– Are the middle classes really at fault here, squeezed as they are between the workers (soldiers, policemen, builders etc.) and the ruling elite who use the workers to maintain and build order? What else are they supposed to do? This comes close to a very important theme for Hard Mag, just what is the role of the middle class intellectual/artist/writer/thinker? What is the responsibility now? Have things changed much in the last 50-60 years? What would you be interested in seeing happen in the next 5-10 years? How far can you see things (such as the art spectacle, middle class attitudes of unfairness and intolerance) continuing to accelerate?

– The middle classes aren’t at fault. They are the yeomen class, who have given loyal service to the feudal lord, refining their archery and swordsmanship, and now find that they are no longer needed, since the feudal lord has hired foreign mercenaries equipped with the new wonder-weapon, the flintlock. As for the special problems facing the middle-class artist — it looks as if alienation is going to be imposed on him whether he likes it or nor. Most artists and writers in the past have been middle-class, the surrealists to a man, with backgrounds similar to those of the Baader-Meinhof gang. However, the middle-class world against which they rebelled was vast and self-confident. Who today would bother to rebel against the Guardian or Observer-reading, sushi-nibbling, liberal, tolerant middle-class? I think the main target the young writer/artist should rebel against is himself or herself. Treat oneself as the enemy who needs to be provoked and subverted.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed

The most disquieting section of the Joy Division documentary is the cassette recording of Curtis being hypnotised. It's disturbing, in part because you suspect that it is many ways the key to Curtis's art of performance: his capacity to evacuate his self, to "travel far and wide through many different times". You don't have to believe that he has been regressed into a past life in order to recognise that he is not there, that he has gone somewhere else: you can hear the absence in Curtis's comatoned voice, stripped of familiar emotional textures. He has gone to some ur-zone where Law is written, the Land Of The Dead. Hence another take on the old 'death of the author' riff: the real author is the one who can break the connection with his lifeworld self, become a shell and a conduit which other voices, outside forces, can temporarily occupy.

Mark E Smith once understood this very well; perhaps still understands it, even now, sitting at the bar at the end of the universe, his psychic antenna dulled by booze. In a very different way to Curtis, Smith at his most incendiary was a depersonalised host for stray, strange signal. Where Curtis's dispossession was concentrated into a single and singular voice that sounded as if it was already dead, Smith became a cacophony, an 'ESP medium of discord', a damaged transmitter that was like Baudrillard's schizophrenic: a switching centre for all the networks of influence. That is partly why the Smith 'auto' 'biography' is so disappointing. Biography is an end of history form, deflationary and reductive in its rush to reassure us that it was always about people. The point that artists come to believe it it is all about them – and not about their ability to channel externalities which erased them – is usually the point at which they lose it.

… the Mark E Smith persona has solidified, become a ‘national treasure’. Mark E Smith, the sort of no-nonsense bloke everyone would like to have a drink with. A fancied wit, still sharp, sarcastic – he’d keep you on your toes – but at the end of the day, he’s as pubbish and blokish as his one-time mentor John Peel, only with added prole cred. Mark E Smith, who gives his own life story to a culture in which biography has passively aggressively defanged fiction. See, we can explain it all now. True life tales. Nothing odd to see here.

This Mark E Smith is a doppelganger who has gradually all but replaced Mark E Smith the psychic and the schizophrenic, the ‘righteous maelstrom’, the dissonant vorticist transmitter who heard voices and spoke in tongues, the medium and media-channeler. The Mark E Smith who could make himself a riot of voices. People think of themselves too much as one person – they don’t know what to do with the other people that enter their heads.

Mark K-Punk

It would be a mistake to read The Unmamable's 'I'll go on' redemptively, as the triumph of some indomitable spirit, human or otherwise. Beckett makes contact instead with an intensive negativity, a purgatorial continuum in which things can always get worse, without ever reaching the relief of the worst. Total negativity would yield quiescence, yet for Beckett, as for Ligotti, silence and stasis are unattainable, they lie outside texts which might be for nothing but which are not, cannot be, nothing. Those afflicted with being might yearn for nothingness, yet even their dreams belong to being.

