Here’s a Link to the Century of Self by Adam Curtis

Listening this morning to George Kenny of the Electric Politics Podcast I was surprised when George introduced his podcast by announcing he had some sort of respiratory problem and wouldn’t be making his usual remarks because he didn’t have the energy. He also said that he’d be posting his podcast early because he might have to go to the ER. It turns out he did go to the hospital ER and has pneumonia.

Get well, George. You are a trooper.

Diet Soap was recently featured on the Reading Local blog

Reading Local is a quest to find everything there is to know about the Portland, Oregon “book scene.” Including profiles of Portland based writers, the publications authored by these writers, coverage of book related events, reviews of Portland bookstores, and many other topics.

They Wrote:

It’s somewhat surprising just how many lit journals and magazines there are in the Portland area. One that I was completely unaware of, until receiving a tip from Spencer Cushing, is Diet Soap, “a surrealist/anarchist ‘zine featuring fiction and non-fiction, edited by Douglas Lain and M.K. Hobson.”

Diet Soap is indicative of the way the internet has expanded the range of communication options available for writers (everyone for that matter). For example, you can download podcasts featuring a “variety of good interviews and fiction,” read selected articles from recent issues online, email Diet Soap at info (at) dietsoap (dot) org for a free pdf copy of the ‘zine, or you can order a print version from their Lulu store. I expect that soon enough they will create videos, just in case you like to experience your lit visually as well.

Past issues have explored “Surveillance,” “Sex and Gender,” and “Sabotage.” With contributions from writers Ben Segal, Darin C. Bradley, Dana Goldstein, Chelsea Martin, Ginetta Corelli, William Peacock, Patricia Russo, and many more.

It’s always nice to be noticed.

http://www.readinglocal.com/

Neil Kramer is back for the second half of a conversation about the control system and the self. This episode also features a reading of Gary Snyder’s “Buddhist Anarchism,” and the voices of Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, Jill Bolte Taylor, and Slavoj Zizek. You can download the episode or subscribe to the podcast at dietsoap.podomatic.com or at iTunes. If you’ve been listening and have a comment write to info@dietsoap.org and your comment will be read in the next podcast.

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First published in War Commentary – For Anarchism mid-march 1944.

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In no characteristic is existing society in the West so sharply distinguished from the earlier societies, whether of Europe or the East, than in its conception of time. To the ancient Chinese or Greek, to the Arab herdsman or Mexican peon of today, time is represented in the cyclic processes of nature, the alternation of day and night, the passage from season to season. The nomads and farmers measured and still measure their day from sunrise to sunset, and their year in terms of the seedtime and harvest, of the falling leaf and the ice thawing on the lakes and rivers. The farmer worked according to the elements, the craftsman for so long as he felt it necessary to perfect his product. Time was seen in a process of natural change, and men were not concerned in its exact measurement. For this reason civilisations highly developed in other respects had the most primitive means of measuring time, the hour glass with it’s trickling sand or dripping water, the sundial, useless on a dull day, and the candle or lamp whose unburnt remnant of oil or wax indicated the hours. All these devices where approximate and inexact, and were often rendered unreliable by the weather or the personal laziness of the tender. Nowhere in the ancient or medieval world were more than a tiny minority of men concerned with time in the terms of mathematical exactitude.

Modern, Western man, however lives in a world which runs according to the mechanical and mathematical symbols of clock time. The clock dictates his movements and inhibits his actions. The clock turns time from a process of nature into a commodity that can be measured and bought and sold like soap or sultanas. And because, without some means of exact time keeping, industrial capitalism could never have developed and could not continue to exploit the workers, the clock represents an element of mechanical tyranny in the lives of modern men more potent than any individual exploiter or any other machine. It is valuable to trace the historical process by which the clock influenced the social development of modern European civilisation.

