KAPUŚCIŃSKI 1: MEMORIES of a MENTOR

Top: First publication of a photo by Ed Barber taken in 1984 outside Paddington Station.

RYSZARD KAPUŚCIŃSKI
(1932-2007)
Memories of A Mentor

I can remember quite distinctly where I was when I first encountered the work of Kapuściński. Sitting in the sunshine on a Saturday morning next to the old coal bunker in our garden of the time, next to a huge flowering array of michaelmas daisies, having a cup of tea. A parcel had arrived in the post from Picador Books with material on this man who to me at that time was a complete unknown.

The parcel contained a 53pp photocopy of a profile of Kapuściński by Andrzej W. Pawluczuk of Kapuscinski, published by the Authors Agency and "Czytelnik" in Warsaw in 1980.

I began reading and was almost immediately excited and electrified in the way I had been when I first read 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' in Rolling Stone magazine. This was something new and exciting, a new journalism from the East.

Shortly afterwards, I conducted the first interview that Kapuściński had ever given in Britain on 9th August 1984. It was, I am pretty sure, his first visit to the country. We met at the Basil Hotel in Knightsbridge in their wonderfully old-fashioned tea room. It is fair to say we were both nervous but soon found simpatico between us.

At that time I believe only The Emperor, his extraordinary account of the court of Hailie Selassie had been translated and published in English. He was to become, in very short order, widely regarded as one of the great foreign correspondents of the 20th century.

It is fair to say that we became friends, dear close personal friends. We maintained a correspondence. We were to meet again in April 1986 for a further interview.

Kapuściński was a mentor to me. He was the first person to tell me that journalism was a vocation. Iasked him what he could tell me about the world he had roamed over for so manyyears. He told me I would remember the important things; this is what I recall. Firstly, people are the same the world over - they are born and they die, they have children. Secondly, human nature doesn't change, that's why Machiavelli and Shakespeare are contemporary works.

Ryszard got angry with me once, saying he didn't eat an orange until he was 15. That put me in my place. Another time I was a bit downcast, he asked me why and I told him I had money worries and he just reached in his pocket pulled out a role of notes and gave them to me. As if it was the most natural thing in the world.

Our correspondence was sporadic and is now in a file carefully protected. The first letter from him is dated November 30th 1984. The second on January 26th 1985. All was going well. I was editing a brand new magazine called Tomorrow and the interview was to feature in it. Then calamity struck and the magazine was taken out of our hands. [There is a long story attached to this which will have to be written about at a later time]. I alerted Ryszard to the situation and received the following letter from him, dated 17 September 1985:

Dear John:

'I am extremely sorry to answer your letter so late but I have been away from Warsaw for quite a long time, in such an outlandish place deep in Poland that I couldn't write a single page there. Still, I was thinking about you quite often and only when I arrived in warsaw could I rush to answer your letter.'

He thanks me for the clippings and a copy of an Evelyn Waugh book on Ethiopia I sent him. The letter continues:

'I was really shocked when I read about your misfortune. I feel exteremely sorry for you/and for myself! Who will ever popularise me in the way you were so kind to invent?/I hope that you have already recovered from this misfortune - this is, at least, the good news I would like to recieve in your next letter.

'If everything is fine I will come to England next spring for at least three months. I am already looking forward to seeing you then and I am glad at the thought of meeting you. Once again I apologise for the fatal delay but I wish we could still correspond with each other. I would like to keep in touch with you as I do appreciate your letters, news from you, your kind heart and your help.

My best wishes as ever
Ryszard Kapuściński

Other short letters followed and then on 8th April 1986, I wrote to him c/o St Anthony's College Oxford, to altert him that I had obtained tickets to a lecture by Bob Geldof at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in Pall Mall on 22nd April. Geldof had persuaded Mick Jagger to do Live Aid by giving him a copy of The Emperor. I introduced K to Bob. (see 'Memory Exercise' - my very first entry in this blog on June 1st 2005 for more details)

Various letters followed and we met again at the Royal Court Theatre when he came over for the stage play of 'The Emperor', adapted by Michael Hastings and Jonathan Miller, in April 1987. The letters show that I was in touch Bill Buford, then running Granta over his Kapuściński piece and also with Adam Low who was making a BBC Arena programme.

A Xmas card arrived and then another letter in July 1988, saying he had spent the spring at the Temple University in Philadelphia and had also been to Uganda - he was working on his book on Idi Amin at that time. A further letter in October said 'we've experienced recently very turbulent events taking place and they consumed a lot of my time but I was unable to isolate myself from them.' By the time I wrote again in December I had been to Moscow.

In 1989 he wrote in February and April, in the latter letter congratulating me on 'The Greenprace Story' (see previous posting). 'I am only too happy to congratulate you on having this book published. I found this perfect fusion of remarkable photos and text, extremely interesting, made with highest journalistic skills. I am pretty sure that the book will receive an approving media coverage and an enthusiastic public recepion.'

An Xmas card came in 1990, I responded on January 2nd and his last letter came to me on Jan 24th. It read, in part. I am happy to learn that you are planning to come to Warsaw and I will be very glad to meet you at the airport.'

In fact I never made it to Warsaw. Ryszard took a long trip across the former Soviet Union for his book Imperium and I got absorbed with other projects. He wrote again in April 1991, I responded with a lengthy two-page letter. At that point, the letters run out.

Time passed. Every so often I would think of Ryszard but our contact by then was lost. Then came the news this January that he had passed away. Its taken about three months for me to face reading all these letters again. A dear sweet man, sadly missed. I will never forget him and always treasure the support and inspiration he so freely gave me.

