Photograph of Truman Capote, 1948, by Carl Van Vechten.

Truman Capote is quite adorable in this interview with David Frost from 1969, although the great writer becomes slightly unstuck by his inquisitor’s questioning.

When asked, Capote says love and friendship are the same thing, but that sex doesn’t have anything to do with friendship.

“I think it is very difficult to have a sexual relationship with somebody who is actually a friend, because there is a kind of tension and antagonism that goes on in a sexual relationship that is the antithesis of friendship.”

Though he may have once written that sex was like sneezing, Capote reveals he has had more “love relationships” than “sex relationships.” Which puzzles Frost, as Capote only admits to having been in love twice.
 

  
In his memoir Confessions of a Mask (certainly the only book I’ve ever read describable as “Proust meets Jeffrey Dahmer”), the great Japanese writer and all-round rum fucker Yukio Mishima is kind enough to share the precise circumstances of his first orgasm…

It arrived, or better yet arose, when he saw, browsing a volume of art reproductions in his father’s study, Reni’s “St Sebastian,” undoubtedly one of the more louche and insouciant evocations of Christian martyrdom (paid conspicuous tribute to in the above image), and enough to give Mishima his full sexual awakening, concurrently instigating a full-blown sexual and aesthetic obsession with death and sadomasochism that would ineluctably lead, decades later, to Mishima’s own Sepukku (ritual suicide by disemboweling; better known in the west as Harakiri) in 1970, following a failed attempt to lead a military uprising.

Considering his lifelong and highly eroticized preoccupation, it’s easy to imagine that this attempted coup d’état was only really ever meant to provide a pretext for the suicide itself. It was probably one of the strangest occurrences in literary history. Along with four members of the Tatenokai, a Japanese private militia, Mishima (a man, incidentally, who revered writers like Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Proust…) unveiled a banner and manifesto at Ichigaya Camp, the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, but his speech was met with mocking laughter by the soldiers. This rejection, though, allowed the comrades to get down to the good bit: disemboweling themselves and decapitating one another. Mishima had been planning this meticulously for a year, but had clearly been fantasizing about it for a lifetime—shades here of Kurt Cobain, whose childhood diaries announce an intention to become the world’s biggest rock star and then take his own life.

Still, though, Sepukku. I can barely read the Wikipedia page without falling out my chair. (Hey, my cat just obligingly caught a mouse he’s been after for about a year and a half, ripped it in two, and left mouse intestine strung across the kitchen linoleum. Cheers, Kit Bear!) I was certainly unable to remain in my chair for the half-hour duration of the following 1966 film, Mishima’s only one, Yûkoku (“Patriotism”) or The Rite of Love and Death, directed by and staring Mishima himself, and based on the almost unreadable short story of the same name. It is essentially an elaborate and idealized rehearsal for the way he would later meet his own death. I watched it on my tip-toes, with regular yelps and howls.

Although the short film was normally screened with the accompaniment of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the following version—the only one with the film’s proper 3:4 aspect ratio and English titles on YouTube—was scored by musician Aaron Embry. It’s strong stuff, and also—like the rest of Mishima’s writing and life—utterly mesmerizing. (If you are new to Mishima, maybe skip down first to watch the engrossing English interview with him below.)
 

 
J.G. Ballard, surely the sharpest critic of late capitalism, offered up the bleakest literary prophecies of what sorts of chaos would be unleashed in the human psyche by changes in the environment brought on by pollution and technology. Ballard was writing about the endgame effects of global warming long before such a term or concept existed, even on the scientific fringes.

In The Burning World (aka The Drought) the author portrays a dry, nearly barren global landscape caused by industrial waste forming a chemical chain that catastrophically disrupts the precipitation cycle. Populations are uprooted, needing to move towards the oceans or die as the rivers turn to streams. The Drowned World is set in the year 2145 in a post-apocalyptic, heavily flooded London with tropical temperatures. Both novels explore what happens morally and socially when modern societies devolve to a hunter/gatherer culture.

But Ballard was writing science fiction, wasn’t he?