The ontological haemorrhage to which Beckett's 'characters' in the Trilogy are subject – the collapsing of Molloy's world into the worlds of Malone, Macmann and the Unnnamable – is echoed in Ligotti by the repeated 'moment of consummate disaster, when the puppet turns to face the puppet master'. Just as 'the Unnamable not only imagines characters, he also tries to imagine himself as the character of someone else' (McHale) …

Mark K-Punk

You do not make it very easy for the audience. Compared to Simenon’s novel where the story is very easy to follow, you omit a lot of things, you do not show only indicate many details.

Not the story that matters. First of all, I respect my viewers as much as myself. If I do not like primitive, stupid, simple stories, then I won’t humiliate my audience with a story of this kind. Because I suppose the viewer is as smart and sensitive as me, so I have to make a great effort to present the best I can. I always have to do my best and have to speak supposing that the viewer is as clever or more clever than me.

The other thing is storytelling. We talked about this last time: every story is the same. It is not worth caring much for telling a story. We shall not tell a story. There are things which are already known. We can omit them, because that is not the point. The point is whether fate is there in the characters’ eyes on the screen. There are big stories, but they can be authentic only if there are real human destinies presented in them. The point is how deep you can present or approach human fate. If you suceed in it, then you could do it.

Bela Tarr, interviewed

– In one of the editions of Crash, you write, “The fiction is already there. It is up to us to invent the reality”.

– I think that is pretty true on one level. We live in a world of entertainment culture that’s informed by relentless television, hundreds of channels, by advertising, by politics conducted as a branch of advertising, by consumerism as a whole. It’s seen as a reality because people are quite serious about it, but it’s completely devoid of real elements.

My father as a young man, or my grandfather as a young man, or my grandmother, would have recognised reality. They had a clear understanding that reality was work. That isn’t true any more. The whole thing is a huge fiction. This is why we’ve sort of lost our direction as a nation. We assume that everyday reality is as real as in our grandparents’ time. I think even our present Prime Minister is to some extent a prisoner of his own fantasy world, who doesn’t realise it and has started to believe his own fictions.

I don’t think it can be reversed — the other world, the reality, has become so fictionalised. Any points of reality we have are in our own heads. Our obsessions. Nodes of anger, greed, hope, the need to remythologise our lives — these are the only realities we have. To my father’s and grandfather’s generation all that was just nonsense. ‘You’re dreaming boy. Go to work. Wake up’. There’s been a sort of switch of polarities.

J G Ballard, interviewed in 2006.

Boredom … To think without anything in us thinking, but with the exhaustion from thought; to feel without anything in us feeling, but with its anxiety; not to desire, without anything in us refusing to desire, but with the nausea of non-desire – all that is part and parcel of boredom without being it, and is nothing more than paraphrase or metaphor. It is, as far as our feelings are concerned, as if, over the moat encircling the castle of our soul, the drawbridge was suddenly raised and there remained nothing between the castle and the adjoining land but the possibility of looking at both of them without being able to cross from one to the other.

Boredom … To suffer without pain, to love without desire, to think bereft of reason …

Pessoa's Soares, The Book of Disquiet

There's a lot of clever people around who write songs', Dylan says. 'My songs, what makes them different is that there's a foundation to them. That's why they're still around, that's why my songs are still being performed. It's not because they're such great songs. They don't fall into the commerical category. They're not written to be performed by other people. But they're standing on a strong foundation, and subliminally that's what people are hearing.

'Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book', he adds. 'All my beliefs come out of those old songs, literally, anything from 'Let Me Rest on That Peaceful Mountain' to 'Keep on the Sunny Side'. You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. I believe in a God of time and space, but if people ask me about that, my impulse is to point them back toward those songs. I believe in Hank Williams singing 'I Saw the Light'. I've seen the light, too'. Dylan now says he subscribes to no organised religion.

From Dylan on Dylan

Office Summer

Day after day in the office. Day after day, but it is as though one day buries into another: that days, great sheets of light lose themselves in days, falling without settling. How many years have passed this week?

No meaning in work, no purpose. Administration, endless administration, wearing me away and wearing away everything. Is this the end of something? The endless end, the end that forgot to end.

This a period of unfinished posts – who could gather themselves together on an afternoon to finish something. Who'd have the belief, the drive? Meaningless, all meaningless.