KAPUŚCIŃSKI 2: THE FACE

This is article appeared in The Face magazine in August 1986,based on interviews conducted on the 9th August 1984 and 3rd April 1986.

Ryszard Kapuściński (bottom right) at a meeting during the strike at the Gdansk shipyard in August 1980. The journalist who had witnessed numerous popular uprisings abroad was back in his native Poland to see the rise of Solidarity. Behind him in the photo (2nd from right) is Lech Walesa.

THE POLISH JOURNALIST RYSZARD KAPUŚCIŃSKI CLAIMS TO HAVE WITNESSED 27 REVOLUTIONS. MORE ASTONISHING IS THE WAY HE HAS FOUND TO DESCRIBE THESE TURBULENT EVENTS.

Kapuściński by John May

"The way I understand the role of the journalist, serious journalist, is somebody who is looking at what he's doing not only as a way of how you make your money but also as a mission, a responsibility. For me. this is a vocation."

Who is this Ryszard Kapuscinski? This is a large question to which it is not easy to find an answer.

He is a man who has travelled the whole world, who has witnessed 27 revolutions in his role as a foreign correspondent, who has developed an important new style of writing which blends journalism and literature, scholarship and reportage.

At present in the Western world, his reputation largely rests on two books: The Emperor about Ethiopia under Hailie Selassie and Shah Of Shahs about Iran under the Shah and Ayatollah; two volumes of a projected triology concerning the nature of autocratic power. The third volume, which he is currently writing, describes Uganda under Idi Amin.

Brilliant as they are, these books are just the tip of a mountain of material which his translators are busily preparing for the numerous publishers and magazine editors clamouring for his work. His writing has or will be featured in New Yorker, Granta, The New York Review Of Books and Harpers. 1987 will see the American publication of Another Day Of Life, his book on Angola, and the Polish publication of a book of poems. Still untranslated are five books of reportage and numerous notebooks and articles.

I first met Kapuściński in August for an interview that led to a long correspondence and further meetings in London this year. He has just recovered from a serious back operation which forced him to lie immobile for six months, unable to read or write, in such great and constant pain he contemplated suicide. Yet on our subse­quent encounter he looked healthier than ever.

A stockily-built man, he always arrives briskly, with a smile on his face. His deep-set eyes are kind and enquiring, his handshake strong and warm, his conversa­tion intense, his manner unfailingly polite.

All of which is surface detail. To under­stand Kapuściński better, it is necessary to return to the geography and social condi­tions of his childhood which have marked him in a profound way.

He was born on March 4, 1932 in Pinsk, a small town on the river Pina in the eastern borderlands, now part of the USSR.

His father was a very poor, semi-literate teacher in the village school until the war came, when he served as an officer in the Polish army before joining the armed resist­ance movement during the Nazi occupation.

Kapuściński says of his father, who died several years ago: "I loved him and admired him but he was a very simple man who never travelled. He never left Poland. Even in Poland he knew two or three towns only. So I'm a stranger in my family because the rest of them are very modest people, staying in their places where they were born. I was the only one crazy, so there's no explanation for this."

Perhaps this craziness could be accounted for by the fact that the war started when he was seven years old.

He says: "My generation in my country was very politicised from the beginning and we had a very hard experience as children. Our first understanding of the world was as a place where there is a big fight going on and the power is manifesting itself through force and there are social and political conflicts."

These two factors — poverty and turmoil — were to give Kapuściński a unique view and advantage in his work as a foreign correspondent.

He says of his home: "It was purely a Third World country so I found myself, being out of Europe, equally at home. I think this was also one of the things which makes me feel better in the poor village than in the very luxurious hotel.

"I met for the first time a telephone when I was already a teenager and not only was there no telephone in my place, the idea of telephones was foreign to me.

"The other thing is: I like very agitated situations and conflicts and there was a lot of this in the Third World. All these wars, revolutions, coup d'etats, that again was making tension."

In the spring of 1945, with the war at an end, his family moved to Warsaw where his father got a job as stock clerk with a construction firm and Kapuscinski restarted his schooling. He says he would have liked to be a "medicine doctor" but it was obvious his talents lay elsewhere.

In 1948, at the age of 16, he had his first poem published and seven years later he graduated from the University of Warsaw with a Master's degree in history.

Almost immediately he began work for the youth journal Sztander Mlodych during the most active period of its history as an investigative publication. In one report he uncovered widespread corruption in the industrial city of Nowa Huta, at the time a showplace of Socialist enterprise. For this story he was awarded the Golden Cross of Merit at the age of 23.

As a result, he began working for the Polish Press agency, in the beginning travelling around his own country, producing a series of reportages later collected in a book entitled The Bush Polish Style.

Then, in 1956, he made his first trip out of Poland as a foreign correspondent — to Afghanistan, India and Pakistan. It was to dictate the shape of his life for the next 30 years.

"My motivation was I can't stay in one place. I have to move. I'm thinking when I am in motion. This was the starting point.”

He was in Zanzibar when the revolution broke out; fled to Tanganyika to write the story only to find himself involved in a counter-coup there. For several weeks he was the only journalist in Angola when the Portuguese were leaving and civil war was about to break out. He was arrested by gendarmes with machine-guns in Stanleyville, managed to escape to Burundi, only to be rearrested by Belgian paratroopers who wanted to execute him.

He began to acquire a reputation of being in the right place at the right time. He says of this, with characteristic modesty: "Some­times, yes. Sometimes it's experience. To do something you also need a stroke of luck. You need many other things. You need a certain ability. You have to know how to work hard. You have to be patient. You have to know how to suffer. Also you need a stroke of luck. It's something very difficult to describe, to define.

