< The School Of Life >

ideas to live by

Sophie Howarth is young, smart and can name Alain de Botton as one of her greatest collaborators. In the welcoming surrounds of The School Of Life, Howarth invites us to take a look around and sample some cerebral sweetners, 21st Century style.

Wendy Cavenett reports.

It’s just before midday in central London, and Sophie Howarth unlocks the front door of the London headquarters of The School Of Life. It’s business as usual for the 33-year-old, who marks each day with a level of enjoyment and job satisfaction few people achieve but many desire. Inside, cool grey walls compliment aged wooden floorboards, the older style shop front beautifully transformed into a rather comfortable space featuring all sorts of curiosities – from a cluster of cedar tree trunks and tastefully stuffed black birds, to unusual knickknacks and shelves of books classified by concern rather than subject matter (How To Survive Insomnia, How To Make A Difference, even How To Enjoy Your Own Company).

At The School Of Life, you’re encouraged to ruminate about life’s great questions – Why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing? – as well as life’s big everyday dilemmas – Why isn’t my relationship working? Why do I hate my job? Should I make up with my dad today?

Too many questions you say? Not so according to Howarth, who often refers to the “cultural history of ideas” as the key to the learning experience. It’s all about ‘breaking down the hierarchy between art and life,’ Howarth writes in her impassioned essay on education, featured in the Autumn 2008 online version of TATE ETC (Europe’s largest art magazine).

“I don’t know what the academic situation is like in Australia,” she says, “but here a lot of academics are incredibly frustrated by the university system. There was a time when universities were places where you could go for a period of time, and you would have access to thinking people and knowledge, and it could prepare you for adult life. It seems that universities have totally lost the scale of that ambition.

“Information is much more accessible to people now but it’s knowing how and what it is you need to go and find, why it is you want to go and find it, and what you want to do with it. And in a way, I do think people grow confident here because we are quite bold about saying: Is this idea useful to you or not? Does this ancient Greek philosophy between friendship and erotic love feel like it makes any sense in terms of your own experience, or does it feel redundant in that state?”

Since its inception in September 2008, The School Of Life continues to experience phenomenal success with nearly 5,000 individuals utilising its many programmes and services. With a faculty of more than 20 educators, and appealing to a demographic of 20 to 40-somethings, The School Of Life endeavours to offer a new experience for learning, encouraging students to engage with material from diverse sources in ways that are both familiar and exciting.

Try a communal meal to encourage conversations between strangers. Attend a rousing secular sermon on such matters as empathy and seduction. Or schedule an appointment with the school’s bibliotherapist and read with relish your book list prescription. There are even holiday adventures (“we are quite interested in exploring the idea that a successful holiday is a state of mind,” Howarth says), and psychotherapy services for individuals, couples and families. But it’s the school’s evening and weekend courses based around five key life themes – namely work, play, family, politics and love – that give structure and cohesion to Howarth’s grand learning idea. Offered on-site in the store’s basement classroom, each course subject – designed by leading authors, artists, psychotherapists and academics – encourages individuals to discuss, explore and research ideas to help understand the important questions, events and relationships in their lives.

“It’s just that a lot of institutions are rather stodgy, and of course, they are not making education seem desirable,” Howarth says. “One of the very obvious things that I knew straight away was to borrow from retail – the way that retail works is that it makes people want something. Why is it that all sorts of people who can’t afford to pay their tax bill will afford to buy an iPhone or an iPod? It’s because they want it, so the idea was to make education desirable in that way, to say: Actually ideas are really useful, sexy, productive, fun, interesting; they’ll make your life a whole lot more dynamic.

“So that was part of the idea of, as it were, borrowing the façade of a retail environment. It means that people have a way to engage with The School Of Life that is very familiar to them because everybody knows how to go shopping, and you go shopping and you select things that you decide you want for your life. And if we could just package the history of ideas up in that kind of way…

“I mean, it sounds almost like a betrayal of what people strictly thought education should be, but I think we need to learn some lessons from retail. I think retail is doing something right that [educational] institutions are getting wrong.”

Howarth, a native Londoner, is an educator, writer, artist and curator. Before founding The School Of Life, she worked as Head of Education and Research at iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), and as Curator of Public Programs at Tate Modern in London. She admits it was her dream job, and relishes the seven years she spent devising several of the gallery’s opening displays and commissioning hundreds of events, courses and conferences.

“In relation to museums or libraries,” she says, “education is always seen as the rather boring bit on the side, and I really wanted people to feel like actually this is the most exciting bit; this is what makes the artworks come alive or matter, is how people engage with them.”

Howarth’s Tate programmes were enormously successful and ultimately helped establish her own beliefs about adult learning outside the university system. She wanted to create a self-sustaining business model (a “social enterprise”) that would not depend on financial support from either government or private industry. She had several ideas including a philosophical cooking school, but liked the concept of an “ideas store” – where the promotion of desire for products would be re-directed to promote a desire to buy and consume ideas and experiences. When her friends joked that what she really wanted was to create a ‘university of life’, Howarth (and a number of collaborators) began in earnest to develop an alternative curriculum that would offer a few subjects addressing big life themes.

Rigorous standards for all aspects of the school’s programmes and services were developed over many months. Writes Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times: “The ambition is to offer a road map to a fuller life - secular and interior, not religious - toward which end a sense of humor helps.” British and international press coverage has been both positive and continual since the school’s inception with many journalists reporting back once they have sampled some of the school’s offerings.

The Love course, for example, asks questions such as: Why are relationships so complicated? How important is sex? How can love be made to last? Popular columnist for the UK’s The Evening Standard, Liz Hoggard, writes: “The scale of reference on the course is wide – everything from Woody Allen and Tolstoy to philosophers such as Spinoza and Schopenhauer. I came to realize that love is not found, it is made.”

It’s difficult not to be impressed by Howarth’s intellect and general enthusiasms. She’s cool, sensible and rational, and speaks in a warm, educated voice. She has a soft spot for the practical philosophies of the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius (especially his no-nonsense approach to transcending self-pity), and she seems genuinely happy, her conversation a refreshing mix of wit, insight and scholarly observation. It’s little wonder that some of today’s most interesting talents – including philosopher, Alain de Botton; author, Toby Litt; and comedienne, Ruby Wax – want to work with her.

Possibly the most influential is 39-year-old, Zürich-born writer, de Botton, who, according to his website, set up The School Of Life with some colleagues in 2008. For the man who has reached millions with his books and docos on work, happiness, travel and philosophy for the everyday, The School Of Life seems to be one of the most exciting projects he’s currently involved with.

Writes de Botton of the school: “The idea is to challenge traditional universities and re-organise knowledge, directing it towards life, and away from knowledge for its own sake. In a modest way, it’s an institution that is trying to give people what universities should I think always give them: a sense of direction and wisdom for their lives with the help of culture.” For Howarth, the association has proven to be both enriching and important, with de Botton co-creating the school’s work and love courses, running one of the earliest holidays (to Heathrow Airport, where he was recently holed up for his latest literary venture), and conducting a lively sermon On Pessimism (as a homage to Seneca) in March, 2008.

“Alain is one of the school’s ambassadors,” Howarth says. “He was one of the first people to believe in the idea and played a significant role in helping get it all established.” He regularly shares his ideas with the school, his “vibrant, witty and honest way of thinking about everyday life” very inspiring.

Not surprisingly, Howarth has received many requests from around the world to franchise The School Of Life. Countries including America, Australia and New Zealand have expressed a flattering amount of interest in a school that is barely one year old. Individuals and organisations from Melbourne and Sydney have suggested numerous ways a franchise could operate here, but Howarth believes it’s too soon. She admits that they don’t lose money on any of their courses, but their overheads are proving to be expensive and are continually in the red.