Read Pessoa instead. Pessoa who has strength enough to make the afternoon into a pocket in which to write. Who folds it around him, around Bernardo Soares, the clerk, and writes a book in his name.

We share the same afternoon, I tell myself, Soares and I. Only I lack Pessoa's strength, being unfolded by the same afternoon he was able to draw around himself (around his absence in the shape of Pessoa).

Cranes outside; I'm high up – the sixth floor. All the building and rebuilding. Dust in the air. Very quietly through my computer speakers: a Shostakovich string quartet, the 5th. Books on the other side of the office – what are they? Golding's Free Fall, finished.

Didn't I mean to say the other day something about the Shakespearean distance of his prose (what a stupid phrase)? The sense of a whole other order of talent (another stupid phrase). That a kind of writing was as natural to its author as breathing (what an idiot I am!)? Never mind the plot – what plot was there? And his The Paper Men, next up to read. Aren't I still halfway through Saramago's Blindness? And shouldn't I make a start on The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis? But it's the afternoon, when nothing's possible.

Lie on the floor then, I tell myself. Open up that Cy Twombly catalogue, read that, look at the pictures. Boredom. No, far beyond boredom. In a state known only to advanced monks and administrators. You've worn yourself away, I tell myself. You're just like anyone else, anyone at all. In fact you're more like anyone than anyone.

I go out to buy some water. Dust in the air from the streets. What are they building? Big green cranes. Scaffolding. Some new frame around the station. To open up a greater station inside the station. They did the same in Manchester, I think to myself. A new station in the station, all that retail space, I think. I was there the other day, passing through, I think.

Unfinished posts – how to finish this one? Why bother?

A Holding Pattern

Of course there's something fussily indulgent about placing each post in a category. Nothing worse! It's pure bad faith. There's something of the collector about me – it's revolting. A collector of my own 'work' – what laughter! Work, as if I'd know the meaning of that word!

What day is it? I look at the clock like a sleeper rolling over. It's the afternoon, the afternoon. The day doesn't matter. It's any day, it's everyday. But haven't you said that before? You've said nothing else! Not a thing! And all your categories laid out, your archives! Imagine that, having archives! Who could presume to have archives but you!

But there they are, the archives, the categories, a way of pretending to yourself you've achieved something. But what have you achieved, what really? Swimming in place – is that's what it's called? A holding pattern – that's it, isn't it?

As though it were enough to mark the day by writing. A prisoner marking the wall with a line, and then another – and then, after a few, a scratched line across the others. Except you'll never get there, will you? It's the same line, the same attempt at a line every time. The same attempt to make your mark in the day, when the day is in fact the very impossibility of making such marks, a black surface and nothing else.

Back to your admin, then! Back to it! You love it! You're so good at admin! It keeps you from doing anything, from writing anything! It's a perfect excuse: I've too much admin, when in fact you're relieved that admin exists. For what else would you do in these perfect, open days, the one falling through the other? How else would you pass this expanse of time?  

So, there’s a sense of apocalypse. Rather, a sense of foreboding because maybe the apocalypse isn’t coming?


Apocalypse? What is this? Sure, I’ve read something in the Bible. Maybe we are in it, who knows?


Lars Rudolph, who acted the part of Valuska in The Werckmeister Harmonies, from an interview (or is it Bela Tarr himself speaking? I can’t tell.)

Everything in me can be summed up as an urge to be immediately something else; an impatience of the soul with itself, like an importunate child; a disquiet which is always on the increase and always identitical. Everything interests me and nothing retains my attention. I apply myself to everything by continually dreaming; I pin down the slightest details of the facial expressions of the person I am talking to. I register the intonations down to the last millimetre of what he expresses; but, even listening, I do not hear him, since I am in the process of thinking about something else, and what I remember least about our conversation is precisely what is said – by one or the other.


So, very often, I repeat to people what I have already told them, I ask over again a question to which they have already replied; but I can describe, in four photographic words, the facile expression which they employed to say what I no longer remember, or this tendency to listen only with the eyes to the story which I do not remember having told them. I am two – and both of them keep their distance, Siamese twins linked by nothing.