"I just feel I should be here. It's not that I'm always right. Sometimes nothing hap­pens in certain situations in which I am sure something will happen.

“For example it was before the war between Honduras and Salvador in Central America. We were a group of correspon­dents waiting for the war one month. Nothing happened, everybody left the coun­try. I was left, just a few days more and exactly the next day it happened.'

The question he is asked most often about his experiences is: why is he willing to face death so often, to place himself in very dangerous situations to get his stories?

"You see, in the moment when you're working- and you know that something is going on at the front, your first thing is to go there. At this very moment you don't think about fear. You think about being there.

"Because this situation in which you found yourself requires from you a hundred different activities. Again you have no time to think. Only when you come out of this you think, "Idiot, stupid, why did you do this?'

"Once I was in this really terrible situa­tion in the Angola war. We were driving by night and we were ambushed and there was fire all round. We were just laying. Don't know nothing because it's night. I was praying, saying, 'My God, if you save me this time I will never again go to this situation. I promise.' And I was serious."

Kapuściński's importance as a writer stems not from his news reports but from the fact that he has used all these experiences to develop a new form of writing — he calls his books "texts" to emphasise this — which blends literature and journalism. He wants to be there instantly but also to make a long and profound study of the situation.

Kapuściński shares with that other great Polish writer Stanislaw Lem and with the structural anthropologist I.evi-Strauss the thirst for exploring new worlds, of trying to find new boundaries. In his view it is important to go out of his tradition in order to perceive the world from another perspective.

"To explain my situation, I was always working in these Third World countries as a press agency correspondent. When I finished that job I found myself very unsatisfied because agency reporting, in a traditional and of way, is so obsolete, so narrow, so limited. There are a lot of things which don't fit and those exact things are the most important.

"What is a fact? Today, 8 August, is a fact but for me, if I'm going somewhere, the mood is also a fact; the way of thinking is a fact, the colour is a fact, the smell is a fact. So all these new facts don't fit the traditional way of writing but they are very important to the reality, how they influence the behaviour of the people, the events and everything. So then you have to find new ways of expression and this you can find only in a literary way."

After his official duties were over, he began writing for himself, exploring new forms.

"They are non-factual books in the tradi­tional sense of the word. Reflections about experiences I had, people I met, a sort of lyrical writing but at the same time based on the realities and transmitting the cultural facts, social facts, psychological facts. This I call reflective writing, trying to use my knowledge but expressed in literary, poetic language.

"1 would like my books to give not only the impression of what I see but also to give to the reader knowledge of other worlds, other culture.

"The contemporary world is a world of many different traditions, cultures, lan­guages, civilisations. You have to find how you can translate one culture and code to another culture and code, which is very difficult.

"At the same time it's very important to find what is universal in all cultures and what is universal in the behaviour of man in all cultural settings. So you have to see the world from different points, starting from analysing very small details and trying to find, in these very details, something which is universal; and the reverse, finding some universal laws of history, in the place of the man in a given historical situation.

"My own experience, and this is a large experience because I practically know the whole world, is the great similarity of human beings. There are some differences, which are differences of culture and educa­tion but generally, if you take the main behaviour of man, his reaction and feelings are very similar, independent of all culture. I think this allows humanity to exist. "

In Kapuściński’s books it is possible to travel through time, to observe all shades and periods of power, from the Royalist to the Ruritanian, from the baroque to the bestial. For power is the major subject of his work and his analysis and understanding of it has rarely been equalled.

"You can have a sort of technical prog­ress," he says, "it's visible in history. But if we still read Plato, Machiavelli and Shakespeare like contemporary books it means that there is no ethical progress. Suddenly you find groups of people behav­ing in the way that has already been described in literature five thousand years ago in Sumer or Babylon. It's like a contemporary play, just changing the cos­tume.

"You see the problem is that culture is in very big danger, culture in the broad sense of the word, because there is no possibility of coexistence between the primitive, totalita­rian power and the culture. These are two big powers which cannot exist in one place.

"This totalitarian power wants to destroy the culture because the real danger to them always comes from there — from the students, from the intellectuals — but also from the force of traditional culture, trans­mitting the values of democracy, of free­dom, of human dignity. '

This is the problem of history, or the future, as he sees it, and the one that fascinates him most. Being Polish has, of course, enabled him to observe such proces­ses at first hand and many read his books as metaphors of his own country's problems.

"In Poland, when people ask me about other writers, colleagues and friends, they ask not so much what he's doing but how he behaves, what position he takes in the conflicting situation ..."

Kapuściński's position is that he now finds himself faced with a new problem — fame, and its accompanying demands. The Emperor has already been translated into 20 languages, Shah Of Shahs into twelve in the first year and his readership is growing rapidly. As a modest man with scholarly devotion to his craft, this new pressure is difficult for him to bear.

"I'm trying to escape somehow but it is very difficult," he says. "It's the changing role of the writer in contemporary society. Society asks him to be more and more involved in the problems of the world. Be active, be personally present. You have to fight to have the time to write your books."

In 1978, the Polish film maker Andrzej Wajda admitted that the hero of his movie Rough Treatment, the story of a star reporter in his forties who returns home and finds he cannot adjust to normal life, had a 'clear correspondence' with Kapuściński

Wajda, who is still trying to film The Emperor after being refused permission twice to make it in Poland, says of his friend: "He is to me the embodiment of a free person, the kind we all wish to be, for the whole world is his home. He departs and comes back, tells a few fascinating stories and disappears again. The fact that he understands the world perfectly gives him a sense of his worth, something that is not accessible to others. '

Who is Ryszard Kapuściński? One of the great journalists of our time.