“Our aim is not to make any money but our aim is not to lose money either,” she says. “We haven’t paid back what it cost to create our courses yet so I’m looking at different ways in which within three years we can be financially self-sufficient, and then I’d be really excited to choose franchisees who I felt I trusted with the brand. But at the moment, they would need to be able to lose quite a lot of money!”

With the stresses of business survival so vividly outlined, I ask Howarth if she’s happier since founding The School Of Life. “Definitely,” she says. “I think having a sense of purpose and having an interest and engagement with other people are pretty good ingredients for it. But it’s interesting because we never really describe the school as being about making people happy. We always describe it as being about wisdom – although unfortunately that word has been slightly co-opted by the spiritualists of the world.

“I guess by wisdom I mean happiness that is also realistic that doesn’t involve illusions. You know, we’re very much founded on rational thinking here and we want people to think deeply and pleasurably about how they want to live the rest of their lives, but we don’t want to promote a kind of happiness that’s based on a fantasy or illusion. I mean, often you get that either in religion or in life-coaching. You get things built on nebulous foundations, so I guess we would rather think that the real reward of what we would call wisdom is a much more thought through thing than simple happiness; more robust and kind of more lasting as well.”

In her TATE ETC article, Howarth refers to Anthony T. Kronman’s 2007 book, Education’s End: Why our colleges and universities have given up the meaning of life. Kronman, a highly respected Sterling Professor at Yale Law School, wrote his polemic about the failing education system, especially in regard to the meaning of life. “Why did the question of what living is for disappear?” he asks. “Our lives are the most precious resources we possess and the question of how to spend them is the most important question we face.”

It's difficult not to agree.

* * *

The School Of Life
Sophie Howarth's TATE ETC article

< Michael Ondaatje >

family ties

By Wendy Cavenett


When a worm tied itself up into a knot on the biology bench in front of him, it opened a can of words that have made Michael Ondaatje one of the most revered writers alive—and led him back to Sri Lanka to untangle the chaos of his father’s life.

Michael Ondaatje inspires awe. When the Ceylon-born writer enters a room, sudden, hear-a-pin-drop silence falls, a response reserved for the select few living members of literary royalty. It’s old-school, Don DeLillo or VS Naipaul respect, earned by a canon of work that crosses all literary territory until it settles somewhere previously unknown. In that place, the factual and the imaginary collide, time creates secret codes and quiet revelations appear luminous. Hymns, poems, narrative fragments and conversations evolve, transmuting layers of meaning until what Ondaatje leaves on the page is left within our lives.

He can save a nun falling from a bridge (In The Skin Of A Lion) or paint the eyes of a Buddha through a mirror’s reflection (Anil’s Ghost). He promises to tell us how to fall in love (The English Patient), forges trust despite madness (Coming Through Slaughter) and finds humility in an outlaw (The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid). He even takes us to his childhood home to meet his parents (Running In The Family).

Ondaatje has always enjoyed critical acclaim, but with The English Patient, his fourth novel, his career went mainstream internationally. It won him the Canadian Governor General’s Award for fiction and more importantly the 1992 Booker Prize (shared with Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger), a first for a Canadian writer. Its adaptation for film won nine Oscars, including best picture, director, and supporting actress (Juliette Binoche).

“I never imagined that I would have a book of poetry out, let alone a Booker Prize-winning novel,” Ondaatje says. “I wasn’t very ambitious in the sense of wanting to be famous or anything like that. I wanted to write poetry—to save my life! That was why I wrote. And then, with The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid, I started to write prose as well. The next book, Coming Through Slaughter, was the first novel, so it kind of just happened. I inched along, in talking about my wider world, but I didn’t really think that I was ever going to have a career as a writer.”

Now 58, Ondaatje has published more than 10 collections of poetry, five novels and several anthologies. With his wife, writer Linda Spalding, he edits the literary journal Brick and he’s even written a book on Leonard Cohen’s early literary works. After a career spanning 35 years, from his first collection of poems, The Dainty Monsters (1967), to his most recent novel, Anil’s Ghost (2000), there is no sign that his devotion to his craft is waning.

Michael Ondaatje is in a boardroom in Sydney’s Park Hyatt Hotel. He is sitting at the end of a long conference table surrounded by high-back leather chairs. It seems a strange place for our interview but inspires talk about his initial career.

“One worm changed everything!” he says, laughing. “I would have been very interested in pursuing science, but I had this experience. It was my first day at university and we were working with worms. We had to dissect it or something and I could have cut it up in a second, but my worm tied itself up into a knot and the teacher came by and said, ‘This is the kind of behaviour that should not occur in classrooms. You shouldn’t do that to worms.’ I was thrown out! So that was my beautiful biological career, lost!”

It’s hard to believe Ondaatje is the shy, reserved writer we read about. He laughs, tells jokes, talks quickly in gentle, low bursts and watches everything with those striking, blue eyes. There’s something of the wanderer about him, too; his hair is longer and greyer than in the publicity shots, and he comes across unattached yet centred, and just a little wild.

Since Anil’s Ghost, he has been working on his next book, The Conversations, based on a series of interviews with the American sound and picture editor, Walter Murch. The two met during filming of The English Patient and have kept in touch since its completion. Murch, “a fascinating and wonderful man”, edited such classics as The Conversation (1974), Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Unbearable Lightness Of Being (1988). Murch’s concise study of film editing, In The Blink Of An Eye, remains a small treasure for anyone interested in the field.

“I’ve also made a couple of documentary films in the past,” Ondaatje says, “and I really enjoyed that artform, so I watched Walter carefully during the editing of The English Patient to see the master at work. When I finished Anil’s Ghost, I realised that what I really wanted to do was talk to Walter. I wanted to see how far we could go with some in-depth conversations about editing. He said that he’d love to do it so we started and for about a year we would meet whenever we could. We would have these long, long sessions that would last a couple of days. We came up with hundreds of pages about editing: What’s it like to edit? What’s it like to edit film as opposed to editing books? Is it very different? And because he’s worked on some of the essential films of our time, all the examples he uses are ones that we know in our heads. We can recall them so we can understand what he is talking about as opposed to some obscure Jean-Luc Godard film that nobody remembers!

“It’s really a book about one individual’s craft, which is quite Zen-like in an odd way because it’s not just cutting film to the speed of the bongo drum or something like that. It’s so subtle and intricate and emotional in many ways, and it’s fascinating to see; and because he’s so articulate he can talk about it in a very addressing way. He’s not the average Hollywood person; he’s interested in physics and music, literature and stuff like that, so he’s often talking about Beethoven, Flaubert as opposed to, you know, Meg Ryan… and Walter and I realised that editing a film is the one part of filmmaking that is closest to writing; the rest of filmmaking is pure chaos and it’s utterly governed by time.”

Ondaatje’s fascination with time, revealed in part by his capacity to structure his work almost outside its limits, extends back to his own birth. In his semi-autobiographical work Running In The Family he writes, “About six months before I was born my mother observed a pair of kabaragoyas [water monitors] ‘in copula’ at Pelmadulla. A reference is made to this sighting in A Coloured Atlas Of Some Vertebrates From Ceylon, Volume 2, a National Museums publication. It’s my first memory.”

Michael Ondaatje was born in the Ceylonese (now Sri Lankan) capital Colombo on September 12, 1943. At 11, he immigrated to England to attend boarding school and seven years later, relocated to Canada. He went to the University of Toronto (Bachelor of Arts) and Queen’s (Master of Arts), and taught at York University to support his writing career.

Picturing that small boy arriving in England, Ondaatje says: “In retrospect it was okay, but at the same time it was probably hell! I was glad I went there in spite of the fact that it was like another planet. It was like Mars. There were people wearing ties and long trousers and socks, stuff I’d probably only seen in magazines. I was a complete alien and I had to adapt quickly, but I took it all ironically. And I certainly took the school days when I was in England pretty ironically as well. You know, I was getting pretty anarchic at the time. There was a Lindsay Anderson film called If… released in the ‘60s that is all about English schools. My experiences were very similar to that.”

