fashions in university buildings
arc as in other places. And these people are very responsible and devoted to
the university, these are good people.
AS: But all the more reason why the architects' department should all the time
show a concern for the way the university is developing, and as it were, have a
'doorstep project' that the students realize, that it brings a kind of reality, 'it could
happen here', would we really like it if. That kind of consciousness is necessary
to be grown in the students. I also think that unless the architects take this kind
of active role on their campuses they won't learn how to deal with people, how
to fight this consumerism. By pure chance we were asked to have another look
at one of our Team 10 documents, because somebody was wanting to do an
academic exercise on it, and we had to bring it with us because we knew we had
no other time. The piece that I was reading last night happened to be a Team 10
discussion on consumerism, how difficult it was to deal with administrators and
fight off this sort of supermarket-culture that we are all involved in where they
say 'yes, but we've just seen something smashing somewhere and never mind the
old idea, let's do this because presumably where we saw it had an old idea that
they've just pushed aside'. Cities were nice in the old days. There were always old
men who could remember the intention of why they put the fountain there, or
why they paved that street, and why they didn't do something else, or who planted
that tree in grandmother's day or something. Now this is all lost, largely because
of the great number we are, but also because of these really horrific pressures of
the 'McDonalds and Coca-Cola culture'.
BG: Yes, but probably that is something we can't help, but you brought out
certain issues where the architect can be helpful. In that respect you point out
something: the architect is not simply a designer, the architect is more than that.
He should go into the preparation of the design process, the design, the aftermaths
of design and even the consequences of design should also be in a way dealt
with by the architect. How could this effect architectural education? What sort
of new measures should be then located into architectural education?
PS: That's a good question because it enables me to continue in a practical way...
When we opened the new building for the School of Architecture in Bath, the
head of the School said 'We will have a two-day meeting', actually very like a
Team 10 meeting, and he said 'We will call it Genesis', i.e., how the design process
began, and it was fantastically good. A footnote on this is that we invited the
president of the University and the man I'm talking about, the registrar, and the
contractor, and the administrators in his department to this lecture, so they
would hear the genesis of the building they had just finished, and what influenced
it, and we had the person who worked on the concept of the university as a young
man, someone who is now the boss of a firm was then an assistant.
AS: In his first job.
PS: You know, the man that did Hook, did the University of Bath general plan;
his assistant from the time: so he went through the arguments on which the
university plan had been based. We followed naturally on that, what happens
twenty years later, how do you reinterpret. They invited other people (because
we are a mixed school) an engineer came who worked on Piano's art gallery in
America. He started in the same way, he said 'This woman',
AS: Schlumberger.
PS: They are a French drilling company.
AS: Strasbourg-Alsace.
PS: She wanted to make this art gallery in Houston where there are no planning
regulations and no zoning, therefore she said every building built in this town
which is successful, like a new restaurant or a little shopping thing, immediately
skyscrapers come around and kill it because real-estate men see it as a point of
attraction.
PS: She said 'Before I commission an architect I've got to buy, nine city blocks.
I am going to put the art gallery in the middle, nobody will be displaced but I will
have the freehold, they will have leases...' She accepted a piece of the town as the
urban landscape setting; it's another of these 'how to save portions of the town
you like'. The art gallery and the car lot over the road; the pace of the area has
changed of course but not changed much. There will be more people in the street
and there will be more car movement, but it's probably an increase of say five
percent, whereas if it happened the other way the increase would be times fifty.
AS: The trees are all there, the density is still the same round about.
PS: The end of that story about the pedagogy: we had (you could say that) half
the students in the upper school. So the kind of Team 10 meeting was the
administration, the engineers, service engineers; not people simply talking about
things. They were the people who had done the work, they made the building,
therefore it was direct information which for the young architect is fantastic.
AS: It was successful on several counts. One is the idea of the family getting
together, the enlarged family having a few guests. The Team 10 idea had
penetrated as a teaching method, as a communication method. And the next was
the business of people feeling they could tell all the details of the actual production,
all the little faults and things that went on, because they trusted everybody
who was listening. One of the most successful things apart from 'what a nice event
it was' and 'how everybody enjoyed it'; this communicating directly was so
successful I am sure that the Bath School is going to repeat it because everybody
there could see that it was a marvellous family way of extending that collective
sense to outside the school, outside the three professions (architects, structural
engineers, service engineers) who were trying to learn to work together better,
which is the teaching method in Bath. It was a real reaching out, and this I think
is a marvellous teaching method because everybody is learning, and the communications
are kept going.
BG: So it is not simply participation of people, but participation of the architect
himself in all the events.
