Dan Schneider's Open Salon Blog

Reviews Of 3 Werner Herzog Films

Fri, 25 May 2012 14:05:12 -0400

Reviews Of My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?; Cave Of Forgotten Dreams; And Into The Abyss

I recently streamed and watched three recent films by the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog. The first was a fictive film- My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?- which, despite my expectations and others’ reviews, turned out to be the best fictive film Herzog’s done since the end of his collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski, and the other two were highly lauded documentaries (a form Herzog has excelled in over his half century long career)- Cave Of Forgotten Dreams and Into The Abyss- which were, oddly, not nearly as good as the criticism received.

(1)

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? is a 2009 film that misses out on greatness simply because it’s a single-minded film, and not a film that contains any depth, in relation to how its tale nor characters relate to the greater society. It is one of the best portrayals of a psychotic and psychopathic mind since Martin Scorsese’s 1976 classic, Taxi Driver, but the comparison to that great film is very instructive as to why the Herzog film fails at greatness. In Taxi Driver, we see how Travis Bickle’s actions reflect and affect the people and times he is in. We get nothing of that in the Herzog film.

That stated, we do get an utterly brilliant and wholly realistic portrait of a killer in star Michael Shannon’s Brad McCallum (or McCullum- the name is never clear for most of the characters in the film pronounce it McCullum while the screen credits list it as McCallum), who calmly murders his shrewish and overbearing mother (Grace Zabriskie) with a sword while at a neighbor’s house. The film’s title comes from the last words his mother utters before death. The rest of the film follows Brad’s journey, while holding his two pet flamingos hostage, and this scenario is the best and most realistic portrait of such a time since Dog Day Afternoon. We see lead San Diego detective Havenhurst (Willem Dafoe) and his partner Detective Vargas (Michael Peña) deal with the people Brad knows, as they try to coax him to surrender. These people fill in Brad’s backstory with flashbacks. Included are his Brad's fiancée Ingrid (Chloe Sevigny) and his friend, Lee Meyers (Udo Kier), a local theatrical producer. Brad and Ingrid had studied with him, and we see flashbacks of Brad’s obsessions, and being asked to leave the cast when he obsessed on elements of a Greek tragedy (he was to play Orestes in Sophocles’ Electra) Lee was gearing up to direct. The film then ends with Brad’s surrender, after Ingrid realizes his ‘hostages’ are his flamingos- or eagles in drag.

Shannon is pitch perfect with his madness, starting from a Peruvian kayaking trip he demurs from (the scene of the start of another of Herzog’s great films on insanity, Aguirre: The Wrath Of God), which kills his friends, to his assumption of the name Farouk, to his belief that the face of God resides on an oatmeal container, to his calm bizarreness in general. Sevigny is excellent as the clueless and desperately lonely fiancée, while Kier delights as the agog friend- and Herzog makes ironic use of Kier’s iconic stature as a horror film actor to rein him in to comment on assorted bizarre things he witnesses, such as the over the top scenes between Brad and his loony and racist ostrich farming uncle Ted (Brad Dourif), which ends in a classic ‘Herzog Moment’ involving a dwarf. While Dourif chews scenery, it’s perfectly apropos to the moment the film unhinges itself, and also given that we see this partly from Brad’s POV. Other odd moments occur when we see Brad at Machu Picchu, in a Tibetan marketplace, and seeking to buy pillows for ‘the sick, in general, ‘ at a San Diego military hospital, and often these scenes, retrospectively, are seen as telegraphed earlier, but not in the ham-handed way a Steven Spielberg would do so. The film ends with Brad’s surrender, and asking Havenhurst two questions: 1) could he put in his report that it was ostriches running, not flamingos, that were the birds involved, and 2) what happened to his basketball, which, in the film’s final shot, we see a small bou pluck out of the branches of a tree.

Herzog’s direction is flawless, and cameraman Peter Zeitlinger does his usual sparkling cinematography by making blasé San Diego seem feral. Ernst Reijseger’s score is apropos to the scenes, but the weak link is the film’s screenplay, written by Herzog and Herbert Golder. It is good, for al it does; the problem is with just a few more moments and scenes, here and there, this 91 minute film, at 100 or so minutes, could have hit greatness. Some critics missed the boat and panned this excellent work, usually bemoaning it as a bastard love child between director Herzog and producer David Lynch, but there is little Lynchian material here. It is all Herzog. And it is definitely NOT a black comedy. Moments of humor do not make a film a comedy. It is straight on drama, and very realistic to the point that its utter lack of real poesy hurts it, artistically. Still, this is a relative claim since Herzog oozes cinematic poesy in almost all his films.

(2)

Well, almost all his films. The most interesting thing about this tercet of Herzog films is how banal the two highly lauded documentaries I watched were. The first was 2010’s The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, an 89 minute plop into the center of Chauvet Cave, in France, where two decades ago, the oldest known cave paintings were found, dating back over 32,000 years. Because the film was shot in the cave’s limited quarters, and the crew was not allowed to get off a small two foot wide walkway, the film uses odd camera angles, and the goofy 3D device to try and sell it, but it does not work (and, no, I did not see this streaming film on Netflix via 3D).

The French regard for the cave is a bit over the top- sealing it in as if it contained the country’s entire collection of precious minerals. Instead, all we see are some rather banal to interesting cave paintings. Yes, they may be the oldest yet discovered, but the renderings are, of themselves, not particularly great. The cave is also filled with toxic gases and radiation, but the bulk of the film follows the scientists and spelunkers opining on the art in rather puerile terms, and also going to great lengths to conjecture over the meaning of the images. Some of these posits are almost funny, but most are almost assuredly wrong, for they reflect what each scientist holds most dear. They become Rorschach Tests.

Why Herzog deemed it prudent to film this in 3D is something of a mystery. One supposes he wanted to try and make the paintings, not on flat surfaces, come alive, and maybe they do, in 3D, but in 2D it does nothing. Worse, this film really does nothing. There is nothing essentially Herzogian in it. It’s a documentary any filmmaker could do for a cable channel, save for the pointless Postscript to the film, involving albino alligators and mystic mumbo jumbo Herzog finds profound.

The film, at 89 minutes, is probably an hour too long, and while interesting cinematography, by Peter Zeitlinger,, and a nice soundtrack by Ernst Reijseger, enliven the film, they can only do so much. Herzog’s narration is not what it is in earlier documentaries of high quality, and one sense the filmmaker gets bored with it all about halfway through the film. Nonetheless, it’s a tossup as to which of the two documentaries, here under review is worse. This one is not good, but not bad, merely dull.

(3)

By contrast, whereas Cave Of Forgotten Dreams is a dull film, Herzog’s nest documentary, 2011’s Into the Abyss, is almost a pointless one, and, given its trite title, that’s the least of its sins. Clocking in at an hour and 47 minutes in length, this film attempts to be Herzog’s answer to Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, save that Morris’s film was on a miscarriage of justice whereas this film documents apt justice being done to two gutless and psychopathic killers, one- Jason Burkett- given a life sentence, who cons a dumb woman into marrying him and bearing a child, and the other- Michael Perry- on Death Row, who shows no remorse for his part in a triple murder over the theft of a red Camaro, and even mocks the justice system by feigning to impart forgiveness to the state of Texas and the victim’s families for wanting him dead.

That stated, since the pair are obviously guilty, there is no reason for the film, as the duo evoke nothing but contempt, and Herzog evokes nothing but the worst Texas stereotypes of white trash, even those who are not criminals, themselves, and even those who have all the material trappings of ‘success.’ Ostensibly, Herzog claims the film is supposed to be about how people on death row deal with their conceptions of time. Instead, we just get the details of a rather, and unfortunately, banal murder. There is nothing special about any of this- the killers, the victims, the motives, their fates. So why is Herzog interested? Yes, in 2004’s Grizzly Man, one can at least argue we get to see true insanity in Timothy Treadwell’s death wish that is met at his consumption by the bears he exploited. We get no such satisfaction here. Yes, the killers die, but no lessons are learnt, except perhaps that Burkett’s prison groupie wife is as fucked up as the rest of the town of Conroe, Texas, despite hailing from Nebraska.

Yet, this film lacks even the Herzogian touches that a flawed film like Cave Of Forgotten Dreams retains, if even poorly. On a side note, a quick Googling of the case shows that many of the claims made by people in the film- apart and aside from the two killers, is simply not true. Now, this may be Herzogian, if he actually knew the truths and allowed lies to be filmed, but, given the tenor of the film, and Herzog’s anti-death penalty stance, it seems more likely to just be poor fact-checking.

Herzog narrates the film, but the cinematography and music, by Peter Zeitlinger and Mark Degli Antoni, are not up to snuff. Again, very pedestrian, and one sense that Herzog almost feels as if he needs to get a film done, no matter what, including the quality. In the end, Perry fries, and Burkett survives, but the most important point comes from the daughter and sister of two of the victims, who describes the deep sense of peace and satisfaction she got from seeing the vile Perry bite the bullet, and her disappointment that Burkett and his then girlfriend (not seen in the film but at the scene of the crime) did not also get justice meted to them. It is to Herzog’s credit as a man and an artist that he allows this sentiment to get out, despite his disagreement with it. Nonetheless, the whole film seems a pointless exercise, and Herzog accords it a similar energy.

(4)

Overall, the three films rank as a disappointment. For the last two decades, Werner Herzog’s career as a documentarian has eclipsed his ever rarer ventures into fictive filmmaking, but, if these three films are an indication, perhaps the remainder of the man’s career should be focused on that realm where he made his name and career early on, for My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? towers over both Cave Of Forgotten Dreams and Into The Abyss, artistically. It is not a great film, but it’s damned close, and with a bit more focus on the fictive side, perhaps Herzog may yet produce another masterpiece or two before his last breaths. Here’s hoping.

The Dan Schneider Interview 4: Steven Pinker

Sun, 6 May 2012 11:05:17 -0400

DS: As I embark on a fourth DSI sojourn with one of today’s leading writers and thinkers, Steven Pinker- noted cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, I want to first thank you for agreeing to be queried. Since several other interviews have occurred in this series, you know that I have striven to make these not just interviews of the moment, but to still have much of, if not all, the relevancy it now contains if someone should read this years later, online, in a book, or in some yet to be written biography of you. Of course, we will touch upon your latest work, but I am more interested in the Pinkerian take on things, not only in your fields of expertise, but on matters a lay reader, who may have but a vague notion of who you are, would be surprised to hear you opine on. One of the reasons I think you are one of the leading writers in the sciences is because you have an excellent and lucid style of writing. You analogize well, to distill arcane points into explicable nuggets, and you are a good raconteur. That being stated, let me first allow the newcomer to your work a chance to read, from the horse’s mouth, who Steven Pinker is, what he does, and some of the major accomplishments you’ve made, as well as some of the goals you seek to achieve in your various fields.

SP: Thanks, Dan. I was born in 1954 in the Jewish Anglophone community of Montreal. After getting a bachelor’s in experimental psychology at McGill, I’ve spent most of my life bouncing between Harvard and MIT, with a few intervals in California (Stanford and Santa Barbara). My initial research was in visual cognition – mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention. But starting in graduate school I cultivated an interest in language, particularly language development in children, which eventually took over my research. I’ve written many experimental papers in language and visual cognition, and, in the 1980s, two highly technical books on language. The first outlined a theory of how children acquire the words and grammar of their mother tongue. The second focused on one aspect of this process, the ability to use different verbs in appropriate sentences, such as intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, and verbs taking various combinations of complements and indirect objects.

After that book, I spent the next fifteen years or so on the distinction between irregular verbs, like bring-brought, and regular verbs like walk-walked. The reason I obsessed over this seemingly small topic is that the two kinds of verbs neatly embody the two processes that make language possible: looking up words in memory, and combining words (or parts of words) according to rules. Among the papers I wrote during this project was a monograph that analyzed 20,000 past-tense forms in children’s speech, concentrating on errors like bringed and holded that reveal children’s linguistic creativity at work.

In 1994 I published the first of five books written for a general audience. The Language Instinct was an introduction to everything you always wanted to know about language, held together by the idea that language is a biological adaptation. This was followed in 1997 by How the Mind Works, which offered a similar synthesis of the rest of the mind—from vision and reasoning to the emotions, humor, and the arts. In 1999 I published Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, which presented my thoughts on regular and irregular verbs as a way of explaining how language works in general. In 2002 I published The Blank Slate, which explored the political, moral, and emotional colorings of the concept of human nature. My new book, The Stuff of Thought, is about language as a window into human nature: what tense reveals about the human concept of time, what verbs reveal about causality, what prepositions reveal about our sense of space, what swearing shows about emotion, what innuendo and euphemism show about social relationships.

I also write for the press on various topics relating to language and human nature – my most recent articles have been on the psychology of kinship, the historical decline of violence, and the use of metaphor in politics.

DS: Before we wade into the morass of language and the mind, my wife Jessica once had to memorize this textbook definition of language: Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols. My query- is it still applicable today? If not, what more can be added to that definition?

SP: As the author of a book called The Language Instinct, I’d certainly disagree with the “non-instinctive” part. The definition-writer is correct to note that human language, unlike most forms of animal communication, is voluntarily produced (in physiological terms, it is under the control of the cerebral cortex rather than the limbic system), and that the content of the linguistic signals (words, their meanings, and the constructions in which they are assembled) have to be acquired to a much greater extent. But the very fact that language is “purely human” suggests that we humans have to be equipped with an instinct to use and language, since all neurologically normal kids in a normal social environment acquire (and in some cases invent) language, without needing formal lessons.

DS: I first encountered you and your work over a dozen years ago, on the excellent (albeit now sadly forgotten) PBS tv show Thinking Allowed, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove. I actually had the chance to interview Mishlove a few years ago, on my now defunct Internet radio show Omniversica, and enjoyed his willingness to go beyond materialism, even if I disagreed with some of his ideas on the preternatural. That’s an area I will touch on in a bit, but what struck me most about that three part series he did with you was how good a communicator you were- in both the Carl Sagan/Albert Einstein media savvy way (you and your famous locks) as well as an ability to break down the most ineffable concepts into morsels the laity can understand. First off, were you always a Great Communicator (pardons to President Reagan), or was it a developed skill, needed for your mission? And, though I will delve more deeply into this in a bit, as well, that ability to communicate also includes a knack for the written word. Again, natural, or acquired?

SP: That’s very kind. I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of conveying difficult concepts without dumbing them down. I’ve long been a teacher (I put myself through college as a math tutor and Jewish sunday-school teacher), and have long paid attention to the mechanics of pedagogy – especially the use of language, visuals, and analogies to get ideas across. Not only has my research touched on all of these mechanisms (I once was involved in a project on the perception of graphs, for instance), but I read style manuals for fun, and like to analyze sentences I admire in other people’s prose to figure out why they work. I have no way of knowing whether I inherited any talent at communication -- my parents and siblings are highly articulate, but of course I grew up with them, so we don’t have an unconfounded nature-nurture comparison there. But whatever talents I did happen to be born with, I certainly cultivated, and continue to cultivate.

DS: Many scientists simply have not a way with words. Einstein’s essays, as example, are not engaging nor well phrased, and even Darwin, who could have moments of clarity, seemed to rarely find concision an ally. Yet, while I think the creative arts, including fictive writing and poetry, are in a several decades long down cycle, I think science writing is in a Golden Age since the mid-1970s or so. From E.O. Wilson, to the essays of Stephen Jay Gould, to Sagan to Jared Diamond to Martin Rees and Timothy Ferris to Robert Bakker and Jack Horner, Daniel Dennett, and a few dozen others, the world of science is bristling not only with ideas, but people who can clarify and excite the public. Science books often make best seller lists, yet, if that is so, why are Americans so ignorant on things like abortion, stem cells, evolution, race, sexuality, and on and on? Is it the old phenomenon of wanting to have the books on their shelves, as status symbols, but their never being actually read? I recall the old scene in Annie Hall, where Woody Allen exasperates over some boob misinterpreting Marshall McLuhan, and Woody pulling out the man, himself, to depants the fool. Do you ever encounter folks like that, who think they know more about ‘Steven Pinker’ and his ideas than you do?

SP: I agree that we’re living in a golden age of science writing. No such list would be complete without Richard Dawkins, and I’d also add John McWhorter and Geoff Pullum in linguistics, Judith Rich Harris in psychology, Steven Landsberg and Robert Frank in economics, and Robert Wright and Matt Ridley in evolutionary psychology, among others.

As for scientific illiteracy, there is a combination of causes: bad science education, the continuing higher prestige of the humanities over the sciences in American and British elites and universities, the ascendancy of romanticism in American popular culture since the 1960s, and the fact that ideas are sociopolitical and moral identity badges as well as true-or-false propositions. Republican politicians distance themselves from evolution not because they are ignorant of it or misunderstand it: (probably both are true, but that’s also true of many who profess a belief in evolution. They distance themselves because they identify evolution with amorality and nihilism.

DS: Why is it that science books, when reviewed, are almost always reviewed solely for their social or political relevance and their rightness or wrongness on a given issue, rather than their crafted skill with words?

SP: My impression is that the quality of writing is often briefly commented upon, but that there is little analysis or criticism of what makes the prose work or not work.

DS: After all, every science text will be outdated in a few decades, but if the writing is great, it should still be read. I think of the great essayist Loren Eiseley, whose supernal prose is as poetic and cogent today as it ever was, even if some terms are outdated. Have you ever read Eiseley? Who were the scientists whose writing, as well as works, inspired you as a child? I recall the How, Why And Wonder Books, as well as the dinosaur paintings of Charles R. Knight.

SP: I only became aware of Eiseley through your recommendation, and have yet to read his books, but I look forward to doing so. As a child and teenager, I devoured the World Book Encyclopedia, the mail-order Time-Life series of books on science (one arrived at our house every month), and heroic biographies of scientists and inventors. As far as stylists are concerned I loved George Gamow’s whimsy in One, Two, Three, Infinity, Martin Gardner’s economic prose in his Scientific American “Mathematical Games” feature, and an old textbook on invertebrate biology my mother gave me called Animals Without Backbones by Ralph Buchsbaum (I quoted it in The Language Instinct), and I see that it is still in print). In college I discovered the witty prose of Anglo-American analytic philosophers like A. J. Ayer, Gilbert Ryle, W. V. O. Quine, Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam, and Jerry Fodor, and then two great stylists in my own field, George Miller and Roger Brown. Roger was one of my graduate school advisors, and I wrote an obituary for him that called attention to his literary style.

DS: Let’s talk of your latest book, The Stuff Of Thought: Language As A Window Into Human Nature. I posted the first in depth online review of it, and I think it’s perhaps your most accessible book. When I read it my first thought, re: the book and my using it for this interview, was ‘Pinker just lobbed a grapefruit into my gearhouse.’ Now, this is a softball metaphor meaning you just threw me a ball that’s easy to hit a home run off of. Why do our minds think in such ways? Is it an evolutionary adaptation? If so, what possible benefit can it have?

SP: In SOT (as well as two previous books) I speculate that analogy and metaphor may

be the gift that allows us to apply cognitive abilities that evolved for concrete pursuits (such as dealing with space, time, force, and matter) to more abstract domains, like science, government, and economics. We use the language of space to talk about abstract variables (e.g., the economy rose, my spirits fell), and we use the language of force to talk about steady states and causation of change (e.g., Amy forced herself to go; The bureaucracy won’t budge). Presumably the language reflects the way we think about these phenomena, at least for some of us some of the time. An open question is: for how many of us, and at which times? That’s something I’m now studying empirically, with a graduate student, James Lee.

DS: Let me focus on your latest book for a while, and ask a few questions based upon specifics that you raise in that book. The book opens with the notion that 9/11 may be considered one or two events (or three or four). How is how we view such an event important? After all, I recall arguing with people, right after it happened, that the very image of the falling towers would leave a far longer and more deeply lasting impression than anything else. This video on YouTube seems to bear me out. People have long forgotten most details, and it all has blurred into a gray fog. Why is the old cliché, ‘an image is worth a thousand words,’ so correct?

SP: One reason that the number of events on 9/11 is significant is that it was the subject of a $3.5 billion lawsuit – in particular, over whether the leaseholder was covered for two “events” or just one. That hilarious-but-sad YouTube clip, in which people could not say which month “9/11” happened in, makes a linguistic point – that over time, transparent expressions, such as “9/11,” congeal into rote-memorized sounds, so people stop hearing the “9” in the “9/11.” Much of language is shaped by this process, as I note in SOT and in Words and Rules.

DS: You also mention the last two Presidents infamous parsings of meaning- Bush’s 2003 State Of The Union claim about Iraq seeking uranium, where the word in question was ‘learned,’ and Clinton’s use or abuse of ‘is.’ Which man abused language more? From a pragmatic standpoint, however, was not Bush’s abuse of language worse, since thousands (or up to hundreds of thousands) have died because of what he said. Clinton’s words merely soiled a dress.

SP: Yes, I agree. Also, as I note in the book, Clinton’s notorious discussion of the meaning of is was linguistically sound, whereas Bush’s use of learn was probably mendacious.

DS: Since the purpose of these interviews is to get away from the formulaic interviews that proliferate online, where the same queries are asked over and again, let ask a few questions you pose rhetorically, on pages 4-5 of The Stuff Of Thought, so that folk who merely think of you as a brainiac with a thick mop of hair, might get to know a bit more of Steven Pinker, the man, citizen, and scientists. I quote: ‘Does stem-cell research destroy a ball of cells or an incipient human? Is the American military incursion into Iraq a case of invading a country or liberating a country? Does abortion consist of ending a pregnancy or killing a child? Are high taxes a way to redistribute wealth or to confiscate earnings? Is socialized medicine a program to protect citizen’s health or to expand government power?’ To me, questions 1, 2, and 4 present two reasonable views of the same thing. In case 1, the ball of cells is an incipient human, but the fact that it’s incipient is what matters, not its destruction. In case 2 we did both; it’s the aftermath, and lack of planning for it, where the horrors have arisen. And in case 4, both apply, but I see no harm in redistributing wealth, since the very structure of our system allows certain people via their work or ingenuity (but most likely via their connections) to get rich in the first place. Without the system there’d be no wealth to distribute or redistribute. In case 3, the former claim is so, because a fetus is not a child. It is not born yet, and few human cultures have ever recognized conception days, for a very good reason- since the day can rarely be pinpointed. The final case is an example of the latter option necessarily following the former. The real question is whether that is a good thing or not, not whether it is one nor the other. To use another metaphor, ‘are you willing to step in the shit?’ What are your views?

SP: Your elaborations are incisive, and are consistent with my argument later in the book that our ability to frame an issue in different ways does not imply that political debate reduces to a beauty contest between rival frames, or that it is a matter of “mere words.” People can analyze, question, and evaluate rival framings, as you have done here. But I think I will accept your invitation to avoid stepping into the canine biosolids.

DS: You also deal with the idea of identity, and use the examples of William Shakespeare and Paul McCartney. In my review of the book I opined, ‘No, he does not dig into that silly canard over whether Shakespeare was gay or not because he wrote some sonnets from a feminine perspective, but he asks simply what do the words William Shakespeare mean? When one talks of The Bard, is one referring to the man commonly thought of as the Bard- the playwright who used that name (or its differently spelt variations), those thought to be Shakespeare (such as Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe, and a galaxy of others!), a great writer/poet, the author of Hamlet, or whomever it was wielded the pen?….He claims that whatever the case, the name is still attached to that ‘guy.’ Well, yes and no. Here’s why, and perhaps this is a point of view that only an artist or creator (as opposed to its antipodes- a scientist, or discoverer, like Pinker) could have. The name William Shakespeare not only refers to a human being, and a deceased one, but also that person’s works….while it may be true to state that William Shakespeare was a great writer, the author of Hamlet, or really Edward de Vere, that is only true when using the past tense. When one states that William Shakespeare is….all of that is false, except for the fact that Shakespeare is the poems and plays collectively, for when one asks, ‘Have you ever read Shakespeare?’ they are not asking if you ever saw the moldering tattoo on the dead man’s thigh that said, ‘Mother.’’ What is your main assertion about appellations, and do you agree with my idea that the word ‘Shakespeare’ now subsumes the man?

SP: I do agree, and it’s a subtle and interesting point. The famous argument that names are “rigid designators” (i.e., apply to the entity in the world originally dubbed with the name, rather than to whatever satisfies some definition) does not apply when the name is used metonymically (i.e., to refer to something associated with the usual referent of the name). The word Shakespeare, when used as a shorthand for “the works of William Shakespeare,” is not a rigid designator, but has a definition.

DS: As an asides, and mentioning people becoming words, or eponyms- such as gerrymander, bowdlerize, and boycott, is it the uniqueness of a name that heightens its chances of incidental immortality? As example, I often thoroughly respond to folk, in email or on blogs, and do so point by point. I guess I’d call it ‘schneiderizing’ an argument, but it sounds silly, as my name is not as ‘odd’ to the ear as the three mentioned. That, and the term to fisk has become accepted as a point by point refutation (named after a British journalist, Robert Fisk). Yet, I see that as almost as silly as using my own name. Perhaps that’s due to my being an American, and Yankees fan, and recall the way Boston Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk willed a Game 6 home run with his arms. To me, that’s true fisking. What do you see as markers of such aborning eponyms?

SP: What makes a new word stick in the language is something of a mystery, as I discuss at length in the chapter on naming. Sometimes successful new words fill a lexical gap – a concept that people need to express, but lack a word for, such as spam – but not always. We still lack a good word for unmarried heterosexual partners, for example. The fame of the referent probably does play a role, as does the sound of the name. But to be honest, no one really knows why some words stick and others don’t.

DS: You also write, ‘While taboo language is an affront to common sensibilities, the phenomenon of taboo language is an affront to common sense. Excretion is an activity that every incarnate being must engage in daily, yet all the English words for it are indecent, juvenile, or clinical. The elegant lexicon of Anglo-Saxon monosyllables that give the English language its rhythmic vigor turns up empty-handed just when it comes to an activity that no one can avoid. Also conspicuous by its absence is a polite transitive verb for sex- a word that would fit into the frame Adam verbed Eve or Eve verbed Adam. The simple transitive verbs for sexual relations are either obscene or disrespectful, and the most common ones are among the seven words you can’t say on television.’ Simply put, I think it’s one of the best published assaults on the subject I’ve read, and my query is, ‘What the fuck is wrong with so many people that they get so bent out of shape about words regarding such basic issues?’

SP: Thanks, Dan. In part, people get upset about taboo words because they get upset about what the words refer to – we don’t like to smell or step in feces, and most of the time we don’t like to see people urinate or copulate or flatulate, so we don’t like to think about these things by hearing words for them, either. But clearly this is only a small part of the story. In the earlier part of this answer, I did use words for each of these things which were not objectionable, like urinate. So another part of the story is that taboo words are produced with the tacit recognition that they are dysphemistic – that is, used to call attention to the disagreeable nature of the referent, use with the precise intention of offending, or both. So sure enough, listeners are offended. Yet another part of the story is that taboo words vary across time and subculture, so that the same word can have very different effects on different speakers. And part of the story – the one your question taps, I think – is that people differ in terms of how much informality they expect, and how much open discussion of sexuality, religion, and other touchy subjects they are prepared to take part in.

DS: To me, it is an excessive indulgence in, or aversion to, taboo language that is the odd thing. Especially when such occurs online, at blogs that try to censor and shape discussions. Do you feel that blogs, and the Internet do anything more than display the utter stupidity, cowardice, and sciolism of humanity? Online, people do not like it if one has a) an opinion b) states it and c) are correct. Wrongness is forgivable, being right is not. What is it about the Internet that fosters such ills- the anonymity?

SP: It’s not clear that it’s a phenomenon specific to the internet – just listen to AM talk radio.

DS: The book is also suffused in culturata- from the pop- such as Seinfeld, to the obscure- such as urban legends, and I think you are a master at using examples of accessible tidbits to illustrate your points, whether or not I may agree with the point. Do you take voluminous notes and record such things? Have you many scrapbooks. I am never without pen and paper, and constantly write notes. Or do you simply have the detritus of trivia floating around your head?

SP: I keep a physical file of clippings and cartoons that may be relevant to a given book. I also have a directory on my computer disk, a “Favorites” category in my web bookmarks, and a text file in which I tap in allusions or ideas that could be helpful some day.

DS: You also flay a philosopher named Jerry Fodor, and his idea that things are conceptually innate, and stand apart from a relation to other things. I agree that this is false, although, at the other end of the spectrum, I have argued with others who believe that all is subjective. To me, there are blacks and whites with a helluva lot of gray between. Not all gray, not black and white. You seem to take that view. I state, in reviewing your book, ‘….on a scientific level, the book does something quite amazing: it bridges the chasm that many Academics have over language itself. Postmodernists believe language is a circular self-referential trap, while pragmatists believe it lends insight into what reality is. Pinker’s book seems to posit that that is a false dichotomy, not because both claims are false, but because both are fundamentally true.’ Have I stated what your view is? If not, clarify and expound, please.

