Where does creative work originate? Anybody who has worked collaboratively can tell you about the mysterious processes at play. The excitement and flow of a creative project appears psychic at times. When things are going well, serendipity seems predestined. Participants will remember events in a different way, a different order, with different emphases and agencies at work. Even with clear notes and documentary evidence, there will be gaps in recall and it is not always clear who thought of what. It is a sobering lesson in the partiality of human cognition. During such periods of concentration, individual differences give way to something ‘other’ – a product of distinctive input but catalysed into an utterly new synthesis.

In 1977, Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs collaborated on a book called The Third Mind. This series of essays and experiments explores this idea of a shared consciousness, riffing off T.S. Eliot’s line “Who is the third who walks always beside you?’ (and citing Ezra Pound’s editorial influence on ‘The Waste Land’). For Gysin and Burroughs, collaboration introduces mutually unpredictable elements, taking each individual to a creative territory they would not have reached alone.

Whilst such collaboration is central to certain art forms, musical improv, for example, there is an economy of scale at work here. Larger creative communities can coalesce and even catalyse at particular points and in particular places. The Italian Renaissance in Florence, Paris in the 1920s or the Weimar Republic are obvious examples. Matt Ridley explains this in terms of exchange. Ridley is a controversial figure, trained as a zoologist and non-executive chairman of Northern Rock bank in the period leading to its collapse, he is also the author of The Rational Optimist and his engaging talk ‘Deep Optimism’ outlines his argument that exchange allows ideas to ‘have sex’: “The effect this had on cultural evolution was exactly the same as the effect the invention of sex on biological evolution. Because the invention of sex accelerated and made cumulative for the first time genetic mutation and evolution… What sex does is it allows the species to draw upon the genetic inventiveness of the whole species, not just its own lineage. And exchange has the same impact on human culture”.

As with The Third Mind, this collaboration takes invention into some surprising places: “Every technology we use is a combination of other technologies, other ideas. The pill camera is my favourite example. It takes a picture of your insides as it goes through. It came about after a conversation between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile designer”. A parallel in the arts would be the Siobhan Davies’ 2006 dance work In Plain Clothes, choreographed in collaboration with an architect, a linguist, landscape designer, and a heart surgeon. In fact, Ridley’s notion of exchange is quite radical, and demonstrates how many acts are unconsciously engaged in a giant collaborative effort. To illustrate, he compares two objects sitting on his desk: an ancient axe he keeps as a memento and the mouse he uses for work.

The axe was made by someone for himself. The mouse was made by a team of people for me. They got together one day and said ‘Matt Ridley needs a computer mouse, let’s make him one’. How many of them were in that team? There were hundreds, thousands, I think there were probably millions. Because you’ve got to include the man who was growing coffee in Brazil to feed the man on the oil rig who was drilling for oil, whose oil would be used for the plastic, etc, etc. They were all involved in this cooperative enterprise to make me a computer mouse. They were all working for me. In the old days, you got rich by having people work for you, quite literally. Louis XIV – it’s a fair bet he didn’t make that silly outfit for himself. Louis XIV had 498 people to prepare his dinner every night. But here’s a bunch of tourists going round his palace in Versailles. And each of them, when you think about it, has 498 people preparing his dinner for him tonight. They’re working in bistros and cafés and restaurants and shops all over Paris, but they’re ready at an hour’s notice to drop everything and prepare a meal for one of these people. They’re working for him in just the sense that people were working for Louis XIV.

This resonates with Brian Eno’s idea of the creative potential of the collective, which he has dubbed ‘scenius’: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of genius”. The brilliant loner is inserted back into the cultural context that made their work possible. Shakespeare is the conduit for England’s expanding wealth and horizons in the late 16th century, whilst Beethoven’s exhaustive exploration of form was made possible by the patronage of the Austrian Empire. As Kevin Kelly says (in a short essay ‘Scenius, or Communal Genius’): “Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work”. Kelly cites literary examples like The Bloomsbury Group, but also the mountaineering ‘hackers’ Camp 4 and the MIT engineering lab Building 20. He concludes that such environments share four nurturing factors:

• Mutual appreciation – Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
• Rapid exchange of tools and techniques – As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
• Network effects of success – When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
• Local tolerance for the novelties – The local ‘outside’ does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.”

In spite of these discernible trends, collective collaboration remains a fragile and mysterious chemistry, on a larger scale, perhaps, but still reminiscent of Romantic theories of inspiration: “The serendipitous ingredients for scenius are hard to control. They depend on the presence of the right early pioneers… What Camp 4 illustrated is that the best you can do is NOT KILL IT. When it pops up, don’t crush it. When it starts rolling don’t formalize it. When it sparks, fan it. But don’t move the scenius to better quarters. Try to keep the accountants and architects and police and do-gooders away from it. Let it remain inefficient, wasteful, edgy, marginal, in the basement…”

I’m reminded of Talk Talk at work in the studio, as recalled in Phill Brown’s book Are We Still Rolling? With sufficient finances from previous sales, the band locked themselves into the studio for months at a time: “At this stage only Mark appeared to know exactly what the desired result was. As with Spirit of Eden, we worked in almost complete darkness, with an oil projector in the control room and the odd red light in the studio… Also, as nothing was planned and we were playing by the rules of chance, accident and coincidence, we needed to try out almost every idea and combination of sounds before we knew we had the right part or texture”. Record companies were kept at bay with the inevitable backlash once the albums were finished: “Much later in 1997, we discovered that the album Laughing Stock had been deleted in the UK a few months after its initial release”.

However elusive creative communities may be, it hasn’t stopped people trying to establish and plan them. There was more to ‘Cool Britannia’ than embarrassing photo opportunities. It signalled New Labour’s commitment to creative industries in the UK and a recognition that British culture was a hugely successful export. In fact, successful post-punk record labels like Rough Trade had been the very epitome of the Thatcherist small business revolution – an irony gleefully explored in the quasi-corporate image of PiL, BEF, Scritti Politti and other bands of the early 80s. By 2007, UK creativity had become the model for how the entrepreneurial business should operate, something local governments were keen to encourage. The question became ‘how do you turn a city into a creative hub?’ In my home town of Brighton and Hove, 1 in 5 of local business was involved in the creative sector, as a slew of reports testified. Richard Florida began to talk about a ‘creative class’ that migrated to where the action was.

The business of culture and the culture of business were beginning to blur. Venture capitalist Paul Graham was also in search of that magical collaborative community in his 2009 essay ‘Can you buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe’. A startup hub, it seems, shares much of the same traits as its cultural counterpart and Graham’s guidelines are similar to Kelly’s. Invest but don’t impose too many rules: “If you want to encourage startups in a particular city, you have to fund startups that won’t leave. There are two ways to do that: have rules preventing them from leaving, or fund them at the point in their life when they naturally take root. The first approach is a mistake, because it becomes a filter for selecting bad startups. If your terms force startups to do things they don’t want to, only the desperate ones will take your money”. Attract talent to your city to seed and influence subsequent generations: “Don’t try to do it on the cheap and pick only 10 for the initial experiment. If you do this on too small a scale you’ll just guarantee failure. Startups need to be around other startups. 30 would be enough to feel like a community”. Encourage the free exchange of ideas. “For the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to live in could make itself one of the biggest startup hubs in the world… Interestingly, the 30-startup experiment could be done by any sufficiently rich private citizen. And what pressure it would put on the city if it worked.” Graham also emphasises the necessity of a good university as the incubator of collaborative culture. We might think of key art institutions such as the Bauhaus or Black Mountain College and their enormous influence on culture as a whole.

However, despite the focus on the creative industries over the last 15 years, reports repeat the same problems with investment. Business models break down because art is not subject to the same economics as other products and services. Whilst Warhol’s Factory was an efficient production line, creative output is rarely so functional and cannot guarantee a sufficient rate of return. Investors and producers are completely at odds with one another. In fact, art is often precisely antagonistic to wider economic values, being a space to question and examine them. The appeal of Berlin or Leipzig or Warsaw as creative communities is the inverse of investment, it is cheap accommodation and empty spaces to colonise, just as it was in the New York of the 70s. Commercial and cultural hubs can look very different.

If exchange of ideas is equivalent to the invention of sex, coming online means we’re at it like rabbits, cross-fertilising like the last days of Rome. However, some habits are yet to change. Certain art forms are more inherently collaborative than others but novels are still a somewhat onanistic activity. Gysin again: “While the history of painting and the plastic arts shows them generally to have been a collective affair in their conception and their realization — even after the notion of the artist-paradigm came to dominate every other mode of representation — literature has been a solitary practice, an ascesis, a withdrawal, a prison of words. Collaborations in this domain were rare. If we except certain accidental associations, the value of which is open to question, we find that few works have been composed as the result of a joint effort”. Furthermore, whilst authors see the internet as a brave new platform for marketing, the loss of editors and the whole network that previously contributed to the writing of a book makes it perhaps even less collaborative than before. Although widely criticised as a crude and exploitative exercise in branding, I’m rather intrigued by the James Patterson franchise. It may have broken the norm of the individual author. Things change in unpredictable ways.

It is often said that we live in a golden age of television. The attraction and potency of writing for HBO, AMC, even The Simpsons could be exactly down to the collective experience of working around the table with the very best, the scenius. As Deadwood reached its final series, you could practically sense the writers urging each other to greater daring, to push television dialogue into places it had never been before. I’m convinced that the poor state of cinema this year (overwhelmingly remakes, sequels, and spin-offs – production-led scripts) is the result of this. Hollywood’s loss is TV’s gain.

Communal creativity is neither as sublime nor as elusive as Kevin Kelly implies, but pimping ideas online and through meet-ups is not collaboration either. It’s gossip. The time of heavy investment in the arts may be behind us (at least in the UK) but the creatively curious owe it to themselves to seek out and connect with others. With pooled resources and in shared studios, collaboration is simple and it is everywhere. Three heads are better than one.

Explore Further:
Matt Ridley’s ‘Deep Optimism’ talk at The Long Now
Kevin Kelly’s ‘Scenius’ essay
Paul Graham’s essay ‘Can you buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe’
A literature review around the culture and creative industries by Justin O’Connor

Ben Granger

English As She Is Spoke – Pedro Carolino

See all books byPedro Carolino at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Some of the best-loved writing in the world has been gibberish. Nonsense is as old as art itself, whether its practitioners are snot-nosed kids or the aging wonderful weirdoes like Carrol or Lear who entertained the self-same children by developing and codifying their abstract language. Writing for children is a good excuse for venting the inner gibber, but for nonsense to become adult and respectable it had to ally itself to a movement, not just nonsense but anti-sense. Leaving the nursery behind, the avowed aim of the Dadaists and Surrealists was to inspire a revolution in both the inner mind and the outer world by creating works that assaulted the status quo of sense.

“I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault.” declared movement founder Andre Breton. But beyond the absence of straightforward meaning artistic output, crucial to the surrealist argument was that intent itself distorted art. The rational world of logic was held intrinsically compromised by the dead controlling hand of society. To have beautiful work created by accident was the state to which they aspired. This purity of random intent was in turn aimed at later by William Burroughs and his acolytes, whose “cut up technique” of montage aimed to “exterminate rational thought” from the process of creation. Something untamed and ecstatic was held to hail from the accidental, stroking those parts of the mind that stately logic could not reach.