We may be finding out sooner—much sooner—rather than later how prescient Ballard’s dark, apocalyptic visions were. A report released today by the World Bank projects that much of Bangkok could be underwater before 2033 and that parts of Africa, Pakistan, India and Afghanistan could face severe drought by mid-century.

Via Reuters/Raw Story:

The flooding of 40 percent of the Thai capital was just one of dozens of negative effects the Washington-based World Bank warned would happen if the world grew warmer by just 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), which it said is likely to occur in the next 20 to 30 years under a “business-as-usual” scenario.

Under World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, the global development lender has launched a more aggressive stance to spur action on climate change. Kim has said it is impossible to tackle poverty without dealing with the effects of a warmer world.

The report builds on an earlier World Bank study released last November that shows the global impact of a 4 degree Celsius rise in temperatures by 2100.

Keep in mind that the National Climate Assessment global warming impact study found that even if mankind seriously put the brakes on carbon emissions by 2030, California would still face a likely rise of SIX degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century, causing rising ocean levels which will contaminate the water table and a severe increase in out of control forest fires.To say nothing of what this will do to the state’s agricultural output. To be clear, two models with varying inputs more or less predicted the same outcome… whether we do anything about greenhouse emissions or not.

The National Climate Assessment report used words like “apocalyptic” and “unprecedented.” You can read it here.

The World Bank report focused on the misery that higher temperatures will cause for developing countries. Sub-Saharan Africa and much of Asia will bear the brunt of the effects and their populations will need to move closer to water sources or perish. Imagine resource scarcity anarchy Mad Max-style writ large across entire regions and continents. Droughts are likely to hit north-western India, Pakistan and Afghanistan the report said. That should be fun.

Staple crops such as wheat, rice and corn have troubles in warmer climates, and the World Bank reports projects that up to a jaw-dropping 90% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa could be starving within forty years.

Even if North America and Europe will not suffer the grimmest fates from climate change (within your lifetime and mine, at least) imagine what this is going to do to the price of putting food on the table for your family. Everything always goes to the highest bidder.

The World Bank’s report can be read here.
 

 
Uncle Bill ‘fesses up about his heroin habit.

This interview from 1977 begins with William Burroughs replying to a question as to whether he had any regrets in using heroin?

A writer can profit from things that maybe just unpleasant or boring to someone else, because he uses those subsequently for material in writing. And I would say that the experience I had, that’s described in Junkie, later led to my subsequent books like Naked Lunch. So I don’t regret it. Incidentally, the damage to health is minimal—no matter what the American Narcotics Department may say.

Burroughs may have been clean at the time, but he returned to using Methadone in later life, which makes parts of this interview rather poignant.

For a fascinating article on Burroughs and the history of heroin, check out the Reality Studio.
 

 
I’m given to understand that US Dangerous Minds readers are much less likely to have read Philip Larkin than our British readers, in which case I may have the great, great pleasure of introducing at least some of you to arguably the most indelible English poet since W. H. Auden.

Jazz enthusiast, librarian, right-winger… labels and clichés cling to Larkin’s persona and legacy with peculiar tenacity. Certainly he was in many ways a conservative writer (Larkin expressed particular hatred for “the three Ps”—Ezra Pound, Charlie Parker, and Picasso, whom he blamed for “ruining” their respective art forms). Yet, as it dawned on me when I sought and found the following splendid recordings of some of his greatest poems, read by the author himself, had Larkin and (say) Bob Dylan both kept an artistic swearbox to hand, Larkin’s would be the fuller—courtesy of the instantaneously memorable, oddly iconic (as much so, in its own way, as “Howl”) “This be the Verse”…

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. 
  They may not mean to, but they do. 
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
  By fools in old-style hats and coats, 
Who half the time were soppy-stern
  And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
  It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
  And don’t have any kids yourself.

Following this there’s the magnificently black “Aubade,” then the more elaborate, demanding but equally brilliant “The Whitsun Weddings” (possibly two of the best poems in the English language). Finally, there’s a gentle, amusing documentary portrait (Love and Death in Hull) of the personal life of this much read, much loved and much maligned writer.
 