SP: This would require another book, but in brief: I think that a language maps onto internal representations (in a language of thought) that are not the same as the language itself (e.g., English). I think that those internal representations get their meaning both from the relationships among the representations (e.g., the meaning of my concept of “dog” in part comes form its connection to my concept “animal”) and from the relationship between the representation and the world (the meaning of “dog” comes from the fact that when my visual system is in the presence of a dog, I think the thought “dog”). By the way, Fodor himself has endorsed these positions (indeed, was responsible for first articulating them) at various points in his career.

DS: In a stinging display of humor, you write this, in ridiculing Fodor’s belief: ‘Fodor correctly notes that history has often vindicated unconventional ideas- after all, they laughed at Christopher Columbus and Thomas Edison. The problem is they laughed at Manny Schwartz, too. What, you’ve never heard of Manny Schwartz? He was the originator and chief defender of the theory of Continental Drip: that the southern continents are pointy at the bottom because they dribbled downward as they cooled from a molten state. The point is that they were right to laugh at Manny Schwartz.’ You demonstrate the Appeal to Authority fallacy here. Is the use of such a fallacy usually based on an intellectual or ethical lack? What other fallacies are your pet peeves?

SP: I debated whether to retain that passage, and decided to keep it because Jerry (a former colleague of mine at MIT, and someone I respect a great deal) is himself is an avid practitioner of aggressive humor. If he can dish it out, he can take it. But back to your question. The fallacy here is not really the Appeal to Authority, but the opposite fallacy – The Appeal to the Heretic, namely that if someone is a revolutionary who bucks the establishment consensus, that is sufficient reason to believe his claims.

DS: You also state, of Fodor’s idea, ‘….it’s hard to see how an innate grasp of carburetors and trombones could have been useful hundreds of thousands of years before they were invented.’ This got me thinking on an old idea I had, and one which I’ve heard a few times, as the basis for possible stories- that is the idea of being born ‘out of time.’ As example, there are doubtlessly living potential blacksmiths and abacus whizzes whose talents are meaningless today, just as there were potential astronauts or computer programmers centuries or eons ago, who never got a chance to display their skills. If such talents are not immanent, what are they? Is the analogy to a potential drunkard who never tastes alcohol in his life apt?

SP: I have a gentle anthropologist friend who told me, “Every day I thank God that I was not born a Yanomamö tribesman” (and he is an atheist). It’s a great question. Presumably to the extent the society defined specialized niches and freedom of choice, people would have gravitated to professions demanding cognate abilities. The programmer might have been a “computer” in the original sense (a guy paid to do sums), or perhaps a bureaucrat who implemented precise laws, or a Latin teacher. Perhaps one of the tragedies of postindustrial society is that certain talents (e.g., being a superb machinest, or seamstress) no longer have such niches.

DS: In your chapter, Cleaving The Air, you write of how people often mistake chronology for causality. As example, you cite two potential assassins who try to kill a man, and use this as an example of the ‘counterfactual theory.’ Please elucidate.

SP: Actually, the counterfactual theory arose to solve the problem that chronology is not causality. I take some herbs and my cold sore goes away. Does that prove that the herbs cured the cold sore? No, to show that you’d have to show that if the person failed to eat the herbs (the counterfactual scenario), the cold sores would have remained. The dual-assassin thought-experiment, for its part, was intended to make life difficult for the counterfactual theory. Specifically: two assassins conspire to take out a dictator at a public rally, with the first one to get a clear shot firing whereupon the other melts into the crowd. They end up killing him with simultaneously fired bullets. But if Assassin A hadn’t fired, the dictator would still be dead, and ditto for Assassin B. Hence, according to the counterfactual theory, neither one killed him! But that can’t be right. So the counterfactual theory has problems, too.

DS: To give this a real world grounding, let’s go to the JFK Assassination, and the ideas of whether Oswald acted alone, or was part of a conspiracy. Putting aside the facts, and arguing over them, I believe that’s a false choice. Oswald could have acted alone, yet there could have also been a conspiracy. His claims of being a patsy may have been true. Suppose he told others of his plan, in a fit of macho braggadocio, and then some of the slimy people he hung around with shadowed him, and had assassins in place, should Oswald miss. Oswald shoots the ‘magic bullet,’ then there’s a frontal kill shot by another of the gunmen Oswald was unaware of, and Oswald panics, flees, kills the cop, and looks guilty as hell. Yes, he planned and shot at Kennedy. Even hit the President, and Governor Connally. But, technically, he did not kill JFK. Is he guilty of assassinating the President?

SP: There you have it – a possible real-life example. “Multiple sufficient causes,” it’s sometimes called.

DS: In a sense, though, such an exercise seems akin to the Presidential parsings you mention. Also, it reminds me of one of Zeno’s Paradoxes- the one where one can never move because one would have to get halfway to a place, then a quarter of a way, then an eighth, and so on. Is counterfactualism merely mental masturbation?

SP: You haven’t watched enough Law and Order – courtroom examples pop up all the time. Can a widow of a smoking asbestos miner sue the tobacco company (who will say the asbestos killed him) or the asbestos company (who will say the smoking killed him)?

DS: In that same chapter you mention force-dynamics and morals (or as I prefer, secular ethics). Please elucidate. In reading of it, it reminded me of the old canard about how would your life be affected if the whole population of China disappeared overnight. I have always answered honestly. I’d be taken aback, shake my head, then do what I gotta do. Yet, so many others, of a PC mindset, would pontificate on how upset they were. I see that as hypocrisy. Is that force-dynamics?

SP: Yes, the example comes from Adam Smith. I’m not sure if force-dynamics (the idea that we conceive of causation as the exertion of force by a potent agonist against a resistant antagonist) is the best explanation here. It probably has more to do with the triggers for empathy.

DS: In a similar vein, two other arguments on ethics come to mind. One is that I do not necessarily value human life over other forms of life, or even non-life. As example, a few years ago, a cat I adored ran away. Last year, another cat I loved died. I still recall when the first cat was lost, how my best friend could not comprehend my devastation. ‘It’s just a cat,’ he said. From his perspective, he likely dismissed my grief as anthropomorphizing. Yet, it was not. I simply valued a being that gave me nothing but joy and love. Unlike mankind, cats do not steal, lie, cheat, and wantonly murder. Yet, there are some people- and not just wacky anti-abortionists, who value the slightest thing human over all else. What are your views on such?

SP: I am not a vegan, whereas I am opposed to murder and slavery, so I must be at least something of a human chauvinist.

One escape hatch would be to argue that humans, because of our social ties, self-consciousness, and ability to anticipate the future, suffer more acutely from murder and slavery than animals do, and that’s why it’s not as bad to kill an animal as to kill a human. But I think that such an argument is not enough to truly justify meat-eating and leather-wearing.

If it isn’t, then either I’m a horribly immoral person (which is certainly possible) or the human-animal boundary would have to have some moral status. One could argue that the boundary a bright line that, on one side, prevents obvious horrors like infanticide and involuntary euthanasia of the retarded or demented (who may have cognitive abilities akin to those of animals), while on the other, still allowing us to swat flies, comb out lice, and poison rats (and perhaps eat clams, or fish, or chicken, or beef, depending on how widely you spray-paint the line). I suspect that this is ultimately not a solvable problem, and that we’ll muddle through with a compromise: on the one hand, animal life deserves our moral consideration; on the other, the human-animal divide has a place in moral deliberation as well.

DS: Then there is the old example of, ‘What if a building was burning, and you could only save a person or the last extant manuscript of the works of William Shakespeare (or The Mona Lisa, or some other great work of art). Which would you save?’ Most people say, the person, and likely mean it. Yet, to me, I would have to weigh the person and the works. Even a good person is likely to not have a fraction of the cultural impact of a great work of art, especially over the centuries. Yes, saving Darwin or Galileo or Picasso or Rembrandt, over their works, is easy, for they can recapitulate most of that stuff. But saving Larry MacDougall, of MacDougall’s Plumbing? I’m not gonna lie, Larry would probably die, because nothing he could ever do would likely be as valuable to human culture as that great work of art. And it’s not because I devalue a human life, as much as I truly value human creations over human non-creators. Does that belief make one a cold, calculating proto-Fascist, a Stalinist wannabe, an über-sensitive lover of all things, or simply a mature, rational adult?

SP: I think I’ll stay away from that one. For one thing, my plumber might be reading this.

DS: To me, the great art that survives always leaves its audience looking upwards; it forces understanding on the percipient, whereas bad and pretentious art is hermetic. In my review of The Stuff Of Thought, I bring out that to play with words is to inevitably play with ideas, yet few seem to see that. Why?

SP: I’m not clear enough about who isn’t seeing what to answer that.

DS: In the chapter, The Metaphor Metaphor, you write of the inability of most people to separate themselves from themselves with language. And it put me in mind of the very notion of so-called ‘stream-of-consciousness’ writing, by writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. I’ve long found this to be bunkum. Not only does the human mind think metaphorically, but it thinks punctually. Punctuation is not a mere ad hoc device for the page, but a representation of the mind’s processes. Thus, most stream-of-consciousness writing fails and feels patently phony. Do you feel punctuation is generated, and not generative?

SP: An interesting question. You’re certainly right that stream-of-consciousness prose did not catch on as a compelling literary device. We’re all conscious, and we all want to get inside the heads of other people, and consciousness really does seem like a stream (in William James’ original metaphor), so one might have thought that a flow of unpunctuated words would simulate consciousness and be an appealing way to experience another person’s mind. But as you note, it does seem to have been more of a one-shot experiment – perhaps even a gimmick – rather than an enduringly effective medium. The question is why, and I can only guess.

In the history of punctuation itself, there’s a tension between the use of punctuation to indicate prosody (melody and rhythm in speech sound) and to indicate syntax (and the correlated distinctions in semantics and thought). If the former, then wordless thought may indeed be punctuation-free. If the latter, then thoughts would have natural boundaries – perhaps temporal breaks between mental propositions, or parts thereof -- that are indeed akin to punctuation, so omitting them is unnatural.

But many other issues are mixed in to your question. Are there different modes of thought, some discrete, others more flowing? Does the discrete nature of language make the rendering of stream-of-consciousness in words inherently difficult, so that the reader has to be aware of what the author is trying to achieve to appreciate his or her efforts -- which would thereby be a rarefied artistic accomplishment, rather than an easily accessible simulation?

DS: What of most contemporary art? You have been called retro by some avant-garde types, because you criticize much modern art. In a New Yorker review Louis Menand writes, ‘Pinker thinks that modern art is all ideas because it is only as ideas that he can experience it. In fact, Ofili’s painting is not ‘smeared in elephant dung,’ and Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ is not ‘a crucifix in a jar of the artist’s urine.’ It’s a photograph of a crucifix in a jar of urine, and, technically and formally, a rather beautiful and evocative piece.’ The problem I have with this sort or review is that it’s all the criticism of intent. Menand simply does not deal with your writing, only what he feels you believe, and whether or not it’s good or bad. This is de rigueur in reviewing. Why is that? After all, when I read the elegant prose of a Loren Eiseley it matters not if the science is decades out of date. The writing is supernal.

SP: As far as modern art is concerned, my intent was not really to criticize it (I like many of the products of Modernism) as to explain a phenomenon, namely that the elite arts are in trouble. Humanities departments are floundering, the contemporary visual art scene is a travesty, and elite art music has become esoteric and marginalized (in an era in which popular music has exploded in creativity). The point of my chapter was to connect this decline to the denial of human nature among 20th-century intellectuals, critics, and elite artists – in particular, to the claim that beauty is a bourgeois social construction, rather than reflecting properties or our perceptual, emotional, and cognitive faculties.

If I were to write the chapter today I would have drawn finer distinctions. I would have distinguished more sharply between modernism and postmodernism; the latter is far more guilty of the denial of human nature. I would have distinguished between the different forms that modernism took in different genres (music, for example, as opposed to fiction, painting, and architecture). And I would have distinguished between the great original works of modernism, which represented admirable creativity, and the products that arose in its decadent phase, when it became a stultifying dogma.

Still, I stand by my main argument – that critically admired yet popularly despised products of 20th-century elite arts such as atonal music, brutalist architecture, postmodernist lit-crit, and grotesque conceptual art are, at least in part, products of the modern denial of human nature and the separation of the arts and humanities from the sciences.

DS: I never practice the ‘criticism of intent,’ nor do I focus solely on the ideas. If the actual craft of wordplay is bad, who cares if the idea is good? In my review of The Stuff Of Thought, I write, ‘Another thing that makes Pinker’s writing so good is that whether or not one agrees with his view, on a moralistic or logical level, one cannot help but be caught up in its argument, for look how plain and lucidly unfolded his argument is. There is no preening intellectually, nor self-congratulatory backpatting. And, finally, while I mentioned his nice inversion of both the human anatomy and grammar, he also distinguishes between taboo language as the thing itself, and the reasons why we invented and use such language. It is in these sly little *pops* that Pinker shows he not only understands the origins of language, but how to subtly use its often hidden ‘tricks,’ such as recapitulating visuals with linguistic tropes, and also using semi-hidden anaphora to induce an almost mesmeric quality before hitting a reader with an idea. What is anaphora? Read a Walt Whitman poem, where every line begins with the same few words or phrase, or read the Biblical ‘begats.’ Anaphora tends to have a mesmeric effect on a reader, lulling him into a sense of complacency so that the turn on to a new idea, theory, or concept is all the more jarring. In effect, anaphora acts as an amplifier to make the proposition all the more memorable in the reader’s mind, and also likely more receptive to it….That Pinker uses such verbal abracadabra, not only here, but throughout this book and his others, is more proof of what separates him, technically and stylistically, from many of the other excellent writers in science’s current Golden Age. Again, you may disagree with Pinker on any or all levels in regards to his scientific claims, but my assertion of his excellent writing is unassailable.’ Now, aside from the fact that I praise the craft, I actually am dealing with the words you write. The criticism of intent disallows that, for it presumes an übertext behind what is written, and only Menand can decode that for potential readers. In effect, he’s reviewing a different book from the one you wrote- in this case, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial Of Human Nature. Yet, when he writes, ‘In fact, [Chris] Ofili’s painting is not ‘smeared in elephant dung,’ and [Andres] Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ is not ‘a crucifix in a jar of the artist’s urine.’ It’s a photograph of a crucifix in a jar of urine, and, technically and formally, a rather beautiful and evocative piece,’ we have no idea if he’s quoting you or Tom Wolfe, from Wolfe’s book The Painted Word, which he says you quote. Aside from being grammatically fuzzy as to who he is referencing, he’s playing a semantic game, just as such shock artists, as the two mentioned, or Karen Finley- who has smeared herself in her own feces, do so just to get attention. Ofili’s paintings are, indeed, smeared in elephant dung, as well as with it. I have seen them up close. Thus, Menand is being disingenuous, and trying to impute that disingenuity on you. And while it’s true that Serrano’s work is a photo, not the bottle itself; a) we do not know if he is quoting you nor Wolfe, b) the difference between the single metaphysical level of the bottle as a Duchampian work, and the photograph, is slight in comparison to its artistic merit, and c) if the crucifix was replaced by a Twizzler, no one would care. The very selection of the crucifix is the giveaway as to the fact that the ‘art’ is simply an idea, and prank. Yes, one may admire the shade of the urine color, for aesthetic or other reasons, but it’s clear that Menand has an axe, and is wielding it willy-nilly. Thoughts?

SP: The howl of rage in Menand’s review is largely defensive. Menand knows that his home fields, the humanities and arts, are in bad shape, and that the school of thought he identifies with, postmodernism, deserves much of the blame. But he bristles at an outsider making these points, and refuses to hear out the suggestion that an increasing consilience between the arts and sciences points to a way out of the self-inflicted catastrophe. (Brian Boyd, in his American Scholar essay Getting It All Wrong, offers a brilliant critique of this blind spot in Menand.) Rather than coming to grips with the phenomenon I identified, Menand tried to discredit my competence to write about the topic with various “gotchas,” such as the list of works of shocking art that have made recent headlines. Sure, Piss Christ is literally a photograph of a crucifix in urine, not a crucifix in urine, just as the expression “Warhol’s soup cans” does not literally refer to cans of soup but to paintings of cans of soup. I agree that his pedantic harping on this shorthand is a sign of desperation.

As for the photo itself—well, I know a thing or two about the technical side of photography, and I can tell you that “technically and formally,” Piss Christ is similar to what you can see from serious amateurs in any issue of Popular Photography. As you point out, to discuss this work in technical and formal terms, rather than as an attempt to shock, is disingenuous – if it were a photo of a twizzler in a glass of apple-juice, no one would ever have heard of it. And what if it were Piss Martin Luther King? Or Piss Anne Frank? Or Piss Mohammed?

DS: In a lighter vein, you wax on about the name Steven in science, and then discourse on the popularity of naming children. Yet, you only touch on, tangentially, one of the more bizarrely interesting phenomena in this regard- the naming habits of black Americans. After all, there are not many LaToyas running about the veldts after wildebeests. To what extent is this similar to the phenomenon in the 1970s, where blacks declaimed they were ‘descended from kings’? Most of these American black names have nothing in common with African black names.

SP: There are two phenomena here. One is the romantic connection with Africa that became a source of cultural motifs in African American culture beginning in the late 1960s (dashikis, Afro hair styles, names like Aisha, and so on). That is similar to the vogue for Celtic names among contemporary Irish-Americans , or the fad for Israeli names among Orthodox Jews in the 1970s and 1980s. Another is a trend in which African Americans have been giving their children creative and euphonious new names – Shaquille, Latrelle, LeBron, LaTonya, Chamique, Semeka, and so on. These seem more faux-French than faux-African, and what they illustrate is that trends in baby naming often revolve around sound patterns rather than meanings. (Examples from mainstream white naming patterns include Jennifer, Jenna, Jessica, Jesse in the 1970s, and Lois, Gladys, Doris, Dolores, Glennis in the 1920s). The popular sounds vary across subcultures. Sometimes they sample from a romantic or nationalistic source, but sometimes they just recombine an endemic pool of favored sounds or sound templates.

DS: Ok, let’s take a step back from The Stuff Of Thought, and speak more generally. Since language is manifestly a major part of your life’s work, what do you see as causing the devolution of simple and engaging conversation? Is it emailese, Postmodernism, Political Correctness, video games, Madison Avenue, hip hop, etc.? Or, is this a cyclic thing, as I think, and there will have to come a time when people will want to stop reading novels by a writer simply for his or her social status- ethnicity, sexual preference, disability, socioeconomic status, and appreciate the written word for its ability to move alone, by planting abstraction sin the mind’s palette?

SP: I’m wary of interpreting social trends, since so few of them are independently documented. Do we really know that conversation has deteriorated, or, do we, like so many generations before us, simply assume that civilization has declined, the younger generation is going to pot, and the good old days are gone? I’m with you in deploring certain phenomena – pretentious Pomo gibberish, identity politics in the arts, and the phobia of articulateness among many college-age people (I remember recently being interviewed by the editor of a student newspaper at a major university and being appalled at her unwillingness to frame a single question as a complete grammatical sentence. As you note, this could be cyclical – I hope so.) But other of the phenomena you cite may be neutral or even healthy. People command multiple registers, so I don’t think email diction will change the spoken language any more than the advent of the telegram a century ago caused people to omit articles and prepositions or end every sentence with “STOP.” Words infiltrating our language from other subcultures and dialects has always been the source of its richness – whether from sports, jazz, sailing, technology, or hiphop. Literally thousands of words and idioms we now find indispensable came into the language as slang or jargon from some subculture.

DS: Although it’s not PC to admit, I feel that- like language acquisition- and the need to learn it by 6 or 7, lest end up a wild child like Kaspar Hauser, there is a similar limit to honing one’s talent with words, and if one has not done so by 30, that’s it: lights out. Also, that writing talent is immanent. You cannot learn to be a great writer. You are or are not. Someone without the gift is doomed to failure. I’ve seen this with literally hundreds of wannabe writers. I know, when I’m in a groove, it’s like the view from the cyborg in The Terminator films- I can instantly revise and handle multiple drafts at once. Lesser writers cannot. Also, I’ve seen, historically, how most writers tend to peak between the ages of 35 and 50. Do you agree with these views on writing? Have their been studies on writing and other artistic abilities that have demonstrated that these can be so?

SP: I’m not an expert on the lifespan development of talents in different fields, but certainly writing is more forgiving of the aging process than, say, mathematics, where people really do accomplish their best work in their twenties and early thirties. Great writers are thought to reach their peak later in life than mathematicians and scientists (though I recently read that even with writers there is a peak; you don’t get better and better as you get older and older, alas).

Presumably success in each field depends on a specific tradeoff between raw brain power – CPU speed, so to speak – which declines with age, and the acquisition of an inventory of elements, motifs, and strategies to recombine, which increases with age (in the case of writers, this would be words, idioms, constructions, and turns of phrase). Different fields require different mixtures of computational power and inventory richness, and so the peaks are found at different ages.

I suspect you’re right that good prose style is partly heritable, since everything is partly heritable. And as a teacher, I clearly see some students who just have a way with words from Day 1, and others who, with all the tutoring in the world, still have to struggle to compose a phrase that isn’t clumsy or opaque. As with everything else, the very best writers cultivate whatever talents they are born with, paying attention to good examples, scrutinizing their own works, constantly trying to improve.

DS: Many artists seem to deny their own creativity, pawning it off on God, or some other force or demiurge. I call this the Divine Inspiration Fallacy. There is no Muse. For better or worse, it’s all me, or you, or any artist. Comments on its existence, origins, verity?

SP: With ourselves, it must be because our own thought processes are mostly unconscious, so we have no access to the true source of our ideas. In viewing other people, we see the product, but not the process, of their thoughts. We don’t see the years of apprenticeship and immersion, the crumpled drafts in the wastebasket, the trains of thought that led nowhere, the penultimate attempt that brought the thinker to the threshold of Eureka! As I note in How the Mind Works, careful, fact-driven accounts of the creative process from historians and biographers tend to be deflationary – geniuses engage in a lot of practice, a lot of play, a lot failed experiments, and a lot of slow incremental progress, rather than being struck by lightning bolts of inspiration.

DS: I maintain that the creative arts are higher than the performing or interpretive arts, because you are basically starting with less to work with. In short, an actor interpreting Shakespeare or O’Neill has it much easier than the two playwrights did in conjuring the drama. Similarly, I posit that writing and poetry are the two highest general and specific art forms, for writing is wholly abstract- black squiggles on white that merely represent and must be decoded, whereas the visual arts are inbred, and one can instantly be moved by a great photo or painting, while even the greatest haiku will take five or ten seconds to read and digest. Poetry is the highest form of writing because, unlike fiction, it needs no narrative spine to drape its art over- it can be a moment captured, and wholly abstractly, unlike a photo. Do you agree with these views? If so, why do you think this is so? I would bet that since language (at least written) is only a six or so thousand year old phenomenon, while sight has been around for 600 million years or more, that’s a hell of a head start the visual arts have over writing.

SP: Too hard a question! I wouldn’t disagree, but am not so sure I could support you either. By the way, I’d date language to 60,000 rather that 6,000 years ago (that’s how old our species is, and every human group ever discovered has complex language, regardless of its degree of technological development). But that’s still consistent with your argument.

DS: Speaking of words, and their practice, where have all the great interviewers like a Mishlove, Phil Donahue, or Bill Buckley gone? In preparing for this interview, I read many online transcripts, and watched some video interviews, and I was underwhelmed by both the queries and any real sense of passion on the interviewers’ parts. One of the things we’ve tried to do with these interviews is avoid the canned sort of responses that most interviews- print or videotaped, indulge in, yet most people find comfort in hearing the expected. On a tangential note, a similar claim can be made about clichés providing comfort. Have you ever studied clichés in your work? I would think that, since they are defined by their numerical frequency, they would be an easy subject to take up. No?

SP: I think you’re right about the art of interviewing, especially in the popular media. Even a middlebrow with a know-nothing persona like Johnny Carson used to have many scientists and intellectuals on his program, like Carl Sagan, who was such a regular that Carson’s comic impersonation of him (“billlllions and billllions of stars”) was instantly recognizable. The younger, hipper hosts – Leno, Letterman, O’Brien – restrict their interviews to actresses and comedians. Even the more intellectual-friendly hosts—Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert—do their interviews with an ironic smirk. Again, if we judge the culture by the level of its middlebrow accomplishments, the lack of any contemporary interview format as extended and in-depth as what one used to read in Playboy (the only reason I looked at the magazine, of course) tells you something.

That having been said, my girlfriend and I recently rented DVDs of old Dick Cavett shows from the 1970s, hoping to indulge our nostalgia for an era in which an urbane, witty, literate man could host a popular talk show. What a disappointment! By today’s standards the show (which stretched over 90 minutes, not today’s 60) dragged interminably, with huge expanses of dead air and conversations that went nowhere. The show clearly came from a more leisurely age, which is not necessarily a good thing, In terms of intellectual stimulation, 90 minutes watching Cavett in the 1970s was far more a waste of time than 90 minutes of surfing the Internet, or even the cable dial, today.

DS: Let’s talk about life as a public intellectual. Obviously, I am engaging you for what you have put forth into the public arena, and to get new spins, insights, on to certain things, and to elicit heretofore unknown opinions. Yet, intellectual- as a noun, has suffered many blows since the 1950s, when the Marxists of Academia were shamed by their folly in support of Stalinist Russia. There was some redemption when the Left was right on Vietnam and Civil Rights, but increasingly, just as the Right has gone off the deep end with their obsessions on homosexuality, abortion, the rise of Right Wing Agitprop Radio, and viewing America as the Great Savior of the world (hence the Iraq War), the Left has been every bit as silly, with New Age Charlatans, the Feminazi rise, the embrace of censorship under the auspices of PC protection for the innocent, and the demonization of America as the Great Satan.

Whereas the Right Wing has left its mark on Corporate America and Evangelical Christians, the Left has a stranglehold on Academia. Let me raise the specter of two names that I think have done grievous damage to the term ‘intellectual.’ The first is likely the more obvious name- linguist Noam Chomsky- a former colleague of yours at MIT. I am no expert on his scientific work, but I do know a bit more than the average layman, and while there’s no denying his eminence in cognitive theory, why would someone like him basically abandon his eminence and research in a field he is the Elvis Presley of, and spend decades playing the buffoon on subjects well outside his purview? Certainly, no one denies him his right as a citizen to speak out politically, but, as I am a writer, and would put my chops on, say- poetry, against anyone living or dead, I would never think that that expertise qualifies me as an expert on Bulgarian politics nor the mating habits of bees in Malaysia. So, why do you think Chomsky, and others in Academia, feel a need to display their sciolism in so many areas outside their expertise, and why do people take a Chomsky so seriously when he has proven to be so wrong on so many political issues- from shilling for the Khmer Rouge and other Communist Totalitarian states to exculpating terrorism to seemingly agreeing with some Holocaust Deniers? Granted, he’s been right on many issues domestically, too, but HE’S A LINGUIST, not an expert on everything. And it seems to me he has wasted his truest gifts in the field he helped establish, on things he’s accomplished nothing in, and damaged his own reputation to boot. By contrast, I’ve never read nor heard you opining on such things. Are you just a mealy-mouthed wimp, or do you learn from others’ mistakes?

SP: Mealy-mouthed wimp, for sure. Though I share your assessment of Chomsky’s political opinions, I diagnose the situation differently. We’re not seeing a case of dilettantism or ignorance – Chomsky commands vast amounts of knowledge in the political fields he writes about, which is one of the reasons he impresses, indeed intimidates, audiences. Nor could he ever be called intellectually lazy – he applies a powerful intellect to advancing his world view. And as he rightly notes, professional credentials should not be the main criterion in evaluating someone’s arguments.

I would say that the problem with Chomsky is rather that with such a clever mind, such impressive erudition, and such formidable rhetorical skills, he has the power to push an idée fixe arbitrarily far. He can wow sycophants, blow off critics as stupid or evil, explain away embarrassing data, and rationalize mistakes at will. Lesser mortals might be humbled by a critic, or embarrassed by a counterexample, or forced into a reassessment by an unpredicted turn of events.

In Chomsky’s case, as I noted in The Blank Slate, we’re seeing a fundamentally romantic view of human nature, in which people naturally cooperate and create without the need for external incentives, until these faculties are stifled by malign social institutions. We also see an all-encompassing moralistic theory of political and historical causation – that world events can be understood as the intended outcomes of a morally odious agent, namely the United States and its allies. Tragedies, well-meaning blunders, painful tradeoffs, human limitations, least bad options, historic changes in contemporary standards of political conduct—none of these play a role in Chomsky’s causal model. Disciplinary expertise and training are beside the point – when you’re determined to advance an all-encompassing theory, intellectual and scholarly power can work to your ultimate disadvantage in terms of providing an accurate rendering of reality.

DS: I mentioned sciolism, and the Internet, Google, and outlets like Wikipedia, have led to what I’d term a sciolistic dialectic online. Since Wikipedia and other outlets are so manifestly flawed- again, why should I be considered adept enough to comment on Bulgarian politics?, what do you see as a solution to this detrital mass of misinformation? How can the average layman, who wants to improve his knowledge of whatever subject, possibly distinguish the good and trustworthy information from the 99.99% of utter garbage out there?