It took Ondaatje 20 years to return to his homeland, by which time his father, Mervyn, had died. A descendent of a prominent line of Dutch burghers who settled on the island in the 17th century, Mervyn was the unconventional Ondaatje family’s equally unconventional patriarch. He had married Doris Gratiaen, a beautiful and strong-willed woman, after breaking a betrothal to a highly eligible aristocrat.

Prior to that, there had been another brief engagement (to a Russian countess) and the discovery of Mervyn’s great deception: he had pretended to study at Queen’s for more than two years until an unexpected visit by his parents found him out. He had not even passed the entrance exams to the Southampton college and had instead used his parents’ money to rent rooms in Cambridge. There he circumvented the academic element of his university education and instead befriended students, read contemporary novels and supported a healthy social life during the swinging ‘20s.

Dragged back to Ceylon, Mervyn tried to live up to family expectations. He became a plantation owner managing several estates and a major in the Ceylon Light Infantry, though his military commitment was more of a hobby than a responsibility. He was a maverick, an unpredictable soul whose brilliance was overshadowed by severe bouts of alcoholism. Ondaatje says they were crazy times; Mervyn was violent, abusive, uncontrollable, and relied on charm to get himself through his family’s emotional fallout.

It’s a family history as distinguished as it is colourful. There were copious affairs and betrayals, extravagant lives and political successes. For instance, it was an Ondaatje who first translated the Bible into Tamil; another was killed by his own horse and, it seems, thankfully so. Mervyn loved his gin and would often “take over” trains while in uniform. “He managed to get the driver of the train drunk as well,” writes Ondaatje in Running In The Family, “and was finishing a bottle of gin every hour, walking up and down the carriages almost naked, but keeping his shoes on this time, and hitting the state of inebriation during which he would start rattling off wonderful limericks—thus keeping the passengers amused.”

If the emphasis seems firmly on Mervyn, it is because he is key to Michael Ondaatje’s life and writing. Everything comes down to his search for the truth about his father, the “undiscovered man” who, in his later years, was estranged from his wife and children and died without them realising the extent of his failing health. Ondaatje’s family history will always be incomplete.

He doesn’t say why he decided to go back to Sri Lanka but the “bright bone of a dream” revealed his deepest fear. “I was sleeping at a friend’s house,” he writes. “I saw my father, chaotic, surrounded by dogs, and all of them were screaming and barking into the tropical landscape.” A friend once told him it was only when he was drunk he seemed to know what he truly wanted. Two months later at his farewell party amid his “growing wildness”, Ondaatje knew he was “already running”.

Ten years later, The English Patient altered his life direction again. I ask how the film has changed the nature of the novel. “It is different now,” he admits, “but I don’t know that version of it because I haven’t actually read the book since it came out.

“I’ve never read any of my works once I’ve finished them. I’ll probably re-read them all on my deathbed,” he laughs. “I don’t know. I feel terrified about them. What if they’re not good anymore and it’s too late to fix them? I mean, that’s why I haven’t watched The English Patient since it came out, because I’m scared that it’s become really dated.”

He laughs again. “Sometimes I see how late I can tell a joke in a tragedy. In Billy The Kid, I think the last word is of a joke, so I think I really see the world that way. I really do. It’s kind of terrifyingly disordered and uncertain and tentative.”

So writing doesn’t get any easier? “No, I would love to feel that you know,” he says. “I always thought that if you wrote two or three books at least you would know how to write a book. That’s the way I imagine painters are—that they have a confidence—but perhaps they don’t any more than writers do. I think what happens is that when I’ve finished a book I feel I’ve said everything I know in some way. I certainly felt that at the end of In The Skin Of A Lion, and at the end of The English Patient. I know how to write with a pen but that’s it. So it takes a long, long time but I’d rather write that kind of book than jump into the next one the following weekend.

“I really think that one needs to kind of replenish oneself and almost find a new way of thinking or a new language or a new vocabulary or something. So one can start something very, very, very tentatively; it’s a tentative thing that’s so scattered and so fragile that it’s almost like a little secret. Really, all you have is the hint of a character or a hint of a situation. I didn’t know any of the stuff that’s in Anil’s Ghost before I began the book. I didn’t know about archaeology or forensics. I didn’t even know who the characters were. So what did I have? I had a kind of rough time zone and I had a probable place and that was it. So it feels like luck that it came off. It’s like improvisation while you’re writing.”

His luck deserts him this day. The interview over, Ondaatje wants to leave but can’t—the glass-panelled French doors are locked. We are trapped in the boardroom with the impassive chairs. He shakes the handles, tugs at them, but it isn’t until a porter walks past and sees us that the doors are unlocked and Ondaatje, without another word, bolts. It seems a fitting finale, although I’d be hard pressed to explain exactly why. Maybe there’s a clue in his final comment.

“I’ve always known life isn’t like a Jane Austen novel. It’s not the way we think or the way we live. It seems much more random than she would have us believe. I think if you think this is your last moment, then you’ve got to watch carefully.”

> > >

This interview was published in HQ Magazine in June, 2002. Since that time, Michael Ondaatje has had three books published: The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Film Editing (2002); The Story (2005); and Divisadero (2007).

> > >

< Jürgen Vollmer >

real wild child

by Wendy Cavenett


In the last forty years, Jürgen Vollmer has photographed some of the most charismatic people in the film and arts industry including William S. Burroughs, Madonna, Dirk Bogarde and Nastassja Kinski. Of the many European and American directors he has worked with it was Roman Polanski whom he most admired, describing the genius auteur as "a movie in himself". Vollmer is also the photographer who first captured, according to John Lennon, "the beauty and spirit of The Beatles". 'From Hamburg to Hollywood' is a compelling photographic-essay charting the journey of this German photographer who, after a series of fateful encounters, finds himself amidst the mecca of the world's film community.

Says Sir Paul McCartney in the book's introduction, "Meeting Jürgen Vollmer, and his friends Astrid and Klaus, was a very important event in my life and lives of the other Beatles. His sense of style and excellent photographic skills were to have a profound effect throughout our careers."

Wendy Cavenett reports on the phenomenal career that took Vollmer from Hamburg to Hollywood and back again.

It was 1960 in Hamburg and four musicians from Liverpool had secured a two-month residency at a local club called the Kaiserkeller. Initially opened to cater for the youth of Hamburg as a safe entertainment alternative, but it was taken over by the Schlägers, or the 'Hitters' - a black-leather motorcycle crowd - a year after its opening. By 1960, it had become a notorious rock'n'roll haven, a basement club in the sordid red-light Reeperbahn district attracting the wild German "rocker" youth who spent night after night drinking, fighting, dancing and picking up girls. Klaus Voormann, a young art-student, happened to be walking past the club one evening and heard the music of a young band called The Beatles (which then included Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best). Like most college students, Voormann had grown up on jazz so the music of The Beatles intrigued him enough to introduce himself at the end of their last set and to show Sutcliffe some of his sleeve designs. (Indeed, it was Voormann who would design the cover of their 1966 release, 'Revolver'). Voormann was encouraged to bring his friends along and the following evening, Jürgen Vollmer and Astrid Kirchherr accompanied him to see The Beatles.

They were three bohemian artsy-types amid the predominantly wild rocker audience; three 'Exis' - as in 'Existentialist' - drawn - despite the dangerous surrounds - to hear the strange music of these strange musicians. And it was these scions from good middle-class families who became The Beatles' most dedicated fans in Hamburg, with Vollmer attending every performance for the next two months.