KAPUŚCIŃSKI 3: CONNECTIONS THROUGH TIME

It is fitting and also very moving that Kapuściński's last book, published in June this year should be 'Travels with Herodotus.'

Fitting because Herodotus, according to Wikipedia, was a Greek historian from Ionia who lived in the 5th century BCE (ca. 484 BCE–ca. 425 BCE) and is regarded as the "Father of History". He is almost exclusively known for writing The Histories a record of his 'inquiries' into the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars which occurred in 490 and 480-479 BCE. The nine volumes include not only a narrative account of that period, which would otherwise be poorly documented, but also long digressions concerning the various places and peoples he encountered during his wide-ranging travels around the lands of the Mediterranean and Black Sea.'

Moving because we learn that when Kapuściński was a novice reporter in Poland he yearned to travel and broached the subject with his editor-in-chief Irena Tarlowska . Nothing was said for a year until one day K was summoned to her office and told he was being sent to India - a country he knew absolutely nothing about it. He writes: 'At the end of our conversation... Tarlowska reached into a cabinet, took out a book and handing it to me said: "Here, a present for the road." It was a thick book with a stiff cover of yellow cloth. On the front, stamped in gold letters, was Herodotus THE HISTORIES.'

What a strange quirk of fate - that one of the greatest traveller-reporter of our time should be so pointedly and intimately connected with the very first of his kind in such a prescient way from the outset. Thus K's first encounters with India, China and Africa - captured in his usual brilliant prose, which appears seemingly simple yet proves to be both deep and subtle - are interwoven with his readings from Herodotus and his musings of the nature of the man.

He writes: 'Man is by nature a sedentary creature, settled down happily, naturally, on his particular piece of earth...But to traverse the world for years in order to get to know it, to plumb it, to understand it? And then, later, tp put all his findings into words? Such people have always been uncommon.' Of course, K was one of those uncommon ones himself.

*

As fate would have it, this book arrived just after I had finished reading another extraordinary tale of travel and adventure, 'A Fortune-Teller Told Me' which carries the following recommendation from Kapuściński on the cover: 'A great book written in the best traditions of literary journalism...profound, rich and reflective.'

Born in Florence, Tiziano Terzani spent 25 years working as Der Spiegel's Far Eastern correspondent. In the spring of 1976, he had visited a fortune teller Hong Kong who told him:
'Beware! You run a grave risk of dying in 1993. You mustn't fly that year. Don't fly, not even once.' The prophecy haunted him for the next sixteen years and when 1993 rolled round he submitted to the old man's warnings.

The book follows Terzani through that year - a year in which he travels vast distances but only by car, train and ship. He feels justified when he learns that a helicopter he would certainly have been on, carrying foreign correspondents, crashed and several were killed. He discovers the joys of not rushing from airport to airport, of seeing the landscape unfold, of adjusting his behavious to a different clock. Everywhere he goes he consults soothsayers and fortune-tellers of all descriptions. Thus there is an inner journey taking place and a constant dialogue between
Terzani's Western mind and the Eastern philosophies and mindsets that he is forced to consider.

Interestingly, Terzani travels to Mongolia in the company of a book written by a Pole 'Beasts, Men and Gods' by Ferdinand Ossendowski. who travelled the region in the 1920s, trying to escape the Bolsheviks. A former Russian naval officer who converted to Buddhism, he believed Mongolia should remain a separate republic and fought like a demon to achieve that end. His account of his epic flight through one of the most mysterious regions on earth was a bestseller when it was published in New York in 1922.

Earlier in his account, Terzani recalls when he set out to travel by ship from Bangkok to Cambodia. Looking for book to take with him on he voyage, his eyes fell on 'The Gentleman in the Parlour' by Somerset Maugham. This despite the fact that, he confesses, 'I have never been able to feel for Maugham the affection that he inspires in most of his readers.' It is only when he is sitting on deck reading that he realises that Maugham was describing an identical voyage to his own, made on a similar ship in 1929. The book begins: 'I have never been able to feel for Charles Lamb the affection that he inspires in most of readers.' Terzani writes: 'Maugham tells how, on the point of departure, he looks for a book to take along; his eye happens to fall on one with a greeen cover and subsequently he begins reading it on board ship.'

Incidentally, I was turned onto this book initially by reading a 2005 article in The Guardian – ‘The escape artist’ by Piers Moore Ede. It begins: ‘All of us, at some stage or another, pick up a book by pure chance, perhaps in a second-hand bookshop, or from a desultory shelf made up from what holiday-makers have left behind. Occasionally, those books can work a particular magic on us, their resonance deep enough to suggest fate itself has thrust them into our hands.’

I recommend reading the book first and then this article, where you discover how Terzani's journey through life ended.

'Travels with Herodotus' is published by Allen Lane
'A Fortune-Teller Told Me' is published by Flamingo/Harper Collins

GREENPEACE: THE RETURN TO AMCHITKA

Left: Original cover of the first edition of 'The Greenpeace Story' (first published 1989);
Above: The original Greenpeace crew on their way to Amchitka in 1971. From left (top) Robert Hunter, Patrick Moore, Bob Cummings, Ben Metcalfe, engineer David Birmingham; (bottom) Richard Fineberg, Dr Lyle Thurston, Jim Bohlen, Terry Simmons, Bill Darnell and skipper John Cormack.

Memories were triggered the other day when my dear friend Keiran Mulvaney sent me a link to his blog and I discovered that he was on a new Greenpeace boat heading once more for Amchitka. As explained below, this is where Greenpeace began. Its hard to believe its almost 20 years since we put Greenpeace's history together.