By the anti-logic of the surrealists and the Beats English as She Is Spoke, a book written by Pedro Carolino on an unspecified date near the end of the 19th century, is work of beauty to place alongside the Naked Lunch and Tanguy’s Indefinite Divisibility. Carolino had no intent to write a comic masterpiece. On the contrary, he intended to write an English/Portuguese phrasebook. Crucuially, he didn’t deem it necessary to have an English/Portuguese dictionary to do this. Or, for that matter, to be able to speak English whatsoever.On the sainted day he decided to enlighten the peoples of two great nations with The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English, (as it was originally known) something miraculous was born.

The book sets out its philanthropic mission in what soon becomes its trademark transcendent style.

The Works which we were conferring for this labour, found use us for nothing; but those that were publishing to Portugal, or out, they were almost all composed for some foreign, or for some national little aquainted in the spirit of those languages. It was resulting from that corelessness to rest these Works fill of imperfections, and anomalies of style; in spite of the infinite typographical faults which some times, invert the sense of the periods.

With this singular quest in mind, Carolino sets his Works out in stall. Firstly, simple works. In “Of The Man”, we discover those basic building blocks which make us all

The brain The brains

The inferior lip, The superior lip

And of course

The reins

Already a wonderful inner logic has taken shape. Not too much later, the reader is plunged into more sinister realms, such as “Diseases”, namely:-

The Apoplexy The megrime

The Vomitory

In full flow, Carolino expounds more categories, “Eatings” (which includes “Some sugar plum”, “Some wigs”, “A dainty-dishes”, “Hog fat” and “A Little Mine”) “Quadruped’s Beasts”,(including “Ass-colt”, “Rocbuck”, “Ram,aries” and “Dragon”), and “Fishes and shell-fishes” (“Calamary”, “Hedge hog”, “Wolf”, “Torpedo”, and the enigmatic “A sorte of fish.”)

These words, at once familiar and alien, are the components of a fabulous new language, as vibrant as the Nadsat of A Clockwork Orange. But in the book’s next chapter “Familiar Phrases” the warped grammar takes on a whole new rhapsodic delight.

From the whimsically poetic whose actual meaning is not in doubt:-

Have you say that?

No budge you there

Through the more arcane:-

Dress your hairs

I am pinking me with a pin

To the eternally abstruse:-

He do want to fall

He laughs at my nose, he jest by me

After “End First Part’s” the reader, now fully equipped, is encouraged to be more adventurous and venture into “Familiar Dialogues”, which include “For to wish the good morning”, “For to dress him self”, and “For to ask some news”. One of the finest is “With a Hairdresser”

Your razors, are them well?

Sir, I have no heared any thing.

The penultimate section, “Anecdotes”, shows Carolino’s invention at its most fluent and illuminating. The best rib-tickler is surely:-

A man one’s was presented a magistrate which ad a considerable library “What you make?” beg him the magistrate. “I do some books” was answered. “But any of your books I did not seen its — I believe it so, was answered the author I mak nothing for Paris. From a of my works is imprinted, I send the edition for America; I don’t compose what to colonies.”

The sound of drumstick hitting cymbal.

Just when it can’t seem to get any better, we have what could be a mere epilogue, but ends up as a thrilling climax:- “Idiotisms and proverbs”. The cryptic wisdom of this new tongue finally reaches its zenith.

Nothing some money, nothing of Swiss.

To come back at their muttons

Finally the reader can withdraw, delighted, sated, the glimpse of another universe in sight.

This whole book is of course, a “mistake”, and a very extreme one too. But every progression of language develops from mishearing, from distortion. While undoubtedly funny, the undulating incongruity of the language is enough to stimulate realms of the mind previously unexplored. In this sense, English as She Is Spoke is not only a worthy heir of Lewis Carrol and portent of Dali, but also belongs to the tradition of warped wordsmithery which would include not only Anthony Burgess, but also Chris Morris and Mark E Smith too.

So then, in appreciating this great masterpiece of accidental humour, we are not simply laughing at the funny foreigner. Or not just that anyway.

4 Play – Irvine Welsh
[collected scripts of plays based on Welsh's work]

See all books by Irvine Welsh at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com



[Note: this is the complete text of a syndicated interview with Harry Gibson provided to the press to promote the 10th anniversary production of Trainspotting, the play based on Irvine Welsh's novel of the same name.

Gibson wrote the script for the stage adaptation of Trainspotting and directed both the original production and the new production which begins in 2006. See the Trainspotting - The Play site for full details.

Spike also interviewed Gibson at the time of the original production in 1996: Harry Gibson: Trainspotting: Expletives Repeated]

So 10 years on, why the revival?

HG: Love, I think. I mean, audiences love seeing it, actors love performing it, and I love directing it. I’ve done Glasgow, Toronto, New York, the Australia tour and I reworked it for the Edinburgh Festival, so it felt like stand up comedy in a tent, and for the West End so it could fill a big old fashioned theatre; so this is my seventh time. And I know it’s a special show for the producers because it was ten years ago when they fell in love with it except that Mark Goucher had to look away when the needles came out. Well, they picked it up and put it on the road and got a smash hit and a shelf full of awards, so for them it’s pure nostalgia. So here we go trainspotting again.

How did it go down in New York did they get it?

HG: It upset them. Sympathy for junkies isn’t big on Broadway. And the language is way too bad for uptown folks. But for eight weeks it was a must see for Soho artists and Greenwich Village actors. The movie actor Brian Denehey said to me, “That is the darkest show I have ever seen.” And he’s been to some very dark places. Australia though was the opposite. One guy said to me, “That’s the funniest first ten minutes of a show I ever saw”. They just sat there eating popcorn and laughing like mad. The thing is, the play has a personality like all good plays which changes from cast to cast. Sometimes it’s a black comedy, like the movie, sometimes it goes deeper, really tragic.

Yes, what about the film? I mean, this isn’t the play of the film is it?

HG: This is the play of Irvine Welsh’s original book. I read a first edition and we had it onstage (at The Glasgow Citz’s) nine months later. We thought it would be good for four weeks in the small studio, but on the first night we had queues wrapped around the building and by noon the next day the whole run was sold out. We revived it six months later in a bigger studio and it sold out again. That was the one which Danny Boyle (the movie’s director) and his team came to see, but naturally a play and a film are two different animals. I love the movie. It’s a brilliant caper-film. It reminded me of those Beatles & Monkees films with lads leaping around to music like ‘Hey, hey we’re the Junkees, and we just junky around’. One big difference between the play and the film apart from the fact that the play just uses one set and four actors and you can smell it happening in front of you is that the movie ends up being the hero’s getaway, while the play stays with the trainspotters, left standing in the ruined old Leith railway station waiting for trains that will never come to get them a away from it all. Irvine liked that ending. Truer to life.

So Trainspotting entered the language?

HG: Spotting is everywhere now. In fact language is a big part of Trainspotting’s appeal. People write dissertations about it. The play has 147 cunts. In Edinburgh housing schemes, I explain to people, cunt is a laddish term of endearment. You can say “Y’cunt-ye” to a mate and it’s quite cuddly. You would not call a vagina a cunt; a vagina is (excuse my language) a f*n*y. Translators have some difficulties; I think the play’s been translated into 17 languages now, and I am waiting for the Japanese version because I’m told the Japanese don’t have dirty swearwords; mind you it might be the maddest version ever.

The culture of the production transforms the show; the Icelandic version which I saw in Reykjavik looked like a saga; our hero’s mother appeared out of a mist like a troll, with a giant wooden spoon. In Paris, it was “La Haine” type streetkids, playing around mostly on scaffolding. The Dresden director must have done a lot of very special workshops games on because I don’t remember writing parts for four blue eyed blonde boys or asking them to do a buggery dance; this went on for three hours – but still, it got 17 curtain calls. Trainspotting gets done all over the world: Canada down to Mexico across to New Zealand and up to Hong Kong – every country has its trainspotters. At the moment the National Theatre of Romania is doing it in Cluj.

So you’re not short of a bob or two?

HG: Well, let me put it this way. I wish I’d made is a full-scale musical. I might be rich. As it is, it’s just a small show for studios, so cheques do drop on the doormat from time to time but only small ones. We’re talking the price of dinner. So I have not given up my day job. Which is theatre anyway. People ask me, “What made you do this?”, and the boring answer is that it’s my job.

I do plays and I turn Irvine’s books into plays because he is a writer of foul genius. I’ve done the play versions of five of his novels. The latest one is Porno, the sequel to Trainspotting about Sick Boy’s attempt to become a porn baron, but for the first time, I’ve got a play which no one will touch. I think they think it might be pornographic, and it isn’t….very. I think it’s beautiful. But then I think every show I do is beautiful, however wild and in your face it is. It’s got to be beautiful theatre. Otherwise it’s a mess. I saw some Oxford students do it last year, and they fucked it up so bad I wanted to walk out and weep. I needed much vodka comfort.

Isn’t “in-yer-face” a whole style of theatre now?

HG: So they say. Actually, theatre’s been doing in-yer-face for years. It isn’t about outrageous acts, it really means your actors address the audience directly, they don’t pretend they are being spied on through a glass wall. Audiences really like that. It makes a play more like rock’n'roll. Well, like The Fall’s idea of rock’n'roll – they’re Irv’s favourite band. So it feels rough, but actually its cunning and beautiful, it draws you into a dream just like Shakespeare where a Prologue tells the punters what’s going to happen and the hero opens his heart in soliloquies, and you’re drawn into a Midsummer Night’s Dream, or King Lear’s nightmare; now that’s pretty “in yer-face” – “Out Vile Jelly!”

Defining the arts into movements and schools is an intellectual’s pastime. Like Irvine’s use of language it’s interesting to philologists but to many ordinary punters Trainspotting is just a great dirty book like Lady Chatterley’s Lover or The Naked Lunch. And language makes a great paint stripper. Used like a tool and my actors know exactly when to say “fuck” – it can cut through walls of pretension and prejudice. Scholars have called Irvine’s style “dirty realism” and my style “in-yer- face” but we’re just following our literary and theatrical ancestors to reach people’s hearts and minds, And people keep coming back for more.

On tour, Trainspotting keeps bringing new people into theatres; theatre managers cry out happily, “We’ve never sold so much lager”. Of course, theatres have to make a special arrangements; at the end of the interval at the Citzs we used to send a usher out to ring a bell in the car park, where customers had popped out for a spliff. And staff do find customers in odd places, let’s just say couples have been known to get carried away, round the back of the stalls. Occasionally someone gets carried out by the paramedics or policemen, but this is rare, There have been no riots yet!

How does all this affect the actors?

HG: One or two of the actors did take their research a bit too far. There was some scraping -up off the ground. But we’ve never lost anyone. The competition to act in Trainspotting is fierce, so we can cast people who are not only fine actors but know the lifestyle, We don’t cast innocents.

Have you ever cast anyone famous?

HG: We’ve cast actors who became famous afterwards. Our first Mark Renton was Ewen Bremner who went on to play Spud in the film an is now a wealthy movie star. In the West End our Alison was played by the amazing Michelle Gomez, who you now see on TV a lot she’s the HEAT magazine girl. And when I saw Lord of The Rings, there was one of my Tommies – Billy Boyd! This kind of starspotting makes watching films and TV a bit weird for me me- well everyone in The Business, you want to get into the drama, but then an old friend pops up and punctures the illusion. I mean, Gollum you look into his eyes and you know it’s Andy Serkis! And you go “he was in a show of mine!” Which no one wants to know and you get shushed.