It is a frequent circumstance of history that a culture or civilisation develops the device which will later be used for its destruction. The ancient Chinese, for example, invented gunpowder, which was developed by the military experts of the West and eventually led to the Chinese civilisation itself being destroyed by the high explosives of modern warfare. Similarly, the supreme achievement of the ingenuity of the craftsmen in the medieval cities of Europe was the invention of the mechanical clock, which, with it’s revolutionary alteration of the concept of time, materially assisted the growth of exploiting capitalism and the destruction of medieval culture.

There is a tradition that the clock appeared in the eleventh century, as a device for ringing bells at regular intervals in the monasteries which, with the regimented life they imposed on their inmates, were the closest social approximation in the middle ages to the factory of today. The first authenticated clock, however, appeared in the thirteenth century, and it was not until the fourteenth century that clocks became common ornaments of the public buildings in the German cities.

These early clocks, operated by weights, were not particularly accurate, and it was not until the sixteenth century that any great reliability was obtained. In England, for instance the clock at Hampton Court, made in 1540, is said to have been the first accurate clock in the country. And even the accuracy of the sixteenth century clocks are relative, for they were only equipped with hour hands. The idea of measuring time in minutes and seconds had been thought out by the early mathematicians as far back as the fourteenth century, but it was not until the invention of the pendulum in 1657 that sufficient accuracy was attained to permit the addition of a minute hand, and the second hand did not appear until the eighteenth century. These two centuries, it should be observed, were those in which capitalism grew to such an extent that it was able to take advantage of the industrial revolution in technique in order to establish its domination over society.

The clock, as Lewis Mumford has pointed out, represents the key machine of the machine age, both for its influence on technology and its influence on the habits of men. Technically, the clock was the first really automatic machine that attained any importance in the life of men. Previous to its invention, the common machines were of such a nature that their operation depended on some external and unreliable force, such as human or animal muscles, water or wind. It is true that the Greeks had invented a number of primitive automatic machines, but these where used, like Hero’s steam engine, for obtaining ’supernatural’ effects in the temples or for amusing the tyrants of Levantine cities. But the clock was the first automatic machine that attained a public importance and a social function. Clock-making became the industry from which men learnt the elements of machine making and gained the technical skill that was to produce the complicated machinery of the industrial revolution.

Socially the clock had a more radical influence than any other machine, in that it was the means by which the regularisation and regimentation of life necessary for an exploiting system of industry could best be attained. The clock provided the means by which time – a category so elusive that no philosophy has yet determined its nature – could be measured concretely in more tangible forms of space provided by the circumference of a clock dial. Time as duration became disregarded, and men began to talk and think always of ‘lengths’ of time, just as if they were talking of lengths of calico. And time, being now measurable in mathematical symbols, became regarded as a commodity that could be bought and sold in the same way as any other commodity.

The new capitalists, in particular, became rabidly time-conscious. Time, here symbolising the labour of workers, was regarded by them almost as if it were the chief raw material of industry. ‘Time is money’ became on of the key slogans of capitalist ideology, and the timekeeper was the most significant of the new types of official introduced by the capitalist dispensation.

in the early factories the employers went so far as to manipulate their clocks or sound their factory whistles at the wrong times in order to defraud their workers a little of this valuable new commodity. Later such practices became less frequent, but the influence of the clock imposed a regularity on the lives of the majority of men which had previously been known only in the monastery. Men actually became like clocks, acting with a repetitive regularity which had no resemblance to the rhythmic life of a natural being. They became, as the Victorian phrase put it, ‘as regular as clockwork’. Only in the country districts where the natural lives of animals and plants and the elements still dominated life, did any large proportion of the population fail to succumb to the deadly tick of monotony.

At first this new attitude to time, this new regularity of life, was imposed by the clock-owning masters on the unwilling poor. The factory slave reacted in his spare time by living with a chaotic irregularity which characterised the gin-sodden slums of early nineteenth century industrialism. Men fled to the timeless world of drink or Methodist inspiration. But gradually the idea of regularity spread downwards among the workers. Nineteenth century religion and morality played their part by proclaiming the sin of ‘wasting time’. The introduction of mass-produced watches and clocks in the 1850’s spread time-consciousness among those who had previously merely reacted to the stimulus of the knocker-up or the factory whistle. In the church and in the school, in the office and the workshop, punctuality was held up as the greatest of the virtues.