Vollmer and Kirchherr had recently left Hamburg's Institute of Fashion to assist a local photographer. It was Kirchherr, the young German 'Exi' beauty who would become Sutcliffe's fiancee, and although both photographed The Beatles, it was Vollmer who took the famous shot of Lennon standing in a doorway at the docklands in Hamburg while the remaining Beatles walked past, their images blurred except for their pointed shoes. Lennon, with hair quiffed and wearing a battered leather jacket looks the seminal rocker and it was this image Lennon used for his 1975 solo album, "Rock 'N' Roll". In Albert Goldman's 'The Lives of John Lennon' (Guild Publishing, 1988), Vollmer says Lennon performed with "aggressive restraint", that he was "the Brando type". Indeed, the famous docklands shot is reminiscent of images from 1954's 'The Wild One', with Brando as the rebellious, leather-clad lead.

For Vollmer, this fateful meeting was only the beginning of a photographic career that took him from the conservative, bourgeois German city of Hamburg to Paris and eventually Hollywood where, by 1983, he was working with some of the biggest directors in the American film industry including Roman Polanski and Francis Ford Coppola.

Today, Vollmer's German accent drifts softly across the piano room of the Sebel Hotel in Sydney. "I love this country," he says. "I even think I may live here. There is so much beauty. The light is different; it's rich, seductive ... and I love the people." Handsomely European with wispy white hair crowning a tanned face, Vollmer seems relaxed - at home even - on this gusty spring day. Staring through large amethyst eyes, Vollmer seems almost shy and apologises repeatedly for his broken German-English. "I do not express myself well," he says. "But," he admits later, "it is never easy for any artist to describe his work or the motivations behind it."

As a young art student, Vollmer was considered an Existentialist by his contemporaries and the older generations who had embraced conservatism after the horrific second world war. For Vollmer however, the stringent prudence of this bourgeois class only fuelled his need to appear, and ultimately be, different. But an Existentialist he was not.

"They called us that," he says. "They called us 'Exis', types like us who were artsy-artsy types, who dressed like the Bohemians in Paris. I mean there were not - are not - many around in Hamburg but I was definitely one of them. I liked the Parisian style, the Left Bank Bohemian types who of course developed from the Existentialist movement.

"They were not artists but they dressed that way - the types in Paris, you know, the long hair, the turtle-neck sweater and the corduroys they wore a lot. A little wild. Nothing was neat. Always a little bit as if they'd slept in their clothes. That look, you know, I was drawn to. But I'm not an Existentialist. I took more of the exterior of the existential look without being Existentialist. At that time also I didn't know what it was. I had read Camus at the time and I might have also read some of Satre, but I was not an Existentialist.

"We were called, as an insult in Hamburg, 'Exis'. The way the Bohemians looked in Paris was an absolute horror for German people. Dressing like Bohemians was rebellious, aimed at disturbing the square pegs - and the 'rocker' crowds - in Hamburg."

In his late teens, Vollmer went to art school and studied graphic design. "I had never taken any pictures," he says, "I didn't even own a camera and by coincidence, I met a photographer who needed an assistant. I was bored with art school so I took that chance and became his assistant. I was introduced to photography through him and the very first year I actually took my first pictures was the year I met The Beatles. They were one of my very first subjects."

According to Vollmer, Sutcliffe was another type of American movie hero. In the young artist-turned-musician, Vollmer sensed a James Dean edge. He was a "mystery behind sunglasses," he says while Lennon was the quintessential loner. "John was more aloof than the other Beatles. With Paul, you know, he's still like he always was; a very nice, warm-hearted man. Always smiling. With Paul you feel he never has any kind of depression. But that wasn't the case with John. John was much more of a multi-faceted person. He was much more complex and I didn't feel completely comfortable with him in the beginning. It was only when I spent more and more time with him that I could relax for he was very funny. But he was never that accessible as a person. He was very guarded.

"But," he says, "when I first saw The Beatles, I thought, particularly John, that they were real rough 'n' tough rockers. They looked just like their audience. You know, the Kaiserkeller was an extremely dangerous rock cave but when I met them I realised that it was all an act. John was an artist but he had to project that rocker image in order to play to his audience. The Beatles looked like rockers but from their minds and their creative side, they were more like us, like Astrid, Klaus and me. You know like the Exis and eventually of course, they were even more the Exis after they adopted my haircut."

Yes, the 'mop-top maestro' as Vollmer has been daubed, was instrumental in changing the image of arguably this century's most influential band. By 1961, he had left Hamburg for Paris as an assistant to the famous photographer and film director, William Klein. In September of that year, John and Paul visited him. Sutcliffe had already left the band and The Beatles were enjoying yet another stint at the Kaiserkeller. "They glanced at my hair," says Vollmer, "and said 'Yes, we want that funny haircut too'." So, in his hotel room, Vollmer cut their hair into the famous 'mop top' and took them to the Parisian flea markets to complete their new avant-bohemian look. It was to have a profound effect on their career with the youth in England embracing their bizarro appearance as much as their pioneering music.

"In Hamburg back then it was very bourgeois and people always wore the same haircut - always short and always combed neatly back," he says. "My haircut at that time was for me revolutionary against society. When I was young and still going to school (way before art school), I went swimming with the class one day and when I got out of the water, my hair was hanging down over your forehead and I didn't comb it back. I just let it dry like this and kept it that way."

The famous 'Beatlecut' was a true Vollmer creation and it was this flair for the chic that enabled him to become one of Klein's most renowned fashion photographers in Paris. While living amidst the influential rive gauche community, Vollmer began photographing the street youth and their environment in his spare time, creating a series of raw, disquieting images to much acclaim. In 1966, he photographed Rudolph Nureyev during a week's rehearsal for the ballet Le Jeune Homme et la Mort in Paris. Nureyev was his first international subject and these images are still considered some of the best of the famous artist-dancer. By the late '60s, Vollmer was a stills photographer on European movie sets. He worked with Alain Resnais and was photographing the likes of Catherine Deneuve and Yves Montand. While on a film shoot in New York in 1971, Vollmer literally "fell in love with the city" and did not return to Paris with the rest of the crew. Instead, he established himself as one of the most respected film-star/movie-still photographers in America in the '80s and '90s.

He initially worked for several reputable magazines as a graphic designer and artistic director until he established his photographic career on America's East Coast film industry in the early '80s.

"Photos are often the great ingredient that ignite people's imagination and lure them to see a movie," he says. "A good movie photo should trigger interest, a curiosity. You know, these images have great seductive powers that can help make a film successful." Vollmer worked with Roman Polanski for 'Pirates' ("which at the time was a masterpiece but for some reason it didn't come across") and many other esteemed directors including Francis Ford Coppola and Barry Levinson.

"Polanski was the most intriguing director I ever worked with," says Vollmer. "He is a movie in himself. I mean, you don't really have to go to the cinema, you just have to look at Polanski. He gets involved in every detail, every minute aspect of his films. And he was so full of life, so full of energy that with Polanski one has a hard time imagining that he would be lonely. I don't think he was ever truly satisfied but he was driven 100 per cent of the time. He never seemed lost; he was always too determined to create."

It was Vollmer who took the famous Madonna shot for her second film, 'Who's That Girl' in 1987, with the young Ms Ciccone peeping over a wall with her red lips puckered. He photographed Arnold Schwarzenegger for 'Raw Deal' (1987), James Caan for 'Gardens Of Stone' (1987), Walter Matthau during 'Pirates' (1985) and Barbara Hershey and Robert Redford for 'The Natural' (1983).

"I am always wanting to capture people with an authentic laugh," says Vollmer, "and the shot of Robert Redford was one of those. You know, so often when people laugh or smile, you know it's phoney, it's not authentic. But there is such a thing when a laugh will express jour de voir (sic), ah, and when I get that, I am really very happy for this is the highest a person can achieve, being so content at that moment that they laugh authentically.