There have been many other books written before and since. These include
The Greenpeace Chronicle by Robert Hunter
Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World by Rex Weyler
Making Waves by Jim Bohlen
Shadow Warrior: The Autobiography of David McTaggart
The definitive story of this remarkable organisation still remains to be told. I hope we made a useful contribution to that end.

Read more about the Bering Sea 2007 Campaign tour here
From this link you can follow the voyage on Google Earth

Below Kieran's blog entry on the first landing on Amchitka.


Amchitka

Thirty-five years, eleven months, and eighteen days later, we finally made it.

On September 15, 1971, a crew of twelve set out from Vancouver Island in an eighty-foot halibut seiner called the Phyllis Cormack on a daring, even foolhardy, mission: to steam to the Aleutian island of Amchitka and protest, or even prevent, the detonation of an underground nuclear test. When the plan was first hatched, the group that organized the mission went by the name of the Don't Make a Wave Comittee. By the time the Cormack set out to sea, they were calling themselves Greenpeace.

The Cormack didn't make it to Amchitka. President Nixon delayed the test, the crew put into the Aleutian port of Akutan to figure out next steps, and the US Coastguard arrested them on a technicality. But the mission was a success: although the explosion, dubbed Cannikin, went ahead, it would be the last on the island: a further four tests were scheduled but canceled in the face of the enormous protests that found a voice in the Greenpeace voyage.

And yet, ever since, a circle has remained broken, a path unfinished. Almost thirty-six years have passed, the island has become a wildlife sanctuary, and a kind of calm has returned in this most remote of realms, and yet, no Greenpeace ship had completed the Phyllis Cormack's journey and reached the shores of Amchitka.

Until today.

To the last, Amchitka seemed determined to keep its secrets. We arrived as night was reluctantly yielding its grip, and even when daylight barged its way through, Amchitka lay shrouded in thick, seemingly impenetrable fog. An initial boat ride in search of a suitable landing beach provided little of great promise, but at least one option, and after lunch we headed ashore.

The island is ringed by thick kelp beds--the reason it was once lush habitat for sea otters, all now gone, whose violent deaths as a result of the blasts angered Irving Stowe and motivated him to protest the explosions, a move that gave rise to the Don't Make a Wave Committee and thence Greenpeace. There was no doubt that the kelp could do serious harm to the propellor of the African Queen, our large inflatable, so we employed a shuttle service: from Esperanza to African Queen to the smaller Novuraina, which threaded its way uncertainly through the shallows, before we began an undignified clamber across kelp-coated rocks and finally made it ashore.

We had made it. We were on Amchitka. But the object of our attention lay a couple of miles away yet, over the intimidating-looking hillside that sloped down toward us. Undaunted, we picked and clambered and hauled our way to the top of the island, and there, of all things, stood a concrete hut at the end of a gravel road. It had been, presumably, a form of sentry post.

We stepped inside. On the floor there sat what appeared to unexploded shells. We stepped back outside.

We wandered along the road, but according to our charts and calculations, we needed to head inland a short distance. And so we marched across spongy mosses that sprang back up as our footprints left, along thick tundra that enveloped our feet as if trying to suck us into the ground, and tall grasses that hid holes into which at least some of us sometimes stumbled and fell.

Then we rose over a ridge and there, ahead of us, was what we had come to see: Cannikin Lake, created when the force of the blast caused the land to collapse, forming a crater which filled with water from nearby White Alice Creek.

It looked, frankly, disconcertingly peaceful and calm, the water gently breaking against the lush grassy coast, But its placidity is deceiving: samples have shown that the lake, the creek, and the mosses and lichens contain radioactive elements, which are still seeping into the groundwater from the blast chamber a mile below the surface.

At ground zero itself, close to the lake, the reality was more evident. Here, in stark contrast to the lush environment on the way in, the ground was all but lifeless, the remnants of scorched lichens clinging to bare earth. And there was something else, something I hadn't truly realized until talking later with Raymond back on the Esperanza. This is an island that has felt but a handful of human footprints for more than thirty years, that is an undisturbed wiildlife reserve. But there is virtually no life here. Oh, there are some seabirds, some songbirds, moths and spiders and flies here and there. But compared to the other Aleutian islands we have visited, it is lush but desolate. The place just feels wrong. It feels violated. It feels ... dead.

The crew had made it clear they had no intention of allowing us solely to come and monitor and document the site without making at least a symbolic statement, and so we stood, facing the lake, with the ship's flags tied to poles and waving bravely in the strong wind, a testament to how Greenpeace has grown globally in scope in the decades since its founding, and how, on behalf of the nations of the world, we were reclaiming this patch of inhumanity and calling for peace.

Then the flags came down, and everyone stomped back over the hill, leaving Brent, Clive, myself--and Barbara. Barbara Stowe, 14 years old at the time of the Cormack's sailing, our connection to the founding era, had sold pins and buttons on street corners for 25 cents a pop to raise money for the Cormack's voyage. And now, representing all of those who had devoted so much time, energy, and emotion into making that seminal event happen, she was here, with us, bearing witness firsthand to the place her late father had sworn to protect.

We filmed some interviews, and then again we did battle with the terrain, forcing weary limbs through unforgiving ground, and then precariously down the slopes we had earlier climbed, before once more running the gauntlet of rocks and hitching a ride back to the welcoming Esperanza.

On the beach, some of the crew had arranged driftwood to spell "Bering Witness" in honor of the campaign, a quiet message visible only from the cliff tops.