Out of this slavish dependence on mechanical time which spread insidiously into every class in the nineteenth century there grew up the demoralising regimentation of life which characterises factory work today. The man who fails to conform faces social disapproval and economic ruin. If he is late at the factory the worker will lose his job or even, at the present day [1944 - while wartime regulations were in force], find himself in prison. Hurried meals, the regular morning and evening scramble for trains or buses, the strain of having to work to time schedules, all contribute to digestive and nervous disorders, to ruin health and shorten life.

Nor does the financial imposition of regularity tend, in the long run, to greater efficiency. Indeed, the quality of the product is usually much poorer, because the employer, regarding time as a commodity which he has to pay for, forces the operative to maintain such a speed that his work must necessarily be skimped. Quantity rather than quality becomes the criterion, the enjoyment is taken out of work itself, and the worker in his turn becomes a ‘clock-watcher’, concerned only when he will be able to escape to the scanty and monotonous leisure of industrial society, in which he ‘kills time’ by cramming in as much time-scheduled and mechanised enjoyment of cinema, radio and newspapers as his wage packet and his tiredness allow. Only if he is willing to accept of the hazards of living by his faith or his wits can the man without money avoid living as a slave to the clock.

The problem of the clock is, in general, similar to that of the machine. Mechanical time is valuable as a means of co-ordination of activities in a highly developed society, just as the machine is valuable as a means of reducing unnecessary labour to the minimum. Both are valuable for the contribution they make to the smooth running of society, and should be used insofar as they assist men to co-operate efficiently and to eliminate monotonous toil and social confusion. But neither should be allowed to dominate mens lives as they do today.

Now the movement of the clock sets the tempo men’s lives – they become the servant of the concept of time which they themselves have made, and are held in fear, like Frankenstein by his own monster. In a sane and free society such an arbitrary domination of man’s functions by either clock or machine would obviously be out of the question. The domination of man by the creation of man is even more ridiculous than the domination of man by man. Mechanical time would be relegated to its true function of a means of reference and co-ordination, and men would return again to a balance view of life no longer dominated by the worship of the clock. Complete liberty implies freedom from the tyranny of abstractions as well as from the rule of men.

Diet Soap will publish one last themed issue on “Slavery,” and will then publish stories and essays online and in one annual print edition. Stories published online or in the print edition may also be selected to be read on the Diet Soap Podcast.

Submissions that do not include contact information on the attached word file will be rejected silently and in secret. You will never hear from us if you don’t include contact information on your word file.

We pay a flat $5 honorarium for everything. Send your prose to douglain{at}dietsoap.org and your poetry to poetry{at}dietsoap.org. Please include the words “submission diet soap” in the subject line and your contact information in the attached word document or RTF.

Submission deadline for Issue #4 (Theme: Slavery) is September 25th, 2009. Reprints are welcome.

The sixth episode of the Diet Soap podcast features Neil Kramer of the blog the Cleaver. Neil is a mystic and gnostic and he discusses the Matrix with me in what turned out to be a two part interview. Neil is a frequent guest of the fine podcast the C-Realm and other interesting podcasts such as Stormy Weather. Also in this episode is Kaolin Fire’s story “Keep to the Fringe.” Kaolin Fire is the editor of GUD Magazine (Greatest Uncommon Denominator) and this story originally appeared at the How to Write Stories about Writers webpage at dietsoap.org. Please send feedback on this episode and others to info@dietsoap.org. Check out the new podcast at here or at iTunes.

Morgan Gibson(MG)
Ken Knabb (KK)
David Meltzer (DM)
James Brook (JB)

DM: Ken, you knew Rexroth in the sixties?

KK: Yes. Not very well, but I got to talk with him quite a few times. Morgan actually knew him a lot better.

DM: You also met him quite a bit earlier, Morgan?