SP: Thanks for teaching me the useful word sciolism. Wikipedia is flawed, to be sure, but I’m rather impressed by how good it is. It is a surprisingly self-healing system whose notorious errors get corrected in minutes, and it is infinitely more useful than, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica. Whereas Wikipedia embodies a collective, distributed intelligence (of the sort that allows market economies to outperform planned economies, or Linux to be less buggy than Windows), articles in the Britannica reflect the quirks of the single academic who has been charged with writing them. Many of the articles are so parochial and oblivious to the background assumptions of laypeople as to be effectively useless. When I have used it to learn things in technical fields I don’t know about, I often find that I can’t understand a word of the Britannica piece. I used to blame myself, until it dawned on me: if I find a Britannica article too hard to understand, who on Earth is it intended for? Also, entrusting a topic to a credentialed expert often means entrusting it to the oldest scholar around, and the one with the most time on his hands – not a good way to get state-of-the-art knowledge about a field of science! Britannica articles in my own field are often written by embittered graybeards who long ago fell out of touch with the advancing front.

A general principle in cognitive psychology is that “statistical prediction” outperforms “clinical prediction.” That is, a statistical aggregate of a lot of data (even when the formula for aggregating them is fairly primitive) has a better track record than a single “expert.” For example, simple formulas and algorithms do better at diagnosing diseases, investing in stocks, and predicting recidivism than doctors, financial analysts, and parole officers, respectively. It wouldn’t surprise me if, contrary to intuition, a large self-regulating community would converge on higher-quality information than a single credentialed expert.

DS: Back to the idea of ‘intellectual.’ The second name I will drop aggravates me far more than the political nonsense (or naïve-té, to be generous) of Chomsky, and that is the late New Age charlatan, Joseph Campbell. Granted, without George Lucas’s mind-numbing Star Wars films, no one would likely have heard of him. Then there were the interviews and PBS television series with Bill Moyers- another of the Left’s noxious counterparts to Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, and his wholesale mangling of basic mythologies. Even worse were some of his ludicrous notions on the monomyth (Yes, Joe, humans do tell tales that are similar in structure and content!) and other obvious literary devices. Kurt Vonnegut once parodied Campbell’s nonsense with his own ‘in the hole’ trope: The hero gets into trouble, the hero gets out of trouble. What aggravates me more about Campbell is that while Chomsky is both championed and denounced in colleges, Campbell’s New Age ideas are accepted with little rebuke, which leads to the dumbing down of culture by the Oprah Winfreys of the world. PC is now about a quarter century old phenomenon. You have been around long enough to see its rise. Do you see an end in sight? And while no one denies that there are good aims in multiculturalism, simply put, there are simply not enough qualified nor excellent voices in most fields to warrant many of the changes in curricula. Anyone who would suggest that, say, a Nikki Giovanni, should have her ‘poetry’ taught in favor of Percy Shelley, is a fool. And what galls me is that it is always the worst and most politicized hacks whose works are held up to bump off a Dead White Male from his perch, whilst, in my poetry example, a great black poet, like a Robert Hayden or James Emanuel, is never seen as an alternative. This manifests that the Old Boys Network is merely under siege from a new Girls And Boys Network that cares as little for true quality and diversity as the dinosaurs they seek to displace. When do you believe multicultis will tire of the mere novelty of exotica and demand true excellence- not just writers that ‘respect’ them and their tribe?

SP: I wish I knew. It’s generally impossible to predict how long social trends (like the rise and fall of the name “Steve”) will last. For one thing, PC, PoMo, and multi-culti got their start in the 1960s, whereas the counterrevolution only found its legs in the early 1990s (perhaps the kickoff was the Newsweek cover story which first popularized the old term “political correctness.”). Perhaps a change will only happen when the cohort of academics who got tenure in the expansive 1960s retires – as Max Planck said about science, the field advances funeral by funeral.

DS: My wife Jessica, has worked in science, and has told me tales of office politics, but even though science has a reputation as being politicized, is it really as bad as the rest of Academia? Does politics determine granting? If so, it seems that the writings of scientists- at least in popular books, is far less politicized than those from the MFA creative writing mills. Is this an accurate assessment?

SP: There’s politics in the sense of who-you-know, and politics in the left-wing-right-wing sense. Both are operative in science funding, unfortunately. But at least they are viewed as bad things that should be eliminated or minimized, whereas I get the sense that within much of the humanities, politics (in the left-right sense) is seen as ineliminable and perhaps even to be welcomed. Scholarship is seen a means of advancing a salubrious social and political agenda.

DS: How has the Bush regime hurt science funding in America? Recently, some former Surgeons General testified to Congress re: the politicization of their work by the current and past administrations. Has your university and/or field been affected? I would think that studies of the brain and language are less controversial than D&C abortions (misleadingly called partial birth abortions), stem cells, and studies on homosexuality.

SP: You’re right: the fields I work in are, fortunately, not as vulnerable to contemporary political interference as stem cells or global warming. What damage there is comes more from the left more than from the right (though the right does plenty of damage in other fields). “Evolution” is a poison word in grant applications in psychology, not because it will lead to godless humanism but because it will lead to Nazi eugenics. And there is tremendous support for any effort to prove that women are indistinguishable from men.

DS: Since I mentioned homosexuality, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard your views on the subject. One of the interesting things about research into it is that many of the top researchers are gay, even though many of the top critics of such research are straight, and feel that finding a ‘key’ to homosexuality will somehow lead to genetic efforts to eradicate it. Yet, it seems that a ‘single point of origin’ for the behavior- or, a smoking gun, seems increasingly unlikely. Both the gay gene and the gay brain proved to be rather silly ideas, and no more likely to cause homosexuality than a weak father figure. Human beings are far more complex a thing than any other living creature on this planet- even the dolts, therefore if one could actually pinpoint a cause or causes of any behavior- especially complex things like sexuality (be it preferences, fetishes, frequency), it’s likely to be multivalent. That is, one would find dozens of ‘causes’ for any group of a thousand homosexuals, with many things overlapping, but each person’s ‘real reason’ being a secret formula. In short, I think the dog is chasing its tail, and origins are not as important, in such cases, as implications. Thoughts? And, if so, could homosexuality be a) more closely related to fetishism because b) same sex sexual play and dominance play are rampant among higher animals, especially mammals?

SP: I think one has to distinguish homosexual behavior, which is no more of a puzzle than any other form of non-procreative sex (such as masturbation), from exclusive homosexuality, that is, the avoidance of, or failure to seek, heterosexual opportunities. The latter really is an evolutionary puzzle, because (at least in men) it is partly heritable (i.e., is affected by the genes, though not necessarily a single “gay gene”), and one would expect that any genes that lead, on average, to fewer offspring than their alternative alleles would quickly be selected out.

At this point there are no good theories on the evolutionary basis of preferential or exclusive homosexuality. One reason is that this is a topic that neither the left nor the right particularly wants to see funded. You’re right that political correctness is pushing its thumb on the other side of the scale this time. In this case, the left likes genetic explanations, and the right hates them, because a genetic basis for homosexuality would seem to imply that gay men can’t be blamed for having made a sinful choice, that they can’t be persuaded out of it through religious counseling, and that they don’t need to be kept from children to prevent them from proselytizing new converts. (Never mind that all of these concerns are non sequiturs.)

When an issue gets politicized, science is the first casualty, and here too advocates have tried to bully researchers away from conclusions that appear not to put their favored groups in a good light. Michael Bailey, perhaps the country’s leading researcher on homosexuality, nearly had his life ruined by nuisance lawsuits, bogus ethics charges, and false personal accusations because he argued that in one kind of male-to-female transsexual (the ones who are attracted to women) the men are motivated by sexual concerns rather than by being women trapped in men’s bodies. (I even got some abuse for writing a nice blurb to Bailey’s book.) So it’s not a topic in which a wave of smart young researchers are going to dedicate their budding careers.

As I mentioned, at this point, we don’t have a good theory. E. O. Wilson suggested that gay men are like “helpers at the nest” and channel their resources into nieces and nephews rather than offspring – which is clearly wrong. (Among other things, gay men have been found not to indulge their nieces and nephews any more than straight men do.) Dean Hamer had the most interesting suggestion – that the “gay gene” he discovered (still contested), when passed onto women (2/3 of the time, because it is on the X chromosome) made women go through menarche at a younger age, resulting in a lifelong reproductive advantage, which more than compensated for the disadvantage when the gene is in men. Bailey, following Ray Blanchard, has suggested that the mother’s immune system is sensitized by male fetuses and produces antibodies that inactivate testosterone or its receptors in the fetal brain; his evidence is that men with more older brothers are more likely to be gay. Another hypothesis, proposed by Gregory Cochran and Paul Ewald, is that homosexuality is caused by an infectious agent. Yet another is that our environments have recently change in such a way that genetically sensitive men who might have been heterosexual in evolutionary typical environments are tweaked toward homosexuality today. But no one knows the answer, and no one is likely to find out any time soon, at least not in the United States.

Whatever the answer is, it may be different from women, because women’s sexuality is so much more complex and fluid than men’s. Women are far more likely than men to change sexual orientation during their lifetimes (the LUG or lesbian-until-graduation phenomenon), to experiment with homosexuality, to happily do without sex at certain stages of their lives, and so on. For those reasons I’d predict that homosexuality is less heritable in women than in men, and less sensitive to other biological factors like prenatal influences.

DS: On a related score, most mammals seem to have a need to play- i.e.- do activities that seemingly serve no benefit in terms of seeking food, sex, etc. What is the cause of play? Could it be that more complex brains simply need to unwind, and ‘cool down’?

SP: Juvenile play is common in the animal kingdom, and its obvious function is experimentation and practice in preparation for actual encounters with the world. Juvenile predators play at stalking (as in a kitten with a string toy), juvenile prey animals play at dodging and fleeing, juvenile apes engage in play fighting, little boys play with toy weapons, and so on. Peter Gray, the author of the psychology textbook I use in my course and an expert on play, notes that even in grim situations like refugee and concentration camps, children’s play is distinctively practical – while the adults use play as an escape from reality (e.g., card or board games), the children invent macabre reality-based games, like withstanding simulated abuse from pretend guards. With adults, too, a lot of play consists in pushing the outside of the envelope of survival – experiencing controllable doses of ancestral dangers like speed, heights, water, animals, exhaustion, and enemies, presumably to see how far one can go into dangerous territory without crossing the line into genuine harm.

This is not to deny the possibility that some play just consists of pressing the pleasure buttons of the brain. Given that we are technologically clever enough to do all kinds of amazing things, we are bound to be clever enough to short-circuit our pleasure circuitry as well, such as with recreational drugs, music, dance, and other enjoyable pursuits.

DS: And, if it is true that play is a way to cool down a brain, what of dreams? At least to me, since I only know what my dreams are like, my dreams seem to be void of symbolism, and are merely the unspoolings of my mind from a day’s stress. As example, a few months ago, while preparing an early draft of this interview, I was doing research on you by watching this video of a lecture you did after the release of The Blank Slate. I watched the full near two hour long video, and that night, both Jessica and I had dreams with you in it. Jess could not recall her dream, but mine was this: I was the narrator of a film- perhaps a documentary about you, and possibly a student of yours. Yet, the Steven Pinker in the dream, while looking as you do, was not a cognitive psychologist, but an expert on global warming and the melting Arctic ice cap. There were some other students who accompanied you and me to the Arctic to do some research. One was a female student who was likely your lover. Then, after forgetting some parts, the ice caps quickly melted, and all of us returned to the Arctic shores drenched. However, you were immediately arrested by government authorities for either plagiarism or tax evasion, spent a few years in jail, and won the Nobel Prize for something or other. When you got out of jail, with me narrating the film of this all, you gave a big kiss off to the media, not unlike the Woody Allen character does in the Martin Ritt film The Front. Then, I woke.

Now, I see no great Freudian symbolism, and most of my recalled dreams are similar, where people from my past, or an occasional celebrity, meets me and engages in rather dull things (save for a recurrent dream of Sharon Stone in fishnet stockings!). It seems obvious that you were in the dream because I saw the video not long before I slept, a day or two earlier I’d read a piece in Discover magazine on the melting of Arctic ice, and the hiking around that occurred in the dream was because that day Jessica and I had gone hiking in a state park.

So, if dreams, and their causes, are so pedestrian, why do so many still try to imbue so much into them? Or are my dreams an exception? Has anyone ever studied the obsession over dream interpretation rather than the interpretation of dreams themselves? And does anyone really understand why we dream? Is it the brain’s way of cooling down, as I suggest?

SP: Yes, I tend to agree that the content of dreams is a screensaver – any old pattern will do. Lots of interesting and important things happen to the brain during sleep, but the actual screenplay of dreams is unlikely to matter.

You raise a good question about the appeal of dream interpretation, which may be universal, and is always accompanied by a sense of profundity and portent. The nineteenth century anthropologist Edward Tylor suggested that the experience of dreaming is a major reason that people everywhere are dualists, believing that the mind and body can part company. After all, when you’re dreaming, some part of you is up and about in the world – indeed, a netherworld that follows inscrutable laws – while your body is in bed the whole time. Much of religion and mysticism consists of thinking about a mysterious other-world of spirits, ghosts, and souls, which is often felt to be close to the incorporeal world of dreams.

DS: Let’s move on to eugenics. Despite the infamous misapplications by the Nazis, as well as White Supremacists in this nation, I think both eugenics and euthenics are good things, and I feel both hover over all discussions of cloning and stem cells today. Yet, how can one claim to be for liberty and deny others a right to choose their kids eye color, or sex, or a desire to clone oneself? Do you feel that the fear of creating a race of supermen is overblown? Would not Murphy’s Law play a role? Or the Law Of Unintended Consequences?

SP: Yes, I’ve made such an argument before the President’s Council on Bioethics, and in a related Boston Globe op-ed.

DS: On a related note, I cite the two above ‘Laws’ because I feel ‘greatness’ is a random thing. When people have tried to make available the sperm or eggs of Nobel Laureates or Mensans, the kids turn out to be rather average. This gibes with the fact that almost all great people, such as Picasso, Newton, Einstein, and most famously-Thomas Jefferson, have never had any forebears nor descendents come close to their achievements. And the few famed people who’ve had success run in their families- the Adamses, the Darwins, the Barrymores, have never really had greats in their clans, or- as in the Darwin case, Erasmus was not in a league with his grandson Charles. I call this fact the Infinity Spike, meaning that the idea that a Master Race could be engineered- at least intellectually, is folly. Perhaps physical characteristics, but the chances of two Mensans or Nobel Laureates producing another Michelangelo or Kurosawa are only negligibly greater than such a person coming from a plumber and a teacher. Perhaps a three or four out of fifty million chance versus a one and a half to two chance. In short, greatness spikes toward infinity out of nowhere- there is no predictable bell curve nor progression toward excellence. What are your thoughts on this posit?

SP: Yes, see above. The great biochemist George Wald, one of the Cambridge lefty scientists of the 1960s, was asked to contribute to Shockley’s sperm bank for Nobel prizewinners. He wrote, “If you want sperm that produces Nobel prizewinners, you should be asking people like my father, a poor immigrant tailor. What have my sperm produced? Two no-good guitarists!”

Of course, today’s women who pay more for sperm from elite college graduates, or who choose not to bear the child of some low-life from a drunken one-night-stand, are not being irrational. Intelligence and personality are heritable, at least statistically. But you’re right that true genius and other extreme traits are not heritable because of the laws of probability – what statisticians call regression to the mean. This is related to your Infinity Spike.

DS: And, what if my idea about an Infinity Spike is correct- would that mean that it’s folly to try to ‘breed’ a race of Nobel Laureates?

SP: As far as extreme people are concerned (Hitlers, Einsteins, Mozarts), your “infinity spike” idea is surely right. A countless number of things have to align adventitiously for such an unusual person to arise. First, there might have to be dozens or hundreds or thousands of genes, not just one or two, in an exact combination—what behavioral geneticists call “emergenesis.” Second, even identical twins raised together are nowhere near perfectly correlated, despite their identical genomes and near-identical environments. This shows that there must be an enormous role for chance, either in brain development, unique experiences, or both. Third, the exact time and place in which a baby is born surely matters – a Mozart or Hitler today may not find a niche that allows their peculiar powers to express themselves.

And on top of this these factual uncertainties, there are the numerous tradeoffs. There may be genes that might have side effects, such as increasing the IQ of some of your children by 10 points and leaving others confined by spasms to a wheelchair. There may be genes that are desirable only in optimal doses: a gene that makes kids bolder might be desirable if his other 20,000 genes would render him pathologically shy, but not if the other 20,000 would render him a reckless maniac.

Then you have to ask how we would get there from here – if there is even a small chance that the first experiments in enhancement would produce a deformed child, how would those experiments ever get done?

And even if all these technical issues were worked out, there would still be the issue of personal preferences. People, probably irrationally, are horrified by genetically manipulated soybeans – can we really be so sure that they would welcome genetically manipulated babies? It’s instructive to look at the predictions about our “inevitable” technological future that were common when I was a child in the 1950s and 1960s -- nuclear-powered automobiles, moving sidewalks in domed cities, meals in a squeeze tube, blowing the Great Barrier Reef to smithereens with nuclear bombs to create new shipping lanes. These are risible today not just because of technical infeasibility or costs but because of changes in values. At the time, convenience and effortlessness trumped everything else in life. Today we put a value on exercise, biodiversity, naturalness, sensory richness, and medical safety that just didn’t figure at the time. The same may be true for designer babies and other Brave-New-World scenarios.

DS: Let’s move on to a different meaning of The Bell Curve. I refer to the infamous 1994 book (and some would call racial screed) by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. You seem to be sympathetic to it, on a statistical level, but averse to many of its conclusions. As example, you believe that IQ is not immanent, but malleable, and cite statistics that show the IQs of ethnic groups can change over time. To me, this seems rather obvious.

As example, about 15 years ago a cousin of mine urged me to join Minnesota’s Mensa Society, to which she belonged. Well, the experience was disturbing, for the Mensans were a collection of all the worst stereotypes of nerds, geeks, and weirdos one could imagine. Furthermore, I had to take one of their IQ tests, which was dated 1969. The questions were atrociously constructed, and were manifestly not objective, nor did they measure anything which could be called creative. To join, one had to achieve the 98^th percentile. I got to the 92^nd percentile, but there were a dozen or so questions that I knowingly gave the ‘wrong’ answer to simply because the premises were false and/or I disagreed with the ‘correct’ answer I knew they wanted.

Two examples: one question asked to choose the object that went with a cup. The choices were a spoon, fork, saucer, or table. To me, the natural answer, from my less than middle class childhood, was a table. Cups go on tables. Of course, I knew they wanted the answer to be saucer; but that’s simply a cultural bias, and says nothing of a real intellectual nature. The second example was to link geometric shapes. They gave a square and asked to link it to other geometric forms: a circle, a hexagon, an octagon, and a square. Now, I knew they wanted it linked to the latter three shapes, because all of those shapes were polygons. Yet, to me, since the latter three had an even number of angles, and the triangle an odd number, it could be linked to the circle, since a circle has an infinite number of angles, and infinity can be either an odd or even number, they can be linked most closely.

Thus, I think IQ tests merely measure a pedestrian or functionary level of intellect. What are your thoughts on its efficacy in measuring real human intelligence? And, the main criticism- amongst seemingly hundreds, of The Bell Curve, was that is was not multivalent, and did not include different sorts of intelligence, such as Howard Gardner’s Seven Intelligences: language, math and logic, musical, spatial, bodily & kinaesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Comments?

SP: The thing about Mensa these days is that it is aimed at people whose social identity hinges on being smart, rather than at people who are smart or people who do interesting things thanks to the fact that they are smart. Hence the wonk stereotype. My sense is that this was different before urbanization, ubiquitous college education, and social stratification by intelligence, at a time when smart people were more scattered across the country and different socioeconomic circles. During my 21 years as a professor at MIT I would often meet students who had been the only smart kid in their small town. Their lives had been miserable – a fat smart girl in a Maine mill town where cheerleaders had all the status, or a reflective introverted boy in a town where only the jocks were respected. The other kids ostracized and persecuted them, and often their own families didn’t understand them, thinking that they were “showing off” when they did well in math or read books. Going to MIT meant that for the first time they were valued for what they were. I imagine that at one time Mensa had a similar function. The upshot, though, is that the IQ tests they administer are fairly crude, and far from the state of the art.

I think you’re wrong about IQ tests in general. They’ve been shown to predict (statistically, of course) a vast array of outcomes that one would guess require intelligence, including success at school, choice of intellectually demanding professions, income (in a modern economy), tenure and publications in academia, and other indicators, together with lower crime rates, lower infant mortality, lower rates of divorce, and other measures of well-being. The idea that IQ tests don’t predict anything in the real world is one of the great myths of the intellectuals.

I’m sympathetic to modular theories of the generic human mind like Howard Gardner’s, but they have nothing to do with individual differences in intelligence. For one thing, the inclusion of “musical” and “bodily and kinesthetic” intelligence is mainly a tactic to morally elevate those traits by rebranding them as forms of “intelligence.” But a great athlete or drummer is not necessarily “intelligent” in the sense that people ordinarily mean by the term. Secondly, though modularity may apply to the universal design specs of the human mind, and may help explain pathologies that selectively affect one faculty (such as from brain damage or a genetic deficit), that has nothing to do with quantitative variation among individuals in the normal range. It’s an empirical fact – massively and repeatedly demonstrated – that people who do well on tests of verbal intelligence also do well on tests of spatial and quantitative intelligence, and vice-versa. The correlation is nowhere near perfect (some people really are better at math, others with words), but it is undoubtedly a positive correlation. General intelligence in this sense is a real phenomenon.

DS: And would not the fact that racial or ethnic strengths wax and wane due to non-biological reasons be manifest? Take a look at the most demotic of all sports- boxing. A century ago, Jews and Irishmen dominated. Then, blacks took over. Now it’s Latinos that dominate. Did Jews and Irishmen suddenly turn wimpy? And if one could quantify any groups’ qualities, would they not be in constant flux due to aging, birth, death, and other health conditions? And would not systemic poverty inevitably skew and retard certain groups over others? After all, even in nations less diverse than America, the poorer groups are always at the bottom of the intellectual ladder, even if the same or similar groups dominate in other nations where they are not as impoverished.

SP: Differences between groups may have a different explanation that differences within groups, to be sure. But historical changes of the kind you just mentioned do not show that the relevant ethnic differences are arbitrary. If you exclude blacks from professional basketball, then open the doors and they flood in while the Jews are driven out, that doesn’t mean that on average blacks and Jews are equally good at basketball and that the NBA suddenly became anti-Semitic. Likewise as the media become more global, travel becomes cheaper, and sports become more professional and competitive, the best athletes in a sport will be found in whatever nook or cranny of the planet they inhabit, such as east Africa for marathon running. The fact that an arbitrary exclusion can distort the composition of some set of actors does not imply the converse – that when the exclusions are eliminated, the set will reflect the population in perfect proportion. On the contrary, as the selection becomes fairer and more acute, and the stakes for success in competition become higher, one expects to find that any group with even a slight advantage can crowd out the others.

DS: The Bell Curve leads me into my own ideas on human intellect, from decades of observing the creative an non-creative minds. I first posited this in an essay on the literary critic Harold Bloom: Here is my posit: the human mind has 3 types of intellect. #1 is the Functionary- all of us have it- it is the basic intelligence that IQ tests purport to measure, & it operates on a fairly simple add & subtract basis. #2 is the Creationary- only about 1% of the population has it in any measurable quantity- artists, discoverers, leaders & scientists have this. It is the ability to see beyond the Functionary, & also to see more deeply- especially where pattern recognition is concerned. And also to be able to lead observers with their art. Think of it as Functionary². #3 is the Visionary- perhaps only 1% of the Creationary have this in measurable amounts- or 1 in 10,000 people. These are the GREAT artists, etc. It is the ability to see farther than the Creationary, not only see patterns but to make good predictive & productive use of them, to help with creative leaps of illogic (Keats’ Negative Capability), & also not just lead an observer, but impose will on an observer with their art. Think of it as Creationary², or Functionary³.

While I have not, admittedly, ever subjected this idea to rigorous scientific testing (how could one?), I think that, anecdotally, it hold sup. There is simply a difference between Functionary minds and Creationary minds, and an even bigger one between merely Creationary minds (your average artist, leader, or scientist) and those who are truly Visionary. Do you agree with any of this? And is there any squaring of Gardner’s Seven Intelligences with my idea of Three Intellects?

SP: It does seem plausible, but you’re right that psychometrics has little to say about it. There has been some work on distinguishing intelligence from creativity, but much less on visionary genius, and those that exist tend to be more biographical than psychometric. I don’t think they would easily map onto Gardner’s intelligences, since one can be a functionary, creator, or visionary in any of them.

DS: Let’s take a Keatsian leap of illogic and segue back to something that you have expressed an interest in, and take up again in The Stuff Of Thought: epithets, curses, swears. Back in the early 1970s, the comedian George Carlin popularized the seven words that the Federal Communications Commission had put on its banned list for commercial television and radio: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, motherfucker, cocksucker, and tits. There have been claimed variants- such as cock and pussy, and some of the words- like piss and tits, have seemed to cross back over the line to acceptability. Why do all cultures have a prohibition against certain words? And why do Americans obsess over sexual terms more than other cultures? What are some of the equivalents of ‘fuck,’ say, in other languages- not in terms of meaning, but in terms of cultural taboo? And how do curses originate and evolve? Do all such epithets follow similar trajectories?

SP: To make a long and interesting story short: People everywhere tacitly believe in word magic – the idea that words are not arbitrary labels but are part of the referent’s essence, and can therefore, by the fact of being uttered, impinge the referent itself. If you don’t believe it, just say “I hope my child will get cancer” aloud, or say “No one in my family has ever had a serious disease or accident” without feeling a strong urge to follow it with “Thank God” or “knock wood.” Taboo words tend to be ones associated with strong negative emotion – awe of deities, fear of death and disease, disgust at bodily secretions, revulsion at depraved sexual acts, contempt for minorities, enemies, and cripples. The specifics obviously vary from culture to culture and from time to time: just look at the fate of damn and bloody in English-speaking countries during the twentieth century, or at my native Québec, where the two main curses are translated as “Chalice!” and “Tabernacle!” It’s not a coincidence that Québec was, until quite recently, a traditional Catholic society, and that as English-speaking countries became more secular in earlier periods, the religious epithets lost their punch and were replaced by sexual ones. There is a rough correlation between a culture’s values and its profanities, though because taboo words can remain taboo simply because everyone treats them as taboo—that is, people recognize that they are intended as releases, or as offensive, or as a way to show that one means business—a taboo word can remain taboo long after its referent strikes a chord with the speakers.

DS: Curses tend to be words as substitutes for violent actions or thoughts, yet a euphemism is the substitution of a word for another word. Why do people use euphemisms? Is the impulse the same as a curse word? Perhaps the worst sort of euphemisms come in the political sphere, such as pro-choice for pro-abortion, and pro-life for anti-abortion. Yet, many people tend to fall for such nonsense. Wherefore this gullibility? Even more annoying, to me, is how words are twisted upon themselves, such as liberal, conservative, and libertarian. What other areas of human endeavor twist words as much as politics? I’m thinking of the sciences, where minutia, as priority, seems to take the place of common sense- such as the naming rules for fossils, which resulted in the wonderfully evocative name Brontosaurus being replaced by the inapt Apatosaurus, or how a handful of astronomers have suddenly decided to demote Pluto from the ranks of planet, and reclassify it a ‘dwarf planet.’ Yet, a dwarf planet is still a planet, just as a human dwarf is still a human. Any thoughts on these lingual gymnastics?

SP: Taboo words are often dysphemisms—words deliberately intended to make listeners think about the disagreeable or emotionally fraught aspect of their referents, as with shit, fuck, and piss. An irate gardener might shout, “Stop your dog from pissing on my roses!”, but a nurse would be unlikely to say “Mrs. Jones, you’ll need to give us a sample of your piss.” Euphemisms do the opposite—they are a way to refer to a fraught entity (which we all must do from time to time, because we are incarnate beings, who get sick, copulate, die, produce waste, and engage in other messy activities) while making it clear to the listener that one has no desire to offend him by making him think that unpleasant thought.

As for the other questions – we’re barely half way through, and I’m in danger of retyping my entire book into this interview, so let me just say that these are topics that are covered The Stuff of Thought, in particular in the chapters on metaphor and on naming.

DS: Of course, the worst offense against writing is censorship. Where does this impulse come from? Yet, all sides do it- be it the Christian Right or Feminist and PC Left. What are your views on both these extremes? And what drives folks to such extremes. Should not moderation be more attractive? And why and how has the Internet- chatrooms and blogs, accelerated this trend toward extremism? Is it the anonymity that the Internet provides?

SP: The primary urge to censor content comes from the desire not to allow people to know arguments or facts that could compromise one’s own claim to expertise or authority. This is further inflamed by the psychology of taboo – the mindset we all are vulnerable to, in which certain ideas are considered not just illogical or false but sinful to think and worthy of punishment. (The psychologist Philip Tetlock has done many experiments showing how prone people are to this mindset – I discuss his work in Slate and in Stuff.)