The Sexual Life Of The Camel?

HG: Ah. Yes

Didn’t you bet someone that you could write a play about masturbation?

HG: It was the first night party of Trainspotting and I did get into a conversation about writing a play about anything, and wanking did come up, and I did write and won a bet, which I think was a bottle of malt whisky, or maybe a case, but I can’t remember who I made it with, so I never collected! And the play was given a reading at The Royal Court which Andy “Gollum” Serkis was in, but it’s never been professionally staged, which may be because people think it pornographic, which it sort of is…

In a beautiful way?

HG: Exactly! Next question.

How have things changed since 1995, in terms of the drugs scene. Will this new production still strike a chord?

HG: It was 1995, but Irvine was going back to the 80s, when heroin-use surged in Edinburgh and it was Thatcher’s Britain and getting messed up and wasted was like defiant and political. And then getting on an E was the way to love. For a century every different drug-craze was hailed as the way to paradise, or the doors of paradise or the road of excess leading to the palace of wisdom, or just a great way to celebrate being rich or escape being poor hashish, acid, speed, coke, E, and you can go back to champagne cocktails for toffs, absinthe for poets, opium for factory workers, laudanum for stressed gentle folk, mother’s ruin gin for ruined mothers and urchins.

In Trainspotting, the book and play, we’re clear about the thrills and the buzz of defiance, but it’s like William Burroughs, the American junky novelist who tried everything and especially enjoyed morphine, he realised something was wrong; he said, “I spent two years gazing at my foot”. He got tunnel vision, and was disappearing, but then he started to see the light, the bigger picture what he saw as a great conspiracy. Well, in Trainspotting, you see that the light at the end of the tunnel is the light of an oncoming train. You can’t leave the theatre unshocked. Now I think that the whole Trainspotting phenomenon has been part of a gradual turnaround of opinion, at least ( and maybe most important because we write the copy for society) among intellectuals and the mediafolk

We are more grown up about drugs. We’re less inclined to idealise or demonise drugs. Society as a whole is not less inclined to TAKE them because humans have always taken drugs, we might even have become human by doing so but we hear less bullshit about drugs being either instant death or the road to excess leading to the palace of wisdom. In truth, the road of witless excess normally leads to the A & E room and the grave. Our realism is good.

Drugs are something you probably should try so long as you don’t have to. If you have to take drugs, it’s time for a reality check. As a drug worker in The Gorbals in Glasgow told me “If you have a life, you can do some drugs; if you don’t have a life, drugs will fill the vacuum”. As the careers of Irvine Welsh and Harry Gibson show, the palace is reached by getting education. My experience says, “Don’t do drugs till you’ve learned the Latin”.

Much more about Irvine Welsh is at irvinewelsh.com

“One of the reasons he’s fun to work with – he has a really fine, raw sense of horror. By way of exaggeration and selective grotesquery. His view of reality is not entirely normal. Ralph sees through the glass very darkly.”
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, June 1974

One of the many facets that sets Hunter S. Thompson’s 70s works apart from other forms of classic American literature are the growling, snarling, punch-between-the-eyeballs illustrations of Ralph Steadman. Roaring from the pages, his pictures visualise the horrors of corporate America, ripping the surface to reveal the political greed and other grotesqueries that contort and degrade the human forms within his pictures. With his method of isolating and focusing on a physical idiosyncrasy, he explodes his subjects, capturing a hidden truth that was hitherto unseen; it’s as if Steadman sees with the naked eye of a schizophrenic.

Bloodsucking business men, venal politicians, dollar drugged gamblers, archetypal beholders of negation and power transmogrified into grinning reptilia, squarking sharp-beaked birds, gorgons of sheer inhuman greed. In the ferocious stroke of a few simple lines he trans-atlantically expresses all the negative facets of the human condition to a terrifyingly hilarious degree. If we think of the old metaphor of the artist’s pen being a sword, then Steadman’s scribe is nuclear.

Below is an almost verbatim conversation I conducted with Mr Steadman via a phonebox on Kings Street in Manchester city centre. His rumbling Welsh accent was full of charisma, his personality very accommodating, meditatory, thoughtful and warm. When talking about the death of Hunter S Thompson a real sense of bereavement -the only sort that can be when a real friend passes by- was prevalent in the tone in which he talked about him. Amidst rush hour traffic and passing packets of suit-encased, office imprisoned flesh, the conversation went thus …

You must have been gutted when HST committed suicide.

I always knew he’d do it, but I didn’t know when. It was always the case of I always knew that that one day I would take this journey but I did not know yesterday that it would be today. That’s how it felt and it was way too soon. So upset about it. And I knew he’d do it but I wished he’d just shot his dick off. Something that would give him pain but have him talk about it, because instead of shooting away the one exceptionally wonderful piece of machinery in his body: His brain! The centre of all his being. The centre of his genius really. And he is a genius, no doubt about it as for going down as a great, great journalist writer. He didn’t write novels, he took William Faulkner’s advice about fact being far more stranger than fiction.

I mean I just wonder why he did it? You know if only I could have talked to him. Once! Just to say ‘What the fuck! Don’t be daft, Hunter, for fuck’s sake!’ That’s why I thought if he’d shot himself in the foot or something… But, you see, if you can imagine: in a wheelchair, a man of action, a man who always done exactly what he wanted to do, suddenly realising he has no control anymore and he’s gonna end up in a home with a lot of old people scared him. It’s that thing: ‘In the end it was no use, he died on his knees in a barnyard with all the others watching.’ It’s that indignity he couldn’t stand the idea of.

What was he like as a character?

He could be mean. He didn’t like sloppy drunks, even though he imbibed so much stuff he was just on another sort of level I suppose. I don’t know how he carried on like he did. Like he said: ‘I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.’ That’s the well known phrase. He wasn’t no pusher. But he couldn’t stand sloppy drunks and he wasn’t a sloppy drunk cos he never seemed drunk.

Did he ever frighten you?

Yes, many times in the car. I wrote a song with him once called ‘Weird And Twisted Nights.’ One of the lines is “Drive your stake through a darkened heart / In a red Mercedes Benz / The blackness hides a speeding trap / The savage beast pretends.” We’d driven. . . And this was another one of his tricks, he used to like to drive at night with his lights out because the police wouldn’t see him, a starlit night – “The scar heals black . . .”. There’s a record of it you can get from EMI, it’s called ‘I Like It’ (1999).

What is Gonzo Ralph?

Gonzo is a strange manifestation of ones intentions to go somewhere to cover it (the story) euphemistically as a journalist and yet end up being part of the story, not part of the story but become the story. You make one, you have to generate some sort of tension, some oddness, some unexpected freaky thing that makes it go, ‘Yes that’s it!’

The other thing is there is no accreditation for gonzo journalists, so you go there as an outsider. Like we went to the Miami Convention in the Seventies and we had to get inside without accreditation, that was part of the target. It’s to be a rock and roll journalist. What’s a gonzotic frenzy? Well it’s me in the throes of an ink splattering attempt to capture the feeling I have at that particular time.

I like the gonzo logo that HST used for his Sheriff of Aspen campaign.

That red fist – by the way it’s got 2 thumbs and 4 fingers. Have you noticed? Hunter always said to me ’2 thumbs Ralph, don’t forget 2 thumbs!’ It’s the idea of a freak isn’t it? Anyone with 2 thumbs is obviously a freak or a monkey of some kind, a gorilla. And the flower in the middle of the palm, the green flower is a peyote drug plant.

Have you taken much peyote in your time?

No. Hunter was the one who enjoyed all that shit. I’ve taken coca leaves, I’m very fond of coca leaves but I can’t get them in England. I tried them in Peru, between Cusco and Machu Picchu is a little stop off on the train called Olan Taytambo, and there they sell it to you with wood ash and you roll the leaf around the wood ash like rolling a joint or a cigarette. You put it down the side of your gums and just leave it there and you don’t suffer from mountain sickness, anxiety or anything at such a height which is 13-15 thousand feet above sea level. I’ve got a wonderful book which is probably 100 years old called ‘The Divine Plant of the Inca’ (W. Golden Mortimer – 1901) and it’s all about the coca leaf.

Tell me about when you ended up screwed and shoeless in New York City on one of your first assignments with HST…

‘The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved’ was how it all started, the meeting with Hunter for the first time. . . There’s innocence and experience meeting for the first time! The shoeless episode was the second trip where we went to Rhode Island to cover the Americas Cup and I was shoeless and luckily I’d kept my ticket and passport home.

I had my ticket back to New York from Rhode Island (Boston Airport) and then I got a cab and got to 42nd Street where the bar was thankfully still open, the magazine (Scanlan’s Monthly) had closed and I was in a terrible state and coming down from psilocybin. A drug trip, which was the one and only trip I ever had and that was when I said, ‘Right, drugs are out entirely.’ I enjoy a drink. And I was palpitating, so I borrowed a quarter from the Irish barman, cos I had no money in New York, nothing in a hell of a city! I phoned a lady friend called Vendetoce who I knew from the Bologna Bookfair. I made the call and she said “I’m just going out.’ I said ‘Please, don’t go out, stay there till I get there, please!’ She could tell I was losing my voice and she did stay in.

When I arrived I was purple with palpitations and she got a doctor right away and he gave me a librium injection that put me out for about 24 hours. The irony of all this was that before this happened I put her in hospital with a fracture in Italy when we went into a ditch via my car. Imagine how mad she was to speak to me again! Bless her heart. Anyway that proves there are good people in the world. . .

HST once described you as having a paranoid flash within your character. What did he mean?

A sudden desperate fear that everything something terrible is about to happen. Because I always thought that my heart would stop beating just like that. Bang! Why? My question was: ‘Why should it keep beating?’ It’s an odd question but at the same time that’s a paranoid flash. Why take it all for granted for Christ’s sake? So I never did, and then of course I kept thinking about the fucking thing all the time you know and now I’ve come to terms with it. Touch wood and touch wood now even. He (HST) gave me a lovely head, which I’ve got on a cord around my neck. Sort of a strange primitive face and a long thin piece of what looks like clay or stone. He said: ‘Wear this Ralph, it’ll ward off evil spirits.’

Do you see an essential beauty or aesthetic in the grotesque?

There’s an aesthetic even in watching an operation, there’s an aesthetic in putrefaction. I mean to watch how things breakdown and there’s a kind of aesthetic beauty in that. But it doesn’t mean to say you’re being sick, you do see that but you’d rather not watch it. It’s not ugliness, it’s just a rather unpleasant beauty, because there’s nothing ugly in nature. . . I’d love to be a fly on the wall or to be a fly on their piece of shit! Hahahaha!!!!

How do you get those ideas when you transform people in such frightening animal forms?

I see if I can make human beings look like reptiles. I see if I can make them look like hideous creatures that would not come out of anything but perhaps. . . turn a human inside out. . . take a human being, supposing you can sort of like a rubber glove, turn him inside out and then look at it. That’s how it’s really like. When I’ve done a drawing like that and I’ve done a few, I tried to make the person look as though they’re completely turned inside out and I called him ‘The Perfect Gentleman.’

What’s your idea of a living hell?