Soares

I have lived so much without ever living! I have thought so much without ever thinking. Worlds of static violence, motionless adventures heavily oppress me. I am sated with what I never had nor will never have, annoyed by non-existent gods. I wear the scars of all the battles I avoided fighting. My muscular body is exhausted from the effort I have not thought of making.


Dulled, silent, nothing … The sky high up there is a dead, unfinished summer sky. I look at it, as if it were not there. I sleep what I think, I am prostrate when walking, I suffer without feeling anything. That immense nostalgia I have is nothing, it is nothing, like the high heavens which I do not see and which I stare at impersonally.


Soares

… irony has two stages: the one exemplified by Socrates when he says, ‘I only know that I know nothing’, and the other exemplified by Sanchez when he says, ‘I do not even know that I know nothing’. The first stage reaches the point where we doubt ourselves dogmatically, and every superior man attains that level. The second arrives at the point when we doubt both ourselves and our doubt, and very few have attained that during the brief, but already too long, span of time which we, humanity, have seen alternating the day and the night on the variegated surface of the earth.


Soares

The whole of life is an attempt to make life real. As everybody knows, even if we act in ignorance, life is totally unreal in its direct reality; fields, cities, ideas are totally fictive things, born of our complex realisation of ourselves.


[…] To speak! To know how to speak! To know how to exist using the written voice and the intellectual image! Life is worth nothing more; the rest are men and women, imagined loves and false vanities, digestive subterfuges and those of oblivion, people who race around like insects when a stone is lifted, under the vast abstract rock of the unfeeling blue sky.


Soares

There is something sublime in wasting a life which might have mad utility, in never completing a work which would necessarily have been sublime, by abandoning halfway the assured path to success!


[…] And I who talk like this – why do I write such a book? Because I know it to be imperfect. Total silence would be perfection; once written, it unperfections itself; for that reason, I write it.


And above all, because I defend what is useless, absurd – I write this book to lie to myself, to betray my own theory.


Soares

I am today an ascetic in my own religion. A cup of coffee, a cigarette, and my dreams can easily replace the sky and its stars, work, love and even the beauty of glory. I have, so to speak, no need of stimulants. My opium I find in my soul.


Soares

Since we are unable to extract beauty from life, we attempt at least to extract it from our incapacity to extract beauty from life. We turn our rout into a victory, something achieved and positive, with columns, pomp and spiritual contentment. 


Bernardo Soares, via Pessoa

So Tarr, the subject of a current NFT retrospective, arrived in this country cloaked in mystique. But he dismisses any scent of enigma around his work. “When we are making a movie,” he says, “we only talk about concrete situations – where the camera is, what will be the first and the last shot. We never talk about art or God.”


Bela Tarr, interviewed

I must ask what your next film is about.


You may ask it, but I won’t talk about it.


You never talk about it.


Yes, because it is impossible. At the end of Werckmeister Harmonies the old man goes up to the whale and look into its eyes. Is it possible to tell what he is feeling then? That is why it is good to make films.


Bela Tarr, interviewed


I’m fed up with this whole narrative thing because the movie – you know what? – without the narrative, the movie has a chance; you can show something. It’s not necessary to tell. Do you remember the end take of the Werckmeister Harmonies? When the old man goes to the eye of the whale?


Yes


Nobody can ever tell you by words what is happening in this old man and in this sad eye of the whale. But I can show you and that’s enough. I trust your eyes and I trust your heart and I trust your emotions. I really trust the audience.


Bela Tarr, interviewed


[Tarr speaks on many occasions of loving and trusting his audience. He speaks of them as friends, as Godard has done recently.]

– But there are cosmic themes in your films, and you’ve been quoted as saying that you’re “trying to look at things from a cosmic dimension.”


– You know how it happens, when we started we had a big social responsibility which I think still exists now. And back then I thought “Okay, we have some social problems in this political system – maybe we’ll just deal with the social question.” And afterwards when we made a second movie and a third we knew better that there are not only social problems. We have some ontological problems and now I think a whole pile of shit is coming from the cosmos. And there’s the reason. You know how we open out step by step, film by film. It’s very difficult to speak about the metaphysical and that. No. It’s just always listening to life. And we are thinking about what is happening around us.


– What do you think this shit is that’s coming from the cosmos?