AS: The architect must take the action, he must in a way make the connections
and go out (what we said earlier) an architect in a way has to take the position
of the old man; he has to understand the fabric of what he is dealing with and
take up the position of 'remembrancer', and also the 'seer' into the future. He
has to have the foresight to know which direction he should move in, in order to
keep the original idea and not get it spoilt, and to fend off all the poor things that
happen to it. And another reason, apart from running a mortician's parlor of
one's own past dead life, we created this role for ourselves of 'remembrancer', of
the context, of the place, of the fabric that you are trying to deal with. We must
be forward looking as well, because otherwise you put on this old man's hat all
the time.
BG: The horse's
AS: Blinkers, yes, that's right.
BG: Well, in fact I think architecture students, at one time, 1968 to 1970's, tended
to deal with societal problems, but then it also created its own dilemmas where
architects then had forgotten to deal with architecture. So in fact, this is a new
man who will be conscious of politics, engineering sciences plus architecture. So
he must be more than the man we are thinking of now. Is that so?
PS: Difficult to imagine such a thing.
BG: Or shall we put the architect into the political field as well?
PS: I don't think I can do it because fundamentally it is a craft. Unless you do it
yourself there isn't any product, can't do it as a politician.
AS: The way is through good work ... so that the politicians are listening to
architects, engineers, service-engineers, thinking and acting as 'remembrancers',
and acting as people who are looking forward. If politicians can observe this, they
begin to understand what it is you have to offer, and they don't just say 'O.K., we
bought the plan, now you go away. We the politicians are the administrators, can
deal with it'. They realize that you can actually contribute all the time and should
work together all the time, to keep these cities alive, and to keep the qualities of
the various places in the city that people really are connected to, and that you
must not destroy their sense of connection, by just wiping whole bits of cities.
PS: One thing came up in the discussion where I got cross with Chris Abel is
'Team 10 had no kind of political follow-through'. I have always thought that
Team 10 was the effect (to repeat what was said then) was that someone like
Bakema had tremendous social energy, could actually follow it, follow a project
through and if necessary would go to the Queen if it was blocked. Holland is a
small country; someone was saying about Denmark, it worked because it was a
small country, that is, a famous architect can follow a project through, he can
help with its initiation not by being in the council of administrators but by
telephoning his friend who is the Queen's doctor or the prime-minister's; you
know, the old Ottoman system, and you paid the price. Bakema was a good
working architect when he was young, do you see, in the end the buildings
suffered because the office did them, because you can't put your energy
everywhere. This is why we are saying that Raci is on the point of collapse because
his energy is too far extended, he can't keep it going all the time (he won't
physically collapse because he is very strong) but you lose control because the
control is personal. When it goes beyond the person you got to be a different
kind of person who sets up systems and will see them through.
AS: You see already he is having to use students to make the sort of drawings
that the committees expect to see. When I was in Samarkand, the urban design
department has an old Russian house (partly in order to hold the property)
wooden boarded, wooden ceiled; they have all their plans of Samarkand, of the
past thirty years, up on the walls; revised, anything from every five years to every
two years. First you could see political kind of revisions and then the last seven
years you felt that they were beginning to revise these plans on a sort of eighteen
month basis, with a fresh lot of assistants with fresh gimmicks out of the
magazines and it had become absolutely crazy, this worrying about presenting
drawings, communicating to the people, communicating to the politicians, communicating
in order to get the money allocated; and communicating participation,
where to put the road, where to put the market and so on. It was absolutely
desperate and you could see in a way that Raci has got into this position, that
almost it would be better to say 'O.K. we will take full responsibility for this
demonstration bit and unfortunately the rest we just got to chance that somebody
else will come along and take responsibility and hold another bit'. And you do it
as a demonstration area of what it is you are trying to talk about and then you
seed another area. It is in a way like gardening, you've got to put the real seeds
in, nurture them and get the real plants before anybody can see, and then
hopefully hold it long enough in order to get the fruit, and this is why you've got
to get this instilled in the young people. And that is why I say the odd exercise,
on campus, to show this was the original 'plant' as it were, and this is how we
must keep it growing, and keep trimming it and protect it from all the things that
might happen to it. And again, to make offerings to the campus, to show how
architects think and how they can make contributions. If, in the first instant it is
too delicate, politically, to offer your services to one faculty, to show how by
altering its accommodation to make it serve better the occupants, you might take
something like the guest accommodation that we are in; take a block and analyze
it to see if it is actually serving the pattern of both residents and guests to its best
ability and actually finding out from the users, both the short-term guests and
the long-term residents, how they need to occupy the building, and what sort of
space you need to be a useful member of the university community because that
is really the essence of it. If you put a single resident in one room who is going
to stay here a couple of years, they can't really be working at their peak because
they are constrained all the time, you know. That is, an academic resident
(whether it is one person or two people) they need a study space, they need a
kitchen space that they can go to at any hour of the day or night because they
might want to work long hours sometimes. You might have separate apartment
units byconversion; usinggaps (filling indents) in the buildings that are not really
serving any particular purpose, absorbinga couple of balconies that are not really
being used and, by looking next door at the very successful early housing which
has now got beautiful planting grown up around it, putting a lean-to roof over
an extended ground floor so making two extra big units. An apartment unit,
whether it is one-room, two-room; one person, two person; each unit has to be
perfectly self-contained because the socializing takes place other ways now than
the way architects originally thought it would take place.