Not really being the slightest bit interested in what it is I’ve done all my life. Not wanting to do it and then not knowing what to do next. That would be a living hell. I must have a feeling that: ‘Oooh I’m really excited about this!’ The most depressed times I have is when I just don’t wanna do anything. A living hell is not being creative, being utterly devoid of any creative impulse whatsoever.

Does the new political scene make you shudder more than it ever did?

I can’t be very interested in what are no more than P.R. men. That’s all they are – P.R. men for a policy, or a new sort of: ‘Oh why don’t we try it this way?’ As Hunter said of George Bush: he was a message boy for the big boys, the corporate interests in America. That’s all he is. And that’s what’s happening over here, we’ve got spin doctors, people that manipulate everything and everything is manipulation. It’s not winning through a feeling one has about a person. ‘Wow! I wanna follow that person. I’d vote for him.’ Not because you’ve heard something spun about him, but because he feels something. Like you do about Nelson Mandela, you can’t help feeling the guy’s a good man. It’s passion, yeah! Something wonderful. Maybe Tony Blair started out like that, when we suddenly thought: ‘Wow at last, a fresh air politician!’ The man was clean and then he had his dour man, but nevertheless honest dour Scotsman, Gordon Brown.

What are the elements in society that piss you right off?

I’m afraid of the ethos of reality T.V. which pisses me off. It’s not reality television, it’s completely phoney, things that are made up, phoney! It’s not even fiction, it’s contrived bullshit! And celebs that have done nothing and they have to be celebs and they have to go on television. It’s a terribly sad culture to develop or to pursue and take it further and all in the name of the god Mammon. There’s nothing else in it and I just wish there were. And I wish that kids weren’t being fed it all the time. The kids are not brought up to have minds of their own as individuals. Some do, some break out. Maybe it’s always been like that but in a different form?

We’ll probably get by you know, but I think we might not be able to overcome what which is we’re doing to the planet. You see, nature will do exactly what it must, and if we are a hindrance to its development, to even its destructive powers to reform itself and we are in a way, we will go. No doubt about it. We seem to think we have some control over this planet. I once saw a lump of Greenland breaking off into the sea and moving south, which of course will affect the atmosphere and us generally, and it’ll happen more and more. And as the South Pole starts to melt! We were down in Patagonia in December and it was such a wonderful wilderness, just across the water was the Antarctica and I felt: ‘What an extraordinary thing and what puny pieces of nothing we are!’ I’ve just been doing a series of paintings of that area. Look, all in all I’m trying to be an artist, the fact that I was a gonzo journalist-artist of a type, met Hunter Thompson and went that way. That happened. I can’t do anything about that, I’m glad it happened. It was like hitting a bullseye first time in America. But I wonder what I’d have done if I hadn’t met him?

Was is you that did that famous caricature of Mick Jagger with those over inflated lips or was that Gerald Scarfe?

Mind you don’t get me mixed up with Gerald Scarfe! I’ve done the Rolling Stones eating each other. Don’t worry, because people always say: ‘Ooh I love your Pink Floyd.’ No I didn’t do that! Gerry came up to me and said: ‘ Can you help me? I like your line.’ And so I said: ‘Why don’t I introduce you to my art teacher? Leslie Richardson.’ Whose daughter Lucy by the way, is Lucy from ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. They lived in Weybridge and that’s where John Lennon used to go into their antique shop with Julian. And John used to come in there and Lucy was always playing with lovely old bits of antique jewellery, they were sparkling things and Julian liked them. And that’s when he thought ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, that lovely song. It doesn’t detract that L.S.D. became part of it.

She was only 47 and I went to her funeral about four months ago because she died, and her mother Lesley said a really nice positive thing to say: ‘She had a good life. I couldn’t stop her dying . . .’ You know but . . . She was in film, she worked on all sorts of things, on Lord Of The Rings and was doing very well. A lovely lady. And everyone had to drink pink champagne at her funeral. ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ was played in the church, it was lovely.

What sort of music have you been into?

The Grateful Dead of course. I loved Eric Clapton. And Chet Baker the trumpet player. And I loved Dvorak and loved listening to William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg reading to music. And I’ll even listen to Gyorgy Legeti. I’ll tell you what he wrote was the theme for ’2001′. He was a modern composer who then just went off into all sorts of weird stuff.

I was thinking of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathrustra’ but that was Strauss. You like Nietzsche don’t you?

Yeah I do. There’s another guy called Max Stirner who wrote some very radical things about politics. He wrote a book called ‘The Ego And Its Own’. I don’t know whether I can find it here. . . [Sounds of shuffling through papers]. . . Yes he’s German. ‘The Ego And Its Own’ Max Stirner:

“Question: What does man believe in?
Answer: I believe in myself, the answer of the common soldier.

Question: What is the principal of the self-concious egotist? Answer: Change the question to who instead of what and name the individual. Man is the horizon or zero of my existence as an individual. Over that I rise as I can, at least I am something more than man in general. A somebody rather than a nobody.

Stirner dispels morbid subjection and recognise each one who knows and feels himself as his own property, to be neither humble nor be fobbed but henceforth sure footed and level headed. A mist of this body who has a character and good pleasure of his/her own, just as he has of his/her own.

This is not transcendental generality. This is the transitory ego of flesh and blood. You and I cannot be reasoned into one, we are separate beings, two separate egos. It is important to be a self-concious ego in a self- conscious self-willed person. This is not self-obsession.

Those who pretend selflessness are constantly acting from self-interested motives but clothing them in various guises. Watch those people closely in the light of Stirner’s teaching and they appear to be hypocrites, full of good moral and religious plans of which self-interest is at the end and the bottom, but they are not aware of this. That this is more than coincidence. In Stirner we have the political development of egotism, to the dissolution of the state. The union of free men is clear and pronounced. . . ”

Is that boring the shit out of you? Hahahahaha!!!!! Just that whole thing gets to me because it is about self and yet you’re not being selfish. You care about people. But you want people to be straight forward and honest in reply, if they can help you or you can help them. Surely that’s better! That’s community, that what we’re afraid of doing and we’re killing it. You know, we’re really destroying ourselves because we’re really making the motivating force of anything we do selfish. Really acquisitive in a way that’s really not the point of it.

If there was one book that you could now illustrate, what would it be?

I think it’s gotta be Rabelais’ Gargantua And Pandegruel, about the big baby creature. It’s a tough one. I tell you what I’ve just illustrated: Fahrenheit 451, which is the temperature at which books burn, and Ray Bradbury wrote the book 50 years ago, (he’s still alive), and together that’s what I illustrated for him. When I’d done it, he said: ‘You’ve brought my book into the 21st Century. Thank you’. Which is the nicest thing to say.

The book is as important as 1984 and Animal Farm as real powerful social comment, because it’s about a fire brigade burning books. So that they try and stamp out ideas and a group of people get together and each of them take it upon themselves to learn by heart one book before they get burnt. It’s really worth a read. I’d say get the book but you can’t at the moment because there’s only 451 copies, a limited edition. But I’m sure Simon & Schuster or someone’ll do it. He wrote another wonderful book called The Illustrated Man. To write ‘Fahrenheit 451′, Ray Bradbury hired a typewriter and a room for 38 cents a day and he wrote it in 9 days. Try and read the book cos it’s kinda interesting, a definite must to read because of the implications of burning every book in the world.

You worked on Private Eye didn’t you?

I did in the 1960s. That was when I got involved firstly with Punch, but they weren’t really interested in social comment, they wanted jokes. And I went to Private Eye with a joke called ‘Plastic People’ and Private Eye bought it for 5 pounds and said: ‘More power to your elbow!’ And they published it with a double page spread in issue number 11. That was when Willie Rushden was there, Paul Foot, all those sort of people. Do you know I’m frightened that most of them are dead. Willie’s dead, Paul Foot died. I think it’s something to do with dying, I don’t know what it is? [Goes introspective and semi-silent for a second or two] He was a good journalist Paul Foot, very strong left-wing old Labour guy. But never mind, there’s nothing wrong with that, he believed in something!

That’s what’s wrong with them today, they don’t really believe in anything, they’re paying lip service to something. And that’s not belief but something entirely different. Ad-men is what they are absolutely, advertising a product. ‘We’re selling you this, it’s called New Labour!’ Or bright new Conservatives [chuckles], I don’t know what they are. People I don’t know hahahaha!!!

Didn’t that style over substance politics start in Nixon’s time or even Kennedy’s?

The thing about Nixon was that he really believed . . . He was just venal. He didn’t realise how evil he was. I think he was a genuine politician but with a remit of his own. A huge, deep belief in his own fabulous qualities. His dark scowling face made him a bogeyman. For a caricaturist he’s a . . . a gift! I was able to do all sorts of things with him. The light at the end of the tunnel. Offering cyanide pills to Spiro Agnew his Vice-President, and his was in the stocks being offered pills by Nixon. Who was always dressed in black. He was wonderful to draw. That’s when I had my best times in political cartooning.

It became something when we all suddenly felt: ‘This isn’t about domestic things, this is about life and death! Our lives are being fucked around!” Used to anyone’s ends, particularly corporate power with Enron and the rest. It was the “respectable” companies in Nixon’s time, who became monsters as time went by, and they ran politics and they still do and Bush is merely the bagman, the messenger boy for the dark players. I’m not into conspiracy theories, but I think they went into Baghdad for all sorts of reasons which are not made clear. And the way they use the word: ‘Terrorist. . . Terrorist. . . Terrorist!’ That’s become a mantra or even a trigger for fear. Mention the word ‘Terrorist!’ in George Bush’s voice and it’s something else. We can see through it but we can’t do anything about it!

You see that’s what I think is such a terrible, terrible betrayal, the trust that people have in government. The betrayal of people’s good will, good trust that things are being done for the best and they actually ARE being done for the best. Perhaps. But people betray that and let people down and cheat them. To me that almost fits into the same category as crime and torture. One of those unforgivable crimes that torture is for me. . .”

The sound of exasperation and anger in Ralph’s voice was genuine, a real rage about the dubious world order of our times. Whatever his age, this guy still has the growling edge and essential punch that makes him the greatest caricaturist of the modern era. We tied up our conversation with talks about wine, the fact that the British government wanted to eradicate the use of the Welsh language, polite regrets that we hadn’t conversed over a pint and an imploration that I follow and woo a woman who had mistakenly opened the door to the phone-box; sagacious sounds drowned out by passing road sweeps tidying the days litter from the floor of Manchester’s premier street of designer shops and parasitical employment agencies.

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Chris Hall: First off, congratulations on the birth of your new son, Luther.

Will Self: Yeah, little baby Luther. He was born on August 8, so he’s a couple of months old now.

CH: So I suppose you’ve had people pointing out the Superman connection with your other son Alexis (i.e. Lex Luther)?

WS: Yes… It just arose. In my experience with names, they just arise. I was always quite keen on Dmitri because Alexis and Ivan so with the third one you could have the Brothers Karamazov. But Deborah didn’t think that was funny.

CH: So how do you find the time for all this writing then?

WS: Well, I have cycled back quite a lot this year in that I resigned from the Independent before Luther was born, so it’s the first time in more or less 10 years when I haven’t had an ongoing newspaper contract. So, I took fairly extensive paternity leave. But, you know now it’s building back up again.

CH: No plans for a regular column again?