– I just think about the quality of human life and when I say ‘shit’ I think I’m very close to it.


Bela Tarr, interviewed

Probably, I make films in order to tempt fate, to simultaneously be the most humiliated and, if only for a few moments, the freest person in the world. Because I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another. Because today there are only states of being – all stories have become obsolete and cliched, and have resolved themselves. All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that’s still genuine – time itself: the years, days hours, minutes and seconds. And film time has also ceased to exist, since the film itself has ceased to exist. Luckily there is no authentic form or current fashion. Some kind of massive introversion, a searching of our own souls can help ease the situation.

Or kill us.

We could die of not being able to make films, or we could die from making films.

But there’s no escape.

Because films are our only means of authenticating our lives. Eventually nothing remains of us except our films – strips of celluloid on which our shadows wander in search of truth and humanity until the end of time.
I really don’t know why I make films.

Perhaps to survive, because I’d still like to live, at least just a little longer….


Bela Tarr on why he makes films

An Idiot Boswell

Is this what your mighty oeuvre has shrunk too, says W., writing stupid posts about me? They’re not even accurate, he says. You make me out to be too mean, too much of a nag. And you’re too much of a whiner. I’m an idiot Boswell to an idiot Johnson, I tell him.


How’s it come to this?, W. says. What wrong turn did he make? He was like Dante, he says, lost in a dark forest. And there I was, he says, the idiot in the forest. I was always lost, weren’t you? I didn’t even know I was lost, but I was lost. Or perhaps I was never lost. Perhaps I belonged in the forest, W muses. Perhaps I am I only that forest where W. is wandering, he says, he’s not sure.

Whiny Noises

I’m dreaming of administration, I tell W. It’s all I dream about, all I think about. It’s permeated me completely. I’m made of administration. Of course, I’m very good at administration, I tell W. I’m perfectly fitted to it. It’s frightening. Did I ever think I would become an administrator?, W. asks. Oh I knew I’d do anything! Anything! It’s your desperation, says W., they can smell it on you. You’re a desperate man, anyone can see that.


It’s all to do with my periods of unemployment, W. says. I fear unemployment more than anything, he notes. In fact, don’t I tell him constantly about my dreams of unemployment? I probably dream more about unemployment than about administration, W. decides. In the end, my dreams of administration are actually a kind of relief from my constant dreams of unemployment.


W. has no great fear of unemployment, he says. We both agree that I began from a lower position than he did. I expected much less. Survival was enough for me. A job – any job – that was halfway tolerable. You were made to be an administrator, W. says. You have the soul for it. The fear. It’s what makes you a good administrator. My administrative proficiency frightens him, W. admits. It’s a sign of complete desperation. In the end, it’s what will always compromise my work, my reading and writing. You always have administration to fall back on, W. says. You never really experience your failure.


With neither a fear of unemployment nor a fearful skill as an administator, W. is alone with his failure, he says. It’s terrible – there’s no alibi, he can’t blame it on anyone. Whose fault is it but his. W. laments his laziness, his indolence. He had every advantage and now – what has he accomplished? What has he done? I can have no understanding of his sense of failure, W. tells me. It’s beyond my understanding. You’re like the dog that licks the hand of his master. You’ll be licking their hand even as they beat you and making little whiny noises. You’re good at that, aren’t you – making whiny noises.

Misanthropy

You would think that with my simplicity I would also have a simple love for humankind, says W., but that’s not nearly the case. I’m full of hatred, aren’t I? This as we walk around the cloister at W.’s place of work, colleagues warmly greeting W. and W. warmly greeting his colleagues.


I skulk around my place of work, W. observes, I’ll do anything to avoid human contact. He remembers how I told him of the vastly circuitous routes I take through my building so as to not to say hello to anyone. I don’t know why greetings are so difficult for you, says W. 


W. doesn’t believe its misanthropy, just as he has never believed I am a melancholic. It’s simply a kind of low level awkwardness, he says just as my melancholy is no more than a few bad moods.


More friendly greetings from his colleagues. W.’s place of work is a much happier place than mine, we observe, despite everything. It doesn’t know despair. Everyone helps and supports one another, except for management, and everyone is against management.