BG: So, this also brings in one other question, or one other issue: once you make
a design, it also should be open to further changes and there should always be
someone, because ways of living change, ways of using space change. So buildings
should also be, well maybe buildings cannot be so elastic but there should be
something there, something elastic to cope with the new functions, the new way
of life.
AS: You are taking up one of these Team 10 themes, of the building being able
to respond, being able to grow and change, but exactly how it is done, in a way
the architects not only have to learn how to do this and they have to show to other
people how it can be done without somehow destroying the initial building or
extending rather than destroying the initial idea, serving people better and if you
can learn to deal with, as it were, the relatively new guest house, perhaps you can
also learn something of how to deal with the old better.
PS: I would have thought, other than examining the fabric, kind of understanding
it, that it is difficult to build into a building the potential for change in a society
when you don't know what its change is going to be. I think it is more the other
way round like the urbanism where the person is making the alteration, to feel
himself obliged to understand the underlying nature of the building before he
makes the change even though that change is very violent. For example this
business of the impact of information technology; it could not possibly have been
perceived that it would change two thirds of the operations to work in the near
dark; I mean communications are working in low brightness with screens and
things, like they do in a bank now. That could not have been perceived even ten
years ago, that your windows are not for the work process whereas in the
'twenties, having daylight in the office was you should be able to work without
straining your eyes, and sunlight is healthy and so on. You can't perceive what
changes.
AS: Sometimes the architect is asked to build a building that can be extended, or
build a building that can have its partitions changed and what you are describing
now is that any office developer in the West and in HongKong now must have
this enormous floor to ceiling because we have to build in this particular amount
of change, i.e., the deep floor for services.
PS: But two thirds of that will never be used, that is, by the time it is built, the
technology is obsolete.
AS: Well it will be nice to have the space.
PS: The argument is then 'Can we get that space back into the room?'
AS: That is the thing that the architect maybe has to foresee... but if you take the
business of the bank, even the first year could take the bank that is on campus.
That bank was made like a nice umbrella by the architect. In a way he must have
been slightly stupid not to realize that a bank probably needs a basement or a
store.
AS: The needs that you can see just walking into that bank (cardboard boxes full
of old files, the furniture pushed to the side) makes a very good first year program
because they will have to be sure that the store that you make isn't then a security
hazard and so on and does not ruin the nice little umbrella that the first architect
made. Again, by just putting the drawings up in a place and notices up saying
'Come and have a look', every person on campus would understand what the
architects were trying to do. They may not be able to read drawings, but they
would have the place in their mind and it would start to help them read drawings
and immediately you would start to communicate to several thousand people,
enlarge their knowledge and next time they see a drawing they will think 'Well,
I can read drawings because I did, I know that bank'. This is the sort of Team 10
connections of things.
BG: Well I know interviews make you tired but...
AS: Make anybody tired,
BG: I have one very personal question,
(PS: 'Will you lend me two million Karajans?')
BG: It is about Hook. I call it the third generation of New Towns in England and
it was not built. The first generation Stevenage, Harlow; the second I would
suggest Cumbernauld, for instance. And I think Hook found some of Team 10's
ideas appropriate but it was not built. This was a big question in my mind.
PS: You mean 'why'.
BG: Yes, was it because there were no more housing problems or because it did
not fit the society?
AS: Nothing is particularly for any one reason, it is just perhaps it had chosen a
site where I think that there were many voices who could speak to ears in
important places and it just had to be dropped. Milton Keynes was slightly later
and it went ahead, and it probably was not as interesting a plan. I mean you are
quite right, Hook has become something people refer to, even in England now.
And also it was to do with the ideology of the assistants who worked on it, they
were very left-thinking young architects, much more revolutionary thinking than
we were, much more politically minded and therefore in a way it was their
Waterloo. They were very upset to lose it so that everybody who worked on it has
remembered it. If you see the drawings now you tend to laugh, they are so very
primitive.
PS: But they were attempting what we were describing; I mean the plan for the
Bath campus by the same man (and the drawings were very similar) is an attempt
to establish kind of energy nodes without, in the first instance, drawing anything
in the way of buildings.
AS: Yes, it was the planless plan.
PS: They then fell into the same problem we all fall into, they then had to produce
a brochure for the University of Bath and they had to draw something.
AS: They had to make little sketches themselves, little trees and people walking,
people pushing prams. But when I say they are primitive drawings, they were not
inept, whereas what I worry about, also with the students here, they are not really
putting their energy into the drawings. They are not getting excited about being
an architect. They are not working enough that they energize each other, there
is not a sort of sense of architecture as a profession building up in the studios.