"I was always very proud when I got it. It's like the photo of Redford. I caught it, you know and it's not only that I captured it, it's also that even at that moment, the moment that I took it, he had this kind of seductiveness, a seductive smile placed in his laugh. For that is how he is; he has that smiling sex appeal which is specifically Robert Redford. The other photograph that comes to mind is one where John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John are boarding a plane and they both turn around with these authentic smiles. I got it in both! I couldn't believe it. It's a rare thing though which makes any photo with an authentic laugh so wonderful."

Of the many stars Vollmer photographed in his career, there are few, however, that match the photos taken in his spare time in Hamburg, Paris and America and on numerous overseas trips in the '80s and '90s. Says Vollmer in his book, "As a photographer I am trying to capture the mysterious side of people, because as life itself is enigmatic, the essence of a person can only become visible in a moment of mystery."

"I really like the shots I took in Africa, in Sicily and Egypt. They give me the chance to say more in a photo, something more about the human condition than the many star portraits I have taken. I think my favourite photo is one I took in Senegal in 1978 with a group of fishermen with their net. I always have this feeling that each person is in their own little world, that everybody is alone with their dreams and their hopes while relying on others for their subsistence. That is, in order to survive as an individual you have to work with others, you have to be with other people. So for me, the net is some sort of symbol, a way of sustaining your life, of linking the individual with the group for ultimate survival.

In the '70s, three photographic books by Vollmer were released in New York. "Nureyev in Paris" utilised images Vollmer had taken of the star in 1966; "African Roots" included photographs from his trips to Senegal and Gambia (which was published with the endorsement of Alex Haley, author of "Roots"); and finally "Sex Appeal", a collection of candid, youthful images taken in Europe and America with an introduction by William S. Burroughs. "Rock 'N' Roll Times", his book chronicling his early 'rocker' shots wasn't released until the following decade.

"You know, I began to see the significance of many of my photos only decades after they were taken," Vollmer admits. "At the time I took them I just followed my instincts. I couldn't tell you why I took the photos when I did. It's so hard to explain. It's like a drive. For most great writers when they write, it comes naturally; they don't analyse, they don't construct sentences intellectually. This is why they also say if you as a writer are too intellectual, you might destroy or suppress the instinctive, creative urge. For me, it's the same with photography. I never know why I take a photo at a particular time because you can't know consciously as these moments pass so quickly; it is an instinctive action. It's odd. You're always learning about yourself from what you produce creatively. If you allow creativity to come from that subconscious, instinctive matter, you are reaching inside to where you yourself can't always know what is there. This is true for my art, for my photography.

"I am not a trend photographer. I want to go to the essence of what life is all about, what people are all about and I think in my lifetime, I have achieved that with some of my images. And these are the ones I'll always treasure."

"From Hamburg To Hollywood' is limited to just 1,750 numbered copies, each volume signed by its author, Jürgen Vollmer.

Designed by Vollmer himself, this deluxe production exhibits the highest qualities on which Genesis Publications has built its name. Every photograph is precisely reproduced by fine-screen lithography with image varnishing. A hand-made, quarter-bound volume, it comprises 130 pages, with 8-page full colour section, printed on 200gsm matt art paper, and is finished with silver edging. Each copy is housed in an elegantly crafted presentation box.

An original 8" by 6" (20cm x 15cm) displayable print, also personally signed by Vollmer, crowns this magnificent box-set. Offered to you in a choice of one of four classic images (press here), this signed, original print, made from the negative, is available only with "From Hamburg To Hollywood".

"It was very difficult choosing the images for this book," says Vollmer. "There were so many. I selected them instinctively in the end, the ones that really communicated something to me and looking at the book now, I can see that I'm obsessed with loneliness. Fortunately I didn't know this when I was putting the book together, but apparently I'm so obsessed with this subconsciously that most of the people in these photos seem to have this kind of longing, a touch of melancholy as if they want something else from life. They never seem content within themselves.

"Everyone's lonely and that is such a tragedy. Most of the time you can find a temporary harmony with another person but in most cases, it breaks apart over time and becomes something else. There is nothing on Earth that has a constancy. We all know this but seldom talk about it. It's just part of our condition I guess; we are born alone and we die alone. For much of our life, we also live alone."

"From Hamburg To Hollywood" is available in Australia from Berkelouw Books in Paddington (Sydney) and Silver K Fine Art in Armidale (Melbourne).

For more information, please contact Genesis Fine Limited Editions, 9 Pilgrim House, Quarry Street, Guildford, Surrey, England. Tel: (01483) 537431 and Fax: (01483) 304709.

< Philip Roth >

death becomes him

By Wendy Cavenett


A randy academic confronts his own mortality in Philip Roth’s latest novel, The Dying Animal.

It’s human nature to exchange one fear for another, and the older we become, the more the fear builds. In our advancing years, death is arguably the most fearful of them all. To borrow a phrase from Rushkin, Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal “affirms from within” that exquisite sense of life and the equally devastating sense of losing it. And it is this constant confrontation with mortality that forms the basis of Roth’s latest book.

Critic and part-time university lecturer, David Kepesh (protagonist of Roth’s earlier novels The Breast and The Professor of Desire), left his wife and son Kenny in the ‘60s for the sake of personal freedom. Now 70, he tells of an obsessive affair that began back in 1992, when he was a strapping 62-year-old, with a beautiful Cuban exile, Consuela Castillo.

She isn’t the artist, but “the art itself”. Their affair lasts little more than a year, but it devastates the aging professor, then—on the eve of the new millennium—the 32-year-old re-enters his life.

Roth, the great stand-up comic of Jewish-American literature, has written one of his most harrowing, and explicit works on male sexual desire, eros, and the imminence of death. There is little humour in this slim volume, in which Roth uses discourse rather than plot or dialogue to propel the story to its conclusion.

In spare, beautifully rendered prose, Roth undertakes a huge task in very few pages: he deconstructs attraction, obsession, and marriage, as well as the illusion of Platonic love, exile, and human decay. There are some fascinating reflections about the ‘60s revolution, too (“Can I muster the discipline of freedom as opposed to the recklessness of freedom? How does one turn freedom into a system?”), and many passages about contemporary culture, particularly the “staged pandemonium” of the new-millennium celebrations.

Roth, who was born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, stands as a colossus in the American literary canon. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts at the White House in 1998, and during that decade, wrote five award-winning books, including the 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral.

Over this brilliant career, his characters have—more often than not—been thinly disguised mirrors of his own experiences. Perhaps the most famous of these is the writer-protagonist Nathan Zuckerman, who first appeared in 1979 in Roth’s critically acclaimed The Ghost Writer.

Two decades later, mortality has finally claimed the author. “Getting old is unimaginable to anyone but the aging,” he writes in The Dying Animal, a work he manages to transcend through the sheer levity of his own experiences and his ability to do more than just merely represent life. It is unquenchable pain, a profundity of thought and feeling, and a vital work that shatters the illusion of benign wisdom.

> > >

This review was originally published in HQ Magazine in 2001. Since that time, Philip Roth has published several books including: The Plot Against America (2004) and Everyman (2006). Exit Ghost, the new, hotly-anticipated Zuckerman novel, is scheduled for release in the US in October, 2007.

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< Will Self >

life and death matters

By Wendy Cavenett

The year is 2001...

The father tucks his children into bed for the night, slips downstairs and answers the phone. It’s just after 10pm on a cold London evening and Will Self, a modern day enfant terrible, sounds quietly philosophical. He’s on the wagon again after nearly 20 years of drug and alcohol addiction—a devastating illness, he says, that nearly destroyed his life.