WS: I don’t think I’m going to take another weekly contract of any kind in the foreseeable future. I’ve got this floating series of interviews with women that I was doing for the Sindie [Independent on Sunday], none of which are in Feeding Frenzy [Amazon] but which will get a book of their own. I must of done 20 to 25 women over the last two to three years but I wanna do about another ten before I pick my best women to put in the book. But, I haven’t found a home for my women yet. I mean, the Independent were happy for me to do them freelance but to be frank I just wasn’t interested.

CH: Why did you only interview women?

WS: I like women! Dammit, I like women!

CH: You gave Margaret Beckett the full treatment didn’t you?

WS: I was very mean to her. And of course you always regret it because I think in interviewing there’s a real sense of ‘did I have a successful bowel movement that morning’ kind of feeling about it isn’t there? You go in to interview someone and you’re constipated and you think they’re the worst person you’ve met and you go in to see them another day when your stomach is full of gaily coloured butterflies and you think they’re the best thing since sliced bread so you grow weary of that as an interviewer if you’ve got any wisdom – but at the same time if dyspepsia collides with something you perceive in the other person you just let rip.

The problem with interviewing, which is an aspect of our culture, is that there seems to be a licence to be psychically ruthless. It’s almost encumbent upon an interviewer to allow themselves the full traverse of the psychic rifle.

CH: And Tracey Emin, who you said was a termagant?

WS: Yeah…you know I kind of resent it when people interview me and assume that, because I’ve been well-known for a fair amount of time, that it’s kind of open season, but the truth of the matter is that Tracey really liked that piece. You have to ask yourself why is that and quite frankly when it comes to Tracey, although one or two of her pieces have a certain odd, jejune quality, her art work is essentially a peg on which she hangs her media persona which is her main work.

So she didn’t mind that piece and I think that that’s what you’re up against with a certain kind of interview subject. Now with Beckett I’m perfectly confident that she really hated and was upset by that piece and I noticed that after it she started to make some very sour comments on the media publicly for quite a while. But you know, she’s a politician, you have to reckon that someone’s going to take down verbatim what you’re saying. Why wouldn’t they?

CH: Do you normally use a tape machine?

WS: Well, I think that’s why the Beckett interview was such a devastating piece because I just transcribed answers to questions. Because she talked such complete bollocks. You know, why bother?

CH: Is one of the attractions to journalism the lack of needing to suspend your disbelief so much?

WS: I think it’s an opportunity to get you out and about. It gets you interacting with the world in all sorts of different ways. It also gives you the opportunity, funnily enough, to suspend disbelief more readily because you’re presented with an area of fact that you can then instantly turn into an area of fiction or at any rate embellish in some way. I’m not making great claims for my journalism but I think that what I do that gives me cachet and makes editors want to employ me is really colour writing, it’s really lifting what otherwise might be fairly dry into something that is quite outlandish sometimes. I suppose I am in some ways a practitioner of gonzo/new journalism in that I am prepared to inject my own warped sensibilities into a piece.

CH: You say that you read very little fiction now, a problem with suspension of disbelief, but do you just mean new fiction or do you really not read the classics?

WS: No, I don’t read classic fiction either.

CH: I was thinking of the Amis line about disparaging your youngers but exalting your elders…

WS: What you mean so you don’t see us nipping at your heels? No, I don’t think that’s the way I think about it, but unlike Martin, I’ve never been a sort of fiction-open person. Martin exists in a perpetual competition of some sort, whereas I’m absolutely convinced that only pets win prizes and I don’t think that literary art is a competition of any sort.

CH: Don’t suppose you saw the Booker prize the other day then?

WS: No. I mean what could you possibly win, apart from cash and the kind of frankly transitory and ephemeral applause of certain kinds?

CH: I suppose there is the argument of reaching out to a wider audience…

WS: You could say that the whole kind of prize giving and the whole Lit Crit newspaper based establishment represents a kind of infotainment service for fiction in that way, and beyond a certain point it doesn’t make a work a great work – it doesn’t really change someone’s life or supply that missing X factor that makes them exponentially increase their involvement with the world or with literature. Those things are not what make a work last. The only thing that makes a work last is lasting. And that again you cannot tell. You can look at countless examples of that, of books that have lasted that you wouldn’t have reckoned on lasting.

I’ve just finished writing a long introductory essay for the Penguin Modern Classics of Junky [Amazon]. I mean who would have thought that Junky, published back in 1953 as a paperback bound back to back with Maurice Helbrant’s Narcotic Agent for 35 cents, a penny dreadful shocker, would become probably the greatest confessional novel about heroin addiction written in the 20th century – and I think undoubtedly so.

CH: That must have something to do with his subsequent notoriety though.

WS: Oh no, I think that even if he’d written nothing else it would still stand.

CH: Junky‘s very hard-boiled isn’t it?

WS: It is, in fact he took Hammett as his model for it.

CH: He wrote that as William Lee didn’t he?

WS: Yes, for a Burroughsian it’s got a lot of sign posts towards later theories and fictional methods that he then took up and practiced through Naked Lunch, etc, but actually it’s a really good book. I make the argument in my essay that it’s one of the great existentialist novels, that it’s on a par with Nausea [Amazon] or The Fall [Amazon].

War and pacifism

CH: Someone was interested in a recent Today essay that defined the boundaries of your pacifism. They wanted to know why this position is marginalised by the media?

WS: Well, I think States depend upon a component of armed force – they depend upon the notion of coercion at some level and it’s very hard to find a state that hasn’t had a standing army or militia of some kind. So I think the notion of armed force and violence is integral to the kind of command-based hierarchies that states have. To paraphrase Dubya, “anyone who isn’t with us is against us”, so if you’re against all armed force you’re going to be necessarily squeezed out of the discourse. It won’t even be conscious, there will be people who simply cannot hear what you’re saying because it’s so inimical to their idea of state authority.

I think this war has rather crystallised my pacifism. I think in the past I was like a lot of people who said I’ve got pacifistic inclination but I’m not a pacifist because what I couldn’t find in my own mind was the answer to that perennial question: ‘Ah, yes, but what would you have done when the Nazis were coming?’ And as someone with Jewish blood I’ve always found that difficult to answer, but the thing with this war which makes it so wrong in so many different ways is.that it exposes that argument about the Nazis as a specious argument, in that it assumes a conditional assumption i.e. that you are in 1939, because it can be answered with a similar kind of conditional question: ‘But hang on a minute, if everyone had been a pacifist in 1914 then the Nazis would never have come to power.’

So that to me pushes up the argument to let’s just be pacifists now. Maybe that’s the adequate moral response to the phenomenon of violence in all the forms – I get really angry in the street like we all do. I’ve now taken to bicycling, so I get cut up on my bicycle and I get absolutely furious because it’s so dangerous. I’m a big guy and I’m a very aggressive guy and I feel tempted to rip open cars doors and pull people out and beat them to a bloody pulp but, hey, I don’t do it. It seems to me that there comes a point in your life as a moral being in society where you decide that violence is not the solution to car incidents so there can be the same kind of decision at a macro level.

CH: But it’s still your first response though; you’re not claiming to not have those thoughts?

WS: Well I think that people who say they don’t even think like that anymore are probably self-deceiving. I think it says somewhere in How The Dead Live [Amazon] that there’s no one as angry as an Occidental Buddhist and there’s nobody less forgiving than a fundamentalist born-again Christian. You have to acknowledge the impulse to violence, to say that it’s completely gone is a dangerous thing.

CH: What would you do with the World Trade Centre site?

WS: Mmm.. I’d be leery of venturing an opinion on that. It seems to me that’s something for the people of Manhattan to decide. It’s a grotesque singularity, the snuffing out of that many lives in one place… it also seems to me that it’s going to be an inevitable equivocation between civic pride and something to do with the symbolism of what has occurred.

CH: Is it true about you doing the new series of Shooting Stars with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer?

WS: Yes, that is true. I’ve replaced Mark Lamarr.

CH: Given that Lamaar became the greasy Fifties throwback, what have they got in store for you?

WS: I can assure people that that has not been my fate. In fact, au contraire, I have become a sinister kind of John Dee-type figure who controls Vic’s mind by use of instantiated eye beams which fiddle with his mind.

CH: This just developed organically?

WS: Yes, it developed organically over the show that Vic, Jim Moir, became convinced that I was controlling his mind. I think I’ve claimed the upper hand there actually… It was a fun show to do not least because it’s pretty good not to take yourself too seriously, and to get paid well for not taking yourself too seriously is a real bonus. I’m not sure how good I’m going to be on it because it’s not quite my humour, it’s not verbally based, it’s very visual humour – they are rubber-legged funny men. I hope it works for their sake, after all it’s not my main gig but it is theirs.

Water, water everywhere

CH: You’ve written of the benefits to the imagination of living near a large body of water. Could this be why you live so close to the Thames, albeit unconsciously?

WS: Mmm, I think with the Thames… Mmm, yeah I suppose that it does help. I hadn’t really considered that aspect of it: it is tidal, it does move. With the Thames I always think that because it’s such a conspicuous piece of physical geography going right through the heart of something that is oppressively human in that way that it annuls or at any rate vitiates the oppressive sense of human geography and provides you with a sense of topography really, because you know you’re next to a river, you know you’re in a river valley, you know you’re on a planet that has natural features whereas if you’re just in the middle of Acton then it’s rather difficult to hang on to -

CH: You’ve got it in for Acton haven’t you?

WS: I’m thinking of moving to Acton actually. That’s why it comes to mind. I concede that the river may have been why I chose to live in Vauxhall. In fact, I was looking at renting as an office, a very unusual house-boaty thing that’s down by Cringle Dock waste disposal station in the lea of Battersea Power Station, which is this weird thing on two great pontoons built by a load of Finnish architectural students. But I just wouldn’t spend enough time on it to make it practical, but the idea of writing on top of a body of water was enormously appealing.

Schzoid sensitivity

CH: On the South Bank Show a few years back you said that a psychologist had put “schizoid personality” on your case notes. Now, this might sound like a conceit from your own fiction, but I got the impression that you might have interpreted this as meaning that you were schizophrenic, but diagnostically it means a personality disorder characterised by “extreme shyness and oversensitivity to others”.

WS: I did know that, but the same diagnosis had borderline personality written down as well which would be another form of that. But, increasingly I’ve come to view addiction itself as a mimetic illness in that way – it mimics other psychopathologies. People who essentially have addictive personalities are diagnosed as manic depressive or schizophrenic or certainly depressive. What they really are is addicts. The addiction decides, if you think of it as an autonomous thing, to pretends to be another pathology because the addict finds it bizzarely more comfortable to think of themselves as schizophrenic or manic depressive or whatever, rather than confront the fact that they are an addict which of course means that they’re going to have to stop doing what they want to do above all.

CH: So are you shy and sensitive?

WS: I think I am still quite shy. A lot of the extroversion or flamboyance is always a compensation. It’s better to tough it out rather than sit there cowering.

CH: Did you retreat from the limelight after being found snorting heroin aboard John Major’s plane during the 1997 election?

WS: No, not at all. Two things happened on that front. One was that I didn’t go to ground which was useful. In fact, I counter-attacked. I rolled with the punch in the initial aftermath. Doing Have I Got News For You was quite frankly a calculated thing to defuse criticism. I think that there’s a certain level at which English or British society operates as a kind of particularly beastly lower sixth form common room. If I’d gone to ground at that point I think I would have been in trouble. And it did serve to defuse interest in it.