That’s not the case where you work, is it?, says W. There’s no help and no support, only brooding hatred and resentment. It’s no wonder I think I’m misanthropic, says W. He would be, under the circumstances. And it’s no wonder I think I’m melancholic, I mean look at my life. Something has gone very badly wrong with me, that much is clear, says W.

Stammering and Stuttering

W. is impressed by my stammer. You stammer and stutter, says W., and you swallow half your words. What’s wrong with you? Every time I see him, he says, it gets a little worse. The simplest words are beginning to defeat me, W. says. Maybe it’s mini-strokes, W. speculates. That would account for it. You had one just there, didn’t you? 


Perhaps, W. muses, my stammering and stuttering is a sign of shame. W. says he never really thought I was capable of it, shame, but perhaps it is there nonetheless. Something inside you knows you talk rubbish, W. says. Something knows the unending bilge that comes out of your mouth.


W. dreams of serious conversation. Not that it would have serious topics, you understand, he says – that it would be concerned for example with the great topics of the day. Speech itself would be serious, he says with great vehemence. That’s what he’s found with the real thinkers he’s known. Everything they say is serious, they’re incapable of being unserious.


Even I become serious when a real thinker is about., W.’s observed. We remember that afternoon in Greenwich when W. was lost in conversation with one such thinker. I was leaning in, trying to listen; I had a sense of the seriousness of the conversation, W. could see it, he was impressed, for once I wasn’t going to ruin it by talking about blowholes or something.


Conversation!, exclaims W., that’s what friendship’s all about, I think even you have a sense of that. It’s why you stammer, says W. it’s why you swallow half of your words.

Overpraise

Overpraise is the key, W. says. We should only speak of each other to others in the loftiest terms, he’s always been insistent on this. These are dark times, after all. No one’s safe. Look what happened to him recently! These are the last days, W.says. No one could think otherwise. It’s all shit, it’s all going to shit. It always will have already been shit, I say, laughing, as I take a photo of him underneath a sign saying ‘end times’.


Overpraise is all we have, says W., that and sticking together. We have to be a pact, a phalanx who are prepared to die for another. I’d die for you, says W., quite serious. What about me – would you die for me? That’s what friendship demands, says W. Of course, I would never say I would die for him, says W. He knows me. I’m incapable of that kind of sincerity. Or love. I’m incapable of love, W.’s always been insistent on that.


In a moment, I would break the phalanx and be off somewhere else. I’d betray him in a moment, W. says. Whereas he’s always been very careful to overpraise me to others, he says. You have to. There are enemies everywhere, he says. I have enemies and so does he. And then there’s the whole system, says W., which creates enemies instead of friends and enemies of friends. Betrayal is his greatest fear, says W.

Clucky Pride

With other people about, W. is a surprisingly motherly presence. He’s protective and nuturing, and proud of his charge. Does he think of me as his protege?, I ask W. Am I his ward, as Robin is to Batman? Sometimes, W. exhibits what can only be called a clucky pride. 


Does he see himself as my mother? W.’s not sure. He feels the need to nag me, he says. He is a nagger. Why don’t you read?, he likes to ask with grat insistence. Why don’t you write? Go on, write another book, make it a trilogy.


W. is learning Greek for his next book. It’s on religion, he says. He was going to do a book on time, but he decided against that. Religion, he says, and for that he needs Greek. And maths. If he’s going to write about Cohen and God, he’ll have to understand the infinitesimal calculus. What’s it all about?, W. wonders. He’d asked his dad to teach him several years ago, but it was no use. He bought a book called Numbers, but only got through the first chapter, What is a Number?


Greek! Mathematics! W.’s not like me, who will just dash off a book regardless. Still, he says, the second book wasn’t bad. ‘Wasn’t bad’, that’s his phrase. Religion, though, that’s what W.’s thinking about. What am I thinking about?, he asks me. Your clucky pride, I say.

An Imaginary Nun

What have you done today?, W. asks me. How do you actually spend your time? Weeks and months and years pass, but I seem to do nothing, W. says. What have you read? What have you written, and why haven’t you sent me any of it?


Friends should send each other what they write, W. says. He sends me everything – everything, and I barely even read it. He doesn’t know why he thanked me in the acknowledgements of his new book, he says. I tell him I was surprised to find myself thanked as part of a long list of friends and colleagues. Didn’t I always acknowledge his help with very special thanks?