With taboo words (as opposed to taboo ideas), there’s also a concern about the presuppositions and attitudes that a listener has to entertain just to understand the word or expression. To understand an epithet like nigger or fucking Jew or cunt (as a misogynistic term for a woman) is to be complicit, if only for a moment, in an implied community of speakers who codified the contemptuous attitude into a word or expression. It feels morally corrosive even to hear the word and understand how it is intended. Hence the desire not hear them, to prevent people from hearing them.

Of course it’s the very essence of democracy that words and ideas cannot be stifled by force except under very narrowly defined circumstances. And academia can only justify its existence if it is an open forum for ideas, including those that are heterodox at any moment. So wide latitude must be given to the expression of ideas. Still, the policy depends on the context – there’s a difference between privately owned media enforcing a house style (which is not unreasonable) and government censorship (which almost always is).

DS: Let me return to the idea of how words and ideas spread, or as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the idea of memes. Some memes- such as curse words, tend to spread, while others tend to die. Why do you think some terms prosper and others fail? One of the examples of a failed- or wannabe, meme, is the term ‘bright’, for an atheist. Philosopher Daniel Dennett- an atheist, has embraced the term, while you- also an atheist, seem less comfortable with it. Is this so? And why? I believe ‘Bright’ is a weak neologism, and sounds like a bunch of smarty-pants kids wearing beanies with propellers on top, and out of touch with reality. It is a contrived and puerile term. Neologisms like bright tend to succeed only when there is a void to fill, not when they are given Madison Avenue-like deliberation. Sans the void, and with plenty of better and more specific options, neologisms die. Bright is a bad term, ill-defined, inappropriate, and superfluous. Even Political Correctness, at least, has some worth in its reality as Left Wing Fascism, rather than what it purports to be. Also, it’s part of the American movement of dishonestly labeling things- be it pro-abortionists and anti-abortionists who call themselves pro-choice and pro-life, or creationists who call themselves Intelligent Designers. Thoughts on the merits of ‘Bright’? And, is Intelligent Design a pseudoscience like that practiced by Nazi and Soviet scientists?

SP: I’ll note that the question of which neologisms succeed and which ones fail is the topic of one of the chapters in The Stuff of Thought. In these examples, I think you may be missing a layer of irony. Political correctness is a sarcastic term, so its purported use and its use in reality are in fact the same. The term bright, which is self-consciously coined and introduced (unlike most successful words, as you note), is intended to call attention to itself and the circumstances under which it was coined, rather than as a serious attempt to infiltrate the language. We live in an age in which belief in God is considered the default, reasonable state of opinion, and in which most people equate the term atheist with amoral (polls consistently show that Americans are less likely to vote for an “atheist” as president than any other disfavored category). By announcing that the concept of atheist needs positive rebranding, and that it’s a position that intelligent people are likely to arrive at through reasoning, the movement to introduce the term is making a meta-statement, a kind of lexicographic guerilla theater. Whether the word itself catches on as a neutral descriptor is irrelevant.

DS: Here is another thing I have noticed. While the meme of ‘meme’ has been very successful in proliferating, the fact is that most time that I see someone use the term they speak of a meme as if it was a material thing, rather than being merely a metaphor. The meme’s meme, in other words, has been dumbed down to a memetic dead end. Do you see irony in this?

SP: I don’t really understand this – it hasn’t been my experience.

DS: I mentioned that you are an atheist, so let me ask you this: a few months ago, the ABC television network aired, on Nightline, a ‘debate’ on God between a former sitcom star, Kirk Cameron, and his vapid guru, and two almost equally dumb atheists who offer a ‘Blasphemy Challenge’ online. These nitwits are associated with a bad video called The God Who Wasn’t There, made by a recovering religion addict. I reviewed the film, and these folks are as dogmatic as the religiots. Why is it that whenever I’ve seen videos of you or other intellectuals debating on a topic such as this, you are usually pitted against the Lowest Common Denominator representative of dissenting opinion, rather than a serious theologian?

SP: I did have a friendly exchange with the Chief Rabbi of England, as well as a four-way micro-debate in Time magazine with Francis Collins (the head of Human Genome Project, and an apologist for Christian theology), Michael Behe (the patron saint of Intelligent Design), and a Christian fundamentalist preacher. Dawkins has debated Collins in Time, and Harris has debated the talk-show host Dennis Praeger, who’s no dummy, as well as a major Christian religious leader whose name I forget. So it isn’t all farce. Also, while I respect theologians who are students of religious philosophy and history (which is undoubtedly an important field of scholarship), the idea of debating a “serious theologian” about the existence of God is, for me, like debating a “serious astrologer” about the validity of astrology.

DS: Good point. Religion always seemed designed to be just beyond scientific purview, so that there is an Oz-like curtain to cover up the homunculus. Do religions rely on such trickery because they know, in daylight, their claims are essentially silly? And, despite claims of a worldwide religious revival, I see the opposite, especially since Y2K. I see 9/11 as an example of radical religion starting its death throes. It’s so ineffectual for so many that it has to try to grab attention any way possible. And, I believe there are far more Homer Simpsons sleeping in the pews than Ned Flanderses marching onward, like Good Christian Soldiers. Is this disconnect between the reality of a growing irreligiosity in the world and the alarums about Fundamentalist Islam and Christianity due to media outlets, like the ABC network, constantly pushing religion into the mainstream?

SP: I agree. Natalie Angier, in her American Scholar article of a few years ago, pointed to data showing that religious belief in America is soft. People tell pollsters they believe in God because they equate the question with “Do you believe in morality and values?” but it doesn’t play much of a role in their lives or beliefs. Greg Paul and Philip Zuckerman make the case even more strongly on Edge.org. In Europe, Canada, Australia/NZ, Japan, and other postindustrial countries, the trend is even stronger. People don’t care about God, and are staying away from churches in droves – especially Catholic churches, which have been decimated by the pedophile priest scandals.

DS: Why is the mainstream media so hostile to rational thought? In the last half a decade, or so, ABC- as example, has aired a steady stream of Christian propaganda, on the so-called life of Jesus, the reality of God, yet only throwaway moments are devoted to rational responses. Jesus Christ, as example, is a figure with ZERO basis in historical reality. There are no contemporaneous mentions of him, despite his living in perhaps the most litigious and recorded area of the word, at the time. It’s decades later when a Josephus interpolates some mention of the man from Nazareth. Even the Roswell Incident has far more historical reality than Jesus Christ. Yet, corporations like ABC persist in upholding the mythos; ABC because its then anchorman, Peter Jennings (it is rumored), became a Born Again Christian in the final years of his life. Why is there such anti-intellectualism in this country? There seems to be, not only in religion, a desire to damn any real cogitation on issues. Is this the ignorant hand of Postmodernism come to cover all subjects, or is it remanent Puritanism?

SP: Religion sells – a Newsweek editor once told me that they cynically put Jesus or Mary on a cover twice a year because it always gooses up readership. (For confirmation, see the hilarious Mother Jones feature Jesus, What A Cover! Clearly there’s a taboo about discussing the factual basis of religious history in American public forums. I tend to think that the no-nonsense rhetorical tactics of a Sam Harris (like those of David Hume, Bertrand Russell, H. L. Mencken, and others before him) are necessary to bring these issues into the realm of rational discussion.

DS: And what of PoMo? As you have with religion, you have been very critical of Postmodernism. Why? I always laugh when I get emails from deliterate folk who rail against some essay I’ve written on bad writers who hide behind the PoMo cloak- such as David Foster Wallace, claiming I a) don’t understand Postmodernism, or b) the writer (in this case, Wallace) is not a PoMO writer, but a Post-Postmodernist writer. Yet, what could be more PoMo than Po-PoMo? I even recall a Yoko Ono ‘Art’ Show at the Walker Center in Minneapolis, where they displayed such Onovian art as a pencil dot on a blank sheet of paper, and a real green apple on a stand. I knew a singer who actually thought that ‘Ono is deep and ahead of her time.’ To what do you ascribe such gullibility?

SP: Part of it is the feeling of superiority at getting a joke that goes over the heads of the rubes from Peoria. This is of a piece with everyone’s rediscovery of relativism at some point in their intellectual development – the epiphany that other cultures or periods see things differently than the way we do, therefore the world view we take for granted is a parochial and arbitrary prejudice which the enlightened can transcend. It’s basically a confusion between cosmopolitanism, which is good, and relativism, which is bad – bad because it’s self-refuting (if relativism itself is true, and believing it is good, then truth and goodness must exist), and because it’s belied by the success of science.

I must add, though, that to my surprise I really enjoyed a retrospective of Yoko Ono’s art from the 1960s which was featured at the List Gallery at MIT a few years ago. If one projects oneself back to 1966, her art is fresh and witty and thoroughly original. I even understood for the first time how John Lennon, a smart and creative kid who barely escaped the slums of Liverpool, could become infatuated with her. The problem is that there is just enough potential in minimalist conceptual art to support approximately one artist, and the time window in which it was fresh and original lasted for just a couple of years in the early-to-mid-1960s. Since then there have been far too many Yoko Onos, n including Yoko Ono herself.

DS: Let’s move on to another subject that has been misconstrued: human violence. I grew up in Queens, New York, in the late 1960s and 1970s. It was in a bad neighborhood, and I saw much wanton violence. Yet, in the last few decades, violence in large cities, and nationwide, has decreased dramatically, yet with the increase in media coverage, one might assume the opposite is true. Is violence just a manifestation of ‘the beast’ in us? And what is the price of denying that reality? As example, I loved boxing, as a child, and one of my favorite all-time sports moments came in the early 1980s, during a Monday Night Football Game between my beloved New York Giants and the damnable Washington Redskins. Two of my guys- Lawrence Taylor and Leonard Marshall, sacked the arrogant and detestable Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann, and snapped his leg in half. One could hear the snap over the television. While one might ponder why such a thing is memorable to me- and fondly memorable, the fact is that I’ve known many people whose fond memories consist of violent things. Why is this common? Do men feel such things more, because of testosterone? Yet, I overcame my natural inclination to violence, while many others never do. Can you speculate on why some people can and others cannot overcome certain things, such as this?

SP: I had a chapter on violence in The Blank Slate, and the decline of violence over the millennia will be the topic of my next book (2010 or 2011) – an extension of the New Republic article you mention below.

DS: You seem to agree with my earlier posit on how the media misconstrues violence. Do you feel this is deliberate? If not, what could account for it? Is it just corporate greed, to fan the Lowest Common Denominator flames?

SP: “If it bleeds, it leads,” say the producers of news shows. As you note, we are all fascinated by witnessing staged and simulated violence, even if we abjure it in our behavior. Violence in movies has become more graphic (in the old movies, the bad guys never even bled when they got shot); violent video games have skyrocketed; and we continue to enjoy boxing, hockey, Shakespearean tragedies, and Mel Gibson movies – all during a period in which rates of violence have plummeted. This is one piece of evidence for the main intellectual theme of my career– that there is a timeless and universal human nature, but it is to be found in thought and emotion, not in behavior.

DS: In an essay called A History Of Violence, you state, ‘The decline of killing and cruelty poses several challenges to our ability to make sense of the world. To begin with, how could so many people be so wrong about something so important? Partly, it’s because of a cognitive illusion: We estimate the probability of an event from how easy it is to recall examples. Scenes of carnage are more likely to be relayed to our living rooms and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. Partly, it's an intellectual culture that is loath to admit that there could be anything good about the institutions of civilization and Western society. Partly, it's the incentive structure of the activism and opinion markets: No one ever attracted followers and donations by announcing that things keep getting better. And part of the explanation lies in the phenomenon itself. The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence, and often the attitudes are in the lead. As deplorable as they are, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the lethal injections of a few murderers in Texas are mild by the standards of atrocities in human history. But, from a contemporary vantage point, we see them as signs of how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have risen.

The other major challenge posed by the decline of violence is how to explain it. A force that pushes in the same direction across many epochs, continents, and scales of social organization mocks our standard tools of causal explanation. The usual suspects—guns, drugs, the press, American culture—aren't nearly up to the job. Nor could it possibly be explained by evolution in the biologist’s sense: Even if the meek could inherit the earth, natural selection could not favor the genes for meekness quickly enough. In any case, human nature has not changed so much as to have lost its taste for violence. Social psychologists find that at least 80 percent of people have fantasized about killing someone they don't like. And modern humans still take pleasure in viewing violence, if we are to judge by the popularity of murder mysteries, Shakespearean dramas, Mel Gibson movies, video games, and hockey.

What has changed, of course, is people’s willingness to act on these fantasies….Man's inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, ‘Why is there war?’ we might ask, ‘Why is there peace?’ From the likelihood that states will commit genocide to the way that people treat cats, we must have been doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.’

I agree with your second query being the more perplexing. Do you have an answer? Is there really any answer?

SP: In the article, I offer four hypotheses: (1) an effective democratic police and court system deter violence; (2) the ease of trade, travel, and communication have put us in positive-sum games in which other people are more valuable alive than dead; (3) the circle of empathy has expanded because of journalism, history, realistic fiction, and cosmopolitanism; and (4) life has become more pleasant and predictable, leading us to value it for ourselves and others. All could be true, and they could all be manifestations of some general trend toward moral progress that stems from the moral logic of sociality. But I’ll leave an exposition of these ideas to the next book, tentatively entitled The Better Angels of Our Nature.

DS: You have also graphically stated that, on a per capita basis, so-called ‘higher societies,’ i.e.- the First World, Western World, Liberal Democracies, etc., have a far lower rate of violence and murder than tribal societies, even including the last century of the Two World Wars and the ‘Hot Flashes’ of the Cold War- Korea, Vietnam. You use this to debunk the Rousseauvian ideal of the Noble Savage, even claiming that his antithesis, Thomas Hobbes, was right and Jean-Jacques Rousseau was wrong.

Claims such as this have gotten you labeled a Right Wing apologist, a Fascist, etc. Yet, this claim seems to not be so ludicrous, especially when one looks at the Middle East, where most people still live in tribal societies, where a sense of commonweal is peregrine. Why has the Noble Savage perdured, when evidence, especially in the New World, contradicts such? Of course, I refer to growing evidence of cannibalism in the tribes of the American Southwest, evidence for mass hunting kills of Stone Age large mammals and deforestation in the American West, and the odd case of the Kennewick Man.

SP: I keep an eye, probably foolishly, on things people say about me, but as far as I know I’ve never been labeled a Fascist. Even overt accusations of right-wing apologetics are pretty uncommon, given my views on evolution, secularism, humanism, etc. But you’re right that belief in the Noble Savage dies hard. A large reason is that it is a reaction to the demonization of nonwestern peoples in the past and the free pass given to Europeans – the whitewashing of genocides by the conquistadors and other American colonists. It’s also part of the general romanticism that has characterized post-1960s ideology and culture.

DS: Re: the ‘Fascist’ remark, it’s a common term I see tossed about for all atheists or secular humanist in threads, so not specific to you; albeit people such as you, Dawkins, Dennett, et al. are routinely called that. Speaking of the Kennewick Man, if claims about it hold up, could this mean that the Americas were far more integrated in the world culture than thought previously? Specifically, could there have been Caucasian Americans that predated the Mongoloid ancestral Indians? Also, since there seem to be many legends (and tantalizing hints of fact) of pre-Columbian contact with the Americas- by Phoenicians, Chinese, the Vikings, and even the Welsh, is there linguistic evidence (if not DNA evidence) for such intermingling. I refer to claims of the similarities between Welsh and the language of the Mandan Indians, or the claims of some Central American tribes looking ‘Oriental,’ i.e.- having epicanthic folds.

SP: The linguistic evidence is marginal – without a statistical correction for the number of similarities you would be expected to find by chance when cherry-picking words post hoc, one shouldn’t take claims of connections between remote languages seriously. As for physiognomy, I would think that any Asian features of Native Americans can readily be explained by the fact that they are Asians under the conventional theory – i.e., descendants of Siberians who crossed the Bering isthmus 13,000 years ago. It’s certainly possible that there were pre-Clovis contacts between the New and Old Worlds, but I had better leave this issue to the archeologists, and increasingly in the future, to the geneticists.

DS: Let me opine on some of the things in perhaps your most famed and controversial book, to date. In a review of The Blank Slate I wrote, ‘SP later opines that people fear that if genes have some influence on people, that influence is conflated with total influence. This is easily disproved, & SP does so at some length & with great clarity. But why do people conflate some with total? Probably because of innate human laziness, & the distortions that pervade the media- especially in soundbiting ideas that need speechifying to elucidate thoroughly.’

Is my reason too facile? Is there a more pervasive or deeper reason as to why people always seem to think in such black and white terms?

SP: In The Stuff of Thought, I note that all-or-none thinking is embedded in language. When we use a noun as a subject or an object, the natural interpretation is that the referent is affected or located in toto. For example, John drank the glass of beer suggests he drank all of it (compare John drank from the glass of beer), and The garden is swarming with bees suggests that all parts of it contain bees (compare Bees are swarming in the garden). This is common across languages (possibly universal), and probably reflects the way thoughts are constructed, with pointlike or bloblike symbols standing for complex entities. I suspect that this habit makes statistical comparisons (such as apportioning variance, or analyzing overlapping bell curves) highly unintuitive.

The phenomenon you mention also reflects the mental anchor points that people begin with, which in the case of 20th-century intuitive psychology, was the blank slate. If that’s your starting point, then any deviation from 0 – 1% to 100% -- becomes an equivalent heresy.

DS: Later, I write: ‘Then again, it may not be so curious since I see 2 modern parallels to twin studies in other endeavors. The 1^st is in the relatively hard sciences of cosmology & cosmogony, where the Big Bang theory has held sway despite mounting evidence that does not support many of its conclusions- mainly 1) the conundrum that has bedeviled religiots for eons (updated to): If the Big Bang was the beginning, what came before the Big Bang? & 2) The fundamental absence of alot of supporting evidence that would be predicted by Big Bang physics- from strings & superstrings to dark matter & dark energy….The 2^nd area that much of the twin studies seems to find parallels with is in the belief in Near Death Experiences (NDEs). Let me state that I do not believe NDEs are truly NDEs, but rather the last second panic-modes of a dying brain that are remembered upon improbable revival. & believe me, I’ve had a NDE & believe the latter to be true. That said, there is the classic NDE of a weightless incorporeal essence of you floating toward some bright light where you encounter a Jesus/Buddha/deity & look back on your life surrounded by loved 1s who have dies. Unfortunately, this is just not the majority of NDEs. Most NDEs are far more prosaic & range from typical dream-like experiences (such as I had- however bizarre), to downright Hellish nightmares. But only the ‘float to the light’ NDEs are propagated by believers- convenient ‘proof’ of an afterdeath. In this way, NDEs also resemble claims of alien abduction, in that those ‘abductions’ which have occurred in the USA over the last 30 years or so are done by perverse bug-eyed gray dwarves, whereas other cultures report a wild menagerie of extraterrestrial kidnappers.’

Let me work backwards from this: what are your opinions on things such as NDEs, or OBEs (Out Of Body Experiences)? No one has ever produced information gained in OBEs, or past life regressions, that could not have been obtained by ordinary means elsewhere. What of people who have visions of Jesus Christ or the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVMs)? In 1917, there was the infamous Our Lady Of Fatima mass delusion, where some claimed the sun stopped, some claimed a UFO was seen, and others saw Mother Mary. How can so many people be so off-kilter? And what of people who claim to be abducted by aliens and sexually abused and/or experimented upon? Is this Freudianism crawling out of the grave? Has Occam’s Razor- the maxim that the simplest explanation that best fits the known facts is usually correct, fallen to desuetude? It seems that brain studies of recent years are obviating the preternatural claims of all these visions. Similarly, there is not a single case of a supposedly reincarnated person who (via Past Life Regression) has obtained information that could be verified nor that could not be obtained by diurnal means. Also, while it’s true that someone like Uri Geller might be able to bend spoons via mind power alone, since even tyro magicians (much less old pros like James Randi) can do the same, Geller is likely a charlatan (and, indeed, has been proved such on more than one occasion). Why has common sense fallen out of favor?

SP: I don’t understand your criticism of the Big Bang theory. The question of what came before the Big Bang is not “mounting evidence” against it but a permanent conceptual puzzle, whose solution surely is that our folk concept of “before” (and other common-sense notions of time and space) breaks down at boundary and extreme conditions such as the birth of the universe, where we have no right to expect them to apply in the first place. Also, I’m no physicist, but my understanding is that the existence of dark matter and energy does not challenge the idea of the Big Bang (as opposed to the steady-state alternative), nor is the empirical difficulty of validating string theory.

As for near-death experiences – I completely agree. I don’t think common sense has fallen out of favor. On the contrary, as my former collaborator Paul Bloom argues in his book Descartes’ Baby, common sense is fundamentally dualist: we naturally think that people have minds that can part company with their bodies. Recall our discussion of dreaming above, not to mention the deeply unintuitive nature of death – it’s hard to imagine a person, especially the self, simply ceasing to exist. It’s the materialist view that is unintuitive, and that constantly needs to be reinforced by skeptical science.

DS: Still working backwards, let’s turn to Twin Studies. I am adopted, and in my mid-20s, found my natural father and brother. Yet, I sense that I am different from most people in such studies. While I am not a twin, my natural brother and I have little in common, and after a decade of trying to foster a relationship they just drifted out of my life. But, both my natural father and brother share only a tendency to be able to shuck off adversity. In terms of politics, social views, finances, etc., we are worlds apart. By contrast, my adopted dad was a trade unionist, blue collar man with a 5^th grade education, and yet his ethos seems to have slipped into me osmotically. I share much of his view on life, and empathy for working class, minority, and poor people. Were it not for his presence I’d likely be in prison. My adopted mom also resonated with me in encouraging my quests for answers. Even my adopted sister (no blood relation) shares a far greater sense of the world (although not nearly as intellectual) with me than any of my blood relatives did. Perhaps, the fact that I am creative has something to do with skewing the norms in such situations, but I am a bit more skeptical of twin studies. To me, it seems that most of the similarities are trivial matters. As in the underreporting of non-float toward the light NDEs, or the skewed IQ questions, I suspect that much of the claimed similarities arise from an expectation of such on the part of those conducting the experiments, with inconvenient discrepancies overlooked. Not that the idea that identical twins raised apart won’t have obvious similarities. I just find much of it likely overstated. Have there been dissenting studies?

SP: See our discussion of statistical thinking above – as with all large-scale generalizations, “your mileage may vary.” Also, I wonder how many of your beliefs and values were shared with your peers and other kids in your neighborhood, as well as with your parents. As I point out in the “Children” chapter in The Blank Slate (based largely on Judith Rich Harris’s work), there is a huge three-way confound in most people’s experience between genes, parenting, and peer culture. Your being adopted severs the confound with genes, but unless your family was unusual in your neighborhood (e.g., migrants from another country or culture or class) it’s hard to disentangle parents from peers, and when they do dissociate (as in generational changes like the 1960s, or with immigrants), usually the peer values predominate.

As for twin studies – these are truly robust effects, repeatedly replicated with multiple converging methods (twins, non-twin siblings, other relatives, and adoptees), often in massive samples from data-hoarding Scandinavian countries. They also jibe with many people’s everyday experience. I’ve received many emails from people with opposite stories to yours, in which they feel an instant affinity with suddenly discovered biological relatives. And the correlations not just in amusing but trivial traits like flushing the toilet before you use it, or keeping rubber bands around your wrist – they are found in consequential life outcomes like college attendance and success, income level, vulnerability to addiction and psychiatric disorders, and likelihood of getting divorced or of getting into trouble with the law.

DS: Let me skip about a bit, and ask some queries based upon things I’ve gleaned from doing research online about you. In an online video interview you quote philosopher Colin McGinn, who claims that philosophy is the study of things the human mind is incapable of understanding. Do you agree? And are there limits to human knowledge- certainly individually, but as a species? Could other sentient beings know the cosmos and its ‘truths’ differently from the way we do?

SP: Yes, I expanded McGinn’s argument in the closing discussion of How the Mind Works. Certainly qualia, or the “hard problem” of consciousness (why first-person subjective experience exists), is a good candidate for a problem that we can pose for ourselves but for which we can’t even imagine a satisfying answer. (This is why Dennett can coherently argue that it’s a pseudo-problem, while courting the incredulity of every sentient agent who, like Descartes, cannot doubt the fact of his own subjective awareness). By the way, it’s crucial to distinguish the hard problem from the so-called “easy problem,” namely the cognitive, neural, and evolutionary basis of the conscious/unconscious distinction. Most people, including scientists, confuse them.) The implication is that other species, if they had brains that were not confined to discrete combinatorial reasoning like ours is, might indeed find it child’s play to explain how neural firings observed from the outside could feel like something from the inside.

DS: And what of non-human terrestrial intelligences? Could the oft-touted less than 2% genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees be merely an insignificant difference in the grand scheme, no matter how much we see it as ennobling us above all other creatures? And whales seem to have quite a complex ‘vocabulary’- even beyond the great apes? Elephants, in recent years, have shown surprising complexity in their social structures, and individuation- unlike social insects, where complexity arises only en masse, not individually. Could you ever foresee a Planet Of the Apes scenario, where some ‘lesser’ species supplants man as the dominant force on the planet?

SP: It’s a mistake to think that there must be a dominant group of animals “ruling the earth,” as the old museum exhibits used to say. As E. O. Wilson has pointed out if any group of animals is the dominant force on the planet today, it’s the insects. Intelligence is a gadget that is selected when its benefits (in particular, outsmarting the defenses of other plants and animals) outweigh the costs (a big, injury-prone, birth-complicating, metabolically expensive organ bobbling on top of your neck). And that probably happens only for certain kinds of organisms in certain ecologically circumstances. It isn’t a general goal of evolution, or else we’d see humanlike intelligence repeatedly evolving. Since elephants and humans have not been primary ecological competitors for most of the evolutionary history of the elephant, it’s unlikely that they’ve been waiting for humans to get out of the way before getting smarter. It’s more likely that they are at an adaptive plateau in which still-better brains aren’t worth the cost.

DS: What is the difference between consciousness and sentience?

SP: In How the Mind Works, I used “sentience” as a more reader-friendly synonym of “qualia” and “the hard problem of consciousness” – see above.

DS: How much of a role does celebrity play in science- i.e.- how much of Stephen Hawking is his ALS? And to what degree is your fame- outside of science, dependent upon your moptop?

SP: Certainly Hawking is a brilliant physicist whose standing within physics had nothing to do with his illness. As for me – yes, it’s the hair.

DS: As a psychologist, are you ever embarrassed by the Lowest Common Denominator Dr. Phil types in the media?

SP: I’m not familiar enough with Dr. Phil, unfortunately.

DS: Have you ever watched Michael Apted’s The Up Series documentaries? What are your thoughts on it as a longitudinal study of human development? How about sociologically? Do you agree with its epigraph, the Jesuit proverb, ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.’?

SP: Yes, I enjoyed one of the programs very much. It vividly shows the continuity of personality over the lifespan – and also some of the contingent unpredictability. I wouldn’t agree with the epigraph for at least two reasons. One is that it ignores the roles of genes and chance. The other is that it assumes a critical period for the development of personality and character (up to age seven), whereas development continues well beyond that age (just think of kids who immigrate after the age of seven and assimilate fully), and adolescence is surely a critical stage in that development.

DS: On May 9^th, 1961, FCC Chairman Newt Minnow famously derided television as a ‘vast wasteland.’ Manifestly, with hundreds of channels now, this is even more true, and the Internet only magnifies that verity, with all its demagoguery and wrong information, Nigerian scams, Viagra and penis enlargement ads, porno, political hate blogs, scams, online gambling, anonymous defamations, bile, trolls, etc. Are all knowledge-potential technologies doomed to the lowest common denominator? If not, are there steps to ameliorate it, or will time just have to do what it does, level the garbage to dust?

SP: I don’t agree – the Internet is like the printing press or movie cameras in that it doesn’t care what kind of content it disseminates. There is a lot of dreck on the internet because human beings produce and consume a lot of dreck. Remember that half the population is below average in intelligence; ditto for taste and judgment. But the internet is creating a mind-boggling advance in human knowledge and discourse. Not only does it provide instant, searchable access to past issues of journals and magazines, searchable texts of all the great classics, instant access to much of the world’s art and music, and countless quantitative databases, but it provides a forum for the expression of a much wider range of informed opinion than were served by the oligopoly of print-based media with “New York” in their titles. The range of intelligent opinion that you can get on www.artsandlettersdaily.com, www.edge.org, www.slate.com, www.3quarksdaily.com, and so on simply dwarfs what you find on the New York Times op-ed page.

DS: You are, indeed, associated with Edge.org, and last year suggested that the query they pose to some of the leading thinkers in the world be, ‘What’s your dangerous idea?’ I found it interesting that so many of the ideas that some considered dangerous were in direct opposition to each other. As example, one person might claim that God exists and another that there is no God. Or that we are alone in the universe as a planet that supports life, while another claims life is everywhere. But, I got the biggest laugh from the fact that one of those queried was ex-Monkee Mike Nesmith, and his almost comical response about the nature of time and reality was so ignorant and ballocksed I had to believe someone slipped his answer in there as a joke. Why did you suggest that query? And were there any answers, aside from Nesmith’s, that left you just shaking your head, saying, ‘What in the blue hell is wrong with so and so?’ If so, which one(s)?