A fan of the Victorian novelists, and a writer who favors character over plot, Self is a complex of encyclopedic knowledge, effusive wit and candid fervor. In his new book, How The Dead Live, Self takes the reader on an intriguing—and at times, perverse—ride where life and the after-death experience is based on the ancient Tibetan teachings of the Bardos. Narrated by the scoop-breasted Lily Bloom and imbued with all manner of Selfian acuity, this is the novel many have been waiting for, the one that some critics believe announces Self’s ‘arrival as a novelist’.

Here’s Self on Self:

“I was actually sober at the time my mother died and I nursed her during the last months of her life. It was extremely upsetting and painful, but at the same time a tremendous relief to me, her passing, because she’d been quite a difficult character and we’d been rather enmeshed with each other in life. For anybody who’s lost a parent who one’s very close to, it’s such a big event in your life that you can’t quite tell where it stops and where you begin. It’s a wholly disorienting experience in that way. For years after a bereavement like that you’re still asking yourself whether you’ve even apprehended it—you know, whether you really know what’s happened and I think that’s why I’ve actually ended up writing quite a lot about it.

“Just after my mother died, I had that very common experience of thinking I saw her in the street and not really being able to believe that she was dead. After about five years you really know somebody is dead and then, between about five and 10 years after their death, there’s a strange and indefinable point where somebody becomes anachronistic. Even if they were resurrected they’re look out of place, sort of standing next to a new model car they’d look like somebody cut out of an Edwardian photograph. And that’s kind of the point at which somebody becomes ‘deader’. That’s why I use those three heads—dying, dead and deader—for the three factions of How The Dead Live. And that’s why I had this idea of what a marvellously acerbic and direct critic of contemporary mores a dead person would make. You know, how, if somebody feels that they’re alienated from the Zeitgeist when they’re alive, how much more angry are they going to feel about it once they’re dead? So that was a lot of the inspiration for the novel.

“And it’s exactly what it seems to be which I think, of course, some critics and readers have found very hard to take on board because they don’t expect to hear it from me—but the book is really a Buddhist allegory. It’s a mystical allegory. The main character, Lily Bloom, follows in death the stage of the Bardos as described in the Tibetan Book Of The Dead. Her psyche disintegrates and she is represented by these passion plays of the negative elements of her own psyche before being reborn in due course.

“People have always said my work is very dark and morbid and nihilistic, but what I hope it has been is just properly adumbrated, you know, that death shades all of life… Life is life and death. You cannot divorce death from life in the moment let alone in the life-span. One shouldn’t think, say, come 40 I’ll think about dying. Even Freud recognised this for heaven’s sake and saw the death drive as implicit in almost every breath we take. That every conscious thought was willed against the drag of extinction.

“There’s a newspaper column in the Mail On Sunday where they come and interview you about how you would like to die. I was very interested to learn from the woman who came to interview me for this that something like 90 per cent of the people she’d interviewed said that they wanted to die in their sleep. You couldn’t have a clearer exemplification of the attitude of our culture towards death than that—that everybody wants to die, as it were, unknowingly. I’m not saying ‘come and take me now’. But I think that it is a noble wish to die honourably in the full face and full flower of one’s consciousness and to meet death on those terms.”

> > >

This article was published in Australian Style in 2001. Since that time, Self has published many books including: Dorian, an Imitation (2002)—a modern take on Oscar Wilde’s classic, The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Book of Dave (2006); Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe (2004)—a collection of short stories; The Butt (2008) and Walking to Hollywood (2010).
> > >

< Zadie Smith >

driving miss zadie

By Wendy Cavenett

It’s a warm autumn morning and the soon-to-be demolished Sebel of Sydney is teeming with departing guests. Renowned as the city’s celebrity stop-off, it’s only natural that Zadie Smith, a literary star and nascent wild child, is holed up here, albeit, as I discover, unwillingly.
There’s no time for sightseeing, no scheduled R&R. In fact, Smith is tied to the momentous hoo-ha that continues to surround her debut novel, White Teeth. Not that she expected it, but when Salman Rushdie left a personal congratulatory message on her answering machine, she must have realised her life was changing. Now released in eight countries, it seems White Teeth has assumed a life far greater than the author could have ever imagined.

If she had a choice right now, she’d probably catch the next plane back to the UK. Instead, she remains seated, eyes downcast, irritated, tired and indifferent. In such a state it would be easy to misjudge her. Her monotone voice often drifts quietly away and it’s only when we stop discussing the book that she shows moments of what I imagine to be her true self; a wickedly funny, sharply intelligent 20-something Brit who detests life’s pretenders and lavishes praise upon controversial US rap artist Eminem.

“I’ve heard all the questions before,” she says. It’s unfortunate I tell her, but we should discuss her book.

“I think I can write so that’s one of the reasons why White Teeth is successful,” she says answering no question in particular. “I’m very serious about what I do and hopefully that translates somehow onto the page. It’s a funny book. People like to read funny things, and when you’re working well I suppose you happen to fall in line with some kind of Zeitgeist which doesn’t happen very often in a writer’s career. It’s a mixed blessing but there it is.”

The daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father, Smith was born in England in 1975. She grew up in Willesden, read English at King’s College, Cambridge, returned to her neighbourhood and now lives in her own place thanks to a reported $625,000 two-book publishing deal with Penguin.

“I don’t give a fuck about the fact that you can’t get married or you don’t know whether to have children or not,” she says, “I just don’t care about lifestyle journalism crap, but I do like to see people who get up and show a skill, because it is a skill if you do it properly. That’s the kind of writing I’m interested in. People who can show me why they’re writers.

“I recently read Lolita for like the 13th time and thought that was still one of the greatest books of the last century. Nabokov was just a genius. I can’t even take it apart to understand why it’s so good. It’s just a truly great, magnificent book, partly because it makes you empathise with this paedophile basically, and it’s not there to make you feel good.

“It’s quite important to remember that fiction isn’t there to make you feel good about yourself all the time. That’s not actually the purpose of fiction, that’s the purpose of lifestyle journalism for what it’s worth.”

We talk about what she likes: Britney Spears, fashion, Big Brother, pornography, Madonna, Dr Dre, Hollywood films before 1958—American Beauty being the only exception. And then there’s Eminem, her big obsession. The white rap artist who’s been accused of promoting homophobia, rape and murder in his music. He’s also facing criminal charges. “I think he’s a genius,” Smith says. “I think he’s a very rare artist in that he’s Billboard number one, but he’s also totally uncompromising and extremely brilliant. He just believes in narrative absolutely so he’s telling a story and it’s really none of your fucking business what happens in the story, and who gets killed or raped or whatever. He’s incredibly brave and he wants to take art back to something a bit rawer and I think that’s kinda cool.

“I haven’t got any time for really lame backlash crap. It’s so hideous. Even the points I can’t follow him on—like his homophobia; I can’t follow [John] Updike’s homophobia but it doesn’t mean he can’t write, you know? There’s a constant confusion with rap artists and it’s one that Eminem talks about again and again—that they do what they say. The point of being a rap artist is you don’t rob banks because you’ve found something else to do, that’s why you rap. You’ve found something which means that you don’t have to rob banks, or shoot people or rape women. You’ve found some other way of making money and expressing yourself, that’s kind of the point.

“Why people can’t understand that talking in the first person in a rap is exactly the same as talking in the first person in a novel is completely fucking beyond me. I can’t understand it. Apparently, Eminem is writing a book—which I’m very excited about. That’s if he lives to do it, which I very much doubt. But if you look at the past few years, I believe he’s the one artist who has made people think more than any other.”

With the interview over, I watch her leave and hope she is able to sit down and write again soon because there’s nothing worse than creative destruction, especially considering the calibre of Zadie Smith’s talent.