MG: Yes, I was in touch with him in the fifties. I saw him extensively in the sixties and got to know him even better during his visits to Japan toward the end of his life.

DM: Ken, what made you write The Relevance of Rexroth?

KK: I think the answer is connected with the question Jim posed as a theme for this discussion: Why are the Beats still considered such a big deal while Rexroth has been so strangely neglected? In part, it’s a generation thing. There were the classic modernists, Pound and Williams and so on, and then the Beats — and, in between, there was a wasteland generation, and that was Rexroth’s generation. The sort of anthology that Rexroth would normally appear in doesn’t exist because nobody puts out a book called Poets of the Post-Classic-Modernist Pre-Beat Era. You couldn’t even come up with a good title. Rexroth and his few peers did not really form a movement. In retrospect, you go back and say, “Well, there was also Henry Miller, or Patchen, or this or that other poet.” But at the time these were just a few isolated voices crying in the wilderness, they were drowned out by all the New Critics and Stalinists and so on. It wasn’t until the fifties that you could look back and see that something had been building up. And then you see how much Rexroth had contributed to what was to come later. But until then he’s kind of out of it, there’s no pigeonhole for him.

DM: Many of the authors we interviewed acknowledge him as a forebear.

KK: It’s good that they acknowledge him, but it’s not enough. There’s something big missing there, and what I think is missing is . . . I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Situationists?

DM: I consider your Situationist International Anthology an essential reference.

KK: Well, as it happens, the Situationists were pretty much contemporary with the Beats and hippies (if you can consider the latter as two phases of a single movement). The Situationists looked back at different aesthetic movements from the Romantics on — Impressionists, Symbolists, Naturalists, Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and so on — and they saw these as successive stages of a kind of self-superseding of art. In each case, you could say it was a movement toward greater closeness to life, or relevance to life, or criticality of the medium, or criticality of the society they found themselves in. And in the fifties the Situationists contended that this development was at an end — that it had gone so far that no further possibility remained for art. To go further you had to go beyond art, you had to supersede art, bring creativity into everyday life — and into subverting everyday life, into revolution. The idea of just writing a different kind of poem had become meaningless.
While they were saying this in Europe, the Beats and hippies in America were pretty much oblivious of these considerations. But they inherited the same situation. In a somewhat confused, half-conscious way they were expressions of this same historical development that was merging art into everyday life. You might still write poems or songs, but there was a sense that this was simply part of your adventure, part of your life.

DM: It wasn’t a specialized calling.

KK: Right. So the Situationists are basically making the diagnosis that this can’t go further without bursting out of the aesthetic boundaries. And if you think about it, there has been nothing since then that we can qualify seriously as an aesthetic movement. There have been movements like punk, but they’ve been more a matter of lifestyle than of art — there’s been no real aesthetic innovation comparable to Surrealism or Symbolism or Romanticism. The Beats are the last artistic movement of any apparent significance. And even in their case, if you look at what gives them their continued notoriety, it’s more a matter of their lives than of their art. People are intrigued by Gary Snyder not because he writes good poems, even though he does, but because this is the guy who was a fire lookout and then went to Japan and learned about Zen. Or Ginsberg is the guy who took his clothes off in the middle of a public reading.
This is what I meant in saying that those poets’ acknowledgment of Rexroth is not enough. I don’t think Rexroth’s primary importance is as a poet, not even as a poet who had a political side. His vision implies going beyond poetry and politics, even if he himself wasn’t totally clear about all the ramifications of this. It’s ridiculous if he’s only thought of as a guy who wrote some very fine poems, and even more ridiculous if he’s only remembered as a guy who paved the way for a few later poets who are actually far less significant than he was. He’s a figure of historic stature, worthy of standing beside the greatest thinkers and visionaries of the past. He straddles East and West, nature and civilization, mysticism and skepticism, radicality and magnanimity. This is why I wrote that book. By going through Rexroth I was able to deal with all sorts of tricky issues — how can this thing be reconciled with that thing? I couldn’t have picked out any other writer, classic or modern, who would have enabled me to address so many of my own concerns simply by quoting him and then making a few criticisms in the rare cases where I thought he didn’t get it quite right. He covered everything. No one else did.