SP: I proposed the question because science is increasingly turning up heterodox ideas and the internet is increasingly blowing their cover. Whether or not we end up giving an open forum to all ideas, we need to think about the issue of when and how to discuss them. This was the subject of a course I taught with Alan Dershowitz at Harvard last semester (“Morality and Taboo”), and of the essay I wrote in connection with that feature that was printed as a preface to the resulting book and in the Chicago Sun-Times.

DS: Your reply to your query was, ‘Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments.’ Can you expound on this? And why do so many see this as being a racist sentiment? At the extremes, one would not expect short, squat Eskimos to be able to run as fast as certain lean and lanky Africans nor Andean Indians who were born and raised in higher altitudes. Duh!

SP: Rather than expounding on this, I’ll take advantage of the internet and point to my past exposition.

DS: My wife said that her dangerous idea was ‘Why?’ I.e.- why all and not none? The idea of first causes. If you are familiar with the great old British television show from the 1960s, The Prisoner, written and starring Patrick McGoohan, you’ll recall an episode titled The General, wherein McGoohan’s character, #6, defeats the titular room-sized supercomputer by asking the unanswerable Möbian question, ‘Why?’ Nowadays there is talk of quantum computing, and even the idea that the cosmos is a giant quantum computer. But, is that simple question McGoohan asked an intellectual quale? Is ‘first cause’ not simply a theological conundrum? Why this? Why that? Why time? And is the answer likely what Woody Allen suggests at the end of his great film, Crimes And Misdemeanors? That the search for reason and meaning will always be fruitless as long as we look out there, that it is we who invest things with meaning, so we should be careful what we grant? I.e.- it is the engagement of the mind with the real that is the source of wonder.

SP: We don’t have a right to expect that there will be an answer to all the “why” questions we can pose. Anyone who remembers their three-year-old’s “why” stage, in which every answer was followed reflexively by another “why?”, can appreciate that not all “why” questions have answers. Some – like “why is the sky blue?” – only have “how” answers; we can explain how the fact came about, but not what purpose it serves, since it serves no purpose at all. (Purpose exists only in the realm of intelligent agents like humans, and perhaps certain feedback-driven cybernetic processes like human-made machines and natural selection.) Ultimate “why” questions (why was there a big bang? why is there something rather than nothing?) are unanswerable by definition, since regardless of the answer you propose, our inner-three-year-old can always follow up with yet another “why”?

79. DS: To finish up on this question, my ‘dangerous idea’ is that there are no truly dangerous ideas, only dangerous actions, and that the placing of blame on mere ideation removes culpability from the individual and actions- something the Nuremburg Trials should have obviated. Any thoughts?

SP: In my essay, I follow the great talmudic tradition of arguing a position as forcefully as possible and then switching sides. That is, I consider the best arguments for discouraging (though of course not prohibiting) the airing of certain ideas. For example, people are responsible for the consequences of their actions, including their public statements, and publicizing a scientifically unproven idea that is guaranteed to increase racism in an inflammatory time and place (e.g., a biological basis for increased ambition among Jews in the Nazi era in Germany, or for black-white IQ differences in the early civil rights era) is not morally unproblematic. Also, there are numerous circumstances in which as individuals we rationally choose to be ignorant. We may choose not to know the outcome of a football game we have recorded and hope to watch later, or who got the placebo and who got the drug in a controlled clinical trial, or some sensitive information that could make us vulnerable to kidnapping or extortion, or a threat – the proverbial “offer we can’t refuse.” Perhaps the same is true for collective intellectual discourse.

DS: Let’s turn to social engineering. You’ve been critical of the attempts of social engineers to micro-manage society, and blame this on the baleful influence of The Blank Slate ideologues, such as the architect Le Corbusier, who wanted to level and rebuild Paris, France. Growing up in New York City, we had our own such ideologue- Robert Moses, who destroyed neighborhoods, contributed to the government’s redlining and de facto theft of property wealth from black and minority communities. What are your thoughts on such macro-attempts to control the populace? Have they all fallen to the dustbin of history? Or, are their Brasilias still on drafting tables?

SP: Yes, and also Boston’s West End (now home to a high-rise desert) and Scollay Square (now the brutalist City Hall and “Government Center”). Thankfully, the “new urbanism” seems to have slowed this kind of thing down, thanks to its acknowledgment of human needs like green space, intimate places for social interaction, human scale, and resilient, bottom-up social organization.

DS: I have always felt there is a difference between secular ethics (which are immanent) and religious morals (which are imposed from on high). What are your thoughts on the difference? Is there a deeper human set of values that all share? Also, do humans need to be tricked into acting altruistically? If so, is a theoretically altruistic political system like Communism possible? Was it flawed because it did not acknowledge altruism needs to be the medicine slipped into a piece of candy, and cannot be forced?

SP: I don’t think people literally have to be tricked into altruism, but it’s clear that some kinds of altruism are more natural than others. People are more likely to sacrifice for their family and friends than for strangers, and they are more likely to sacrifice for people they perceive as part of their clan or extended kin (which is how ethnic groups are perceived, even if genetically there’s not much basis for the perception) than for an abstraction like “society.” It’s probably not a coincidence that successful welfare states tend to take root in ethnically homogeneous societies, and that widespread immigration tends to threaten their popularity. It’s also not so clear that Communist collectivization was, either in perception or reality, a kind of altruism. The inefficiencies of massive central planning, the aggrandizement of leaders in the cults of personality, the pursuit of ideological dogmas in place of feedback-guided adaptive policies, the ethnic favoritism, and the massive corruption of those entrusted with overseeing the collectivization, meant that even the kernel of altruism that theoretically characterized Marxist social planning was not feasibly implementable by state force.

DS: How about materialism, and relativism? As example, if I kill you, does it matter if I kill you because I’m an anti-Semite, I hate atheists, I hate your hair while I’m bald, I’m a sexual deviant, a terrorist, a druggy looking to mug you, a hitman assigned to ‘take you out’ because you trespassed against a Don, or because you stole a girlfriend from me years ago, and I never got over it? The net result is you’re still dead. Does not this make ‘hate crimes’ silly, since it punishes perceived/subjective motive rather than material/objective action?

SP: I’m not sure what this has to do with materialism or relativism, but I do think it’s legitimate to consider a perpetrator’s motives when determining criminal punishment. The reason is that the ultimate goal of criminal punishment is deterrence, which very much depends on who is tempted to commit a crime and under what circumstances. That’s why we already have an insanity defense, and already distinguish cold-blooded premeditated murder from manslaughter committed in the heat of passion and involuntary manslaughter that results from a fight or from irresponsible conduct. In The Blank Slate, I suggest that it’s not a coincidence that that we assign the most responsibility to those people who would most easily be deterred by a policy of holding such people responsible. Though I share your distaste for laws that would implicitly make a black or a gay or female life more worthy of protection than a white or a straight or a male one, conceivably one could justify a law that sought to deter a category of crimes that might otherwise have been left too tempting by the rest of the criminal justice system, like picking out a gay person at random for a beating.

DS: How about an afterdeath? Is there a material possibility for consciousness outside of physical means? Whether of not we speak of ‘ghosts,’ or possible alien life forms?

SP: No, the evidence points to death after life, not life after death. As far as we can tell, our own consciousness depends entirely on physiological processes taking place in our brains. Whether a robot or computer or alien made from silicon could be conscious in the hard-problem sense is one of those imponderables we discussed earlier.

DS: Let me pepper you with some questions from observations I’ve had over the years, and see what your opinions are, and whether any of these things have ever been studied or documented. In all my years in the arts, I’ve found that men still dominate, in terms of quality. Even in artistic lean times, like these. Even my wife agrees. I believe that this is because men take risks, so there is a higher possible payoff. Women with talent, that I’ve known, tend to be too emotionally attached to their art, whereas men can objectify it, and say, ‘That sucks,’ and start again. Yet, when I think of great female artists- such as painter Georgia O’Keeffe or poet Sylvia Plath, they exhibited definite masculate tendencies- riskiness, aggressiveness, a lack of demureness. Any thoughts? And outside of the arts, just how much of gender is actually sex related?

SP: I’ve ceded the family franchise on the psychology of sex differences to my sister Susan Pinker, the Globe and Mail columnist, whose book on the topic will be published early in 2008.

DS: Earlier I mentioned the idea of the ‘gay brain’ or ‘gay gene,’ and it seems like people always want easy solutions. Yet, people are always obfuscating terminology. Re: homosexuality, why is it the term ‘homophobia’ is used to describe people who are not keen on gays. Literally, it means to be fearful of homosexuals, yet I’ve never met an anti-gay bigot who was afraid of homosexuals (although I know gays are trying to back-smear those bigots with being closet cases, and ‘fearing’ their own sexuality). Rather, almost all people with an anti-gay view have a disgust, queasiness, or ‘yuck’ factor when thinking of homosexual acts. I think a term like ‘homotaedium’ or ‘homotaediot’ would therefore be more accurate. So why has such an inapt term as homophobia taken off?

SP: Actually, homophobia literally means “fear of the same.” The sex part got omitted, presumably because homosexualphobia is too long and clumsy. This happens all the time – fax for facsimile telegraphy, British telly for television, and so on. The phobic suffix can be used to refer to mere avoidance, as in the chemistry term hydrophobic, “repelled by water.” As I discuss in Stuff, there is a lot of caprice in which neologism takes off. Homophobia is more-or-less transparent, which helps, whereas homotaedium would be opaque to most English speakers (a feeling of tedium when watching reruns of Will and Grace?) In general, erudite analyses about what term ought to be used by the public go nowhere. When I was a child I remember some guy arguing that automobile should be dropped in favor of autokineton because auto is Greek and mobile is Latin. We’re still waiting.

DS: Of course, there can be political reasons that poor word choices are used. In the mid-1980s, boiled cocaine became known as ‘crack’ and was posited as a new drug threat, when it had really been around since the 1960s, known as ‘pop.’ It was just that it needed a scarier name since white suburban kids were now dying from it. Then there are words like liberal, conservative, and libertarian, although people with those claimed political views rarely embody them. I.e.- what liberal would ban books, what conservative would ban abortion, and what libertarian would shill for corporations? Even in the arts, the bastardization of words goes on. People cannot distinguish between a good or bad review and a positive or negative one. A good review can be positive or negative, if it makes its points well, and accurately displays an artwork’s flaws or strengths without bias. Even in criticism, critics often mistake subjective like or dislike of a work for objective excellence. Why is this?

SP: Good and bad, like most common words, are polysemous – they have many meanings, when you stop and think carefully about them. So I don’t think it’s correct to say that a good review must mean a well-crafted one as opposed to a favorable one. Adjectives like good tend to modify the aspect of a noun whose variation is most relevant to the context. As I note in the book:

Polysemy is everywhere. A sad movie makes you sad, but a sad person already is sad. When you begin a meal, you eat it (or, if you’re a cook, prepare it), but when you begin a book, you read it (or, if you’re an author, write it). What makes something a good car is different from what makes it a good steak, a good husband, or a good kiss. A fast car moves quickly, but a fast book needn’t move at all (it just can be read in a short time), and a fast driver, a fast highway, a fast decision, a fast typist, and a fast date are all fast in still different ways.

DS: In my review of The Stuff Of Thought, I went out of my way not to simply focus on your ideas, and whether I thought them right or wrong, since I- while an expert at the application of words, am not trained in the scientific basis of language formation in the individual, nor culturally. So, why are so many science, political, or history books reviewed by people who are not trained literary critics, but ideologues in whatever field? As an example of a really bad review (and a negative one) I cite Richard Dawkins’ 7/1/07 New York Times review of Michael J. Behe’s The Edge Of Evolution: The Search For The Limits Of Darwinism. Now, people with even a lay knowledge of the current field of evolutionary science know Behe’s an ID apologist- and guilty of Christian Von Dänikenism. And I think Dawkins is one of the heroes of rationalism- the closest thing to T.H. Huxley (aka Darwin’s Bulldog) today, but the review is poorly written, a mere screed, and has only one passage that deals with Behe’s writing: The crucial passage in ‘The Edge of Evolution’ is this: ‘By far the most critical aspect of Darwin’s multifaceted theory is the role of random mutation. Almost all of what is novel and important in Darwinian thought is concentrated in this third concept.’

What a bizarre thing to say! Leave aside the history: unacquainted with genetics, Darwin set no store by randomness. New variants might arise at random, or they might be acquired characteristics induced by food, for all Darwin knew. Far more important for Darwin was the nonrandom process whereby some survived but others perished. Natural selection is arguably the most momentous idea ever to occur to a human mind, because it- alone as far as we know- explains the elegant illusion of design that pervades the living kingdoms and explains, in passing, us. Whatever else it is, natural selection is not a ‘modest’ idea, nor is descent with modification.

Simply put, the quote gives no idea to the reader what is being referenced, and then Dawkins foams. Is it too much to ask a book review to let the reader sample a bit of the writing, and whether or not the man can craft words?

SP: I’m not sure that a caste of trained literary critics would be a solution to the very uneven quality of reviewing, especially the grinding of hobbyhorses (if you’ll permit me to combine the relevant clichés). I suspect that the problem is that any sphere of human behavior that is exempt from feedback and review will become corrupted, and that is the situation with book reviewing: the reviewers too often review with impunity. Occasionally a magazine will publish a reply from an aggrieved author, but space is limited, and often the reviewer is given the last word, unchecked. This is an egregious failing of the New York Review of Books, which limits the author to a few words in self-defense (if that) and then invites the reviewer to dispense an unlimited stream of trash talk in response. The feature on amazon and many blogs in which readers can rate and comment upon reviews is one step in the right direction.

In the case of Dawkins’ review, I don’t see a problem in the passage that you reproduce. But if he had asked me, I would have suggested that he modify a later passage in which he asks the reader who should be trusted, Behe or list of famous mathematical biologists. This reads like an appeal to authority, which is unfortunate because the great advantage of science is that one can always give reasons for one’s beliefs.

DS: Cannot one disagree with an opponent without constant screeding? In my interview with Daniel Dennett, as example, I was a bit taken aback at the vitriol he still held for the long dead Stephen Jay Gould, basically accusing him of being a ‘useful idiot’ for anti-evolutionists. When you attack opponents, you seem to use humor, or do so more gently. Is this just your temperament or a strategic decision to not alienate potential students of your subject matter?

SP: Well, I certainly ought to do that; whether I succeed is for others to judge. Clearly one should attack the idea, not the person, both as a matter of principle and for tactical reasons, to convince the reader that the facts and logic are on one’s side rather than that one is engaged in a urination competition with the author. As the Godfather advised, “Never hate your enemies. It clouds your judgment.” As with all cases of aggression, though, it’s easiest to appeal to reason rather than dirty tactics when the other guy feels the same way.

DS: How can scientists do a better job of educating the masses? Sometimes, layfolk tend to feel that, on a given subject, scientists often come across as lion keepers, safely ensconced at a zoo, rather than lion hunters, or lions themselves. There’s not a great vitality that comes across to the masses, whereas religion seems more passionate, even if science comes across more honestly, not feigning to know everything, like religion. Do you see a disconnect between science and the masses? Do you diagnose it my way? And what is your cure? Do we simply need to bring back updated book series (in print or online) like the old How, Why, And Wonder Books of the 1960s and 1970s?

SP: I certainly like the Wonder and Time-Life books and agree that we need more child- and adolescent- and nonspecialist-friendly sources like them. More generally, I see science as just the honest effort to figure out the way things work, taking special care to determine whether the things you say are objectively true. Science, in this vision, is just a passionate application of human curiosity, common sense, and the attempt to minimize self-deception and other sources of fallacy. Seen in that light, science is self-evidently worthy, and continuous with rigorous journalism, philosophy, history, and other truth-seeking pursuits. I think scientists make a big mistake when they cast science as a distinct form of human activity with special rules and privileges and perquisites.

DS: I want to end this interview going back to where we started, your latest book, and how humans mangle and misunderstand language. Often in my own writing, I have my own quirks and preferences- as an Emily Dickinson may have had. I prefer a four to three dot ellipsis, and I prefer to use the word alot as one word, not two. I see that- as with former singular words that were two words (another, already, altogether), and are now readily accepted as one, as well as other words that are slowly gaining acceptance as one (alright vs. all right), that alot, as one word, make more sense. Yet, I recently got an email from a woman who claimed to be a high school English teacher, and want to sample some of the exchange we had:

Teacher: I just read your review of The Life of Pi and while not entirely disagreeing with it I was appalled with your spelling of the word a lot. You are so self-righteous you should at least use correct spelling. A lot are two words not one!

Me: As for alot, many words start out as two, but merge into one. Alot will be one of them- it's called vision. A lot makes no sense. What is a lot? Lots? But alot makes sense, meaning many. Language is not static, but internal consistency is a virtue. Great writers know when to improve the lingo, and MLS rules are often nonsensical to begin with. Didacticism is antipodal to creativity, that's why few teachers succeed in the arts.

She then mentions that one cannot singlehandedly change language, even after correctly claiming that Shakespeare did. I countered by stating, who but great writers, ever change the language?

Teacher: Shakespeare was able to change the language and spellings due to the fact that there was no dictionary or stardard (sic) spelling at the time.

Me: For a teacher, you have a poor reading comprehension….You stated 'However, one cannot singlehandedly change the English language.' below, in an earlier email. Then you state, right above that, 'I mentioned Shakespeare because he changed a great deal of our language.' That is a logical contradiction….After all, even dictionaries contradict one another over preferred spellings and pronunciations. Unlike the legal world, there is no 'legal' nor set in stone way a word is spelt (or spelled) or pronounced- and this is without even going into accents nor dialects.

Teacher: You clearly cannot see anyone's point of view other that your own. Students in my class will the use of they're to be spelled there - but it is not so.

Me: That's because it is two different words. Alot and a lot are variants of the same word- not to, too, and two. And you've not even acknowledged the fact that alot is plural, while a single lot is singular. There is no single alot (or a lot). The a- prefix pluralizes the word. Also, a student is not an artist that is changing an art form.

And on it went. Yes, emailers are often lonely and disgruntled people, but if high school teachers are this bad and unable to grasp the power of language and ideas, does that make freaks out of researchers like you and writers like me? Is emailese fated to displace good writing and readers of depth, thus robbing folks of inflection and emotions which can defuse the rampant online anger? I also notice how people like this teacher, are the first to point to older examples of things that were criticized in their day, yet ignore their contemporary equivalents. I.e.- those critics who damned Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, or the Impressionists, are laughed at by the very people who, in earlier times, would have been condemning the aforementioned. This reminds me of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions. Do you agree? And what are your views on Kuhn’s posits?

SP: Attempts to make spelling and grammar more “logical” tend to ignore a basic design feature of language (and all other communication systems): there is always a tradeoff between standardization (an entire community abiding by a single protocol) and logic. Sure, Betamax was technically better than VHS, the Dvorak keyboard better than QWERTY, OS/1 better than MS-DOS, and so on, but there’s also an advantage in using the same code that everyone else is using, even if it is suboptimal.

In the case of language, this tradeoff is amplified by the fact that no one gets to design the code from scratch or dictate who uses it. The standardization arises from countless lateral interactions, like the synchrony in a school of fish, or the way that young people all decided to wear their baseball caps backwards in the 1990s. A single influential writer like Shakespeare is, to put it mildly, exceptional.

Also, there are numerous criteria for “logic” or “good design” in language, and they conflict with one another. Should we aim for maximum transparency, where every syllable stands for a single concept and people can coin neologisms at will? But this would require six- and seven-syllable words – would it be better to aim for brevity and efficiency? Should a language have redundancy, so that a mumbled consonant doesn’t lead to comical misunderstandings? Or no redundancy, so as to maximize brevity and transparency? It’s because of these numerous tradeoffs that none of the “perfect languages” of the Enlightenment (discussed in Umberto Eco’s marvelous book The Search for the Perfect Language) caught on. A major theme of my own book Words and Rules, as well as The Stuff of Thought and The Language Instinct, is that all human languages are shaped by these tradeoffs.

In the case you discuss, I’m not sure I see the rationale behind spelling a lot as alot. I suppose one could argue that the a is a clitic that is pronounced as a unit with the following noun and therefore should be joined to it in spelling (the fact that it has the phonologically conditioned variant an would support the clitic analysis). But of course that would mean a loss in transparency, as readers would no longer see the a and lot as separate units – the same a as in a dog, and the same lot as in lots and a whole lot. The argument could go either way, if there ever was deliberation over which system to adopt. But the point is that there never was such a deliberation, and never will be. English has just evolved that way, with morphological rather than phonological spelling. It’s hard enough when a cadre of copy-editors, English teachers, and usage mavens try to enforce a standard that people en masse tend to flout, but a single person trying to do it, no matter how much logic is behind him, is like ordering the tide back.

DS: Thanks for doing this interview, and let me allow you a closing statement, on whatever you like. Hopefully there may be some seeds you can use here for your next project.

SP: Thanks for your rich and insightful questions. No closing statement – I’ve said enough.

(originally posted 8/25/07)

The Dan Schneider Interview 3: Pete Hamill

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:04:47 -0400

DS: Pete Hamill, thank you for agreeing to be interviewed for The Dan Schneider Interview series. The very purpose of this series is to combat what I call the ‘deliteracy’ of current and common culture, i.e.- the active dumbing down of art and discourse. Nowadays, many magazines that used to interview people of substance and ideas would rather speak with the latest pop babe of the month, or the current politician whose garbage is grabbing the most headlines. Additionally, even though most of this world’s information sharing is done online- not via tv nor radio, the Internet has become the largest haven to the Lowest Common Denominator- and a Lite version of the LCD, at that. Most websites, if they want articles on any subject, demand that the articles be about five or six hundred words, claiming that web surfers will not read longer pieces. I disagree with that claim, and cite my own popular personal and non-commercial website, Cosmoetica, as proof that it is wrong.

We seek to raise discourse back to the level it was, in the days when figures as diverse as Phil Donahue and William F. Buckley were on the air, not the Tucker Carlsons nor Oprah Winfreys. Before you, we have interviewed National Book Award-winning fictionist Charles Johnson, philosopher Daniel Dennett and this month we turn to you, Pete Hamill, a reporter, newspaper editor, and fiction writer. But, before we delve into the recesses of your mind and memory, there will be people who stumble upon this website and page, and click to check out what you have to say. Could you please give a brief syllabus of who you are, what you do, and what your goals as an artist and journalist are?

PH: That’s almost impossible to do in any brief way. I’m a son of immigrants (Catholics from Northern Ireland). I’m the oldest of their seven children. I’ve been a professional writer since June 1, 1960, when I first went to work as a newspaperman. I’ve published 20 books, including ten novels. I’ve covered wars and politics and murders and sports. Stating a goal would sound pompous, and I have no slogan posted above my desk. As any writer grows older the goals are always shifting. But I suppose that in my journalism and my fiction, I’ve tried hard to make the world more human.

DS: Unlike many published writers today, who are mere assembly-line writers, cranked out by the MFA mills, you are one of the few published novelists who’s actually done ‘real work,’ where one gets one’s hands dirty. You have blue collar beginnings. What jobs did you do, and do you think that has given you a grounding in realities that today’s young published writers lack? If so, what areas of your writing have benefited most- dialogue, character development, etc.? What books did you read when young? What films did you watch? How about the films of Jimmy Cagney, John Garfield, or the Bowery Boys? My dad was a big fan of Leo Gorcey.

PH: Growing up in blue collar Brooklyn, work was always part of the deal. I don’t mean it was an activity to be endured, but the people who shaped me – starting with my parents – were survivors of the Great Depression, and firmly believed in the absolute necessity of work. I left high school after two years and went to work as an apprentice sheet metal worker at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I learned many things there, working in the company of men (I was 16). One was HOW to work. That is, to get up, go to a place at a certain time, and do work that you were not in love with doing. More important, I learned at the Navy Yard to see people more clearly (those who were not the neighbors I grew up with). That is, to see each of them as individuals, to ask them questions beyond the craft of sheet metal work, about their lives and their children and their neighborhoods. They were also survivors of the Depression (and many, of the War). Most were generous and funny and kind to a kid. There were Jews among them and Italians and Irishmen (many of them immigrants themselves) and African-Americans. The tough New York alloy. In memory, all stressed to me the need for an education. It was from them that I first heard about the GI Bill, which would transform so many lives in blue-collar America, including mine.

DS: You are also a veteran. What branch of the military did you serve in, and when? Have you used any of these experience sin your writing- be it reportage or fiction? Your brother Denis is also a writer- mainly a journalist. Are there other members of your clan that are involved in the arts? And any besides writing?

PH: I went into the US Navy in September 1952, after a year at the Navy Yard as a civilian. My grandfather (Peter Devlin) had been an engineer who went to sea for decades, to be free of the bigotry of Northern Ireland. The sea was free. He was killed in an accident on the Brooklyn waterfront in 1916, and so I never knew him. But he existed in the family tale. One of his relics was a deck of playing cards adorned with photographs of the construction of the Panama Canal. They went from him to my mother and eventually to me. So I joined the Navy after a year of working on ships at the Navy Yard in Brooklyn (converting aircraft carriers for use by jet aircraft). I was filled with romantic notions of Seeing The World. I wanted to go to the Korean War, and see Asia; and if that was not possible, then to Port Lyautey in North Africa or other ports in the Mediterranean. The Korean War came to a sudden end in early 1953, and I was assigned to Pensacola. It had a great small library on the base, and there I first read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos and others. That’s where I started moving on a road that would lead to becoming a writer (that road always begins with reading). The tale is told more fully in my memoir: A Drinking Life.

I used the Navy time in a novel called “Loving Women”, which explores (among many other things) a Brooklyn kid’s confrontation with race (beyond the more abstract and partisan stirrings caused by the arrival of Jackie Robinson in Ebbets Field in 1947).

My brother Denis is a fine writer, who has published ten excellent novels and writes a column for the New York Daily News. My brother John worked as a newspaperman for about ten years and has worked on many movie scripts. My sister Kathleen also wrote for newspapers in the New York area. My late brother Joe worked for many years as a TV news producer. My daughter Deirdre will celebrate 20 years as a newspaper photographer in September, 2007. My brother Brian is a well-known photographer, who worked as a still man on about 25 Woody Allen movies, along with those of many other top directors. A collection of his photographs was published by Harry Abrams in TK, and his work continues to be exhibited in various galleries around the country.

DS: Before settling on the written word, you studied painting, and years later even wrote a book on Diego Rivera- the famed Mexican painter, whose wife was Frida Kahlo, also a painter. What was the book about? What do you think of his politics? Why are so many Latino writers still enamored of simplistic, naïve, and failed Marxist politics? I posit that most ‘political art’ fails because the politics is always made primary over the art. Do you agree?

PH: The book on Diego was a re-introduction to his work and his life, after a period when he seemed to be a mere addendum to the life of Frida Kahlo. When I went to Mexico in 1956, Diego was still alive, but I didn’t care much for his work. I was an Orozco man, with his big bold draftsmanship, his avoidance (with some exceptions) of mere political cartoons. I also liked Tamayo, who had returned to Mexico a few years earlier, after a long time in New York. But years later, I began to see more in Diego, his earliest murals, and above all his portraits and self-portraits. In the book, I deal with his politics too, his split from the Stalinists, his dilettante embrace of Trotskyism, his craven campaign to rejoin the Mexican Communist Party. There’s no point telling here what I’ve already told in the book, which is still in print.

On a personal note, I moved from painting to writing during the time I was in Mexico, because I had a need for narrative. Surely this need came from my earlier immersion in comic strips (esp. Terry and the Pirates by Milton Caniff) and some comic books. I could draw, attended Cartoonists and Illustrators School at night --after a day’s work at the Navy Yard -- and began thinking about becoming a painter while I was in the Navy, through the influence of a fellow enlisted man, Henry Whiddon, from Marietta, Ga., a fine painter. I wanted to make art in which This happens, and This happens, and AS A RESULT, this happens. Later, I couldn’t figure out how to do that in painting and that turned me towards literature. I do still paint and draw, sometimes to find the faces of my imaginary characters. And Diego’s great mural, “Sunday in the Alameda Park”, was an inspiration for my novel, “Forever.” Diego made clear in that painting that in order to have great heroes you must also have great villains. They are all part of the human tale.

I agree that most “political” art allows the ideology to get in the way of the art. And all ideology is a substitute for thinking, not a form of actual thinking (imagine a painting commissioned by Dick Cheney!). But some painters manage to avoid that trap. Among Europeans, think of Goya or Delacroix, Otto Dix or George Grosz or Kathe Kollwitz, to name a few. Among American, there is Jack Levine, for example, whose political paintings still brim with felt life. Or Francis Bacon. Or Harvey Dinnerstein. For sure, you can’t understand the American 1930s without looking at the art it provoked, “good” and “bad.” And for many centuries, European art served a rigid Christian ideology but much of that art can be examined now in all its human glory without embracing the subject matter. That is, if we think “men made this.” The notion that paintings from a given time should be hidden in the basement, or burned, because the ideas behind them have faded or died – that’s stupid. I include even the worst examples of Soviet Realism or the work of Hitler’s artistic followers. I say: hold on to them. See what they are telling us, even if it’s evil. To this day, I love Franz Kline and De Kooning and Pollock, but never felt a need in their heyday to shove Picasso’s Guernica into the oven. Even kitsch has its delights. You can love Mozart and Dean Martin in the same lifetime, without apology. As long as you truly love each.