“This be the Verse”
 

“Aubade”
 

“The Whitsun Weddings”
 

 
Today is Bloomsday—the day that commemorates and celebrates the life and works of James Joyce across the world.

Bloomsday is the day on which the events of Joyce’s most famous novel Ulysses take place, June 16th, 1904. This is also the date on which Joyce first stepped out with his future wife, Nora Barnacle, to stroll around the city of Dublin.

To celebrate Bloomsday, here is James Joyce reading Episode Seven: “Aeolus” from Ulysses. This recording was made in 1924, on the insistence of Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the Parisian bookshop Shakespeare & Co. and publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses. As the recording is rather basic, a transcription of the extract is been included of below.

He began.

— Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Great was my admiration in listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had been transported into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the speech of some highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses.
His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smoke ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech. And let our crooked smokes. Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand at it yourself?
— And it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest raised in a tone of like haughtiness and like pride. I heard his words and their meaning was revealed to me.

FROM THE FATHERS

It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That’s saint Augustine.
— Why will you jews not accept our culture, our religion and our language? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen; we are a mighty people. You have no cities nor no wealth: our cities are hives of humanity and our galleys, trireme and quadrireme, laden with all manner merchandise furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from primitive conditions: we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong history and a polity.
Nile.
Child, man, effigy.
By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bulrushes: a man supple in combat: stonehorned, stonebearded, heart of stone.
— You pray to a local and obscure idol: our temples, majestic and mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra. Yours serfdom, awe and humbleness: ours thunder and the seas. Israel is weak and few are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible are her arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at our name.
A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. He lifted his voice above it boldly:
— But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage nor followed the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai’s mountaintop nor ever have come down with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw.

Download James Joyce reading from Ulysses here.
 

 
Bonus audio of Joyce reading from ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ plus documentary ‘A Stroll Through Ulysses,’ after the jump…
 

 
Some rarely seen footage (it’s not like there is a lot if it, you’ll note that they ran out of it pretty quickly) of poet and novelist Richard Brautigan cut over readings from his classic Trout Fishing in America and the novella In Watermelon Sugar.

Richard Brautigan was once one of the most widely read poets and novelists of 60s and 70s America. He wasn’t quite as famous as say, Kurt Vonnegut or Allen Ginsberg, but he was up there. Brautigan was especially revered in counterculture circles. In the Dean Koontz novel, One Door Away From Heaven, one of the characters, a drug addict, believes that she would be able to unlock the occult secrets of the universe, if only she could understand the deeper meanings of In Watermelon Sugar.

It’s a tragedy—seriously, it’s a damned shame—that he is now all but forgotten. Fans of both Vonnegut and Tom Robbins will find much to appreciate in Brautigan’s work.

An album, Listening to Richard Brautigan, recorded in 1969, was supposed to come out on The Beatles’ experimental Zapple label managed by Barry Miles, but Zapple didn’t last that long (It eventually came out on EMI Harvest).

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Richard Brautigan: The Voice at the Heart of Nowness
 

 
Why I Write was George Orwell’s essay answering that perennial question asked of most authors and novelists.

Orwell was a 5-year-old when he first thought of becoming a writer. It was an idea he clung to throughout his childhood—writing stories in his head, rather on paper, imitating the styles of his favorite authors. Then, between the ages of seveteen and 25, Orwell attempted to abandon his vocation.

He joined the Imperial Indian Police. He affected a philistinism. Denounced literature, and literary magazines—in particular the Adelphi, which he considered ‘scurrilous,’ and used for target practice. Ironically, it was the Adelphi that later gave Orwell his first encouragement as a writer, publishing some of his early essays under his name Eric Blair.

It was only on his return to England that Orwell started writing in earnest. He apprenticed himself, writing every day, developing a style, and submitting articles to magazines.

Writing, he discovered, was something he had to do.

Most authors would say the same: writing is something they have to do.

It’s the having to do it that starts them off. But it’s the keeping to it that is the difficult part.