The other thing is cleaning up from drugs. It made me less interesting to people in that kind of prurient way. And there’s always that level in the media and society as a whole just as the papers are full of stories about illicit drugs and strange sexual practices so that was the basic voyeuristic level of interest in me as someone who got completely fucked up on drugs and booze. And if you’re not doing that anymore then you’re not vulnerable in that way.

CH: Have you read your brother Jonathan’s book, Self Abuse [Amazon], which is partly about growing up in what he sees as a dysfunctional family. Can you comment?

WS: Well, I can’t. I have read it, but I made a pact with myself not to comment on it publicly because I just don’t do that stuff. What I can say in answer to the question is that there are a lot of factual inaccuracies in it.

CH: The introduction to Feeding Frenzy refers to a cabal of restaurateurs who wanted shot of you saying you’d tried to buy drugs off the doorman of his restaurant…

WS: That was before [the Major incident] of course. That was actually a malevolent restaurateur rather than the tabloids themselves. He was someone who didn’t like the reviews I’d been giving his restaurants.

CH: So there genuinely was this plan to get rid of you?

WS: Oh yeah, that’s true.

CH: A cabal?

WS: Yeah, as far as I know is true as well. That’s not just rhetorical rubbish.

CH: That’s a bit weird isn’t it?

WS: No, it’s not weird. I mean I don’t think it was said with any great seriousness. What I think is, you know what these guys are like, they all sit around getting drunk and think ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could bump off Will Self?’. I don’t think they were serious but it does show you the level of naffness and the extent to which criticism can bite. I remember Deborah pointed out when I said ‘I don’t know why these fucking celebrity egg flippers get so upset about these reviews, you know they go on parceling up three bits of raddicio for £45, why are they bothered?’ and she said ‘Well, some of them really do regard what they do as an art form’

CH: You often just criticised the interior design of the restaurant rather than the food…

WS: Well, these guys, and I do know some of them, aren’t stupid, what they realise is that by concentrating on the restaurant you’re completely dissing the food and the whole culture that they represent in which it’s really important to drizzle olive oil in a particular way. You’re saying that ‘Hang on, this isn’t important’. Not only is it not important it’s a kind of grotesque moral singularity: You’re sitting around thinking about adding huge amounts of monetary value to ingredients that would barely keep a starving Somalian alive for a day. If you start criticising the food you start to take it on its own terms. You can’t allow it that much credence. You’ve suspended disbelief in what’s being done. Whereas my approach was to say ‘I just don’t buy any of this shit’ you know.

Novel uses

CH: I liked the long ‘travel’ piece you wrote in Australia. You’re very much a spiritual person aren’t you?

WS: Yes, when I went to see the whirling dervishes. Yes, I think so. Middle-age tends to afflict us in this way doesn’t it? And I think that cleaning up from drugs necessarily entails a revaluation of the spiritual facet of yourself. In order to shut off an entirely self-destructive way of life you have to look for a positive direction. But I think for people viewing my fictional work it’s always been there. I think that, this is a broad brush, but people tend to mistake me for a nihilist but I’m not really like this at all.

CH: Ballard gets misunderstood in that way too.

WS: Yes, I don’t think people really get what he’s up to in that respect. I think people who do understand, really understand, and people who don’t understand just don’t understand it. I’m unashamed of saying that: that I am more interested in spiritual questions. I’m looking at writing a novel about revealed religion at the moment.

CH: What about the other novel you were writing on ‘land use’?

WS: Yeah, if only I’d written it before foot and mouth. No, I mean what I wanted to do was set something in a rural context and that’s what I will do with this book on revealed religion. It’s not about the farm industry. I’m engaged in rather an odd thing which is that I’m going to turn a screenplay of Dorian Gray that I’ve been writing for about three years back into a novel.

So, I’m basically going to rewrite Oscar Wilde [Amazon], which is something I would have never done off my own back, but having been commissioned to write a screenplay and realising the very strong likelihood that it will never get made, I wanted to make something out of the material I already had.

I’ve transposed Dorian to the gay scene of the 1980s and 90s, into the epicentre of the Aids epidemic and I think it’s an interesting treatment of it and it’ll make an interesting novella. So that’s going to be the next fictional project. The fascinating thing about Dorian is that – I’ll probably get hung, drawn and quartered for this – it’s not actually that great a novel. What it is is an incredibly powerful cultural idea.

Just like the idea that Dorian himself is impervious to time, so the text itself has been impervious to time because in many ways it, rather like a Ballard book – you know he’s one of the very few writers to have been able to foretell the cultural future in that way. Wilde foretold the probable shape of a kind of aggressively “out” gay culture in the 20th century. I think that’s what’s fascinating about Dorian and the way in which gay culture in the late 20th century has become a synechdoche of the narcissism, and media obsession of western culture as a novel, and that’s where I pick up on it today.

CH: So it’s nearing completion?

WS: Err, no. But I would like it to be published some time next year, but when I really get my teeth into something it comes fairly quickly, and it is all there. It just says “Interior. Night. Scene 82. A bar in Greenwich Village.” I have to knock all those out and put it into prose and I’ve got a book hopefully.

CH: Have you been approached by any filmmakers regarding adaptations of your stories?

WS: An amateur made an amateur film of Cock And Bull [Amazon], which he wanted to push commercially, but after seeing it I confess I denied permission for this. In truth, I never would’ve allowed the amateur production to go ahead had he not come on with a sad story about already having spent aeons working on the screenplay. Cock has also been optioned for film twice by the producer Christine Vachon (‘Boys Don’t Cry’) but nothing has come of it, despite my seeing one excellent screenplay written by a guy called Nix (I kid you not). Otherwise, not a single one of the other narratives has been optioned.

CH: Would you be amenable to films made of your work, or do think it might be disastrous?

WS: I think for a writer it’s an almost always an artistic lose-lose scenario. Either you take the money and abrogate all responsibility for the finished article (which then, in all likelihood, ill serves the original), or else you take less money and become creatively involved (if they’ll have you), in which case, in all probability, your participation will be vitiated to the point where it makes no difference anyway. I know several of my peers who have spent years working on film adaptations of their work, only for them either to come out badly, or else not come out at all. Martin Amis has it about right when he says: ‘Don’t believe they’ve made a movie of your book until you rent the video.’ In part, I feel obscurely satisfied that there have been no film adaptations. To my mind it proves that I’m doing something which can only be done in the form of prose fiction. Mind you, the bank manager might well have a different take on this.

CH: Which stories would you be interested in seeing adapted?

WS: I’ve always felt that ‘Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys’ (the story) would make a great British road movie. The problem with road movies in Britain is that there isn’t usually enough road, but by starting in Caithness, on the north coast of Scotland, and having scenes the entire way to London, I think this story avoids the usual pitfalls. I’ve even gone so far as to rough out a scene plan for it, but because of all the problems mentioned above, I’ve never gone any further. I also think ‘The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz’ together with its sequel ‘The Nonce Prize’ would make a good movie. As for the novels, well, Cock would be good (no sight of the genitals – just reaction shots); and Great Apes [Amazon], I feel, could be made quite easily and effectively, by simply having humans play chimpanzees, without any makeup, just half-naked, copulating freely, grooming etc.. And with subtitles (they would sign as in the book).

CH: Which filmmakers would you trust with your work?

WS: Completely trust? Well, Cronenberg for Cock, Gilliam for My Idea of Fun [Amazon] or How the Dead Live.

CH: And finally, what question would you ask yourself?

WS: Erm, I think the question I ask myself most is, and this comes up particularly in relation to this anti-war stuff which is the first public political thing that I’ve put my head above the parapet for kind of ever. So I’d be inclined to ask myself: do you really believe that your work as a writer represents a significant or a meaningful contribution to political and social debate or do you think there’s something more you should be doing? So that’s the kind of question I tend to ask myself most.

Fin

Ballard is one of the best writers of speculative fiction alive today. Whether exploring the innate sexuality of automobile accidents, the power of dreams as reality, or navigating through the rubble of modern civilization, his often savage, apocalyptic work has influenced artists and filmmakers alike. Ballard himself counts among his influences the surrealist painters Dali, Magritte, and Ernst, as well as William Burroughs, whom he considers to be one of the most important authors of the twentieth century.

Ballard first entered the literary world as a science fiction writer, a genre he soon exhausted and has not explored in years. His transition to the mainstream was not entirely smooth, however. His 1970 anthology, The Atrocity Exhibition, was deleted from the Farrar, Straus and Giroux catalogue soon after its U.S. publication because of short stories like “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” and “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy.” After reading his classic 1972 novel, Crash, an editor wryly commented, “The author is beyond psychiatric help.”

I found Mr. Ballard to be quite sane – piercingly so, in fact – as he talked to me recently from his home in Shepperton, a suburb of London. Ballard is the author of 16 novels, including Hello America, The Crystal World, Empire of the Sun, The Terminal Beach, The Unlimited Dream Company and The Disaster Area. His newest novel, Rushing to Paradise, was just published by Picador U.S.A.

Ballard as seen by Ballard

MM: How do you see yourself as a writer and what do you think is your niche in the literary world?

JGB: I can’t speak for the United States, but I suppose some still refer to me as a science fiction writer. But since Empire of the Sun came out ten years ago, I think people have welcomed me to the mainstream. Although I’m not so sure I want to be embraced by the mainstream. I think I’m still what I always was, a kind of fringe writer. I think I’m an imaginative writer who began his career by writing science fiction, but I haven’t written any, really, for a very long time. I don’t even consider Crash to be a science fiction novel. I don’t know whether you’ve read it or not.

MM: Definitely. It seems to me that fantastically imaginative fiction tends to be lumped in with the whole science fiction genre.

JGB: Exactly. If you look at twentieth century novels, you can see that there’s a sort of mainstream, or what I would call realistic or naturalistic fiction. And then there are the imaginative writers who often tend to be mavericks. You know Genet, Celine, Burroughs, and so on. And I like to think of myself as a maverick. I’m certainly not a literary man, and this is an important point. I’ve met a great number of writers, novelists rather, English ones in particular, whose stock of references – their sort of instant associations that come to mind when they create and all that – all tend to come from the world of literature. Mine do not.

I’m interested in science and medicine, the media landscape, and so on. My reflexes are not the reflexes of a literary man. I’m more of a magpie pecking at any bright pieces of foil. I’m interested in the world, not the world of literature.

Science Fiction

MM: So you wouldn’t file your work of the past 15 or 20 years under science fiction?

JGB: No, not anymore. Some of my work was, there’s certainly no question about that. And I’m very proud that I was a science fiction writer. As I’ve often said, it’s the most authentic literature of the twentieth century. Sadly enough, most science fiction is being written by the wrong people nowadays. The constraints of a certain kind of commercial fiction have tended to formularize the field over the last 50 years.

MM: Speaking from my own experience, I think many people, especially as young readers, are drawn to the newness, inventiveness, even classic adventure elements of science fction, but eventually outgrow it. As you said, you find the repetition and formula simply bore you. Especially when you realise there’s so much more out there. Why limit yourself? Why be just a science fiction writer or reader?