> > >

This interview was published in Australian Style in 2001. Since that time, Smith, now a multi-award winning novelist and Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, has had numerous books published including: Piece Of Flesh (2001)—an anthology of erotic stories; The Autograph Man (2002); On Beauty (2005)—winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction;  and Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009)—a collection of essays on writing. Smith also wrote the introduction to the brilliant The Burned Children of America (2003), a collection of 18 short stories by a new generation of American writers.

> > >

< Pico Iyer >

global soul
By Wendy Cavenett


A few years ago, Pico Iyer found himself amongst the wooden houses of Japan reading the Buddhist “burning house” poems and contemplating life without possessions or a home. For the British-born Indian who moved to California as a boy, these were not unfamiliar thoughts; he had always considered himself homeless, a citizen of the world who experienced many cultures but ultimately belonged to none. In essence, the Global Soul.

“I had a useful peg for exploring all these issues when my house in California suddenly burnt down,” Iyer says, “and I literally woke up the next morning and realised that whatever I thought of as home has no connection whatsoever to a piece of soil. It really had to be something invisible that I carried around inside me.”

When his new home in California was destroyed by earthquake and flood, Iyer left America to live in the rural suburb of Nara in Japan. He likens the experience to an Old Testament parable, the classic “fire, flood, and migration” story.

“The words themselves, of exile and homelessness and travel, are old ones that speak to something intrinsic to the state of being human,” he writes in his latest book, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home.

A term coined by Iyer to describe the burgeoning population of mongrel citizens in the modern International Empire, the Global Soul’s “sense of home is not just divided, but scattered across the planet”. Yet it’s also a term he applies to the greater, world public.

“The impetus behind the book was also that more and more of us are obviously Global Souls because there’s so much migration in the world, and people have so many cultures inside them,” he says.

“And also my sense that home is slipping out from under one’s feet, even, for example, for someone who has lived all her life in Sydney: even if she is pretty rooted in her little neighbourhood, the city itself is changing so much that her sense of home is sort of up for grabs too as it would be if she were travelling around. That’s to say even people who aren’t travelling are affected by these huge movements swirling around them because it actually feels as if the cities are changing complexion very quickly.”

It is this modern sense of statelessness that draws the various essays together in The Global Soul; the psyche of the new post-millennial population revealed through a fascinating selection of subjects including the phenomena of LA International Airport, global business in Hong Kong, multi-culturalism in Canada, and Iyer’s ‘Alien Home’ in Japan.

“The sudden swell and ending of boundaries and the new mongrel world we’re entering essentially asks us the question, ‘Who are we?’ and forces us to define ourselves,” he says, “and that’s potentially a very good thing if we can come up with a good definition. But it can be a really vertiginous thing which is why in my book I have a lot of these scenes of people literally losing a sense of who they are, walking or travelling around so much or living so far from the traditional categories which gave them a very simple way of saying I’m an Australian, or I’m a Catholic or I’m part of this small town.

“The world’s becoming so fragmented and it’s coming to look so much like a computer screen with new data clicking over every nano-second, that in some ways, I think that quickens the hunger for stillness and rootedness. More and more of us now, very self-consciously, have to take measures to steady ourselves or address questions that before we would take for granted.”

Named as one of 100 visionaries worldwide “who could change your life” (along with Noam Chomsky and Vaclav Havel) by the Utne Reader in 1995, Iyer has spent a travel-filled life chronicling his experiences with the changing cultural mix. A contributor to Time since 1982, Iyer is regularly featured in The New York Review of Books, Harper’s and the Times of London. He is also the author of six books; one novel, Cuba and the Night (1995), and five non-fiction titles, Video Night In Kathmandu (1988) and The Lady and the Monk (1991) both reprinted more than 10 times.

“Even though I don’t consciously do it, nearly all my writing has to do with cultures talking and walking past one another or somehow overlapping,” he says. “How the sort of mating dance of cultures takes place on the level of surfaces. So for example, if you go to a Japanese baseball game, how Japan takes what’s American and makes it something partially Japanese and partially American, but also in The Global Soul, how it plays out internally in people who are multi-cultural, and in somebody like me who’s presumably inherited a bit of India and a bit of America and a bit of England while living in Japan, how I would try to make peace and order among all these different parts.

“I guess I’m an explorer of cultural mosaics and a travel writer only because from the time I was born, everywhere has been new to me; everywhere has been a foreign destination, even the place where I was born which was England.”

Far from being another meditation on the technological, political or economic aspects of our “global future”, Iyer’s book incorporates philosophical thought, social commentary and travel writing into a modern-day manifesto about identity, cultural confusion and the psychological effects of accelerated change.

The airport, long considered the perfect metaphor for such dizzying contemporary experiences (Brian Eno’s seminal ‘recorded sounds’ composition, Music For Airports, immediately comes to mind) is explored at length in the book’s second chapter. Although a resident of California since 1965, Iyer was educated in England and travelled back and forth from the US to the UK for more than a decade. He’s been on the move ever since, and it’s obvious that the airport has come to embody something of Iyer’s own homelessness.

“I calculated recently that I spend 40 days a year either in airports or airplanes,” Iyer says, “so the airport is a significant place where my life takes place. I think airports themselves are like geographic jetlag—they’re neither here nor there, they’re not home but they’re not really foreign either. They’re these strange in-between places.”

Bunking down in Los Angeles International Airport, Iyer spins an incredible vision of this heady yet anonymous space with “all the comforts of home made impersonal”. He slips in the odd outrageous statistic (Did you know Dallas-Fort Worth International is larger than Manhattan, or that the leading cause of death at JFK is coronary?), enters the ethereality of jetlag, and reveals the incredible LA International Airport set-up that includes more than 50,000 employees, a fire station, airport police squad, a private hospital and a $10 million post office.

“Jetlag is both emotional and psychological,” he says, “a whole state of being that humans literally never knew until about 30 years ago. And when we do hear about jetlag, we tend to hear quite a lot about the physiological effects, but I suppose what really moved me to write this book was to address the kind of dream-life of globalisation or the emotional and psychological effects of all these things and jetlag is the perfect metaphor for that because it’s a fairly vertiginous and disconcerting state.”

As a person who acknowledges travel as the ‘seat of experience’, Iyer is concerned by the rise of virtual encounters in our lives, whether that’s talking with someone over the phone or internet, or watching TV and films.

“The illusion of knowledge is one of the great dangers of the present moment,” Iyer says. “Also the way that the small screens kind of get in the way of the big picture. I think there’s a greater importance in travelling than ever before because more and more people are getting the world in their homes through TV screens and computer screens and, in some ways, they’re even further removed from the streets outside them.

“We also seem to have less and less sense of past or history and a great excitement about the future, though of course it’s just as unknown as it always was, but we are much more dominated by the future now than we were even 15 to 20 years ago. It’s almost as if the future’s a very attractive stranger who appears at our doorstep and we throw our arms around her or him without really beginning to think who this person is and what it entails for us.”

So, what of the man who has spent the better part of a life-time exploring the Earth’s cultural fabric, someone who consistently ups and travels as easily as picking up the telephone; a person who remains estranged from any community, culture or country despite his love affair with human interaction and cultural contrasts? The answer is Iyer takes extreme measures to balance out his life—even a Global Soul needs some sense of rootedness and calm. When he’s not travelling, he can be found in his small two-bedroom apartment in Nara with his Japanese girlfriend and her two children, working on two books, living months in isolation. He even spends time at a Benedictine Hermitage in California where the only sound you hear for days are the pearling bells and the occasional spot of rain.

“Whatever is fundamental in us—whether it’s a family or faith or ourselves,” he concludes, “we probably don’t want that changed. So we need to define what should remain changeless before it becomes lost in the blur of everything that seems so exciting.”