MG: He could have identified himself as a Beat, but he chose not to, out of integrity. I see him disagreeing with the Beats. I’m not saying all of this because I worship Rexroth. I think there are many flaws and contradictions in Rexroth’s work, but I think he’s quite distinct from the Beats in several ways. One is aesthetically, in that he is really a traditional, classical writer in many ways. He advocates anarchist action and revolution, but in his own personality, his attitude, his way of writing he is highly disciplined. His aesthetic is cubist, not surrealist. Conscious construction rather than the “free expression” that Ginsberg and Kerouac advocated. And he had a much better sense of the Western and Asian traditions, bringing that into the present work, the present writing, whatever he was doing. The Beats had a rather spotty sense of the background.
While we were driving over here I was ticking off the answers to that question of why he’s not very popular. First, he is a countercultural figure, but he’s really apart from the counterculture, since he’s such an elitist, an arrogant elitist. And most people saw him that way. I mean, they might admire him or agree with his anarchism but they saw him as an elitist who’s got the final answer. If you didn’t agree with his anarchism, he made sure you were humiliated. And then, how could most young people identify with a guy who seemed so old-fashioned in some ways? They might say, okay, in another age or another part of America, he might support us, but they couldn’t identify with such a traditionalist. Their radicalism was impulsive. It didn’t require theoretical knowledge. You didn’t have to know history to be a sixties radical. Some did, but you could be out on the streets doing your thing and not know anything about Kropotkin or Marx, whereas Rexroth insisted you had to know all of that before you formed your own position, and act accordingly. Another reason he was far apart from the general culture, though he spoke a great deal about revolution, was that when I knew him he was not really an activist. He told me in the mid-sixties that he wasn’t invited to antiwar demonstrations. They felt that he was above it all, and he did tend to pooh-pooh the politics of the times.

DM: Yes, he had that unfortunate attitude, which was off-putting. I remember as a young poet listening to his radio show on KPFA with other poets, and we used to listen to it at times just for laughs — this windbag just going on and on, all these proclamations, this is so, and that’s so. But again, that was our own youth and our own historical turpitude.

MG: I’m glad you said turpitude, because I think there’s an ethical difference. There’s a kind of amoral, hedonistic quality in the counterculture — there is also a heavy moralistic political aspect to the counterculture — but Rexroth’s morality is more complex. It is not the Weatherman or Maoist kind of dogmatism. On the other hand, it’s not pure hedonism. His ethics are philosophical and religious. His longer poetry and plays dramatize philosophical dilemmas. And he seems to swing between Buddhism and Western anarchism — and Catholicism. Do you know Father Huerta, his confessor, a Jesuit? A wonderful man. Sort of a worker-priest in the streets. He and Rexroth were very close the last couple of years. My background was anything but Catholic, I always had trouble identifying with that. But I think it enriched his idea of love. And love permeates all of his thought — the revolutionary ideas as well as the mysticism, the social philosophy, everything is permeated by love, a kind of Christian love. I think it’s the body of Jesus, the body of Christ that we are all supposed to be part of. I think it’s very much part of his mysticism, though he didn’t talk about it much, but it entered some of the poems. In The Heart’s Garden, The Garden’s Heart, for example. It’s in the Buddhist poems, too. He found Buddhism compatible with Catholicism. He saw Buddhism as a thing you do, a meditation practice, a contemplative attitude. It’s not a set of beliefs or a dogma.

JB: Rexroth talked a lot about San Francisco and the Bay Area of the time; that is, the late sixties, early seventies. And he would often refer back to the earlier era of Red San Francisco and the longshoremen and labor organizing. Haight-Ashbury was a working-class neighborhood, which is one reason things could happen as they did in the sixties. People did not move into the Richmond or the Sunset. They moved into the Haight. San Francisco is now a very different place, a kind of theme park of itself. Shouldn’t we talk about then and now, and why the scene is so different? The city started changing quickly in Rexroth’s last years, with the culture congealing into Reaganism at the end of his life.