And at the test site, too, a memorial now stands: a small piece of driftwood, which Diek retrieved from the shore and tied to a short post. In the wood, he carved a simple message: Phyllis Cormack 1971, Esperanza 2007. And now it stands on the shore of Cannikin Lake, a solitary sentinel, bearing witness on our behalf to a silence broken only by the blowing of the wind, the calls of the seabirds, and the gentle lapping of the waves.

OTHER SOUTHERN DELIGHTS

Following on from my immersion in the ocean that is the blues (see previous posts) these other southern delights are highly recommended.

Originaly released in 1972, based on the novel by James Dickey who also wrote the screenplay and makes a cameo appearance in the film as a sheriff, 'Deliverance' still packs a wallop.

I well remember going to see the first press screening in London at that time and sitting down next to a female scribe, who grabbed my hand during the course of the film and dug her nails in so hard that there were visible marks when we came out, shaken, into the early evening light.

It remained from of the prime examples I would quote, when arguing over a drink, about the relativity of film viewing - when and where you see the film has a defining effect on your opinion of it. (Obviously this excludes 'dogs' that no circumstance would alter or improve).

Cos later, still remembering the nails in my hand, I got excited about seeing the first run of the movie on tv (there were no dvds in those days and VHS releases lagged way behind the release date). First-time round, we had no prior knowledge of the film, were seeing it blind in an ideal environment (plush screening room) and thus the shock factor was at maximum. Seeing it again on tv, interrupted by adverts, took all the heat and steam out of it.

This point is underlined by a short review on Amazon by L.A. Hay "Saturnicus" from Scotland, entitled '35 years too late': 'At the time of its release this film had mega hype. John Voigt and Burt Reynolds were the glamour boys of the day and had the girls drooling. At the time I probably would have liked it; or would I? We children of the sixties were notoriously fickle and gave credit when it was due. Finally getting round to see it, (cannot imagine why I was prevented seeing it in the beginning), I was disappointed. The subject of male abuse would have no doubt been lost on me in 1972 as I would not even known what it was, so perhaps that was a major stunner at the time. Over the years no doubt many other features in the movie so innovative back then, have become commonplace...The lessons it may have taught us, and horrors it showed us, have dissipated with time.'

To these eyes, watching it more than 30 years later, it looks timeless. The cinematography is stunning , the famous 'Duelling Banjos' still works as a hokey then creepy opener and Boorman's mastery of the growing sense of dread (all a question of pace) draws you in until, like the film's protagonists, you find yourself caught on a emotional ride that you cannot get off.

One thing a re-viewing brings home is how editing techniques have changed. Boorman takes his time. The camera lingers longer. One has space to absorb the stunning landscapes, the sound of the river. Compare and contrast the way the film's violent episodes are handled. Imagine how many jump shots there would be in a modern movie. The gore factor would have to be upped to compete with today's hyper-realism.

In retrospect, the 70s was a classic Hollywood period when a new generation of film-makers stormed the walls of Babylon and had a party. This point was underlined by watching the DVD of 'Easy Riders, Raging Bulls' - the excellent documentary of Peter Biskin's book. Particularly stunning are the extras: a really tremendous set of beautifully shot interviews with some key characters. Check out Dennid Hopper's stories about the making of 'Apocalypse Now'.

Check out also the BBC4 web site connected to their screening of the film: audio interviews with Hopper, Altman, Scorsese and Schlesinger. Also audio link to interview with Biskind. Read critique of the book here.

Boorman is currently working on an adaptation of Marguerite Yourcenar's bestseller "Memoirs of Hadrian," which is written in the form of a letter from the aging emperor to his young successor, recounting the story of his early political career in the second century A.D.
Read his 2001 Guardian article 'That's All Folks': Big movies now cost $100m and that figure is going up. How can the studios afford it? They can't. Film-maker John Boorman on an industry facing meltdown.

James Dickey, who was a decorated fighter pilot and US poet laureate, died in January 1997, four days after his last class at the University of South Carolina, where from 1968 he taught as Poet-in-Residence. Audio interviews with Dickey here


'Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus', a film by Andrew Douglas, is a captivating and compelling road trip through the Southern States in the company of singer Jim White. Originally shown on BBC's Arena programme, this a truly amazing and innovative film, suffused with a strange darkness, full of exquisite music and great storytellers. The DVD is not cheap but it pays repeated viewings.











Just been up half the night reading 'Moonshine, Monster Catfish and other Southern Comforts', Burkhard Bilger's account of his investigations into such southern traditions as eating squirrels, fighting cocks, noodling catfish and playing rolley holer - a strange form of marbles. Bilger is a staff writer for the New Yorker and a brilliant reporter and stylist. Here are visions of other worlds beyond our ken. Delightful and insightful. Read an extract here.

CHASING THE BLUES

It has been a rare privilege over the last month or so to immerse myself in the roots of the blues via two detailed conversations with the authors of two recently published books:

'In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions' by Marybeth Hamliton is published by Jonathan Cape [£12.99]


‘Hand Me My Travellin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell’ by Michael Gray is published by Bloomsbury (£25.00)

The first challenges the myths surrounding the Delta Blues; the other brings to life one of the great seminal blues players. Both add immeasurably to our knowledge of both the music and the societies that spawned them.

You can hear these interviews on the Audio Generalist - for free!

Californian-born Marybeth Hamilton teaches American History at Birkbeck College, University of London and has previously written 'When I'm Bad, I'm Better: Mae West, Sex and American Entertainment.'

Read Mick Brown's review of 'In Search of the Blues' on The Telegraph site.