As for the continuing taste of Latin American writers for romantic revolution: I don’t think it’s as general as it once was, in spite of an outbreak of the virus in Oaxaca last year. There is a generation of younger writers – Jorge Volpi and others – who are writing novels that never deal with the tired subject. Most of those I meet laugh at Hugo Chavez as a kind of buffoon, embracing an ideology that has clearly failed, in Cuba, the Soviet Union, even China (for reasons that are quite varied). To insist that the Che Guevara myth still has value is a form of sentimentality. The intellectual example of Octavio Paz, in his essays and in his magazine Vuelta, was an important tempering factor in Mexican life, and the emergence of Letras Libres after the death of Paz – directed by the fine historian Enrique Krauze -- is a continuation of that process.

DS: Like our first interviewee, novelist Charles Johnson, you had an interest in cartooning. Why did you give that up? Lack of talent? Did you also give up painting because you felt you lacked real talent in that area? I feel the creative arts are higher than the performing or interpretive arts, because you are basically starting with less to work with. In short, an actor interpreting Shakespeare or O’Neill has it easier than the two playwrights did in conjuring the drama. Similarly, I posit that writing and poetry are the two highest general and specific art forms, for writing is wholly abstract- black squiggles on white that merely represent and must be decoded, whereas the visual arts are inbred, and one can instantly be moved by a great photo or painting, while even the greatest haiku will take five or ten seconds to read and digest. Poetry is the highest form of writing because, unlike fiction, it needs no narrative spine to drape its art over- it can be a moment captured, and wholly abstractly, unlike a photo. Do you agree with these views? If so, why do you think this is so? I would bet that since language (at least written) is only a six or so thousand year old phenomenon, while sight has been around for 600 million years or more, that’s a good head start the visual arts have over writing.

PH: Obviously, I could write a book on this subject. Here’s the brief version. I think music is the most powerful of all arts, the most mysterious, and I rise each morning in Mexico to the sound of birdsong, made by the planet’s first musicians.

When I was still working in the graphic arts, as a designer, I used to work through the nights listening to Symphony Sid’s jazz show on WEVD, the only station in America named for a socialist (Debs). In the mornings, when I would wake up, it was usually to hear the Hungarian hour. The station was run by the Workman’s Circle, that great organization of Jewish socialists, and it spoke to many Jewish immigrants, including, of course, those who still spoke Yiddish. What stayed with me was the music, since I didn’t know the languages.

In the sense that great poetry is the use of language closest to music, I agree with your thesis. I am not a believer in any supernatural faith (they have all created too many corpses), but I try to read a poem each night as if it were a prayer. Just to pass some music into my mind before sleep. Some holy words. NOT to use the phrases of the language in my own work, but to push some of them into my sub-conscious, as gifts sent to me by far greater writers, ones that make me a richer human being. I never “study” poetry. I try to hear it, to feel it, to live it. For me it doesn’t matter who is fashionable, or current, or hip (in the debased current use of an honorable world). To eat it. (Robert Louis Stevenson urged young writers to “read like predators”)

I also vary the poets. I can read Lord Byron and Charles Simic on different nights, Swinburne and Billy Collins, Whitman and Edna St. Vincent Millay. I’m not trying to rank them. I’m trying to inhale them.

I’m not sure about your remarks re: poetry vs. fiction. Certainly bad or mediocre poetry isn’t better than great fiction. Faulkner IS greater than Edna St. Vincent Millay. And some great poetry does have a narrative spine… what, after all, is the Odyssey?

DS: Your first in to the newspaper business was in 1960, with the New York Post- which you later edited, along with the New York Daily News. You’ve also written for New York Newsday, the New York Times, the Village Voice, the New Yorker, New York magazine and Esquire. Did you prefer editing to reporting, or is there some elemental sense of the streets that a reporter has that cannot be replaced?

PH: Reporting is the heart of the matter. The great Murray Kempton called it “going around”. Journalism is, as the cliché goes, history in a hurry. But it can be more. American reporting, in its great phase, starts (I believe) with Stephen Crane. Many of his early pieces are in “The New York Sketches of Stephen Crane” You can see later how he moved past journalism by looking at the newspaper story he wrote that was later turned in “The Open Boat”. Even newspaper columns, at their best, use reporting as the authority for their opinions. The great editors recognize reporting talent and try to sharpen it, improve it. No newspaper editor would ever say to a youngster: “There’s too much reporting in this piece.” When the work is at its best, it also become “literature in a hurry.” I always think of the line of Ezra Pound (dreadful, of course, on politics and society but smart about writing). In “The ABC of Reading” he wrote “Literature is news that stays news.”

DS: I mentioned earlier your book on the painter Diego Rivera, but he’s not the only artist whom you’ve written extensively about. You also wrote a book called Why Sinatra Matters. What was its premise? I earlier mentioned my idea on the ranking of arts, and since Sinatra was not a songwriter, merely an interpretive artist, why do you think he’s a great artist? Where would you rank him in the pantheon of great American pop singers, from Nat King Cole to Tony Bennett to Elvis Presley to Johnny Mathis; even to some of today’s top singers?

PH: Again, the book stands for itself. If I could have presented my argument in one paragraph, I wouldn’t have written the book. But I wanted to look at Sinatra for the several things that he accomplished, above all as a musician. Yes, he was an interpreter of other peoples’ songs, just as Pavarotti is, or Billie Holiday was. I’ve heard much music sung by people who wrote their own music, and not all of it is good. Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, John Lennon, the Rolling Stones: these are superb artists. But when I listen to hip-hop, I don’t decide to consign Sinatra, Lady Day, Nat Cole and others to the trash bin. Sinatra brought to pop music a distinctly urban voice, from the cities where the children of immigrants were making their presence known. In roughly the same period, Fiorello LaGuardia, Joe DiMaggio and Sinatra drove the Italian organ grinder and his monkey off the American stage forever. When Sinatra teamed with Nelson Riddle in the early 1950s, that form of music reached its perfect state. Sinatra made other people’s music into autobiography, as Billie Holiday had done earlier, and found in American popular song levels of attitude – most of them stoic – that its creators hadn’t imagined. There was something else to the tale: Sinatra’s audience at the beginning was primarily female; it ended up primarily male. He helped humans trained to silence – or emotional numbness -- to express some of their deepest emotions.

And I don’t think very often about ranking artists. Music and literature are not the NBA. All such discussions are (and should be) subjective. For me, Sinatra was the best. But I could understand if some people had other ideas.

DS: Does your book explore any of the man’s ties to organized crime? One of the influences I used to set forth this interview series was the classic extended Playboy interviews of yore- including one with Sinatra. I earlier mentioned how discourse in this nation has declined, yet when I read the Playboy interview with Sinatra, it was amazing to read that this was not one of today’s manufactured and sold pop icons. Love him or hate him, Sinatra spoke his mind. Why do so many of today’s celebrities seem so vapid, by comparison? And why has discourse been soundbitten?

PH: I touch on the Mob, and quote Sinatra on the subject (he wanted me, at one time, to write his autobiography) but the hoodlums didn’t make him a great popular artist. (And by the way, the book is not a biography, but a biographical essay. I don’t get into much of his love life, except for Ava Gardner, whose presence in his life DID deepen and alter the music). If the hoods could have made him a star, there would have been a hundred Sinatras, because the Mob’s overriding concern is (or was) making money. The old hoodlums are now forgotten, except by Mob buffs. Almost all of Sinatra’s music is still available, still a marvel. Which is why the title of my book is in the present tense. (He makes an unbilled cameo appearance as a young man in my new novel, “North River”).

The problem with today’s celebrity interviews is the triumph of the press agent. The interviews are too controlled, the agendas too circumscribed, with too many such agreements made with editors. (Look at the Rolling Stone interviews during the magazine’s first ten years, when everything was open, and look at today’s controlled interviews in almost any magazine). Another problem: young pop artists read each other’s interviews. They adopt scripts for their own interviews. As a result, they perform their own interviews, echoing the reading they’ve done of others. There’s very little spontaneity, and all do variations on the same endless bullshit. Interviews are usually just part of the packaging. There are some superb exceptions, of course: Charlie Rose, Bill Moyers, some of the people on 60 Minutes. Young Anderson Cooper is trying to avoid the traps of celebrity publicity disguised as journalism. Certainly the subject of the decline in interviewing is worth intelligent scrutiny. In general, it just needs more toughness, more rigorous preparation (by the journalists), a refusal to collaborate with the publicity machines (by editors), more interviews with friends and foes to make the subjects more round, more dimensional.

DS: In researching this interview, I watched many of your appearances on the PBS Charlie Rose interview show. That seems like one of the last true bastions of honest and intellectual discourse around. I recall, some years back, being amazed at how intelligent Sylvester Stallone was- on the world and the arts, from an hour long show he did with Rose. In your years of reportage, have you noticed this decline in true dialectic? What reasons do you posit for it? Any remedies?

PH: See reply just above.

DS: Before we touch on your creative writing, let’s discuss some of your career as a journalist. Writer Charles Johnson, in my interview with him, cited MFA programs as a sort of modern equivalent to the old strictures that journalists used to have, in order to learn the basics of how to tell a story. Since you are a journalist, is there a divide between reporting, commentary, and analysis, and the approach to write a short story or novel? If so, define those differences. In another interview you are quoted as stating, ‘Journalism keeps a writer in touch with the actual world- it also teaches speed and accuracy. There is much [more] overlap than known. Academics are who made this artificial separation.’ What are your views on Academics? And where have folk like a Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce or Upton Sinclair gone? These men, like you, wrote both journalism and fiction. Today, that’s rare. And what do you think of other writers who’ve done both- such as William Kennedy or Anna Quindlen?

PH: In my work at NYU, I’ve met academics who are more open, less inclined to fit writers into need little boxes, as if they were literary counterparts of the Elias Sports Bureau. Most of them are young. They don’t stand in such rigid judgment over those who work at both journalism and fiction (the way Dickens did, and Zola, and Twain, and London, and… ah, hell, the list goes on and on). They are also concerned about the clotting of academic language with jargon derived from Foucault, Derrida & Co. On the other hand, based on my own unsystematic reading, I think that too many academics still feel a need to enforce an Overriding Theory (usually derived from French academics, but not always) to explain every goddamned thing in view, from Iraq to the World Series – not to mention novels and poetry. That is, they are caged into an ideology. Not usually Marxism these days, but feminism or post-colonialism or structuralism. I always urge young writers to see the world plain, without any intellectual assumptions. When theory is disproved by observation, then a work of the imagination can give us something very valuable. Bill Kennedy has done that in an excellent way, but I haven’s read the Quindlen novels.

.So have many others. Fiction is about human beings one at a time. If fictions are meant to illustrate some larger philosophy, the characters usually come out as marionettes. That’s why books on acting are sometimes more useful to aspiring novelists than books on literature (with their emphasis on Theory, and rankings). Stanislavski, Michael Chekhov, Uta Hagen, others, are all about making emotion visible. Better to read novels and short stories than to read about them. The great Italian writer Italo Calvino once wrote: “No book about a book is better than the book itself.” Most writers I know would agree.

DS: The mantra in today’s MFA programs is the noxious, ‘Art is truth’ canard. Yet, manifestly this is false. Where do you think such a notion got started? And in my view the only provinces for truth are in science and journalism. Truth only matters if you are speaking of real world people and incidents, and need to be accurate. Last year there was the infamous Oprah Winfrey blowup with the James Frey memoir, and I found myself in the unfortunate position of defending Frey. I term it unfortunate since he is a horribly unskilled writer, yet I was one of the few online voices defending his write to confabulate in a memoir. After all, the very reason memoir exists- apart from autobiography, is because one can change facts for dramatic rendering. Edmund Morris’s Dutch, about the life of President Reagan was, before Frey’s crap, the best (or worst) example of that verity. What are your views on art, truth, memoir, journalism, etc.?

PH: In some ways, Art and Truth are part of what James Joyce once called “those big words that get us into so much trouble.” I don’t know a single writer who sits down at his or her desk muttering: “I make Art. I record Truth.” You’d never finish a sentence. I don’t agree that only science and journalism are the provinces of truth. Garcia Marquez expresses truths in his journalism (and he was a superb journalist) but the deeper truths are in his fictions. Balzac’s “Lost Illusions” expresses truths about journalism (and gossip) that remain true. There were many psychologically accurate novels before Freud or Jung were born.

I haven’t read the Frey book or the Edmund Morris book. I do think that memoir should be as accurate as possible, but in my own experience with “A Drinking Life” I had to use various means to trigger memory (the most powerful device, for me, was listening to popular music that I heard as a boy on the radio). I left quote marks off the dialogue too, since I wasn’t recording my life at eight years old, I was living it. The remembered life was as I remembered it, subject to all the distortions of time itself. There is a difference between memoir and autobiography, although both are essentially briefs for the defense. I once said that everybody’s autobiography could be called “Guilty With An Explanation.”

DS: When do you think PC Elitists and multiculturalists will tire of trying to replace the Old Boys Network in the arts with a New Network? When will they tire of reading simplistic ‘bumper sticker books,’ based on the novelty of exotica and demand artistic excellence, and not just that the writers respect their culture/religion/sex/beliefs?

PH: Ah, hell, I don’t know much about any of this. It’s like discussing the morality of the designated hitter. Great books exist. Who cares if they were written by Dead White Males? You cheat yourself if you don’t try to read most of them during the only life you will ever have. If you are reading “Madame Bovary” (that tale of the original desperate housewife) for the first time, it’s a new book. In general, writers should embrace what E.M. Forster once said: “I do not believe in belief.”

DS: Which do you think you do better at- reportage or fiction? Short stories or novels? And, how has your training as a journalist affected any of those relative strengths and weaknesses? While growing up in New York, I read many of your column pieces over the years, your essays and nonfiction, but to date, of your fiction, I’ve only read your novel Forever and your shamefully neglected short story collection, Tokyo Sketches. While I thought Forever had brilliant moments (especially in the first quarter’s set up of the characters and plot) and was a good book, I felt it went on too long and dragged in the middle. There was also a bit too much melodrama in some of the love scenes and those supernatural moments. You have stated that Forever was finished the day before 9/11, and then you re-did it afterwards. What things were added or changed? However, I thought Tokyo Sketches used all the who, what, when, and why aspects of reportage that you had honed, and since the tales were brief, they painted indelible portraits. Do you feel more comfortable (or natural?) in one form or the other? If so, why do you think that is? Do you plan to write more short fiction?

PH: “Forever” was a very hard book to write, and demanded a broad, deep use of my imagination. Other people’s judgments (including yours) are free to be made. Judging from a steady flow of e-mails, many people love it. So do I, in the way I love my daughters and my grandson. But it’s written, published, done. I think more of what I’m writing now than I do about what I’ve written already.

I love the short story, and it feels natural to me when I’m writing one (probably because the length is so much like the length of most journalistic pieces). I admire so many masters of the form: Joyce, Chekhov, Irwin Shaw, Kafka, Turgenev, William Trevor, John O’Hara, Alice Munro, John McGahern, Ian McEwan, Hemingway, Faulkner, Maupassant. Another list that could go on and on… The story is different from the novel, of course, the way chamber music is different from a symphony. The sense of time is different. But their lesson for young writers is based on the way the tellers of the tale get the characters on stage quickly, and suggest the dilemma. All must be done swiftly. Think of Frank O’Connor’s “Guest of the Nation”.

But when I get into a novel, my imagination shifts. I keep making notes for short stories (on 3x5 index cards) and keep intending to take a second look at the more than 130 stories I wrote for newspapers, back in the day. But a novel is consuming, at least for me. As noted, “Forever” was suggested by Diego Rivera’s mural in Mexico City. One basic part of the design was to cover much of the history of Manhattan through a single character’s experiences, and when Sept 11 happened, I knew I couldn’t leave out the worst calamity of the city’s history. So I took another year….I was there when the towers fell, and spent days in the smoke and rubble. But I couldn’t truly use my own experience. I had to make it into Cormac’s experience, and that’s where imagination came in.

DS: I’m well known online for my decrying of the current state of the arts world. I see all of the major arts in down cycles, but it’s important to recognize the cyclic nature, and not fall into the Chicken Little trap. As example, published poetry’s last gasp of greatness was over three decades ago, and fiction has devolved into genre crap- be it sci fi or Chick Lit. Even ‘literary fiction’ has become a genre, with writers such as a T.C. Boyle or David Foster Wallace getting manifestly bad writing published. Painting has stagnated since the advent of Abstract Expressionism and Warholian Pop Art, while photography has not caused a stir since the heyday of Diane Arbus. Even an Annie Liebovitz is merely a photographer to the stars. Classical music and jazz have withered away, and even Classic Rock is decades old. Rap, country, and saccharine pop rule the charts. Hollywood has wholly given up on adult films- the few made today are either Woody Allen films, or independent features seen by a few thousand people, while television- despite hundreds of cable channels, has never matured past former FCC Chairman Newt Minnow’s famed 1961 denunciation of it as a ‘vast wasteland.’ The Internet is even worse. Perhaps only the writing in popular science books is an exception. So, my question is, how do you, Pete Hamill, as a serious artist- presumably one who wants his novels read decades after his death, view this abysmal sea of pop culture as it wears away the shorelines of deeper culture and art? And, are you a Chicken Little sort, or a believer in cycles?

PH: The truth? I don’t care much about any of this. It’s hard enough to get your own work done. I think the world is in dreadful shape, with religious crackpots everywhere (including the US), and not enough mocking laughter. But I am essentially an optimist, shaped by the people who honorable survived the Depression (including my parents) and the war, and by the great unleashing of joy and possibility that came with the end of World War Two. A fifteen-year period of austerity and self-denial had come to an end, and the GI Bill offered visions of the future to all of us who were the children of Irish factory workers, Italian sanitation men, Jewish cab drivers, and African-American barbers. It took a bit longer for African-Americans to feel the same sense of possibility, and that came with Robinson, who started the modern civil rights movement.

I don’t delude myself. I wonder what will happen when the crackpots get nuclear weapons after killing Musharraf? Or what happens with all those weapons when fanatics machine gun the Saudi royal family? I have a nine-year-old grandson. He should have a chance at the same kind of life I had, when it was possible to imagine a future. I want him to read the Odyssey too. I want him to gaze at Rubens in wonder, or be stirred by Charlie Parker or Ludwig van Beethoven. Maybe your analysis of the culture is accurate. But there are far worse things in existence now than self-appointed cultural commissars. And yes, in spite of everything, I’m not yet a Chicken Little. It’s impossible to live in fear.

DS: As a journalist, you are certainly familiar with politics as a business, but what of politics in the arts? You are manifestly, on the liberal spectrum of the fence, but not the Loony Left. How do you view the rise of Political Correctness over the last quarter century, and what effect do you feel it has had on the arts? Personally, I’m against the NEA, because nitwit politicians have no clue as to what art nor artist is deserving, so the money is usually wasted on programs that do nothing at all. Do you agree? Do you think there is a better model for bettering the arts? Perhaps one that merely grants greater access to better artists, and does not stack the deck for a bunch of cronies and against those who pursue art for art’s sake?

PH: Again, I don’t know much about any of this, either. I believe in work, and have never received a grant of any kind. I’m, in general, against the artist who says, “I’m so pure, you must support me.” Somehow many great, impoverished artists of the past were able to make art without government grants. In the case of theater or huge orchestras, I can see the point. But to write a novel? Or poetry? William Carlos Williams worked as a doctor. Wallace Stevens as an insurance man. TS Eliot as an editor. If you choose to be a poet, make sure you know how to do something in order to eat.

Political Correctness, in general, is stupid, as practiced here, as practiced around the world. I’m against limits about what can be said, even when I disagree with what is said. There must be room in the public libraries for Mein Kampf too, or we have no way of knowing as much as possible about Hitler’s evil. You’re offended? Stop reading, or looking, or listening. And I’m against all forms of fatwas called down on people who offend. I wish Islam would develop its own Lenny Bruce, its own Voltaire. I wish more of television and radio would mock the current American regime, and its own faith-based nonsense.

DS: In a similar vein, in real world politics, I (born in 1965) have never known a remotely great American President. Four were utter disasters: LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 2. Two were mediocrities- Carter and Bush 1. One was irrelevant- Ford, for his too little time in office. So, that leaves old Slick Willy as probably the best President I’ve known, and I really thought he wasted all his potential. Do you think this lowering of the bar on Presidents has to do with the primary system? Would this nation be better off going back to the Buddhas of the smoke filled rooms to pick candidates? Before the primaries, we had guys with vision, like Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, and JFK (however flawed they may have been). Even Eisenhower was a better leader than any President in my lifetime; even if they were not appreciated in their day. Similarly, has this same demotic ideal done as much damage to the arts, in your view? After all, this Great Depression in the arts world neatly dovetails with the rise of the NEA. I’m not arguing that funding artists is wrong, only funding the bad and mediocre, which are 99.99%. Government bureaucrats simply have no ability to discern artistic merit, when so many cannot even competently handle far more common sense matters. So, how to get the money to the people who can really use it- the budding Michelangelos or Twains who work in factories or warehouses, rather than effete wannabe artistes?

PH: See above, but I’m not a person who thinks all problems can be solved with a government program. I say that even though I grew up with the radio voice of Franklin Roosevelt in our kitchen. His portrait, from the Daily News Sunday supplement, was on one wall, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus was on the other. For a while, I thought FDR’s voice was the voice of God. Maybe I was right. But some government programs do work. All the reforms of the New Deal made a true difference to millions of people. And the GI Bill changed the post-war United States. I don’t believe a dime of taxpayer money should be spent on the “faith-based initiative”, to garner votes. Let the preachers work by day as hard as Mexican immigrants do, and tend to their flocks after work. It’s hard to imagine Jesus of Nazareth driving an SUV.

On the other hand…In general, most right-wingers see every problem in the country, or the world, as a nail that must be hit with a hammer. A little thinking about consequences would surely help us all. In my time on the planet, most rich kids (not all) have had little regard for consequences. Pulled over drunk on the side of some road, Momma makes a fast phone call…

DS: I posit: the failure of ‘published’ literature today lies more with the failings of publishers, editors, and critics to do their jobs well, more so than the bad and generic writers who are published. My point is that bad writers have always been with us, but the cronyism, favoritism, and grants giving NEA cash cow has led to a system of writers and editors who dare not say negative things about another writer’s work lest find their own publication chances minimized, if not extirpated. Do you agree, and if so, what observations can you add? And, is not the MFA writing workshop archipelago merely a vast networking tool for the bad writers who are gulled out of their money? Is not the NEA a cronyists’ dream, one that dashes any real hope of funding for the best writers, ones who challenge orthodoxies as those the very concept (much less reality) of the NEA represents? Is it not far too politicized to the Left?

PH: As noted, I don’t know much about MFA programs or the NEA, and attendant cronyism. I have some writer friends, along with non-writer friends, both in New York and in Mexico. None of them lives off grants.

DS: Let’s speak about your latest book, North River. On your own website the book is described in this manner: ‘It is 1934, and New York City is in the icy grip of the Great Depression. With enormous compassion, Dr. James Delaney tends to his hurt, sick, and poor neighbors. His patients include gangsters and Tammany chieftains, veterans and day laborers, prostitutes and housewives. If they can’t pay, he treats them anyway. He is a good man in a bad time.

But in his own life, Delaney inhabits the country of numbness. He is haunted by the slaughters of the Great War. His only daughter has left for Mexico to pursue revolutionary dreams. And his wife Molly vanished many months before, leaving him to wonder if she is alive or dead. Now living alone in the far west of Greenwich Village, hard by the Hudson, which New Yorkers still call the North River, Delaney submerges his own pain in the pain of his patients.

Then, on a snowy New Year’s Day, the doctor returns home to find his three-year-old grandson on his doorstep, left by his mother in Delaney’s care. Coping with this unexpected arrival, Delaney hires Rose, a tough, decent Sicilian woman with a secret in her past. Slowly, as the ice in the North River begins to break up, Rose and the boy begin to care for the good doctor, and the numbness in Delaney begins to melt.’ Your fiction has made use of history in the past, but also it has had a supernatural bent. From this teaser, is that so with this novel? And, can you expound a bit more on what it deals with? Is it more a character study, or a cross-section of the times?

PH: It’s a love story for grown-ups, set in a time when many people dealt with great adversity with invincible decency. Again, it’s difficult to explain a book in a few sentences. The best answer is: read it.

DS: There are so many books published that are poorly edited- from novels that meander or have fundamentally shallow stereotypes masquerading as characters (Joyce Carol Oates, T.C. Boyle), to books that have some potential (Toni Morrison’s fiction or Frank McCourt’s memoirs) but are poorly constructed, to the work of people who simply cannot write (David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers). Which came first- the chicken of poor editing or the egg of deliterate readership. And by deliterate I mean the willful choice to not read great nor compelling writing. To avoid the classics in favor of reading blogs. To write in emailese rather than proper grammar. What have been your experiences with editors of books? And, as an editor of others’ prose- in your capacity as editor of journalism, do you have more or les tolerance for editors that neglect the very basics of their job?

PH: I’ve had good luck with my book editors: Peter Gethers at Bantam; Jason Epstein at Random House; and for the past six books, Bill Phillips at Little, Brown. All have worked to make the book better, and I learned from each of them. They don’t think the use of Spell Check is editing. Jason, early on, insisted that a book should not make the reader dumber. Both Jason and Bill are fine readers of the broad structure of novels, (or non-fiction works), and at the same time can be fine line editors. Little, Brown, at the old offices in Boston, also employs rigorous copy-editors. All want the book to be as good as it can be, including me. These editors never asked me to write the book they would have written. Or a book that fit into some current fashion. They were trying to sharpen my own vision, my own intentions.

As an editor, I tried to do the same for other writers, particularly the young. That sometimes meant small lessons in craft. Often suggestions for follow-up. And always urging reporters to read, read, read. Not junk. But the great stuff. And for the rest of their lives.

DS: And what do you believe of the outsourcing of the publishing industry’s task of finding and promoting new quality writers? Most literary agents today are simply not equipped to evaluate good writing, as evidenced by the utter lack of quality writing that is published. Even worse, most literary agents do not even read the work submitted to them. They pass the buck down to college aged new hires or coed interns seeking college credits. Simply put, no twenty year old is qualified enough to discern the quality if a Huckleberry Finn or A Tree Grows In Brooklyn comes across their desk. This is how hacks like a Chuck Palahniuk get an ‘in,’ because their deliterate prose is no better nor worse than that the college aged readers of manuscripts can produce. Some complain that the reason for literature’s decline the last few decades is the consolidation of the publishing industry into a handful of corporate giants, yet small independent presses are publishing writing every bit as bad as the big presses, so there is something more fundamentally wrong than runaway corporatism. These are the symptoms, Pete. What is your diagnosis, since you were around when writers like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Saul Bellow were lauded with fame, which is earned, as opposed to the mere celebrity of the latest hack writer who’s being pushed merely because he poses as a badass, or she preens like a harlot?

PH: Again, I don’t know this world well enough to speak about it. For many years, I’ve had an agent who does read. Esther Newberg. I take her judgments seriously. But I don’t have time in my life to go to lunch in places where such talk is common. You might be right. I don’t know. (I think the triumph of television might have more to do with the proliferation of dreck. In most of my novels, I try to write about the world before television).

DS: Let’s change gears back to journalism. You are a native New Yorker, as am I. How has coverage of the city changed in your years on the job? And, other than yourself, who are the old sultans of journalism- both in New York City and nationwide? Mike Royko is dead and Jimmy Breslin is part of the old guard. Even Molly Ivins is no longer around. Do you still look to contemporaries in the business, as role models, or do you feel you’ve evolved as a writer and reporter? What things have you learned in the last few years, on the beat, that you wish you had known decades ago?

PH: I haven’t written a regular column for more than three years. And it’s been a long time since I looked for role models (I’m too old, and anyway I hate the phrase). But I admire Frank Rich, Clyde Haberman, Dan Barry and Jim Dwyer at the Times. At the Post, the sports and business guys do terrific work. I admire Mike Lupica, Juan Gonzalez, Albor Ruiz, Michael Daly – along with my brother, Denis – at the Daily News. Reading them, I always look for two reactions in myself, those I wanted to provoke in my own readers: 1) I didn’t know that. 2) I never thought about it that way.

There are many talented people around now, beyond the names listed above. I hope they are all having a good time.