MG: He used to say that San Francisco was on the verge of being the Paris Commune of America. I mean, he really thought that this was the beginning of utopia. He said it was the most radical city in the world. He just idolized it. And then when he moved to Santa Barbara in 1968, he said it’s all going into the sea. He thought the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene was the utter collapse of civilization. I think he identified the whole fate of the world with San Francisco. He admitted defeat. As early as ’65 he said, well, we’ve had it. This is it. We’re not going to make a utopia. Even the early poems sometimes say that, you know, we had this dream. It’s gone. We were the happiest men of our time. But it’s over.

KK: It’s not just San Francisco, it’s the whole society. A generation has grown up with the spectacle, as Debord says. Younger people have grown up in a world that’s almost totally dominated by the spectacle, they have no conception of what was around in the past, not even half a century ago.

DM: Yes, there’s been this continuous pacification and almost stupefaction from the tyranny of abundance that really seems to be short-circuiting any kind of political movement. . . . In the last period of his life Rexroth wrote some very interesting books, like Communalism, the Classics Revisited essays he originally wrote for the Saturday Review, translations from the Japanese, French, Chinese — a wonderful range and acuity and also stylistic availability.

KK: Classics Revisited is not only the best book about the classics, but if I was confronted by someone from Mars and they asked, “What is humanity about?” I would say that if you take that one book, you’ve got everything — all the potentials, all the tragedies, all the beauties, all the absurdities, all the different ways of looking at life, all the different stages where people have made a breakthrough in the sense of self, or community, or relation with nature, or what have you. It’s all there, in those little essays of three or four pages.

JB: That still slips past the question about how Rexroth drops out of the picture. You present an image of a fellow who’s written all these essays and popular articles for newspapers and magazines, who’s written poetry, who’s a very public intellectual . . . it seems like everything’s going for him — and then something doesn’t happen. Why isn’t it now available or interesting to people?

KK: I think he had some blind spots that prevented him from going a step farther and following up the implications of all these insights that he had. It would have pulled the rug out from under his aesthetic orientation. He had this notion that the poem was going to subvert people little by little. That it was more effective to be subtle, and not just use crude propaganda. He clung to the idea that artistic creativity was the thing that would hold things together even if society went insane all around it. I think the Situationists were right in questioning such an idea. This is not necessarily to say, as they did, that art is totally dead, but it’s not on the cutting edge anymore. The cutting edge is more like what the Situationists were doing. Rexroth didn’t make that leap. Had he done so, you would find people interested in him just like people continue to be interested in Guy Debord. Rexroth is in some ways wiser than Debord, but he falls short in this matter of not really seeing beyond art, not having a clear critique of the spectacle.

JB: I think that’s probably pretty true about the limitations of Rexroth, the outer limits of his thought and practice, but then you have people who are much more limited like Gregory Corso or Jack Kerouac and they have maintained their popularity.

KK: People like Corso and Kerouac are easier to assimilate, they’re very consumable. You know where they’re at. But Rexroth — nobody knew where he was coming from. You could not say this guy’s a beatnik, even though he’s very hip. You could not say he’s an academic, even though he’s incredibly learned. He’s sort of classicist, but he’s also a revolutionary . . . People don’t know what to think about somebody like that.

JB: So you’re saying that if Rexroth had been more than he was, he would have gone beyond the available categories and become more interesting to the public at large. Or if he had been less than he was, he would’ve been more easily consumable.

KK: Precisely.

DM: Morgan, what was your motive for writing your book on Rexroth?

MG: In Revolutionary Rexroth: Poet of East-West Wisdom I tried to draw together the diverse directions of his work — anarchism, mysticism, and erotic love. I thought there would be a kind of unity to his worldview or at least a coherent set of ideas or values, and I tried to argue for that in the book. But recently in rereading his work, I think his ideas are much more diverse and cannot be explained in terms of a coherent theory or philosophy. Very well, he contradicted himself. As Ken said, Rexroth probably did not want to be labeled.