> > >

This article originally appeared in Australian Style, in 2000. Since that time, Pico Iyer has released four books - Abandon: A Romance (2003),  Sun After Dark: Flights Into The Foreign (2004), The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (2008) and The Man Within My Head (2012).

Between books, he still writes many articles each year!

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< Douglas Coupland >

doug's excellent adventure

By Wendy Cavenett

The non-interview is the great wonder of modern reportage; conversational, chaotic, an enclosed, meditative experience that never quite seems to escape the undertow of doubt. Douglas Coupland, Mr X-er himself, not only inspires the non-interview but exemplifies its free-form dive away from convention. “It’s like we’re having one of those college conversations at three in the morning,” he says, “and we’re both really high or something.”

It must be that crisp, millennial air of anticipation, or maybe it’s just the sparks from the big fizz rippling through contemporary culture’s cerebral cortex. Whatever it is, Mr Coupland is, by all accounts, an ambiguous kind of chap who tends to speak of himself in the third person and re-arrange his thoughts out loud. “Have mercy!” he says, “Have mercy! One question, 18 answers. They come in leaps, you know, so have mercy!”

So how would he describe himself? “What, to aliens?” he responds. “If it was to aliens and they were hungry I’d say, ‘Ah, too skinny. Not much meat on me. The people next door are much crunchier and tastier.’ To Earth people I’d say, ‘Enjoy the pace of things.’ Is that too fortune cookie-ish?” Probably.

Coupland is the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accidental Culture, the seminal work that documented the disillusioned and disenfranchised post-baby boomer twentysomethings (i.e. the 41 million Americans born between 1961 and 1971). Now 38, Coupland’s famous ectomorphic body (“all skin and bones”) seems to be holding its own while his “barricaded inner world” continues to spill onto the pages of books read by more generations than just his own. Since X there has been Shampoo Planet, Life After God, Microserfs, Polaroids from the Dead, and Girlfriend in a Coma.

February 2000 sees the release of Miss Wyoming, his latest and probably most sensitive novel so far. It manages to incorporate Coupland’s obsession for existential dilemmas—particularly the emptiness fame and materialism brings—while staving off brand-name overplay and what many critics post-Generation X saw as trend-based, hyper-narratives (a strange position for Coupland considering his X catch-phrase, “I am not a target market”).

“I’m always interested in stories about people who consider themselves unredeemable,” he says, “whether that’s their own minds or in the minds of other people. Yet somehow, through some form of action—whether or not it’s them causing it or something happening to them—they claim some kind of redemption. And that’s what Miss Wyoming is about.

“I’ve had enough moments with Hollywood now to see a lot of things first hand and I thought what if there was this fantastically used-up, scary film producer who’s been around the block a million times and a media damaged teen idol/film star/has-been, and you meet them individually and they’re really scary but then they meet each other and then suddenly they’re beautiful. I mean, how does that work? So I guess it’s about how people make each other, how people can actually redeem each other.”

Coupland, who was born on a Canadian NATO base in West Germany, grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. He graduated from the Emily Carr College of Arts and Design in the 1980s with a degree in studio sculpture, and before X pandemonium hit, practiced his art, held various McJobs (low paid service positions with no future), and was, for a short time, a faminologist—he lived in Sligo in Ireland for a month investigating the mechanics of famine. He was also fascinated with Antarctica and is one of the few people who is able to draw a “cartographically accurate map” of the place. Believe it or not, the characters who populated X were all named after Antarctic geographical locations.

“I’ve always approached book-writing from the visual arts point of view,” he says, “taking whatever idea or form it is you’re exploring, giving it a really good work-out and then building on that with another idea or form.

“I actually see my work more as if I was in an art gallery looking at a retrospective show of things on a wall than I do looking at it as a series of books. You know, I see evolution in my work. Miss Wyoming is the big leap. Generation X was like going from water to being amphibious; Miss Wyoming is like spurting wings.”

Today, Coupland is reliving his college years. He’s back in Vancouver after sampling life in Milan, Tokyo, Montreal and Los Angeles (amongst other stopovers) during the 1980s, and he’s again involved with various visual projects. He still writes for the college’s paper, receives studio time on-campus, and enjoys hanging with the students. “It’s kind of like I’ve re-created the happiest year of my life,” he admits, “which was third year of art school, except it’s now slightly different.”

So does Coupland prefer the past? “Oh no,” he says, “I enjoy right now, exactly where I am. Absolutely, without hesitation. I have no romanticism about the past or the future—that comes fast enough. No, I’m not into time travel at all.”

While Coupland is all for techno-innovation, he is the first to admit he prefers his life relatively “low tech”. Not so his 63-year-old mother who has “completely rewritten her life” thanks to new technologies. Wearing only GAP and Banana Republic clothing, Mrs Coupland surfs the internet (“she can find anything”), is now a complete extrovert, and wants to find a job.

“it’s sort of like the old regime meets the new,” Coupland says of his mother. “With me, I call it a ‘fold of filters’, you know, putting on enough social sunscreen to deal with life. I don’t have a fax machine, I don’t answer the phone unless it’s a scheduled call, and I don’t socialise on email anymore. I think there’s like an equilibrium point that everyone has for themselves and mine’s quite low-tech actually. If I adopt a new technology, something else has to go.”

In contemplating the state of modernity, Coupland has deconstructed the conflict between progress and its effects on the individual. His style is highly digestible, intelligently ironic and in most cases, keenly observant. Today’s loneliness, and the helplessness that inevitably brings, consistently form the basis of many of his characters’ maladies. In Generation X he coined the phrase OPTION PARALYSIS: “The tendency when given unlimited choices, to make none”, a completely modern-day phenomena linked to a ‘loneliness stinking of helplessness’.

“I think in most modern societies there are so many different options, so many different things you can do with your life,” he says. “It’s not like there’s only two or three cookie-cutters options available and that’s it, and that, in tandem with a long life-span, and various mechanisms for personal, intellectual and spiritual enlightenment… it’s all new territory. It’s not the same old thing in brand new drag, it’s completely new and I think it was unexpected.

“When you invent a technology, a series of technologies, you always have very weird, unexpected side effects,” Coupland says. “Like when they invented automobiles, there was no way of knowing that dogs would like to hang their heads out the side and put their face out in the wind and hang out their tongues. If you were to look at a water molecule, there’s no way you’d be able to understand or anticipate glaciers or snow or ice.

“So we’re living in this constant motional fall-out from all these technologies, and if we go back to like 1900, just 100 years, statistically, you’re probably going to be dead by 38 or something, so this would be the year I die. I mean, senior citizens are one of the great wonders of the world. We’ve just opened up this whole new continent of time that didn’t exist before which is something we tend to forget.”

So what of the future? What would Coupland like to see in the new millennium? “Instead of having a census,” he says, “I wish every 10 years the government would force everyone to write down one thing they’re learnt about life up to that point and then collate them to create a master book of culture. We could learn something from that.”

And what would he write? “I think I’ve probably learnt to worry less than I use to,” he concludes, “but that’s taken work. It’s not like I hit some magic Xanadu transcendent point or anything. But that’s the one thing for me: Don’t worry so much.”

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This article originally appeared in Australian Style, 2000. Since that time, Douglas Coupland has published various books including God Hates Japan, (2001), a Japanese language novel with computer animator, Michael Howatson; All Families Are Psychotic, (2001); School Spirit, (2002), with conceptual artist, Pierre Huyghe; Hey Nostradamus!, (2003); Eleanor Rigby, (2004); and JPod, (2006).

In 2006, a TV pilot based on the first two chapters of JPod was commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Filming was completed in early 2007. In 2008, a series of 13 episodes will be screened on CBC.

For more, check out Douglas's website @
http://www.coupland.com/

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Picture of Douglas Coupland by Roberta Karpa,
Polaroids From The Dead, (1996).

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