DS: Who are the young guns in New York journalism today? I read a book a few years ago, by a reporter named Charlie LeDuff, called Work And Other Sins, which had a Hamillian feel and flair to it. Yet, latest I heard, he was embroiled in some plagiarism claim that sidetracked his career, as well as claims that he fabricated parts of his reportage. Manifestly, the last ten or fifteen years have seen many reporters- as well as some famed historians, fall into the trap of ‘accidental’ borrowing. Even creative writers have had novels pulled. Then there was the Oprah-Winfrey-James Frey dust-up over his horribly written memoir. What is going on? Putting aside a moral high horse, this is just ridiculous. Emulating someone’s style is a different beast from appropriating their words, so why have so many fictionists, historians, and reporters chosen this tack? (Note: I avoid the term ‘fallen into this trap’ because to steal words is manifestly a conscious choice.)

PH: All writers, like painters, musicians, sculptors, go through four stages (as explained to me long ago by a brilliant teacher at art school named Burne Hogarth): Imitate, Emulate, Equal, Surpass. That seems a natural part of an apprenticeship, and if a kid picks up some of another writer’s music for a while, then the editor should tell him to stop. Kids who plagiarize are fools. It takes too much time, and you learn nothing. I’d like to see the book publishers create a kind of Price Waterhouse of Fact Checking. Have it run by some graduate of the New Yorker. Have each book be subjected to the in-house fact-checking standards of major magazines. Do this BEFORE accepting the book for publication.

Alas, at newspapers, there’s no time to do this on breaking news stories. But it could be done on features.

DS: I mentioned Jimmy Breslin, and- other than yourself, he’s probably what most non-New Yorkers stereotypically envision as a hard drinking New York newspaperman. He’s also a fellow Irishman. What has been your relationship with the man? Are you friends or rivals? What scoops has he beaten you to, and vice versa? In your memoir, A Drinking Life, you speak of your battle with booze. Is this vice even more pervasive in the journalism biz, or is it the ‘curse of the Irish’?

PH: Jimmy and I are friends for 40 years, but I don’t see him much, because I don’t see many people very much anymore, particularly from the old days on newspapers. He was a great columnist, who re-invented the form at the old Herald-Tribune while I was still a daily reporter at the Post. In my mind, we were never rivals. I didn’t think about “scoops” much, so who the hell can remember now? But when one of the young guys attacked him 20 years ago in print, I went to the man and said: “When Breslin is gone, it will be like 300 people left the room.” Now, Breslin too has given up his daily column, and it’s like 300 people have left the room.

By the way, I have been off the booze for 34 years now and for the past fifteen, at least, Breslin hasn’t been drinking either. Neither of us could have done as much work as we did if we were Stage Irishmen. In our early days, the culture of drink was part of newspapers, a leftover from Prohibition and the Depression. Newspapermen (and women) then were paid very little money, and lived bohemian life-styles. Then in the 1970s, the Newspaper Guild finally got reporters the money they deserved. One result: they became middle class. Many moved to the suburbs, and a lot of laughter came to an end.

DS: Recently, I watched an episode of Texas Monthly Talks. In it, the writer and art and literary critic Dave Hickey spoke at length of several things that made me think of this upcoming interview with you. First, on a journalistic note, he spoke of how he loathed the New York press scene of the 1960s and 1970s- including such folk as you and Breslin. He said that the circle was insular, and more concerned with worrying over the high price of veal in Connecticut restaurants than doing real reportage. Is this an accurate assessment of the milieu back then? How much does ego, reputation, and position play in the media business? I don’t feel ego in any profession- including the arts, is a bad thing, as long as the ego is commensurate with the talent and output of the egoist. Otherwise, all you’d get is false humility, which is a nice way of saying someone’s a bullshitter. Agree or not?

PH: Hmmm. I’ve never ordered veal in a Connecticut restaurant. Neither, I’m sure, has Breslin. I learned to drive when I was 36. Breslin still can’t drive. How would we get to Connecticut? And why would we go all the way up there when each of us knows 49 restaurants in New York that might do the veal better? I haven’t read Hickey’s piece, so I’m not sure what he is talking about. Insular certainly wasn’t right. My closest friend then (and now) was a prizefighter named Jose Torres, a former light-heavyweight champion of the world, who after retirement from the ring became a newspaper columnist. Two other friends (then and now) were guys I grew up with in Brooklyn. I had painter friends, too, and actors. In the 1960s and ‘70s, a lot of us went to the Lion’s Head, where there were stockbrokers in attendance, old Communists, several poets, a few jazz musicians, several cops, two firemen. We were all friends and I suppose all groups of friends are by definition insular. I learned much from all of them. I miss the ones who are gone, and cherish the living. I don’t know how “ego” is defined in this context. But if you bragged about the greatness of your new column, your new book, your new poem, or your latest sexual conquest, you’d have been laughed out of the bar.

I distrust the assumptions of some of this discussion, that there was some nasty, self-absorbed, conniving conspiracy to make ourselves important. There are ways to be human, and good at what you do, that do not start with ego, reputation and position.

DS: Hickey also raised an interesting point in regards to art and literary critics. He actually admitted that, when he was a young critic, he actually used to make decisions over whether he ‘like’ or ‘disliked’ something (as opposed to any objective criteria for excellence) based upon whether or not his career could benefit from either trashing a work or boostering it (regardless if he thought it good or bad). Now, manifestly, we both know that this is the way things have worked for a long time, and this ‘corruption’ is similar to cronyism, but I had to give Hickey some credit for actually admitting he acted as a shill. Given the book blurbery that abounds these days, are you scrupulous about what works or writers you will blurb for? Have you ever had an instance where you knew a critic trashed a work of yours simply because of some personal reason or kerfuffle? And why do so many published critics display such an utter lack of professional ethics by reviewing the books of friends and associates?

PH: I never write a blurb without reading the book. My friends know better than to ask me for blurbs, and when I do write something nice about a friend, I always try to declare my relationship. Writing a blurb is hard work, like writing haiku. And if you read the book, there go three or four days of your life. You seem obsessed with the politics of the publishing world, and I’m sure you’re not. But again, this is stuff I don’t give a rat’s ass about.

DS: What do you think of some of the big name literary critics of today: Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, Marj Perloff? To me, they are walking, talking reminders of all that is wrong with literature and criticism today, and the great need for Mark Twains, Ambrose Bierces, Oscar Wildes, H.L. Menckens, and Dorothy Parkers. I contend that America’s current collective Attention Deficit Disorder makes a critic’s job all the more important, especially to save good books from a swift oblivion. Thoughts?

PH: I’ve read some of Bloom, and found it a bit self-important. I learned from Vendler some things that had not occurred to me about Seamus Heaney, a poet (and man) I admire. I’ve never heard of Marj Perloff. Again, to quote Italo Calvino…

DS: What are your views of Postmodern criticisms of art? What or such political criticism, such as Feminist or Politically Correct ideologies? What do you think of the dictates of New Criticism? And, even if you agree with one or more of these approaches, since they all devolve away from their central tenets, is there any real purpose to the relentless construction of schools and –isms in the arts?

PH: All of this, as I’ve said in different ways above, seems like a parlor game for adepts, largely written in code, generally useless to writers. The ideas are banal, the writing turgid. Maybe it’s what we have now instead of the WPA?

DS: Hickey reserved a particular venom for the criticism and management of the painting and visual arts world of the last thirty or so years. He said that there was a time, when a movement would come, crest, and go in less than a decade, so even if a movement was effete, it would soon be displaced. He claimed the very idea of revolution in the arts, these days, is dead. Now, I think the idea of ‘revolution’ in the arts tends to lead to fifth rate Beatnik poetry. But, he had a point, in that he says that there is no longer any objective judgment made over whether some work of art- whether it’s the shit art (literally) of a Chris Ofili or the simplistic graffiti of a Keith Haring or the silly body smearings of Karen Finley. It’s all accepted as ‘art,’ simply because the artist declares it so. Critics seem to have become mere marketers. The same is true in literature. Hacks like Bloom and company merely mouth the same old same old about Shakespeare, get declared out of touch by ‘rebel’ artists, and the real artists who will be read and appreciated in a century are ignored by the Dead White Males like Bloom, and scorned by the pseudo-artiste hipsters. Yet, this cycle has always been. Think of the Salonistas and the Impressionists. A few years back I co-hosted an Internet radio show called Omniversica. On one show we spoke with a poet named Fred Glaysher, who- in arguing with my co-host Art Durkee, claimed that, in art, change does not come until some giant- or great artist, comes along, and buries the rest of the wannabes. It’s akin to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions. Do you agree?

PH: In general, yes. Most art criticism is written in such purposefully obscure language that it doesn’t seem to matter. It’s part of the fuck-you-try-to-read-me school. Then there’s the school that believes that nothing matters, or everything matters, so why not embrace it all, or reject it all? Goya and Jeff Koons have the same weight. What we know is this: there’s no need to read most of it. If you’re an artist, go to work. Think about it later. The great champion Joe Louis said once, “When I had to think about throwing the right hand, I knew I was done.”

DS: To turn the focus more inward, in some ways, you seem to treat New York City the way William Kennedy does Albany, New York, and the way James Joyce did Dublin, Ireland. It seems to be home base for your fictive universe. Is this just coincidence, or is there some something utterly Irish about memories of the hometown? You mentioned, while promoting Forever, that you did not feel that any novel had done justice to New York City- at least in the sense that Ulysses did Dublin. First, do you really think Ulysses is a Dublin novel? It’s so interior that its exterior location seems almost inconsequential. And, what do you think of Joyce as a writer? I think he was a great writer, but not a great novelist. His best work was Dubliners, and each succeeding book went downhill, to the ridiculously bad Finnegans Wake. Joyce has moments or great poesy and clarity, but then follows it up with pages of verbose, witless pap. In structure, Ulysses most reminds me of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen- a huge work with moments of emergence onto a bright, sunny knoll, then a long, lost sojourn into the dark canopy of a forest. Any thoughts?

PH: I read “The Dead” at least twice a year. It’s one of the greatest short stories of the 20^th century, certainly the greatest love story. I disagree about “Ulysses”. To me it’s saturated with Dublin. I agree about “Finnegan’s Wake”, but last Bloomsday I was with a group of people reading Joyce in celebration of the great man. One was an actress, and she essentially sang a short piece of the book, and for the first time I understood that Joyce must have thought he was writing music, specifically opera. But it will remain a book I never finish before they cart me off to the Greenwood.

DS: I also have had a running argument with people regarding Joyce. Having read several bios of him- including those by intimates, I’m convinced that Joyce’s breakdown as an artist, and is increasing loss of an ability to write well, was a result of the syphilis that also blinded him. Any ideas?

PH: About syphilis and Joyce, I don’t have a clue. There is, however, a statue of him in Dublin that is referred to by locals as “The Prick With the Stick”. Maybe they knew something…

DS: Speaking of Irish, about a decade ago, riding the popularity of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Riverdance, all things green were in. Did your career or work benefit from any of that?

PH: Not that I know of. My own memoir was published before Frank finished writing “Angela’s Ashes”. His book takes place in Ireland, and only parts of my work have taken place there. I’m an American writer, of the New York School. I always say I’m part Irish, part Jewish, part Mexican, part French, and part Jesuit.

DS: Getting back to New York. What novels would you rank in the pantheon of New York literature? And do you consider than merely to be Manhattan? As a born and raised Queens resident, that would be too provincial. What of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows In Brooklyn? I think its one of the supreme works of fiction in human history.

PH: Where to start? I read Betty Smith’s novel more than 40 years ago and I should read it again. I go back often to Stephen Crane and Melville (Bartleby still lives among us) and, of course, Whitman. The last only wrote one novel, and it was pretty bad. But he inspired novelists as varied at Thomas Wolfe, William Saroyan, and Jack Kerouac. “Gatsby” remains one of the greatest works of literature about New York, worth reading every few years. I admire the work of Daniel Fuchs, too, and the stories of Jerome Weidman, and the Brownsville memoir by Alfred Kazin. Abraham Cahan”s “The Rise of David Levinsky” is essential to understanding New York’s past and present. I admire too the novels of my brother Denis, and the way he enters the minds of people formed by the Sixties… I still read parts of “Manhattan Transfer” by Dos Passos… John O’Hara wrote brilliantly about New York in many of his short stories (the New York stories should be collected in a separate volume), as did Irwin Shaw (who was from Brooklyn, and captured certain aspects of the city better than anyone else in the 1930s and 1940s. I still see the girls in their summer dresses crossing Washington Square…) When young I liked “The Amboy Dukes” by Irving Shulman, and Harold Robbins “A Stone for Danny Fisher” (I know, I know…). They portrayed a recognizable New York, esp. Brooklyn…Sol Yurick has written well about New York and so has Harvey Swados. Hubert Selby added a different layer to the examination of the city. Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” is a great novel about New York. Essays by James Agee and Truman Capote remain fresh as do the best films and short stories of Woody Allen. Forgive me for going on: I’m sure I’ll think of more books in a day or too..

Among younger writers, I very much liked “The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem. It’s not my Brooklyn, but it’s a Brooklyn I recognize.

DS: Do you think New York’s uniqueness, as the most diverse and cosmopolitan place on earth, has any part in why artists are drawn to it, yet why there are not as many great works of fiction about it as other places? After all, New York is a patchwork of integrated segregated neighborhoods (nabes, not hoods) just a few blocks wide. You also grew up during the last century’s great shift and resegregation by men like Robert Moses (a figure you may want to do a book- fiction or nonfiction- about), where public projects destroyed many neighborhoods and led to redlining. I left the city in 1991, when my family still got threats if we were to sell to a minority family. Have things changed any in the years since?

PH: The challenge of New York (and of all great cities) is that its size, density, layered reality makes it difficult to do what novels do best: tell us about people one at a time. The velocity of change plays a part too. As soon as you think you understand the city, it changes again. It’s easier to write about Winesburg, Ohio, than any immense metropolis (name the great Los Angeles novels). It’s true that most New Yorkers live in hamlets, some shaped ethnically, some economically, some defensively (against threats from outside). If a writer has any luck, he or she will so define one of the hamlets that it will stand for many others of its time and place. New York is not now the city where I grew up or the one that you left in 1991. It’s not the city mauled by the grandiosity of Robert Moses. It is ALWAYS evolving. I believe it’s better now than at any time since I was a boy, helped immensely by the social cement provided by the new immigrants (who were arriving when you left). You saw it on September 12, 2001. Nobody fled to Nebraska. Almost everybody got up and tried to go to work.

There have been some changes too in the way people settle into the city. In one small part of Brooklyn, Chinese immigrants and Pakistani immigrants are settling on the same streets. Imagine the food that will come from THAT? Or the literature? Already we are receiving the gifts of the new immigrants, in the fiction of Junot Diaz, or Edwidge Danticat. More will surely come.

The worst problem is that New York is becoming more and more difficult for the artistic young to find a place for themselves, even if that place will lead to failure. The real estate thing is out of control, and all those kids who used to arrive at the Port Authority bus station, dreaming of being painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, performers are finding New York a hard place to live in. It’s one thing to have four airline stewardesses share an apartment. But four lyric poets would end their stay with a homicide. Decent people are thinking hard about this problem. I hope they solve it or the city’s artistic essence is certain to be depleted.

As for Robert Moses: the great book remains Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker”. Perhaps some new Balzac will find a way to make a novel that gets us to see him in other ways. But when I make a choice for a novel, I almost never choose someone whose company I can’t sustain for two or more years. I’m not like those novelists who can write a dark, corrosive exploration of the secret life of a prick. I don’t want to live with that person, day and night (especially at night). I don’t see the world that way either. I’ve met far more decent people in a long life than heartless villains (though I’ve met my share of those too). That has led to occasional accusations of sentimentality, esp. since I come from Irish parents. This is often just critical laziness, and ethnic stereotyping. So be it. In my fiction, I write about the human beings I have known.

DS: Yet, despite your New York roots and fictive world, I first came upon your fictive side (I’d read you for years in the New York tabloids) when a friend of mine sent me a copy of your aforementioned short story collection, Tokyo Sketches. I thought it was an excellent book, yet it got virtually no publicity on this side of the Pacific. Why wasn’t Tokyo Sketches given more of a chance to find a stateside audience?

PH: I don’t know why. You write a book and hope for the best. My wife is Japanese, and a fine writer of non-fiction, but none of her books are available in English. They don’t fit into easy categories: atrocity stories, Chick Lit, Asian exotica. But she reads them to me, and they are very good.

DS: What influence did your wife have on the collection? She, Fukiko Aoki, is also a journalist. How did you meet? Not too long ago I watched the Akira Kurosawa film The Bad Sleep Well (Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru) and it contains a devastating portrait of the Japanese press in the 1960s. I earlier mentioned Dave Hickey’s assessment of the New York press of that era. What similarities and differences were there between your two groups’ approaches to the craft? Has the Japanese media become as lazy and star-struck as the American media?

PH: I can’t answer much of that series of questions. I loved that Kurosawa film too, and saw similarities to our own press, but I see them in Balzac’s “Lost Illusions” too. In general, the press/media will always be imperfect, because it is made by human beings. Those who practice the craft are susceptible to all the human weaknesses: flattery, egotism, nasty ambitions, the need to reward friends and punish enemies. The best avoid those sins and try hard to keep it straight. No hidden agendas. No contracts. No lies. In short, no need for apologies.

DS: Let me digress for a moment. In the Introduction to Tokyo Sketches, you wrote, ‘When I first saw that amazing city, I was overwhelmed by an odd tangle of emotions….At the same time, I felt oddly at home. For a New Yorker, Tokyo has the familiar dense vastness of a great city. The basic structures and components are there: rivers, bridges, skyscrapers, traffic, markets, movie houses, parks and subways and bookstores. The streets are as thick with people as the avenues of Manhattan. Most of these stories originated in some form during those brief encounters late at night. Sometimes the tellers of the tales were Japanese. Sometimes the stories were told about other people. But they often shared some common trait: a broken communication, a misunderstood word, a clash of myths, the enormous, unforgiving power of the past, I thank all those who gave them to me.’ When you claim the stories came from others, are you being literal, hyperbolic, or metaphoric?

PH: All three. In other words, I could be with a group in Tokyo or Rome or New York and hear a tale and begin to imagine it. Usually I slip into the men’s room, and make a few notes on an index card. In his own way, that’s what Henry James did too (see his Notebooks, in the F.O. Matthiessen edition). One reason I stopped drinking was to try to become a better rememberer, one of those people, as James said, upon whom nothing is missed. I certainly still miss many things, but I know a good story when I hear one or witness one in fragments. Any writer should try to live a fully conscious life, without anesthesia. Let the laughs be really laughs; let the pain be pain. My friends who thought drugs led to expanded consciousness burned out young. The drunks slobbered at the end, and they too died. The lessons were obvious for any writer. Stay straight, Look. Get the details right. Then imagine.

I once had lunch with the great critic and short story writer, V.S. Pritchett, and asked him how he knew so many things. His stories were filled with the details of work and domestic lives. He said, I like to walk around London. When I see an interesting shop, or a person filled with unease, I stop and watch. I go into a doorway. I watch some more. That’s all.

It was never, of course, all. Pritchett was a modest man, as are most good writers who know how difficult their task is. There was more to the process than what he told me that day. But he was on to something.

DS: I ask because many artists seem to deny their own creativity, pawning it off on others, or worse….God, or some other force or demiurge. I call this the Divine Inspiration Fallacy. There is no Muse. For better or worse, it’s all me, or you, or any artist. Do you agree? I think that the Divine Inspiration Fallacy is also the underlying root of why so many artists- especially those of quality, feel a rivalry with other quality artists. Were they to realize or acknowledge their creative force as a part of their own nature then there would be no reason to be envious. As example, I look at a great artwork as a new way to Nirvana- so to speak, and seek to know how that path was blazed, how it can be recreated, or adumbrated. Yet, those who believe in the Divine Inspiration Fallacy, and view creativity as something apart and above them, see any success by others as somehow their rival’s plucking down something from the ether that could have been theirs, and now is one less great insight, work, or idea that they can never have. Surely you’ve known such patterns of artistic envy from history. Have you any personal tales in that regard? And, do you think that the DIF is an answer to why so many artists are insecure, especially in comparison to other artists?

PH: I’d never heard of the Divine Inspiration Fallacy until now (with that title) but by any name it remains absurd. Surely, writers and other artists can have a variety of motives for making a specific work. But if they wait for the divine to come floating through the universe, they are doomed to silence. I’ve known writers who were eaten up by envy, who measured themselves always in regard to others, who saw conspiracies at every turn. Such thinking is exhausting and leads to silence and bitterness. Their energies should have gone into doing the work, with or without divine intervention and regardless of who else was in the room. I like reading about the Renaissance workshops and how artists were trained to master their various crafts. Not much chatter there about the Muse. And though craft is not everything, in most cases art is not possible without it. Yeats once urged Irish writers to learn their craft. He was speaking to all poets. And all writers.

In my own work, I was generally free of envy, certainly about my contemporaries I wasn’t trying to be better than anyone else, or refute their aesthetic positions. I just wanted to be the best Pete Hamill who ever lived. When a friend or acquaintance had a huge success, I cheered.

DS: Re: short stories vs. novels. What is this nonsense that people will not read short story collections? Most of the people I know disagree with that. After all, if there are ten stories, and just two or three are good, the book is worth its price, but one has far less than a twenty percent chance that any given novel will be good. This seems to violate the precepts that most magazines now offer- that people have short attention spans. Were that true, the novel would be passé, and short stories the rage- no? This suggests, to me, that these claims are all just pulled out of the asses of agents, editors, and publishers as excuses, when they simply do not ‘like’ a manuscript. And why do you think that the like-dislike axis has supplanted the good-bad axis. After all, while one’s likes are subjective, quality is not. One can argue over which of two great artists was better, but there will always be a chasm between the rare greats and the all too common bad artists.

PH: I don’t see the world that way. If I read ten pages of a novel – new or old – and don’t hear the music, I put it aside and read something else. You bring your own life to reading a book, and sometimes that gets in the way of appreciating a classic, and sometimes it allows you to delve deep into the lives of others. For example, I have never been able to “get” Jane Austen. That doesn’t mean she was not a great writer (many of my friends love her work). It simply means that the circumstances of my own life got in the way. My mother worked, full or part-time, all of her life. It has been hard for me to connect with those young women in Jane Austen who would do almost anything except take a job. That’s a narrowness, but of no consequence to the world. I never think of myself as a judge when I sit down to read, and absolutely never as some sort of literary prosecutor. Life is too short for the vehemence demanded by both roles. One unfortunate remainder from the Sixties, is a judgmental vehemence that is ugly and unforgiving.

DS: Back to Tokyo Sketches. A few years after I read some of the tales, I started watching foreign films, and some by the Japanese masters like Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi. Yet, without a doubt, after having watched some of Yasujiro Ozu’s films, I have to believe that he was a great influence on those stories. When I think of the Noriko Trilogy (Late Spring, Early Summer, Tokyo Story) I sense the same pacing and contemplativeness as you had in those tales. Is this just coincidence, the effects of Tokyo, your wife, all of the above, or did Ozu and his films play a part?

PH: It must be coincidence, because the only Ozu film I’ve seen is Tokyo Story and I don’t remember thinking: “Ah, I must try to emulate that mood.” When I go anywhere, I go with the eyes of a New Yorker. I was a New Yorker when I went to school in Mexico, when I lived in Rome and Barcelona and Dublin and San Juan, when I spent time in Saigon and Beirut and the Belfast of the Troubles. That doesn’t mean I was immune to what was in front of me. All of those places were part of my education. But I wanted to answer the same questions that New York had suggested. Why is this place here? Who owns it? Why are they killing each other? Most writers do the same thing. Malamud goes to Italy as a New Yorker. Dickens visited the Five Points in New York as a Londoner. Kafu Nagai looked at the US as a man from Tokyo. We all carry baggage. It’s the mixture of viewpoints, the old, the fresh, that makes for something interesting, even new.

DS: Aside from Ozu, I recently became acquainted with the writings of the neglected Lafcadio Hearn. Are you familiar with his work? I think his cultural essays on Japan, at the turn of the 20^th Century, are even better than his fictive work- the most famous being Kwaidan. What has happened to journalists who are also fictive writers- the Hearns, Twains, Bierces, Wildes? You seem to be the lone exception that has been able to succeed at both- and don’t even get me started on the crap of Anna Quindlen. Why do you think that is? Is it something unique on your part, or just random chance? Do you think that literature in America could be bettered by the fictive work of trained journalists who could provided a grittier, more realistic counterbalance to MFA acolytes? And, since journalism used to provide time for tyros and apprentices to learn their craft, is that still true? And, why are there no such parallels in the creative writing world? There are rafts of twentysomething hacks who get a book or two published, are massively hyped, then they fade into the obscurity they deserve. Even if they have talent, they have no real incentive to improve, since most only care for the attention and not the grace of communicating. Do you agree?

PH: I also like Lafcadio Hearn, but again, I’m not sure how to answer. I never formally studied journalism or “creative writing” but it’s possible that such study gets in the way of exploring all the possibilities of an individual’s talent (and certainly some good writers have come out of Wallace Stegner’s programs and out of Iowa). Perhaps they make writers too self-conscious to really go on a roll. Perhaps they feel the crushing presence of giants. I just don’t know. About 20 years ago I read an excellent book called “Ways of the Hand”, by David Sudnow. He was a classically-trained musician who couldn’t play jazz and the book was an intellectual exploration of why. His conclusion: he didn’t trust his hands. And hands contain memory. (This is a crude short version of the book). I thought: that applies to writers too. When writing fiction I almost always begin by writing longhand on yellow pads, to get the tricks of journalism out of my hands (those that make for speed and compression), and to recover a certain innocence that I had before I learned how to type. The words flow in a different way.

I do think that journalism remains a good place for fiction writers to begin, because it provides a broad experience of human life beyond the confines of the places where you were young. It says: there are many people who are not like you. It also demands speed and accuracy. You don’t have three weeks to write the lead graf. You can’t wait for the bluebird of inspiration to fly into the city room. Journalism can also have a blunting effect, if you let it. There are ways to get around that, to avoid cynicism (while embracing a healthy skepticism). Keeping journals, for example. And reading, reading…But I also think there are other ways to serve an apprenticeship. Driving a taxicab, for example, can be a great way to learn about the city and its people. Teaching doesn’t seem to me to be a good way for a young writer to find the way. It creates too much self-consciousness, which can be paralyzing.

DS: And, as an aside, sometimes I’m asked why do I write, and I usually say that in ten thousand years, on some starship ten thousand light years away, I want some sentient being, human or not, who may be lonely on some interstellar freighter, to seek to alleviate his tedium by searching the Encyclopedia Galactica, to stumble across my work- read a poem or story or essay, and say to himself, ‘Ah, that ancient earthling- he knew!’ What it was I knew is no matter, but I want that power to awaken. To me, there’s no other reason to write, save to bring pieces of your life and knowledge to others, so they can benefit intellectually or emotionally. Can there be a deeper or more profound concept of immortality? After all, when we speak of Shakespeare, we do not usually refer to the guy stiff under Avon, but to the ideas and feelings his art ushers forth.

PH: I thought a lot about actual immortality when writing “Forever” and concluded it would be a terrible fate. If it were granted only to you. Everyone you loved would die. Your friends would die. Your dogs would die. Ooof.

I’m not sure that the men (or, more likely, the women) who made those paintings on the walls of Lascaux were thinking of immortality. Or whether it was even a goal of Shakespeare. In my own work, I wrote “Downtown: My Manhattan” so that my grandson, seven at the time, might better understand at 20 the bearded old guy named Grandpa, and his passion for that big city he kept taking him to when young. (The boy lives near New Paltz). It’s hard for me to conceive of immortality beyond that, most particularly in this world of too many people, not enough resources, and millions of lunatics devoted to imagined ghosts.

DS: Yet, so few artists, in any field, ever think that way. It’s all hype and commoditization. Why do you think so many writers write junk fiction? Do you think it be ‘cause they can’t write anything of complexity or do they just want the money and choose not to want to write anything of depth? Or are they just incapable of depth? Any thoughts?

PH: Again, I don’t know. I don’t know any of these writers and can’t speak about their motives. They might be writing at the top of their talents. They might think their audience is dumb. They might be dreaming of a Big Score. They might be part of the America I don’t know anymore, the land of NASCAR and too many guns and fat Minutemen squatting on the border, aiming carbines at young men named Jesus. I have no time left to read their books (I’m 72). I’d rather read Melville again or Caesar’s Gallic Wars.

DS: I note that the characters in your tales are believable- they seem to be people one might really meet and dialogue with. Yet, when I read the stories written by MFA writers, inevitably their characters are stock, at best, and stereotypes, at worst. I think of a book of stories I read by Annie Proulx, Close Range. It was larded with the worst sorts of city slicker stereotypes about Westerners, and the worst tale of the bunch, Brokeback Mountain, gets overpraised, then bloated into that horrid film of a couple years ago, and yet it’s praised for all the wrong reasons- not because it’s well written or a well made film, but because its two lead characters are homosexuals with boners for each other, Yet, had they been heterosexual characters cheating on their wives, there’d be no film, and the story would never have attracted attention. Every story in Tokyo Sketches was better than Brokeback Mountain, especially in characterization, but people seem to want hollow characters to relate to. Let’s be real- and this has nothing to do with envy, but you have to read shit like that, and say to yourself, ‘How the hell can this crap be so praised, when my own work is demonstrably better?’ What does this state about America, or at least its reading public? And, what will happen, is that reams of even worse knockoffs of that bad story will be published, and the downward spiral is in full descent. Your characters have real grit. Is this something that only a good observer- or a trained one- a reporter, can have?