DM: I’m thinking of his introduction to the alchemical works of Thomas Vaughan and that A.E. Waite book on the Kabbalah — a whole branch of the Western hermetic tradition he endorsed in a sense by writing those introductions. How does that relate to contemplative Buddhist practice?

MG: That’s a big one. I don’t know as much about Western mysticism as I know about Buddhism, so I hardly know how to make that comparison. He was very much interested in Indian Vedanta as well as Buddhism, that is the non-Buddhist tradition of India. But I don’t know enough about St. John of the Cross or the other Western mystics to say anything very helpful. He had a number of holistic metaphysical experiences, he claimed, going back to childhood, where he sensed the harmony of the entire universe or all reality, universe and supernatural combined. He seemed to think that these intuitions were quite profound and they convinced him of a kind of spirit of love throughout the universe. Then the different mystical writers he read, whether Asian or Western, seemed to confirm that for him, or express it in different terms. But he didn’t need them to convince him. In other words, he didn’t read mysticism in order to have mystical experiences.

KK: I think he’s seeing all these things not so much in contradiction, like whether they’re orthodox or not, but as different perspectives on a fundamental reality. There’s a reality which is just part of being a human. It’s embedded in the brain or the psyche. It’s the foundation of all these visions and powers and conflicts and possible transcendences. He’s experienced it. Other people have. And they have communicated it in different ways. In that communication, somebody like Boehme or other hermeticists might be particularly vivid cartographers of these things. Other more orthodox mystics might be less imaginative cartographers, but then some of the orthodox people might express it well, too. Rexroth would try to point out how you have some Christian mystic doing this and some Japanese Buddhist doing that and then you have some atheist experiencing a similar thing over here — so you get a sense of the whole world or worlds in there or out there, or both at once, and that you can draw on any of it. It was as if you’re visiting Europe. He’d say, “Here’s a map of Paris. Check these things out.”

DM: I think that’s a good way of looking at it. So in a sense, then, it isn’t contradictory in the larger picture.

MG: I wanted to add, I don’t think he ever was seeking enlightened experience, like satori. He was quite unlike Kerouac and Ginsberg in that sense, who were running around trying to find satori, the secret, the wisdom. In his view it had already come. It had come to him. He had a number of these experiences that he thought were genuine and he was perfectly content with them. He didn’t need to induce an experience by drugs or by reading certain texts. In a sense, he felt he already had it, whether rightly or wrongly. And he didn’t need external stimuli. I think that’s a very basic difference with other poets who might be mystical or visionary.

KK: He did go out into nature periodically. I think it was partly to reconnect with that. I don’t think he went out there and came back from the Sierras and said, “I’ve seen a new vision.” It’s more like going back — he’s been through a bunch of turmoil in the city, so it’s time to go back to this place that’s always there. It’s in here, within you, but it’s a little easier to connect with it when you’re in the mountains.

DM: Also, of course, he’s a very underrated poet of that wilderness, that nature.

KK: An awful lot of his poems are about nothing but that. They look like they’re about nature, but really they’re about the transcendent experience — the unspoken thing — like Japanese and Chinese classic poems often are. The poem talks about the moon, the trees, there’s no mention of “me,” but there’s an implicit hint.

MG: There’s considerable interest in Rexroth in Japan because of his presence there. A lot of instructors teach Rexroth, proportionately more than in America. And through personal contacts, a lot of people met him and passed on the word to their friends. I can go to a university in Japan and someone will know his work or at least have heard of him.

KK: There does seem to be a revival of interest developing. Several volumes of his writings have recently been published in French, other people are translating him into Spanish, and the Rexroth material at my website has been generating enthusiastic responses from all over the world.