JGB: I agree with you. That’s true. And that’s why I myself stopped writing. People within the science fiction world never regarded me as one of them in the first place. They saw me as the enemy. I was the one who wanted to subvert everything they believed. I wanted to kill outer space stone dead. I wanted to kill the far future and focus on inner space and the next five minutes. And sci-fiers to this day don’t regard me as one of them. I’m some sort of virus who got aboard and penetrated the virtue of science fiction and began to pervert its DNA.

Rushing to Paradise

MM: Your new novel deals with obsessive themes like fanaticism, radicalism and militant feminism, all within the frame of the extremist wing of the environmental movement. It’s not only eerily timely, it also strikes a raw nerve, especially in view of the healthy wave of anti-political correctness sweeping ouer the United States at the moment.

JGB: Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? The great talent of the United States is to take things too far, so that you have these huge pendulum swings of sorts. Always correct and then reverse. And then correct and reverse again. Here in England, I would say the extremist fringe of the feminist movement is largely positive. I’ve got two daughters as well as a son, and they’ve benefited enormously from the feminist movement of the past 20 years. England is a very class-bound society, and women, until recently, were practically an inferior class. Most professions were closed to women 30 years ago, except teaching and publishing. Nowadays they’re all mostly open. So we do have a few extremists, but nothing compared to the U.S., where you really do have some very strange people.

Sex, Violence, Censorship, Reality

MM: You said in a recent interview that “Everything should be done to encourage more sex and violence on television”.

JGB: Yes, I did say that. And I think it’s true. I mean, I live in the most censored nation in the Western world. There’s no question about that. Many people have said so. Film, TV videos, and art are more heavily censored here than anywhere in Western Europe or the U.S.

Censorship in England has a clear political role. It represents the fear of the established order that given any sort of imaginative freedom, or too much of it, the power structure will collapse. If people see sex and violence treated frankly, they may turn the same frank eye upon their own political situation. And start climbing up the base of the pyramid towards the apex. The people in real control sanitise the view of the world for us. Absolutely.

Best Work

MM: In his book, The 99 Best Novels Since 1939, Anthony Burgess considers your novel The Unlimited Dream Company to be your most important work to date. Which do you consider your best?

JGB: My most original and probably best novel is Crash. This is probably where I pushed my imagination as far as it has gone. I’ve also got a soft spot for other books of mine, most notably The Atrocity Exhibition. The Atrocity Exhibition is practically incomprehensible to most readers, whereas Crash is directly intelligible. There’s no doubt at all about what the author’s getting on about.

The Unavoidable Question

MM: Can we talk about Empire of the Sun? That is, if it isn’t already an exhausted topic. What is your opinion of Steven Spielberg’s film version of your novel?

JGB: I was very impressed by it. I thought it was a fine film. In fact, trying to remain as neutral as possible, I think it’s a much better film than Schindler’s List because it’s more imagined than Schindler’s List. I think the film is a remarkable effort in many ways. He extracted a wonderful performance from the boy. He was very faithful to the spirit of the book. There are always problems when Hollywood tackles a war film because the conventions of the entertainment cinema can’t really cope with the horrors of war. Still, I think it was a remarkable film, and more and more people are beginning to realize it.

Current Readings

MM: Have you read anything recently thut impressed you favourably?

JGB: Well, I don’t read much fiction nowadays, to be honest. Writing the stuff all day means when I read I tend to read nonfiction. It feeds my imagination. I read a great deal, but I can’t really pick a landmark book offhand. Let’s see, well, I just finished The Moral Animal by Richard Wright, a study of neo-Darwinism. That was quite impressive. Actually the best novel I’ve read in a while is by that Danish writer Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow. I thought it was a wonderful book. Far more than a mere thriller. In fact, it’s a pity that it had any thriller element to it at all. It was much more than that. It was quite remarkable on all sorts of levels. I hope it did well in the states. My girlfriend is reading his new one (Borderliners) now

Current projects

MM: What are you working on now?

JGB: I’m halfway through another novel untitled as of yet – another sort of cautionary tale. I’d rather not discuss it in detail thaugh.

MM: Any plans to come over to the States and promote Rushing to Paradise?

JGB: Oh, probably not, I’m too engrossed in the new book.

Last Words – William Burroughs

See all books by William Burroughs at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

The works of William Seward Burroughs have always, even among those who think themselves the hippest of the hip, been considered a bit much. Without a doubt, Ginsberg and Kerouac have been the most popular authors of the Beat movement, but the fact remains that Kerouac’s reputation is based on one work of literature and that Ginsberg, despite a promising start, veered off into insipid, preachy poetry in his later days. One hundred years from now the Kerouac and Ginsberg will be cultural footnotes, at best. The undisputed genius of the "Beat Generation" will be William Seward Burroughs.

While the so called "Beat Generation" prided themselves on producing literature of a transgressive nature, Howl and On the Road are hardly shocking to anyone over fifteen years of age. The same cannot be said of Naked Lunch. Burroughs’ masterpiece, and the cut-up trilogy which served as his follow up are still as appalling and prophetic today as they were when they were written.

His notion of a world full of image addicts has taken on new relevance in a world where people flip through four-hundred television channels or surf from web site to web site looking for their next fix, and his concept of a Nova Conspiracy facilitated by taking statements made by two opposing factions and then judiciously editing them so that the disagreeing parties only hear the most inflammatory remarks of their rivals is a deadly accurate description of our modern mediascape, which is ruled by sound bites and bickering pundits.

At his peak Burroughs was a prophet with an imagination as off kilter as any of his counterparts in the Old Testament, but in his later days the manic energy and anger that fueled his best works faded and he produced books like The Cat Inside and My Education: A Book of Dreams.

Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs is an incredibly sad collection of the writings that Burroughs made in the nine months before his death in August of 1997. One would expect Burroughs’s last words to be a apocalyptic rant in the style of his own fictional templates such as the last words of Hassan I Sabbah from Nova Express or The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. This is not the case, however.

Last Words veers between Burroughs’ attempts to come up with new routines dealing with his old preoccupations such as drugs, paranoia, extra terrestrials and control, and his more poignant musings on his beloved felines, mortality, and his past mistakes. Surprisingly, it is his more conventional musings that make for the interesting reading, revealing a contemplative, almost sentimental side to the infamous literary outlaw.

Burroughs’ attempts at routines are, even he acknowledges, as "lifeless and flat as old mud spattered snow," and it is when he writes about the death of Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, or one of his pet cats (especially his cats) that he shows the reader that he still possesses the passion that gave birth to his notorious routines, but that he is, in his own words, "just emerging from a stormy adolescence" and one is inclined, not to lament the decline of a great writer, but to celebrate the belated birth of a complete man.

“I am Human”, cries the protagonist in Will Self’s novel Great Apes. A phrase that may sound like a sturdy truism, in Self’s novel rings heavily: the protagonist has waken one morning only to find all human beings transmogrified into chimpanzees. The reader and the protagonist are both kept in the same suspense: what are the fundaments of this world? Is he mad, is he subject to a sinister experiment of psychiatry or ­ worst of all ­ are his experiences a virtual simulation?

The boundaries for what we regard as “human” are highly unstable in contemporary culture. In the movie The Matrix, what we call “reality” is just code in a giant computer, constructed by artificial intelligences. Similarly, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ is about a computer game that is so biotechnologicaly complex that no one can tell whether they are in the “game” or in “reality”. Bret Easton Ellis’ latest novel Glamorama shows that people are literary just as virtual as real, and Ormus Cama, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet constantly sees through into parallel world, right along the “real” one.

Science fiction literature and ideas have slipped into a wider cultural current and has dragged what we regard as “human” with them. At American universities it is nowadays common to speak about the “posthuman” condition. Old sci-fi concepts of androids, virtual reality and cyborgs are seriously discussed by computer scientists and cybernetic researchers. Researchers Edward Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram claim, for example, that reality is a program run on a cosmic computer ­ a theory highly similar to the one fictionally launched in The Matrix.

In her book How We Became Posthuman, UCLA professor of literature N. Katherine Hayless describes the robot scientist Hans Moravecs vision in Mind Children: how a sophisticated robot purées a human brain and downloads it onto a computer disc. Operation concluded, the human awakes with her conciousness intact, but liberated from the chains of the flesh. Now she exists forever in the form of eternal, incorruptable information. And off to inmortality we go.

Moravec, obviously, is one of the most anti-biology researchers in the field, and would happily see the human body join the dinosaurs in historical oblivion. In her book, Hayles emphatically opposes the idea that posthumanism would implicate the destruction of the human being. Rather, Hayles regards posthumanism as a beautiful thought: to see the human as a distributed cognitive system, where part of the intelligence lies in the human brain, part in intelligent machines and part in the interface between them. Hayles is decidedly opposed to the thought of people wandering about considering their bodies as fashion accessories; for her, posthumanism means welcoming the possibilities of information technology, without being seduced by dreams of de-biologized immortality and unlimited power.

The posthuman vision smashes the pedestal on which humanity has put itself and reconfigures the human condition to incorporate a frictionless interlacing with intelligent machines. In the posthuman condition, there are no differences between bodily existence and computer simulation, not between cybernetic mechanism and biological organism. Information is the originate, the phsysical body is the derivate.

This way of perceiving human beings shoots the Western idea of a coherent, independent subject to pieces. Certainly, for those familiar with the jargon, posthumanism borrow some of its theoretical underwear from postmodernist thinking, or at least some of the theoretical idols are the same. Throughout her book, Hayles enroles the work of among others Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari. The texts she analyses cover vast ground: ranging from sci-fi icons such as Bernhard Wolfe, Philip K. Dick and William Gibson through toWilliam Burroughs and Italo Calvino.

Just as is the case with postmodernism, one can argue at length wether posthumanism is really a forum for reactionists or radicals. For Katherine Hayles ­ as for Donna Haraway ­ it is decidedly the latter: a springboard for feministic and postcolonial thinking. Hayles’ vision of posthumansim does not implicate the end of humankind, but an end to a particular way of looking upon humans, a way which only suits those with enough power, money and time to regard themselves as free, individual and unique subjects. You know who I’m talking about? Of course: the Great White Male.

I believe she’s right. A large part of the inhabitants in the Western civilisation is already to be considered cyborgs. For example, 10 percent of the U.S. population already carry around different forms of artificial implants as pacemakers, plastic joints and electronic pumps ­ cyborgs in the technical sense of the word. The rest of us, who daily use computers to think and communicate, are so in a metaphorical sense. There is no longer any reason to regard the intelligent machines and the smart cards as vicious enemies. Machines spit out our cash, heat our food and open our doors. Perhaps Philip K. Dick expresses the deepest (post)human truth in his classic story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: “The electric things have their lifes, too. Paltry as those lifes are”.

William Gibson needs no introduction. But he’s going to get one anyway.

Gibson coined the term ‘cyberspace,’ visualising a worldwide communications net eleven years before the World Wide Web was born. His debut novel Neuromancer won all three major science fiction awards — the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K Dick — upon its release. He is the first name that comes to mind when the term ‘Cyberpunk’ is mentioned, known and revered the world over by authors, artists, rock bands and more.

Yet Gibson the man remains startlingly elusive. A professional novelist for fifteen years, he has published only seven novels (one of which was co-written) and most of his reputation remains, somewhat unfairly, rooted in Neuromancer. He lives a quiet life with his wife and children in Canada. In a staggering display of irony, for many years Gibson refused to even have an Internet connection, saying the last thing he wanted after a day staring at his word processor was to carry on using the computer. Even now, at the height of his success and in his mid-forties, he continues to quietly support innovative, street-level art.