W. says I didn’t even read the chapters he sent to him, he could tell, my remarks were too general. I did read them, I tell him, well nearly all of them. You didn’t read chapter five, says W., with the dog. He was very proud of his pages on his dog, even though he doesn’t own a dog. You should always include a dog in your books, says W.


It’s a bit like his imaginary children in his previous book, W. says. Do you remember the passages on children? Even W. wept. He weeps now to think of them. He’s very moved by his own imaginary examples, he says. He wants to work a nun into his next book, he says. An imaginary nun.

The Emergency Scheisse Bar

You’ve only been wearing it for a few months, and already it’s disgusting, says W. of my leather jacket. Look at it, it’s green. Who would wear a green leather jacket? I point out I bought it because he complained about my last jacket, my velvet one. It was shapeless and made you look obese, said W., whereas this one just makes you look cheap.


Until recently, W. always carried a suit with him on our foreign visits. He didn’t want to insult our hosts. I never had any concern about insulting our hosts, W. says, going on about blowholes and wearing one of my disgusting jackets. I point out that his suit makes him look like Gary Glitter, which W. finds very amusing. Then, laughing, he remembers seeing my interview suit, with the tapered trousers. They were parachute pants, W. says, like M.C. Hammer’s.


Recently, W. left his suit behind at a busstop, the whole thing, in its carry case. He was reading, he says. Cohen probably. Anyway, he’s already got another one, as I should. Think of our foreign hosts! In truth, W. would rather not care what our foreign hosts think of us. It’s a weakness of his, he says, though other people would regard it as a strength. Of course, W. knows I don’t care what our foreign hosts think of us, that’s very clear. Perhaps that’s a kind of stength, though, says W., though other people would regard it as a weakness.


Doesn’t it bother you that your jacket’s turned green and you’ve stains down your trousers? You never take enough pairs of trousers with you, do you? Just one pair! Do you think it’s enough? W. never thinks it’s enough. You should take two pairs of trousers, plus your suit, he says. How many pairs of underpants should I take?, I ask him. One for each day, says W.,and one extra in case you soil yourself. You’re prone to accidents, aren’t you? He reminds me of the Emergency Scheisse Bar in Freiburg, as we called it. What you hadn’t have found it?, W. asks. What then?

Gibt sie auf!

There is something entirely lacking in you, W. says, although he’s not quite sure what it is. Something which, for all his shortcomings, W. nevertheless possesses. But what is it? Shame – is that the word?, W. muses. A sense of shame? Anyone else would have stopped doing what I do. All that writing on the web! It’s incredible, for W., who would never do such a thing and can’t comprehend anyone who would.


It’s endless, he says, it just goes on and on. And the same thing over and over again, he says. There’s something missing in you, isn’t there? What do you suppose it is? Is it shame?, W.’s not sure. Perhaps it’s a more fundamental monomania, a kind of overpowering obsessiveness. You don’t stop, do you? On and on it goes. How can anyone be interested? Even you aren’t interested, not really, are you?


Perhaps it’s a kind of reflex, W. muses. Some kind of automatic behaviour, of the kind exhibited by those insects who continue to mate even when you cut their heads off. Because there’s no intelligence to it, W. says, there’s only a conditioned reflex, that’s all. Why don’t you stop? No, really, why don’t you?


Don’t you have anything better to do? Couldn’t you occupy your time otherwise? I tell it takes up barely any time at all. But even that time, says W., couldn’t you find something else to do? In the end, W. says, it’s because I crave adoration, that’s his theory, though even he doesn’t find that very persuasive. You need to be loved, he says, he’s always said that.


Then, still musing as we walk up the hill into the town centre, he reminds me of my great hopes for the internet. A new Athens, wasn’t that it? A new Jena?, he asks, laughing, knowing I said nothing about Athens or Jena. Ah, what’s it all about?, W wonders rhetorically. Why am I so deluded? Why won’t I listen to sense?


There’s a short Kafka story, W. reminds me where a man in a great hurry gets lost on the way to the station and asks a policeman the way. Gibt sie auf!, says the policeman, give it up! That’s what you should do, says W.: give it up!