PH: Thanks for the kind words. I haven’t read Brokeback Mountain nor have I seen the movie. And again, for me envy is too exhausting and doesn’t help me write better.

DS: Let me turn to some of the short stories in Tokyo Sketches. A few years ago I wrote a review of your book, and let me just reiterate my comments on some of the tales, and let you opine, as you will, on the tale’s provenance, meaning, etc. Of the first story, I wrote, ‘A Blues For Yukiko details a young, insecure female reporter’s meeting up with a blind, black American blues legend for an interview. Genuine kindnesses are exchanged in their brief encounter & the woman has a brief fantasy which ends the story. Yet, the fantasy is never enacted- the tale ends with its unfulfilled rapture. A lesser writer would have taken the story beyond Hamill’s closing moment with alot of preening exposition. But, any reader of breadth will appreciate that Hamill knows when to pull back. Logically, we know the reporter’s brief revery will be something that will not likely stick in her own mind years hence. The question posed is- just because something is brief &/or ultimately forgettable, are the feelings it produces any less powerful or real than those produced by traumas?’ This story is a good example of where your reportorial skills come in, and your knowing when to end a tale before an extraneous explaining of what it all means, of the sort that inflicts so much published MFA garbage nowadays. What of this tale?

PH: The emotional moment, the epiphany, if you will, is about the importance of having an imagined intimacy. That’s the great lesson of Chekhov. When he finally started writing his best stories, he lopped off beginnings and endings, and focused on the moment. He trusted the imagination of the reader to supply what came before, and what came after; that is, he trusted in the reader’s imagination too. Some of the worst academic writing tells us what we are going to be told, then tells it in detail, then tells us what we were just told, in summary. They should all read more Chekhov. In journalism, we called such extraneous beginnings and endings “bicycle riding”. The great journalists of the New Yorker (Joe Liebling, above all) found many ways into a story, but they always knew how to pare down the stories to some essence. (That doesn’t mean spare, lean Hemingwayesque writing either; Liebling grew increasingly baroque as he grew older). When I write stories now, I don’t think about such lessons but they have become a habit, part of a method.

DS: Here is another, ‘The Opponent is not the best tale in the book, but a good 1, & the piece that most shows off Hamill’s chops. This tale of the redemption of a down & out pug boxer begs the oldest of journalist-cum-Great American Novelist clichés. There are corrupt promoters, an up & comer opponent, a fix, & organized criminals. But, this tale is set in Japan, & the ending shows why.’ Ring Lardner, eat your heart out. As I state, this is an old premise. Were you consciously reworking a trite idea, or was there a real incident, which this was based on, which you though to put a Japanized spin on?

PH: I went to some fights in Tokyo and visited some gyms and was struck by the similarities, and the differences. Sicilian mob guys were not on the premises but the Yakuza were. I was also aware of the clichés of writing about fighters. I had written a novel about a fighter named “Flesh and Blood” and agreed with somebody’s remark that there are only two boxing stories: the one about the fighter on the way up, and the one about the fighter on the way down. I wanted to see if I could make such familiar tales into something fresh. Not new. Fresh. (The best boxing novel remains “The Professional” by W.C. Heinz, a great newspaperman, followed by Edward Hoagland’s “The Circle Home” and Nelson Algren’s “Never Come Morning”. I also liked the stories of the late F.X.Toole). I poured everything I knew about boxing into that novel (and I knew a lot), and when it was finished I lost interest in the sport.

DS: You deal with doomed love in several of the tales, but this tale is, to me, the most interesting, because every young man has been in the position the lead character in this tale is. I wrote, ‘Samurai is even a better tale about love & fantasy. An American teenager becomes obsessed with Japan, at least that he’s seen in Japanese films. He builds up a fantasy image for himself, then loses his virginity to an older Japanese exchange student. Following the lead of a famed Japanese actor’s character, he pursues his Lady Love across the Pacific, swelled on that only youth can suckle, to find out that what he thought was real was not, & reality can be too much.’ What of this tale? And, were any of the love tales in the book based upon the wooing of your wife? If so, which one?

PH: You’re right. There are various things at play, some personal, although I never had visions of myself as a young Mifune. I didn’t draw on anything involving Fukiko either, although she read each of the stories for me to make certain I avoided bone-headed mistakes.

DS: I wrote this of what is probably the best tale in the book: ‘Missing In Action is a truly great short story, about 2 American Vietnam veterans who meet up in a Tokyo bar decades after the war. Both have deep psychic wounds from the war, & intractable personal enmity. Their final clash seems what may be expected, but how it plays out subverts every expectation that a reader drags in from Hollywood & hard-boiled fiction. The backdrop of Vietnam dovetails perfectly with the denouement.’ Oddly enough, I knew many such men, growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and you really nail their psyche. Yet, the setting and the personal situations evoked are universal. Is this tale based on a real incident, or people that you knew? Regardless, it shows off your journalistic skill at sketching characters. Thoughts?

PH: It comes from a casual conversation I had with a man I’d met in Vietnam, when I was there as a correspondent. The rest is imagined.

DS: And this ability to fix indelible portraits in the minds-eye goes into the book’s title. Tokyo Sketches is character driven, not plot driven, like so much interchangeable lowest Common Denominator fiction today. You do not overdescribe, nor do you waste much time on non-essentials. It’s like a Matisse figure- a few flicks of the wrist, and then you put the characters in motion. I described your short fictive style thus: ‘What makes the book & its tales so good is how they unfold. The little details- their descriptions, & usage within- separate Hamill from hack tale tellers. The way he so realistically describes Tokyo- sans mythology- reveals human bonds in ways that PC Elitist writing utterly fails to. Hamill does not ram these similarities down the readers’ throats. Notably, most of the similarities are in the negative vein. The prose is poetic, but never floral. There are no wasted sentences, nor descriptions….Would-be fictionists in creative writing classes should be forced to read these tales for their economy, subversion of the expected, & the power of detail, rather than the pabulum that is spewn out now, which wins award after award, yet leave nary a fraction of the emotional impact of these tales.’ Do your fictive stories spawn from an idea of a person, or an event? And, how do you think this is related to your training as a journalist, if at all?

PH: Both, but then they evolve into tales of people. They do relate to my journalism, but then the journalism was often the result of the study of great fiction. Particularly the short story writers, since they too had limits of space. The best ones gave me a standard of concision to emulate, and helped me to see. But they weren’t the only influences. My training as an artist helped that process, and so did the press photographers I worked with as a young reporter (they were, after all, paid to see.) I always tried hard to make the result look easy. I wanted the prose to be like looking at Matisse (you were right!) or like Fred Astaire (where you never saw the sweat and strain of rehearsal).

DS: Speaking of journalism, what is the biggest story, as a journalist or editor, that you’ve ever been involved with? Obviously 9/11, in terms of sheer scope, but have there been investigations that you felt would have Watergate like repercussions, but just fizzled? How about the Son of Sam Killings, or the Frank Serpico saga? And, despite the hagiography of 9/11, is the NYPD still as corrupt as it was in the Serpico days?

PH: I suppose the biggest story was the shooting of Robert Kennedy in the Ambassador Hotel in 1968. We were friends (and after the killing I was never a friend of any other politician). I wrote the story for the Village Voice. I had no talent as an investigative reporter, nor any ambition to become one, although I think such journalists are absolutely essential to the craft (the Walter Reed exposes in the Washington Post are a good example). And Breslin owned the Son of Sam story, received letters from Berkowitz, and won a Pulitzer (much deserved) for what he did. Ironically, he was on vacation when Berkowitz was caught and I went out to cover that part of the story.

Are cops still corrupt? As noted, I’m not working for a daily anymore, but I suppose there are still a few corruptos around. It is nothing like the Serpico era, because the New Immigrants have changed so many things for the better in the city, replacing drug deals with honest work. But starting with Bratton and now with Ray Kelly, the force itself has been vigilant. The pay remains low, the temptations grand (from the active drug dealers) and corruption is a New York tradition going back to the 19^th century. If it erupts again, I’ll be sad, but not surprised.

DS: What do you see on the horizon in the 2008 Presidential race? Is a Rudy-Hillary rematch a foregone conclusion? Will the Democrats ever take back Gracie Mansion? And what of Michael Bloomberg taking an independent run at the White House? Has he been a distinct improvement over Rudy? And, do you think Rudy’s, and his former law firm’s, shady financial dealings in pre-apartheid South Africa will come back to haunt him?

PH: Ah, hell, this could be an essay. And it’s too early to even think about. A few weeks ago I briefly turned on the Republican debate. They looked like they had been assembled after a RICO indictment. And they were discussing EVOLUTION! Eighty years after the Scopes Trial? Where the hell was Mencken when we needed him? I turned the TV off and started reading a book of essays by Michel Leiris. I AM uneasy about Giuliani with nuclear weapons…

DS: On a more expansive note, why do you think political discourse in America is so low? I say that fully knowing that the putative ‘Good Old Days’ never were. FDR was demonized by the Right, and with some justification- his attempt to stack the Supreme Court, his internment of Japanese-Americans, and his early refusal to do more for Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. And the 19^th Century was a cesspool- as you well know, having knowledge of the days of Yellow Journalism and Boss Tweed. Is politics simply a base occupation- the divvying up of power by the elites to control the masses? If so, are we ever stuck with the noxious ‘lesser of two (or three or more) evils’ paradigm?

PH: Again, this subject requires a full-scale essay. I just don’t have the time. I’ve known politicians who were not base. But most of the current crop is dominated by the need to present an image, not an idea, and surely goes back to the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960. These people actually want to be celebrities.

DS: Yet, if politics is a lowly form of human endeavor, many people see journalists in an even lesser light. The 21^st Century’s nonstop news cycle produces an endless stream of ‘scandals’- be it Anna Nicole Smith, Don Imus, the Virginia Tech killings, the latest little blond girl lost- the latest being that child from the U.K., to the war in Iraq. Then there are the news mannekins- Brian Williams, Katie Coutic, the tabloid tv shows- Inside Edition, Dateline, Entertainment Tonight, and the lowest of all- the political and news blogs. Why has serious discourse- political or otherwise, died in this nation? I grew up watching the old Firing Line debates, yet there is nothing like that now- save for PBS’s Charlie Rose.

PH: Same as above.

DS: There is a prescient column on your website, written not long after President Bush assumed office, in which you write the following: ‘The bizarre circumstances that brought Bush to the White House will be examined by historians for many years. But we should all be worried right now, in present time. Here is the basic problem: Bush will try to be president in circumstances that make almost all domestic movement impossible. The Congress is split almost exactly in half. The Republicans- the only true ideologues in the 21st century United States- will be frustrated in their attempts to impose fundamentalist Christian beliefs on a multi-ethnic, multi-religious nation. The Democrats – who still believe in the ability of a nation to repair its social inequities -- will be unable to move any of their own mildly liberal agenda. The imams of the Republican Party from the South and Midwest will continue to see the presence of the Great Satan among the Democrats. And many Democrats will continue to be unforgiving for the vicious Republican impeachment of Bill Clinton. The result: impasse.

Bush will then be tempted to do what most American presidents do when they can’t make anything happen at home. He will look beyond the borders of the United States. That is, he will try to find some small nation to beat up, wrap the assault in flowery idealistic language, and thus try to look presidential. He will talk about sacrifice and honor, and the brave American fighting man. He will try to force unity upon the fractious Congress. He will cite his rise in public opinion polls as proof of his wisdom and his “courage”. In that spirit, John F. Kennedy – who won his 1960 election by a mere 100,000 popular votes – allowed the Bay of Pigs operation to go forward, and sent the first substantial numbers of troops into Vietnam. Ronald Reagan was content to beat up Grenada while creating and funding (illegally) the Contra War in Nicaragua. Bush the Father went after Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War and killed 2000 human beings in Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega in the bloodiest drug bust in world history.

It’s unlikely that George W. Bush will be more prudent than his predecessors.’

Is this just one of those inexplicable Nostradamus moments, or did you see something other political pundits did not?

PH: No, I’ve been writing about bullshit tough guys for most of my life. Bush and Cheney both ducked Vietnam, which meant that they were part of the League of Frightened White Guys. And such men are always dangerous when they get power. They want to show how they really DID have big dicks when they were young. They almost never examine themselves or offer themselves to the ideal of sacrifice (they live well-defended lives). But they are willing to send young men and women off to die, out of fear, or to defend their own pathetic “legacies”. Uck. If either Bush or Cheney had ever been shot at in a place where they didn’t know the language, they’d have been more prudent.

I grew up admiring true tough guys (they included women, and I celebrate such toughness in “North River”). They didn’t talk tough. They were tough.

DS: Will you speak out on your own views re: politics, religion, etc.? Do you consider yourself a moderate? Are you a Roman Catholic?

PH: I suppose I’m a chastened liberal, but still a liberal. I’m not a moderate about the preservation of individual freedoms, which are being eroded by this lot in Washington. I believe budgets should be balanced, which used to be a conservative value. I don’t believe in the perfectibility of man, another discarded conservative value. (I wish these right-wingers would read Edmund Burke). As noted, I have no regard for ideology. I was raised a Catholic, and love the music and architecture and art that Christianity brought to the world before the Reformation, and many of the enduring human values of charity and forgiveness. I think monotheism is the worst idea ever dreamed up by human beings, but I recognize the power of faith to provide consolation to many, many people, including my mother. I’m just not a believer. And as a child of Belfast parents, I realize how bloody and disgusting the history of religious conflict has been (including Christian campaigns against Islam). I wish all these goddamned religions would go away but they won’t. Many of them are death cults, and many human beings are dominated by the fear of death. I cherish life. Diego Rivera was once asked if he believed in God. He answered: “I believe in Picasso.”

I do have a recurring vision of Heaven. God looks like the late Marcello Mastroanni, hunched, smoking a Gaoulois, sipping a cognac, shrugging away all sin except cruelty. At the table are some of my friends, along with Ben Webster and Giotto and Miles Davis and Picasso and Sugar Ray Robinson. They expect that Boss Tweed will arrive soon, full of mocking laughter, along with Mencken and my old editor Paul Sann, and Rebecca West, and Colette and Edith Piaf. God says, Go and wake up John Lennon, please, and that Sinatra guy. And wait: here comes Fellini….

DS: Let me wrap up this interview with a few questions that ping pong about: You have never been a New York Yankees fan. Are you reveling in their struggles this year? And, heaven forfend, don’t tell me you could ever root for the Boston Red Sox? The Mets, ok; but never the whiny Red Sox! And let’s not even mention the Knicks!

PH: Nah, but I do like some of the Yankees. I love Jeter, and Matsui (my wife and I interviewed him during his first year) and Posada. And Torre is fine fellow, with a National League Face, somewhat stepped upon. But I’m a Mets fan. How could I not be? Willie Randolph is from Brooklyn! And Glavine, in the age of steroids, remains a marvel. And does anybody play with more joy than Reyes?

DS: Do you feel that celebrities or public intellectuals have a responsibility to the working Joe to not be so loony? I mean, one need only look at the crazy causes Hollywood celebrities swoon over, or that artists and intellectuals like a T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound (pro-Fascists) or Noam Chomsky (pro-Communist) shill for, and it’s ridiculous?

PH: No, they don’t have any more responsibility than people who join the NRA. I certainly don’t think they should be silenced. Before they are condemned, they should be scrutinized carefully, admitting the good with the bad (or the stupid). I’m a strict fundamentalist when it comes to the First Amendment. The cliché is that people don’t give up their rights when they become famous, and I agree. We should argue against their dumb ideas but not silence them.

DS: Many celebrities also shill for pet causes, or voice their support for criminals they dubiously claim as ‘political prisoners,’ such as Kathleen Soliah, Eric Rudolph, Mumia Abu-Jamal, or Leonard Peltier. Yet, aside from Guantanamo Bay, and perhaps a few drug users under the Three Strikes nonsense laws, the only political prisoner I can really think of deserving of any support was the recently released Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who was jailed for mocking the hypocrisy of the political system. Any thoughts?

PH: I agree. Most of these are cartoon causes. Not Guantanamo. Not torture.

DS: Let’s end this interview back on writing and art. Whither imagination? Why is so much of current literature ill-wrought, dull, and idea-less? Why do you think clichés like ‘write what you know’ has replaced good honest criticism?

PH: Again, I think “good honest criticism” can play an important role in the wider culture. But too much reading of it is not healthy for the writer, because it too often works against the very thing it bemoans: the impoverishment of imagination. You can’t dream if you’re trying to figure out how your dreams rate in the company of others, dead or alive. I suppose the rebuttal to that would be that good, honest criticism can educate readers, or create more of them. I hope so.

DS: Jonas Salk once said something to the effect that our greatest duty is to be good ancestors for future generations, and this is especially true in the arts, because art is communication, and if we want future people to understand their human past, we need to produce as good and great art as we can. Artists should always create looking upwards, towards that future, and smarter generations, rather than looking downwards at the current morass, for those artists that have done so in the past are no longer recalled. Do you agree?

PH: Not exactly. Looking to a future that might not happen can lead to bad habits, humbug, pretentiousness. The future, if there is one, might mock what you’ve sent to its inhabitants. In general, human beings don’t change much, no matter the cut of their clothes, their means of transportation, their fashions. Reading the classics teaches us that. Auden famously said, Poetry changes nothing. When I was in my 20s, not yet a newspaperman, I lived on Ninth Street and Second Avenue. I would occasionally see Auden going to or coming from St Mark’s Place, where he lived (one block away). I wanted to ask him what he meant, but never had the nerve. I wish I had. I’ve lived a lifetime since those brief encounters, and Auden is still in print. I still wonder what he meant, but far more important, I have the poetry.

DS: I feel that philosophy is ideas, but art is ideas in motion- and writing is wholly abstract art, unlike visual or aural arts, so it’s the greater pursuit, yet art has no correlation with truth- another recent noxious nostrum. Science and journalism are the provinces of truth, not art. Do you agree with these ideas?

PH: It depends upon what truths you are searching for. The truth of the flesh, for example, can’t be discovered by science or journalism, except in the most limited way. The truth of man’s capacity for evil is also beyond the framework of science, or the limited tools of journalism. Professional philosophy also has its limitations. You keep hearing the professor clearing his throat. But literature can get close to such truths, along with some films. Not about Man, but about men, and about women, and about those who lurk in the shadows, carrying flags. So it has been since the time of the Greeks.

DS: Thanks for doing this interview, and let me allow you a closing statement, on whatever you like. Hopefully we’ll read many more words from you in the coming years.

PH: Live your life. Don’t perform it.

(originally posted 8/8/07)

Reviews Of The Science Of Sex Appeal And Phyllis And Harold

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:04:57 -0400

Watching documentaries on Netflix can be engaging yet frustrating. On a single afternoon I watched a 2009 Discovery Channel documentary, called The Science Of Sex Appeal, which offered insights into the whys and wherefores of its titular subject matter, then watched a 2008 theatrical documentary film, Phyllis And Harold, which was the epitome of the noxious brand of film I call the vanity documentary, wherein a filmmaker makes a film about themselves or someone they know, of little import to anyone outside of whom they know, and try to propound it is artistically or culturally significant.

(1)

The Science Of Sex Appeal, which runs 87 minutes, takes a scientific look at what attracts human beings to one another. Well, if you are young, fairly attractive, and heterosexual, for that’s the only sorts of people the film deals with. Nonetheless, it’s a good look at a plenum of subjects, showing a number of tests and discoveries made in the field, from the universal appeal of the golden ratio and bodily symmetry, to subtle hormonal changes in female bodies during menstruation, which can alter appearances and chemically change a male’s scent from repulsive to attractive. It also states much of what is already known, such as masculine looks appealing more to women than feminine ones, in males, deeper voices connoting more testosterone, and the fact that flirting is basically role playing to advertise the health of one’s genes for a potential partner to survey.

The film also follows the search for human pheromones and traces the way the brain neuro-chemically reacts when in lust, in love, and when in a long term monogamous relationship. There are talking head segments with assorted couples pontificating or babbling on about why their beloved (seated next to them) is such a prize, but the most interesting segments were those with individuals of both sexes pairing up with members of the opposite sex, and seeing how those the opposite sex considered most to least attractive, usually paired up with those fairly close to them in physical attractiveness, on a scale of 1-10. Of course, this is well known, as one often sees two ugly or fat people paired, but rarely does one see a George Clooney clone dating a Roseanne Barr doppelganger, nor a Gwyneth Paltrow twin married to an ugly guy.

Except for when things like status and wealth are factored in, and again the film reiterates well known tendencies: women value long term prospects while men shoot for one night stands. Yet, the film falls a bit short in its explanation for why exceptions exist. As example, I am an average looking guy, and have been so all my life. I am not going to make woman swoon, nor repel them. Thus, other factors come in to play, such as my much higher success rate with women in the arts scenes I used to traffic in, because, in that milieu, what made me a ‘catch’ was not my looks, pro nor con, but my great a talent and ability as an artist; and it’s this currency which needs deeper exploration in the science of sex appeal.

(2)

Sometimes, though, deeper exploration is not needed, and even borders on the emotionally pornographic. Such was my reaction to the 84 minute long Phyllis And Harold, a vanity documentary from Cindy Kleine, wife of playwright and writer Andre Gregory, of My Dinner With Andre fame. This film follows the 59 year old marriage of the titular couple, who were the parents of the filmmaker, in its final years before the death of Harold, then Phyllis. They were a rich Jewish suburban couple. He a successful dentist who was often aloof and controlling, although also loving, protective, and seemingly devoted, while she was a JAP (Jewish American Princess) who denigrated her husband behind his back, raised their two daughters to emulate her (even though she fobbed off their upbringing almost solely on a black nanny named Annie), and betray their father by helping her reignite a decades forgotten affair she had with a former boss of hers, when she is in her seventies. That both daughters, the filmmaker and the older sister Ricky, help Phyllis cheat on their father is really one of the more disgusting things I’ve ever seen on film. It’s emotional pornography and far, far more tasteless than any sexual-based porno I’ve ever seen.

That stated, it is an effective film, if its aim is to show how Cindy Kleine aimed to get vengeance at her parents for seemingly not caring for her as much as she claims to have been due, for, at its end, viewers will pity poor Harold- who seems to have lived an entirely different marriage than Phyllis did, for he clearly loves her and has a good sense of humor. They will think Phyllis is a self-centered, none too bright, self-pitying, attention seeking narcissist and drama queen; and the best evidence of this comes when she is asked what to do with Harold’s cremains, and she has to be reminded what he wanted, and that the decision is not about her. But Kleine will come off the worst- a spoiled little rich girl who repulses viewers by being exploitive, hiding her mother’s affair from her father, as she allowed him to continue to believe his wife was good and faithful, thus participating in her mother’s deceit, and pathologically enabling it- along with her sister, and even met the lover, claimed he was a good guy, then trots out that most vapid of clichés- that her mother was somehow ‘courageous’ to cheat on her father. Something tells me that were the roles reversed and she had found out her father had cheated on her mother, Kleine would have condemned him, called him a liar and coward, and would have exposed the affair. She certainly never would have aided him in reigniting the affair. Kleine comes off as a smug, clueless hypocrite.

But, who, outside the family, really cares? These sorts of sordid affairs are commonplace. They were when the Kleines were first married and are now. Is there anything Phyllis’s faithlessness or Harold’s cluelessness teaches the viewer? No. But, as a portrait of a pitiable human being (Phyllis, not Kleine) it is effective. Phyllis talks of no one but herself and her life’s misery for having….drum roll….married the wrong man; even as we find out the lover is a louse who has a wife and kids, is clearly a manipulator, and, when Harold finally dies, never calls Phyllis again, even though, for the first time in half a century, he could have the woman he claims to love so deeply all for himself. We then watch Phyllis get her due, after Harold chokes to death on a lamp chop. She abandons her house, moves to an assisted living apartment, starts enjoying life, sans the burdensome Harold, only to suffer a series of falls and bone breakages, then end up bedridden, and losing her mind. Yet, in the film’s most telling moment, we find out which man really meant the most to her, when Kleine tells us Phyllis forgot her lover’s name and person entirely, while, of her husband, she is said to have said that ‘he was the man who showed her the world.’ This is a profoundly sad moment, as I pitied poor bedbound Phyllis, dying of pneumonia, who reminded me of my own mother’s struggles in her last few weeks of life. Yet, I also thought it showed how shallow a shell of a human being she always was. The lover who ‘excited’ her was not even recalled, while the man who provided for her, is only recalled for what he was able to give her. A more appropriate title for the film might have been All About Phyllis.

Or, It Should Be All About Cindy, for the film, like most vanity docs, is poorly filmed, poorly edited, poorly scored, and quite amateurishly done. The worst offense is how Kleine almost always feels a need to insert herself into the documentary by visual or aural means. Some of the more pointless parts of the film are Kleine’s trip to visit her old nanny and when she whines about first finding out of her mother’s lover when she first had a boyfriend- accusing Phyllis of undercutting ‘her moment.’ The apple does not fall far from the tree, indeed. Then there is Kleine’s abysmal narration, which tells far to much of far too little about things no one will care of. Without Kleine’s having her celebrity husband as producer, would this film have even gotten made, much less distributed?

I doubt it, for, as mentioned, this stuff is commonplace, however sad. Yes, at some level, the viewer can intuit that Phyllis had deep psychological problems, and spent most of her life convincing herself her great life and husband were not so good, even as most women would kill for the life she led, even as, ultimately, as mentioned above, she likely loved Harold more than she could comprehend, more than her lover, but was unable to show it, for they stayed together long after romantic love’s fade, even if Phyllis demeaned herself and her marriage in the process. Kleine, however, likely hated both her parents, for there is no other reason for this total exploitation of their lives, deaths, and failures, as nothing of depth is revealed in this shallow faux exploration of human mating.

(3)

Phyllis And Harold, however, is a not too well told tale of two painfully average and unimportant people whose lives and deaths teach a viewer nothing. It is not the worst vanity documentary I’ve seen, but it may be the most pointless and disgusting. Fortunately, The Science Of Sex Appeal fares better, as a film and exploration of its subject. It I can recommend. Phyllis And Harold is strictly for the pretentious, dour, and masochistic.

DVD Review of The War Of The Worlds (CD)

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 13:04:10 -0400

While perusing through the DVD racks at a local Half Price Books I came across a package with two DVDs and a bonus CD, called An Adaptation Of H.G. Wells’ Classic The War Of The Worlds. Thinking it was a version of the classic sci fi film from the 1950s, I bought it at its cheap price. But it was not the old film. Rather it was from a company called Madacy Home Video, and consisted of some faux newscasts, some documentaries, and a CD of the original 1938 broadcasts of the Mercury Theatre’s radio broadcast of The War Of The Worlds. This was the infamous broadcasts that made a national name of Orson Welles. It’s actually a high quality rendition, and easily the best part of this package. It is unedited, and although it begins with a clear presentation of the program as an adaptation of Wells’ classic, one can easily see why many thought this was a real ‘event.’ One merely needs to recall the famed radio broadcast of the Hindenburg disaster and the narration of Herbert Morrison, in Lakehurst, New Jersey, not that far from the town of Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, where this broadcast was set. Having only heard bits of it from before, I was amazed at just how dramatically and technically proficient the show was, especially since the whole truly is greater than the sum of its clips. Welles, especially, is very good, taking on several roles.

Unfortunately, the video supplements to the package are not nearly of as high a quality. The first DVD has a 49 minute (not 35 minute, as on the DVD cover) faux newscast of a supposed modern invasion (set in 2005, with George W. Bush as President). It is poorly acted, filled with terrible special effects, and generally a disaster. There is nothing to recommend it. Even worse, on the first disk, there is a pointless, and atrociously produced, video called Miss Intergalactic 8056. about a supposed beauty contest. It’s truly horrifically bad, intercutting bad computer effects with old sci fi monster films. The only thing to argue over is whether the effects are worse than the attempts at humor. The final feature on Disk One is called The Pop Culture Of Sci Fi, in which conventioneers at a sci fi convention are asked about the genre, as they are decked out in assorted costumes. It ends, anomically, by following a musician talking of music in sci fi. Again, utterly pointless. Disk Two is a little bit better, as it includes vintage NASA filmlets from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as more recent video footage of NASA press conferences, all concerning missions to explore Mars via satellites and rovers. The disk also includes facts and photos about the earth and Mars, as well as biographical information on Wells. But, aside from its kitsch value, there really is no reason anyone would be interested in this material, save for its tangential relation to the Welles’ broadcast.

That is because, again, the only real draw of this package is the Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater broadcast, which holds up much better than its video counterparts; a testament to the power of both men with the similar sounding names, and proof of the power of real artistry over schlockery. My advice is to take a pass on this package, and go get the DVD of the 1950s classic film. If not, your punishment will have to be sitting, and being forced to endure all of the features on this disk. You have been warned!