Michael Gray is best known as the author of ‘Song and Dance Man’ the first ever book-length critical study of Bob Dylan’s work, published originally in 1972. Over the years it has grown and developed to the point where ’Song and Dance Man III’, published in 2000 and reprinted five times in the years since, is now 918pp long including the index.
His excellent Bob Dylan Encylcopedia blog can be found here
He has also started one on Blind Willie McTell

Read the lyrics of Bob Dylan's song 'Blind Willie McTell'


This new CD set is one of a recently released series which includes Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson - all of which

I purchased for The Generalist's turntable. At £10.99 each they are also great value.

They are issued by Snapper Records,who have also just released 'The Early Blues Roots of Bob Dylan'

A great album in the same vein that my old friend Nick gave me for my 50th birthday, which also comes highly recommended:
'Led Astray - The Folk Blues of Page and Plant'


Blues In Britain is building the most comprehensive list of blues resources on the internet.

AUDIO GENERALIST NEW: JONATHON GREEN - Slangmeister

The latest addition to our slowly-evolving library of audio interviews on The Generalist’s audio site, documents the work of Jonathon Green, one of the world’s leading lexicographers of slang.

Over the last 25 years, in numerous works – including the ‘Cassell Contemporary Dictionary of Slang’, ‘Slang Down The Ages’, ‘Talking Dirty’ and the ‘Slang Thesaurus’ - he has documented this underworld of language with an appetite that equals if not surpasses his illustrious historical predecessors in this field.

Their story forms part of Green’s ‘Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made.’ [Jonathon Cape 1996/Pimlico 1997].

He is currently into the editing stage of the final volume of his as-yet-untitled meisterwork – a 3-volume slang dictionary which will be the most detailed book of its kind ever published.

It will contain some 100,000 headwords; these are accompanied and underpinned by more than half a million citations. Green is hopeful it will be released in 2009. The dictionary will also be available on-line and will be kept constantly updated.

You can hear the interview here:

www.thegeneralist.co.uk

Below is an exclusive preview of the dictionary:

piss n.

[piss v.]

1 urine.

c.1386 Chaucer Wife’s Prol. 729: How Xantippa caste pisse vp-on his heed [OED]. 1440 Promp. Parv. 402/1: Pysse, or pysche, urina, minctura. 1596 ‘Misdiaboles’ Ulysses upon Ajax 42: In commendation of p——g, bringing out of Valerius the story of the Cretans who [...] drunk their own p—s. 1604 Dekker The Honest Whore pt. 1 in Works vol. II (1873) I iv: It [sc. tobacco] makes your breath stinke, like the pisse of a fox. 1610 Jonson The Alchemist II iii: With all your broths, your menstrues, and materials, / Of piss, and eggshells, women’s terms, man’s blood. a.1618 J. Harington Epigrams II no. 43: Found meanes to write his mind in excellent verse: / For want of Pen and Inke, with pisse and ordure. 1682 Radcliffe ‘A Call to the Guard by a Drum’ in Poems 64: From your crack’d Earthen Pisspots where no Piss can stay. 1699 ‘The 2nd Part of St. George for England’ in Playford Pills to Purge Melancholy I 331: As birch is soaked first in Piss when Boys are to be whipt. 1708 The Humours of a Coffee-House 16 Jan. 91: Your Sal Volatile Oleosum Man, that makes such a Noise with crying old stinking Piss about the Town. 1733 Anon ‘The Gentleman’s Study’ in The Dublin Magazine 18: Four different Stinks lay there together, Which were, Sweat, Turd, and Piss, and Leather. c.1807 Anon. ‘The Giblet Pye’ (in Bold 1979) 227: Sly Darby, being enraged at this, / Resolved when next they met to seize / The lock that scatters Una’s piss. 1820 Anon. The Bugger’s Alphabet (in Bold 1979) 42: C is the cunt all covered in piss. 1841 Anon ‘The Racehorse’ in The Gentleman Steeple-Chaser 4: What stuff is that your munchin? / Drink water too that stinks like p-ss. 1888-94 ‘Walter’ My Secret Life (1966) X 2083: As my sperm rises I love her, could drink her piss, her blood, so do I long to be incorporate with her. 1916 Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 96: That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. 1922 Joyce Ulysses 161: Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish cigarette smoke, reek of plug, spilt beer, men’s beery piss, the stale of ferment. 1934 H. Miller Tropic of Cancer (1963) 56: The globe was sprayed with warm turtle piss. 1947 D. Davin For the Rest of Our Lives 52: The drunken back streets of Cairo where [...] the gutters stank of piss. 1953 ‘William Lee’ Junkie (1966) 138: It stinks like piss in here. 1963 Dunn Up the Junction 29: The toilet is aswim with piss. 1975 A. Bleasdale Scully 174: Y’all shitbags an’ cack merchants [...] y’all stewin’ in y’own piss. 1981 S. Berkoff Decadence (in Decadence and Other Plays, 1985) 34: He thinks his piss now tastes like wine. 1996 (con. 1970) G. Moxley Danti-Dan in McGuinness (ed.) The Dazzling Dark (1996) II v: My heart pumps piss for you. 2004 T. Winton ‘Cockleshell’ in The Turning (2005) 123: The ointment’s active consituent is urea. He knows what that is. Piss!

2 an act of urination.