MG: I think we’re mixing two questions about poetry. One is why certain poets remain fashionable, popular, and commercial, which the Beats are, regardless of literary quality. Why are they published and popular and making money and so forth — as opposed to what keeps a poet’s work alive for centuries? I don’t know what makes fashions. Perhaps the Beats in five years will mean nothing to people. I just reread all of Ginsberg, whom I admired for years and years. Now I can’t imagine wanting to read him again. Whereas I also just reread all of Snyder and I want to reread him next year.
Where is the serious interest in the great literary traditions of the world — Chinese, Western, whatever? That has died, and with that collapse, Rexroth speaks wisely to us. I think people appreciate Rexroth seriously because he connects the plight of our world with the traditions. If you’re not conscious of the traditions and you’re not thinking that they might still be alive, you don’t grasp what Rexroth is talking about. When I read Rexroth’s poetry, for that matter when I read Pound’s or Eliot’s poetry, I started reading the poetry of the world. What readers do that today? How many people are aware of the world before their own lifetime?

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Ken Knabb is an American writer, translator, and radical theorist, best known for his translations of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. His website is bopsecrets.org.

Some years ago, in some obscure book, you had come across a mention of – if your memory serves you right – a meeting between a woman without a future and a man without a past. (Or was it the other way round?) Anyway, this concept pops up in your mind now while you are sitting at your writing table, sipping your tea.
Suppose you yourself were to write a story revolving around this idea of a woman without a future and a man without a past? It is an interesting challenge and you are not one to refuse challenges.
You put down your tea cup, rest your head on the back of your chair, close your eyes and start thinking.
First, in order to have a story, you must have characters. If you have too many of them, they become difficult to handle. If you have too few of them, then interesting interactions between them cannot be built up. The ideal range for a short story is between three to five major characters. Of course, in a short-short you can make do with just one character too. Your story is going to be a short-short, you decide, and it will have only one character.
What sort of a character? A woman, age around 35, single. Your character must have a name. If you do not want to show your character as belonging to a particular region of the world or to a particular religion, it is better to use as non-descriptive name as you can think of. How about calling your character Jayrus?
Next, you need to come up with some unique character traits for Jayrus. Here is one: she is a misandrist. She hates the male sex with a passion.
You now have your character. How does the story proceed?
It is good technique to let some of the happenings in your story parallel the happenings in the outside world.
Jayrus is a writer and one day, while reading an anthology of fantasy stories, she comes across a mention of a meeting between a woman without a future and a man without a past.
The idea fascinates Jay. Suppose she were to try and write a story around this idea – a story totally different from the one she had read? Why not? She will write such a story.
She starts thinking. No idea for a story comes.
She continues thinking. No story.
She goes on thinking. Blank.
She starts going wild. She must write a story. She must. She is now obsessed with the idea of writing the story.
Here is another detail to be added to the character sketch of Jayrus. She is an obsessive woman.
Very good. You are doing fine. That makes two kinks in your character. (The first kink, if you remember, is the fact that she is a man-hater). The more kinks in the psyche of your character, the better. This sort of thing is “in” these days.
Okay. Back to the story.
Jayrus is obsessed with the writing of a story on the aforementioned theme. It fills her thoughts. Her days are spent in brooding. Her nights are filled with vague nightmares.
Then one day, at the time when day meets night, she makes a fervent wish.
“I cannot stand it any longer,” she says. “I wish something would happen… anything… to give me an idea for my story.” And, thinking these thoughts, she goes to sleep.
And the Powers-that-be hear her wish and grant it. Something does happen that night.
The next morning, Jay’s horrified screams fill the house. Some time during the night, Jay has been turned into a man. Some time during the night, a woman without a future had become a man without a past.
Here then is an idea for the story, Jay’s and yours.

In this episode I interview Barth Anderson about the Swine Flu pandemic. Barth is the author of the bio-tech thriller “The Patron Saint of Plagues.” My wife Miriam reads an excerpt from Mr. Anderson’s second novel “The Magician and the Fool“, and the voices in my head make an appearance in this episode as well, as does a Polar Bear Nose and a wumple. Download the episode here or at iTunes.