Inequality of interview

[imomus]

You find me in Vienna, where I've been interviewed for local magazine Falter about a performance I'll give in May at the Technical University.

I must say I love being interviewed, I love the way it makes you feel that people really care about what you think. Sitting in a Vienna bar last night, with a photographer shining bright lights and two reporters (one, Tex, a local TV star) alternating questions, I remembered what Morrissey had once said: being a celebrity is sometimes the only way to be treated at least half-decently as a human being. As all human beings should be treated.

But I also thought of the song at the end of The Threepenny Opera, the epilogue about "some in light, the others darkness". The photographer seemed to guess my thoughts. "You must have been photographed so many times!" he said. But there are lots of people who are never professionally photographed, never interviewed. My own brother, for instance. I don't think there's a single interview with him anywhere, despite the fact that he's the head of a university department. Perhaps he wouldn't enjoy the self-revelation as much as I do, but there's undoubtedly an inverse relationship between willingness to speak and the interestingness of the results.

We should turn the spotlight on the taciturn, interview the never-interviewed, turn and face the strange, squeeze blood from a stone. We should introduce genuinely new information into our media systems, and attempt to establish "equality of interview". We could start right here, right now, by interviewing the Anonymous Detractors and trolls who haunt these pages so enigmatically. Who are they, and what are their thoughts on the issues of the day?

I'll be on trains now until midnight, but I'd love to read some really telling interviews in the comments section when I get home. Today is the day to ask one another questions, and answer them in good faith.

Comments

a new man on the shoulders of the last

[(Anonymous)]

In short, he was a believer in the Identity-philosophy, which he held not idly, as the dreamers of Berlin or Boston, but which he experimented with and established through years of labor, with the heart and strength of the rudest Viking that his rough Sweden ever sent to battle.

This theory dates from the oldest philosophers, and derives perhaps its best illustration from the newest. It is this, that Nature iterates her means perpetually on successive planes. In the old aphorism, nature is always self-similar. In the plant, the eye or germinative point opens to a leaf, then to another leaf, with a power of transforming the leaf into radicle, stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed. The whole art of the plant is still to repeat leaf on leaf without end, the more or less of heat, light, moisture and food determining the form it shall assume. In the animal, nature makes a vertebra, or a spine of vertebrae, and helps herself still by a new spine, with a limited power of modifying its form,- spine on spine, to the end of the world. A poetic anatomist, in our own day, teaches that a snake, being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect line, constitute a right angle; and between the lines of this mystical quadrant all animated beings find their place: and he assumes the hair-worm, the span-worm, or the snake, as the type or prediction of the spine. Manifestly, at the end of the spine, Nature puts out smaller spines, as arms; at the end of the arms, new spines, as hands; at the other end, she repeats the process, as legs and feet. At the top of the column she puts out another spine, which doubles or loops itself over, as a span-worm, into a ball, and forms the skull, with extremities again: the hands being now the upper jaw, the feet the lower jaw, the fingers and toes being represented this time by upper and lower teeth. This new spine is destined to high uses. It is a new man on the shoulders of the last. It can almost shed its trunk and manage to live alone, according to the Platonic idea in the Timaeus. Within it, on a higher plane, all that was done in the trunk repeats itself. Nature recites her lesson once more in a higher mood. The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here in the brain is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated. In the brain are male and female faculties; here is marriage, here is fruit. And there is no limit to this ascending scale, but series on series. Every thing, at the end of one use, is taken up into the next, each series punctually repeating every organ and process of the last. We are adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends; and in nature is no end, but every thing at the end of one use is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial natures. Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant.

Re: a new man on the shoulders of the last

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Magnificent, Anon, thank you!