I once asked the playwright Peter McDougall, ‘How do you write?’ ‘You write about what you know,’ he replied. I told him I had been to half-a-dozen funerals before I was twelve. ‘There you go—that’s what you should write about.’

But I was scared, because it meant writing about how I felt, how I thought. It meant revealing something about myself that I didn’t necessarily want to share. And that’s a major hurdle for writers starting out—having the nerve to put down on paper their true thoughts and feelings.

The author Max Frisch once wrote, “a writer only betrays himself.” Which is true, for a writer must be honest enough to tell the truth no matter how painful. And that was something Orwell knew.

In this short selection of interviews conducted by Charlie Rose, authors Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Malcolm Gladwell, Joan Didion, Jonathan Franzen and Fran Lebowitz give their answers to the question ‘How do you write?’ They also answer that other favorite, ‘Where do ideas come from?’ and explain how best to write successfully.
 

Pablo Picasso made his own statement about the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War in his ‘Guernica’ mural

In 1937, the unabashedly partisan Left Review canvassed a number of writers on their stance on the Spanish Civil War. I find the resulting document pretty fascinating, bringing together, in bite-size form, an embarrassment of literary riches from both sides of the divide.

For literary color, you can’t beat Samuel Beckett’s inspired offering, nor the “neutral” Ezra Pound’s elevated hauteur (which he was, of course, on the verge of throwing to the dogs via his infamous support for the Axis powers during WWII). The vast majority canvassed were pro-Republican, though I left a few out, concentrating on the more renowned and/or eloquent. (Neutrals and pro-Franco writers included in full.)

‘THE QUESTION’

To the Writers and Poets of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales

This is the question we are asking you:

Are you for, or against, the legal Government and the People of Republican Spain?

Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism?

For it is impossible any longer to take no side.

Writers and Poets, we wish to print your answers. We wish the world to know what you, writers and poets, who are amongst the most sensitive instruments of a nation, feel.

W.H. Auden

“I support the Valencia Government in Spain because its defeat by the forces of International Fascism would be a major disaster for Europe. It would make a European war more probable; and the spread of Fascist Ideology and practice to countries as yet comparatively free from them, which would inevitably follow upon a Fascist victory in Spain, would create an atmosphere in which the creative artist and all who care for justice, liberty and culture would find it impossible to work or even exist.”

Samuel Beckett

“¡UPTHEREPUBLIC!”

[Oddly, sometime in 2002 I once saw “¡UP AL QUIDA!” [sic] written on a Dublin bench.]

Ford Maddox Ford

“I am unhesitatingly for the existing Spanish Government and against Franco’s attempt—on every ground of feeling and reason. In addition, as the merest commonsense, the Government of the Spanish, as of any other nation, should be settled and defined by the inhabitants of that nation. Mr Franco wishes to establish a government resting on the arms of Moors, Germans, Italians. Its success must be contrary to world conscience.”

Aldous Huxley

“My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists; for Anarchism seems to me much more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralised, dictatorial Communism. As for ‘taking sides’—the choice, it seems to me, is no longer between two users of violence, two systems of dictatorship. Violence and dictatorship cannot produce peace and liberty; they can only produce the results of violence and dictatorship, results with which history has made us only too sickeningly familiar.

“The choice now is between militarism and pacifism. To me, the necessity of pacifism seems absolutely clear.”

VS Pritchett

“I am heart and soul for the people of Spain in their brave and stoical resistance to Franco and Fascism. The lessons of Spain for the rest of western Europe, even before this struggle, lay in the innate simplicity and nobility of the uncorrupted common people. They have now burned this lesson upon the imagination of us all.”

Stephen Spender

“I am opposed to Franco firstly because Franco and his supporters represent the attempt of the aristocracy and clergy in Span to prevent the history of Spain developing beyond the Middle Ages. In opposing their reaction, so far from being an extremist, I support the Protestantism of the intellectuals like the great Catholic writer Bergamin against the materialism of the Catholic Church in Spain; and I support in Spain exactly such a movement of liberal and liberating nationalism as the English liberals supported in many countries still groaning under the feudalism in the nineteenth century.