But despite being trapped in a Leonard Nimoy-style cage of Neuromancer’s success, Gibson continues to innovate himself both in style and concept. He does not rest on his laurels, and looks set to burst forth into the popular mindset for a second time.

His latest novel, All Tomorrow’s Parties, is released next month. He is continuing his work in television after the success of his X-Files episode ‘Killswitch’. And the highly-anticipated, oft-speculated film adaptation of Neuromancer is finally entering production. He even finally has an email address! What brought that on?

“I’ve just been avoiding it,” says Gibson. “Having kids did it for me, I suppose. I couldn’t very well deny it to them, so eventually we had three or four different addresses in the house. It was difficult to avoid it, then.”

So can we assume William Gibson is ‘back for good’? Like its two predecessors (Virtual Light and Idoru) All Tomorrow’s Parties has taken nearly three years to appear. Gibson admits he’s been somewhat slow: “In terms of the speed which I’d always assumed genre sf writers worked at, I felt I was hardly producing at all. I took a break. Hiatus, as they say in TV. But now I’m back.”

And with an increased workload, most significantly the Neuromancer film. After countless rumours, director Chris Cunningham has finally been announced to helm the feature. Cunningham is a twenty-something prodigy, best known for his dark, off-beat music videos for Bjork, Aphex Twin and Madonna. He’s also a student of the late Stanley Kubrick… but he’s never directed a Hollywood feature. So how on earth did he get this job?

“He was brought to my attention by someone else. We were told, third-hand, that he was extremely chary of the Hollywood process, and wouldn’t return calls. But someone else told us that Neuromancer had been his Wind In The Willows, that he’d read it when he was twelve. I went to London and we met.”

After the debacle that was Johnny Mnemonic, Gibson is understandably coy about the whole process. Johnny Mnemonic was also directed by a Hollywood novice, avant-garde artist Robert Longo. Gibson once told me that the film they made was “More like Blue Velvet.” Clearly not the same film that ended up on the silver screen, then. What makes him so sure this one will turn out right?

“Chris is my own 100 per cent personal choice,” he says firmly. “My only choice. The only person I’ve met who I thought might have a hope in hell of doing it right.

“I went back to see him in London just after he’d finished the Bjork video, and I sat on a couch beside this dead sex little Bjork robot, except it was wearing Aphex Twin’s head. We talked. And we’re still talking.”

Unfortunately, that’s all he’ll say: “I’ve learned that discussing these projects doesn’t really help them to happen.”

So let’s talk about technology. Despite the impact his work has had on real-world science, most of Gibson’s fiction is clearly about people and humanity rather than technology itself. Why does he write science fiction at all?

“Because I believe that most social change is now technologically-driven, and that new technologies are very seldom — almost never, really — legislated into existence.”

Interesting, because Gibson has also admitted many times that he simply “makes the technology up.” That was certainly the case with Neuromancer, where the worldwide virtual network was actually inspired by watching children become absorbed in arcade games. Does he still do that?

“I do make it up, to a certain extent. But it isn’t the toys themselves, the specific tech bits, that I’m genuinely concerned with — rather the way in which new technologies impact the social animal in ways that the developers of these technologies never thought of.”

Is the Gibson household swamped with subscriptions to New Scientist and Astrophysics Today, then?

“I don’t do ‘research’, I just walk around. This stuff’s in everyone’s face today. It’s more a matter of not ignoring it. Paying attention.

“Laney’s node-spotter function [from Idoru] is some sort of metaphor for whatever it is that I actually do. There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them. Although I can’t tell you how; it’s a non-rational process.”

On a similar note, how does Gibson keep his famous ‘edge’? He’s no spring chicken. Yet his characters, especially the younger ones, are remarkably consistent with current trends. How does he keep in touch with the ‘street’?

“It’s the same non-rational process, really, but applied to culture. I think Brian Eno’s right in defining culture as everything we do that we don’t absolutely need to do. I just walk around. I look at what people are doing — particularly if they’re doing it passionately — that they don’t really need to do.”

An image of Gibson wandering around South Central at two in the morning clutching a notebook springs to mind, but I decide not to voice it.

“I’ve always been fascinated by expressions of individual style, particularly in the street sense. I suspect that that’s one of the oddest things about me, at least in terms of someone being marketed as some sort of science fiction writer.”

But which sort, exactly? Gibson is known as the ‘Grand-daddy of dystopian fiction’. Yet nearly all of his work has an underlying optimism, even what might be called happy endings.

“I really don’t think I’m dystopian at all. No more than I’m utopian. The dichotomy is hopelessly old-fashioned, really. What we have today is a combination of the two, with all the knobs turned up to max.”

So it doesn’t bother him?

“No.”

What does he read himself? Does he follow the rise of ‘upstarts’ such as Jeff Noon and Neal Stephenson?

“I read Iain Sinclair and Cormac McCarthy. But,” he smiles, “I’m always on the lookout for a good upstart.”

Let’s move onto All Tomorrow’s Parties. Did Gibson always visualise Virtual Light as the beginning of a series?

“No. I always back into the trilogy thing. It’s embarrassing, really. I swear I thought VL was going to be a one-off. It’s an organic process for me, rather than one of deliberation. The one text grows out of the other. It’s as though the previous book becomes compost for the next one.” Lovely image, cheers.

“I don’t work to any rationale; it’s a seat-of-the-pants thing. And the extent to which I can feel that it’s not rational, is exactly the extent to which I’m convinced that I’m really doing my job.”

In ATP, the Idoru finally becomes a physical entity. There’s surely a lot more he could do with that — will he?

“No. The world she’ll live in is on the other side of a technological singularity. There’s no way I can even imagine it.”

No seat-of-the-pants fourth book, then. ATP is still a satisfying conclusion, but it could have gone anywhere. Many people were expecting a work on the Walled City from Idoru, for example, yet Gibson bypassed it to get straight to ATP, and the end of the world centred around — yet again — San Francisco.

“The bridge was still more resonant, for me. More fun writing about a physical construct, somehow. And ATP seems to me to be about cyberspace everting itself into the physical; about the boundaries starting to blur from the other direction… Some of the most important boundaries, to me, being about genre: is this SF, a thriller, none of the above?

“The San Francisco thing probably has something to do with it being on the West Coast but having the core paradigm of a European city. It makes sense in European terms; Los Angeles, for example, doesn’t. SF is a city stressed by postmodernity, rather than an expression of postmodernity such as LA.”

Yet postmodernism is essential to Gibson’s work. Throughout this series, for example, the media has been portrayed as ever more sensationalist. How close does he think we are to shows such as ‘Slitscan’ actually coming into being?

“In North America we’re well into tabloid TV, but our national print tabs are already way beyond that. Difficult, if not impossible, to parody.”

But parodied they are, and ATP’s conclusion concerning information flow is a dichotomy; on the one hand, increased informational awareness will change everything, and on the other it will change nothing (for the majority of ‘ordinary’ people). Is this purposeful?

“The resolution of a dichotomy usually lies in apparent paradox. But you’ve got your thumb on the book’s heart, I think, and I can’t really explicate that for you. Otherwise we’d be talking about a didactic fiction, and I hope ATP isn’t that.”

Okay, time to stir up the nest. ATP essentially carries the same message as Mona Lisa Overdrive — that pure information (and artificial intelligence) will point the way to society and mankind’s next evolutionary step. Discuss.

“We seem to be — through genetics, now, mainly — on the brink of taking ‘control’ of our own evolution. That’s a matter of ‘pure information’, I suppose. Though I seem to recall characters in an earlier book who used the term ‘pure information’ rather than ‘lies’.

“But really I don’t see that as message so much as mimetic. A depiction of what’s happening now.”

Perhaps inevitable, then, that the meme replicates from book to book. So let’s get more specific. Harwood, corporate ruler of the world and primary antagonist of ATP, declares that he wants to somehow survive beyond the singularity of the book’s climax. Is he an analogy for man’s fear of the future?

“Harwood is about human will, so, yes, I suppose he’s about fear. ‘You’re so spontaneous; don’t ever change.’ All suffering is rooted in the desire for permanence.” Gibson smiles. “I heard someone say that in an Indian movie.”

So is there a moral behind Harwood’s downfall being brought about by three principal characters who don’t manipulate information the way he does?

“Well, there’s a satisfaction to it, for me. Morals are for fables.”

We’re running out of time, but I have to ask: just who the hell is ATP’s ‘Tao man’? He’s an entirely new character, with no name, no background beyond a few vague flashbacks, and is completely amoral. Where the hell did he come from?

“I thought of him as literally being someone who wandered in from another book. He turned up one day. Wouldn’t go away. After the book was finished I wondered if he weren’t some sort of avatar connected to the late William Burroughs. An unconscious expression of Burroughsness. He’s a character Burroughs would’ve enjoyed, I’m pretty certain of that.”

Sounds like something straight out of Mulder’s casebook. And speaking of which, Gibson’s future plans are good news for couch potatoes…

“I’m working on a second X-Files episode with Tom Maddox; talking about doing some writing for Harsh Realm, the new Chris Carter series; and getting another book proposal ready. Plus there’s Neuromancer.”

Welcome back, Your Highness.

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Despite appearing in print for the first time this month, Geoff Ryman’s 253 is not a new book. This self-styled “interactive novel” has been available on the Internet since 1996 at http://www.ryman-novel.com, and its electronic success has prompted the “print re-mix” version to be published.

The original Internet version of 253 was not a simple case of Ryman putting an unpublished manuscript on his Web site for others to read. Instead, it was consciously written to exploit the new possibilities for writing which the Internet offered. 253 refers to the number of passengers which a London Underground tube train can hold, including the driver. The novel follows the pattern of describing each of the passengers on board in exactly 253 words, including their outward appearance and their internal thoughts.

With the electronic version, the reader can choose any passenger from which to begin reading and then follow how that character interacts with the other tube travellers by clicking the links provided. It’s a curiously addictive form of storytelling, relying both on the illusion that the reader is shaping the story through choosing which links to follow, and the voyeuristic joy of finding out what people really think on the tube.

However, much of this joy is lost in the printed version precisely because there are no links. Every passenger gets a page to themselves but there is little attempt to try and recreate the interactivity of the book’s original version. You can’t open 253 at any page, and so any passenger, because you’ll soon be stranded with a particular character, unable to move on to another. Instead of preserving the dynamic essence of 253′s electronic incarnation, the book simply asks you to read 253 character descriptions from beginning to end. With the absence of any real character interaction, this quickly becomes tedious. As Ryman himself admits in the introduction , “Nothing exciting happens in this novel. It is ideal fare for invalids”.

It appears that whoever was in charge of the transition of 253 from the Internet to the printed page had little idea of what they were dealing with. Where the electronic version seems alive and organic, the print version feels like an example of form obliterating content.

In cyberspace, 253 is already considered a classic example of the emerging genre known as “hypertext fiction”, which is seen by some literary critics to be the logical extension of James Joyce and William Burroughs’ non-linear experiments with writing. In print, however, 253 can only be seen as a missed opportunity to demonstrate the impact of the Internet on the art of the novel.