Again it is just a fleeting impression but it may be that such small things as having
the heating on at nights either makes or breaks this sort of situation. Again, you
have got to communicate this to the administrators of a university, why it is this
faculty wants (even if only at certain periods of the year) its heating on at night.
PS: You fight that all the time at Bath. We are the only faculty that works through
the night. Very nice, just the physical experience as you walk these places, only
one building with light pouring out at three o'clock in the morning, and it is not
bullshit, you go in and it is forty percent of the students at work.
AS: But that again can become a communication to the rest of the faculties that
this discipline has its own sort of needs and maybe is serious about its contribution
and that this business of staying with it through the night if necessary is the
way that the architect wishes to stay with the plan right through until it is on the
ground and been inhabited.
BG: Well, we are from that generation who lived it, many things happened so
that things really transformed into this loss of enthusiasm about education. I
think you have brought out the problem again, so we shall be more keen on this
thing probably.
Well, my last question (there is always a classical last question) what were your
expectations, not of Turkey, but of Ankara, and what have you discovered in
Ankara? Because Peter said something to me yesterday or the day before, that
he found the town not as a resort of touristic value, but a real town.
PS: I started with the traditional Western notion that Ankara was uninteresting,
just a new city without a life of its own. When we got all the guide-books out of
the public library, they did not say much more except one of the citadel and the
old culture in a way remaining intact; interesting because I like that kind of place.
And of course it is actually oriental, I mean, the further east you go the more
animals there are. But I think there are two aspects, it is a live city, and in its
traditional part it is fantastically alive. And the new city is really throbbing and
the buildings that you commissioned in the Republican period are remarkable.
AS: You were real patrons.
PS: You were really served well by the people you commissioned, as a devotion
to your Republic and...
AS: To well building.
• PS: The only one we looked at carefully, the Taut building is better built in my
view than it would have been if he had built it in Munich, that he really put
everything into it, i.e., the energy. He thought, 'Well, Atatürk is an idealistic
person, I will do something idealistically', as good as he could make, and I think
that is probably not easily visible to others, I mean people who are not professional
architects. There is hardly anything in the history books about the 30's
period, this period has been written off because of fascism... When I talk about
fascism it is not just a phenomenon of Germany and Italy, it is our view that the
culture, i.e., the buildings in Washington in the 30's and 40's the buildings in
France in the 30's and 40's, in Scandinavia in 30's and 40's, they all smell of the
centralized state... of passive peoples. And then you have to distinguish between
those architects who could not help being infected by the nature of the period,
i.e., strong central governments with strongly separated bureaucracies and the
people and all that, it was everywhere, but it just took this crazy turn in Germany.
AS: In Russia too.
PS: We are afraid of this period. When we took our daughter Soraya to Munich
we thought she wouldn't be infected by anti-Nazism, but the buildings scared her
and she was twenty something. Therefore it is very hard for us to look at this
period, and the buildings are mixed aren't they? You get this Swiss, Ernst Egli
(as you said, with the smell of the Bauhaus) and the Taut which is the end of the
Arts and Crafts Movement. And then these fascist buildings; but they are not so
bad. They don't frighten me, but maybe that is because
AS: Because what the architects were offering was more than just the fashion of
the period; could override the fashion.
PS: You see, there is no getting away from human memory (the 'remembrancer').
Nothing cruel has happened between our two nations since the first war, and
even then, you were regarded as honorable enemies as the Germans were
regarded as honorable enemies. Only this last war took such a horrible turn. But
that being so, nobody will write about this period in a guide book until two things
happen: first, the buildings are cleaner (it is really true) the tourist wants it to be
a bit smart, doesn't he; and also for the history book to reassess this period, then
the guide-book writer takes it from the history book. But I like oriental cities
because I like things to smell, the rain on the dust. When you get out of the plane
in Bombay, they open the door of the plane and the city comes in, fantastic. Like
it would be the other way round: you arrive at Stuttgart or Schiphol, a slight smell
of disinfectant. The whole culture is...
AS: You see we are losing this entirely in Europe because you used to go to
France (in the 1950's) and this could happen, sort of the smell of Gauloises would
hit you but now with the whole business of anti-smoking it has gone absolutely.
BG: Well,
AS: I am sorry we so overrode all your questions.
BG: After two or more hours of tiring, tiresome questions, thankyou Peter, thank
you Alison, for your participation.
AS: Thank you.
PS: There is one, just between us, sort of thing: the temple (Temple of Augustus,
Ankara) is fantastic: the Roman quality. I suspect if it was new it would be like
the Trump Tower (in New York) - have you seen the Trump Tower? Too much
of everything. Rome is wonderful, ruined!