“Secondly, I am opposed to Franco, because, supported by Hitler and Mussolini, he represents international Fascism. If Franco wins in Spain Fascism will have the third great victory in an international war which began in Manchuria, continued in Abyssinia, and may end in Spain. If Franco wins, the principle of democracy will have received a severe blow and the prospect of a new imperialist war, which is also a ‘war of ideologies’ will have been brought far nearer.”

Neutral?

T.S. Eliot

“While I am naturally sympathetic, I still feel convinced that it is best that at least a few men of letters should remain isolated, and take no part in these collective activities.”

Ezra Pound

“Questionnaire an escape mechanism for young fools who are too cowardly to think; too lazy to investigate the nature of money, its mode of issue, the control of such issue by the Banque de France and the stank of England. You are all had. Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes.”

H.G. Wells

“I am not an ‘anti’ of any sort unless it is anti-gangster or anti-nationalist. My sympathies were all with the new liberal republic in Madrid. It has been destroyed between the Anarchist-Syndicalists on the one hand and the Franco pronunciamento on the other. The intervention of Italy and Germany is on traditional nationalist lines; it was to be expected and it has been greatly facilitated by the stupid confusion in the British mind and will.

“The real enemy of mankind is not the Fascist but the Ignorant Fool.”

Against the Government

Edmund Blunden

“I know too little about affairs in Spain to make a confident answer. To my mind (subject to that first reservation), it was necessary that somebody like Franco should arise—and although England might not may not benefit by his victory I think Spain will. The ideas of Germany, Italy, etc., in your document do not square with those I have formed upon the whole of the recent history of those countries. Memories of 1914-18 perhaps do not allow me to see some incidents you mention in the isolated and flamboyant way the manifesto has them.”

Evelyn Waugh

“I know Spain only as a tourist and a reader of the newspapers. I am no more impressed by the ‘legality’ of the Valencia Government than are English Communists by the legality of the Crown, Lords and Commons. I believe it was a bad government, rapidly deteriorating. If I were a Spaniard I should be fighting for General Franco. As an Englishmen I am not in the predicament of choosing between the two evils. I am not a Fascist nor shall I become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism. It is mischievous to suggest that such a choice is imminent.”

 
I have always thought William Burroughs was a terribly superstitious man. His life was tinged by the strange, the paranormal and the occult. Whether this was his interest in the number “23”; or his hours spent gazing into mirrors in search of visions; or his belief that he could negate curses by repeating his own (“Go back, go back…” etc); or that he could, somehow, divine the future from Brion Gysin’s “Cut-Up” techniques.

Of course, he couldn’t. But he was always smart enough to suggest he could (for what it’s worth), while at the same time creating distance through the wry aside, the knowing wink, to escape any suggestion he was deluded.

Put it this way, if some acquaintance buttonholed you at a party, with a relentless, monotone whine of how they closed down a Scientology office by repeatedly playing recorded tapes outside the premises, you would make your excuses and head for the canapes.

Burroughs claims as much here, in his explanation of Brion Gysin’s “Cut-Up Method.”

When you experiment with Cut-Ups over a period of time you find that some of the Cut-Ups in re-arranged texts seemed to refer to future events. I cut-up an article written by John-Paul Getty and got, “It’s a bad thing to sue your own father.” This was a re-arrangement and wasn’t in the original text, and a year later, one of his sons did sue him.

Then comes the knowing aside…

Purely extraneous information, it meant nothing to me. Nothing to gain on either side.

Before he goes on to confirm his acceptance of some mysterious powers of divination.

We had no explanation for this at the time, it just suggesting that when you cut into the Present the Future leaks out. Well, we certainly accepted it, and continued our experiments.

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
 

A Complete Disorientation of the Senses: William Burroughs’ and Anthony Balch’s ‘Cut-Ups’

 
More on the Burroughs, Gysin and ‘The Cut-Up Method,’ after the jump…