1837-8 ‘Toasts And Sentiments’ in The Cuckold’s Nest 48: How very convenient are those corner places, / Which beside every gin shop one sees, / Wherein men may walk to the wall, turn their faces, / And have a good p--s at their ease. 1842 Anon ‘Sally May’ in Nancy Dawson’s Cabinet of Songs 8: At p-ss one day I saw the lass. 1922 Joyce Ulysses 546: Was he insulting you while me and him was having a piss? 1934 H. Roth Call It Sleep (1977) 247: I godda take a piss. 1946 K. Amis letter 15 May in Leader (ed.) (2000) 66: To put a lump of sugar in his mouth or go for a piss. 1952 J. Jones From Here to Eternity (1998) 613: Every time I took a piss I thought I had the clap for sure. 1966 T. Keyes All Night Stand 58: [I] tried to amuse myself by having a piss. 1974 P. Larkin ‘Sad Steps’ in High Windows Groping back to bed after a piss / I part thick curtains. 1989 (con. 1950s-60s) in G. Tremlett Little Legs 99: I told him to stop the car [...] while I have a piss. 1997 Barlay Curvy Lovebox 166: That was that most to-tahly smashing piss I evah have. 2000 Niall Griffiths Grits 170: When wih get back t’mih car ih gors off fer a piss.

3 vaginal fluid.

1865 ‘The Love Feast’ in T.P. Lowry The Stories the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell (1994) 58: When quite undressed, the bower of bliss / Dissolved in one warm rush of piss / Whose briny jet bedewed the nick. 1973 (con. 1940s-60s) ed. Hogbotel & ffuckes ‘Heigh Ho Says Rowley’ in Snatches & Lays 31: C is for cunt all slimy with piss.

4 as drink.

a. any sort of weak or otherwise unpalatable drink, whether alcoholic or non-alcoholic.

1933 ‘George Orwell’ Down and Out in Davison (ed.) Complete Works (1987) I 153: Dat tay in de spike ain’t tay, it’s piss. 1968 K. Amis letter 11 Mar in Leader (ed.) (2000) 694: Food excellent, wine awful piss. 1974 (con. 1960s) R. Price The Wanderers 30: I ain’t drinkin’ any a that orange piss. 1989 D. Waters Heathers [film script] What did you do, put a phlegm globber in it or something? I’m not gonna drink that piss. 1999 K. Sampson Powder 115: He took a gingerly sip of Mâcon Blanc and declared it piss. 2001 N. Griffiths Sheepshagger 184: Whisky, not povo headfuck cheap piss like that.

b. (also pish) an alcoholic drink.

1925 (con. WWI) Fraser & Gibbons Soldier & Sailor Words 224: Pish: Whiskey. Any spirits. 1958 A. Sillitoe Saturday Night 90: You can’t stand up to ’em with all that piss inside you. 1981 J. Wambaugh The Glitter Dome (1982) 15: It’s this Glitter Dome piss you’re drinkin. Irish whiskey, my dick. 1993 I. Welsh Trainspotting 302: A couple of bottles of your best piss . . . and a table for four.

c. beer.

1945 P. Larkin letter 31 Oct. in Thwaite (ed.) Sel. Letters (1992) 110: Your letter found me last night when I came in off the piss: in point of fact I had spewed out of a train window and farted in the presence of ladies. 1977 K. Gilbert (ed.) Living Black 220: Got forty-four gallon drums of bloody metho ‘n all the piss they want. 1999 A. O’Hagan Our Fathers 140: We’ll have two pints of yer best piss. 2004 P. Howard PS, I Scored the Bridesmaids 204: The local piss we’re drinking is called Toohey’s.

5 constr by the, a general intensifier; the essence, the ‘daylights’.

1934 H. Miller Tropic of Cancer (1963) 73: That boss of mine, he bawls the piss out of me if I miss a semicolon. 1942 H. Miller Roofs of Paris (1983) 50: He’s really fucking the piss out of her by this time. 1961 C. Himes Pinktoes (1989) 36: By God, he was going to shock the supremacy piss out of their white-livered bladders. 1972 D. Jenkins Semi-Tough 209: Who the piss wants to know? 1981 J. Bradner Danny Boy 101: How de piss you know owny black man does vote foh de Palmm Tree? 2003 C. Feldmann The Sons of Sheriff Henry 322: Heard? Who the piss hasn't heard!

6 (also pish) rubbish, nonsense, anything or anyone unappealling, worthless.

1947 K. Amis letter 24 Mar. in Leader (ed.) (2000) 123: They show us their pictures, which are UNRELIEVED BAD NINETEENTH CENTURY ANECDOTAL ACADEMY PISS. 1950 K. Amis letter 27 Nov. in Leader (ed.) (2000) 249: Have you read Eliz. Taylor’s A wreath of roses? Piss, but two or three sodding funny scenes. 1963 K. Amis letter 2 Apr in Leader (ed.) (2000) 623: Bawled ‘piss’ and other unspeakables at a young British poet and globe-trotter, who I thought was a great piss-talker. 1974 C. Eble Campus Slang March 5: piss [...] Billy’s getting an A on that test was a real piss. 1991 O.D. Brooks Legs 44: If you dump that swamp piss like I told you, I’ll fill that pot with the best alky you ever drank. 1998 I. Welsh Filth 227: The telly is fuckin pish as usual. 2000 T. Udo Vatican Bloodbath 66: ‘We, as prodisents, don’t believe any of that shite’ ‘Aye,’’ said one of the gang members. ‘It’s pish.’

7 in fig. use, high spirits.

1964 Jim Thomson Pop. 1280 in Four Novels by Jim Thompson (1983) 381: ‘Fellas would get all full of piss an’ high spirits and take right off after them.’ 1994 T. Willocks Green River Rising 161: His time in the infirmary had taken all the piss out of him.

C.1 attrib.

piss-burned discoloured, esp. of a grey wig which has turned yellow.

1686 A. Behn The Lucky Chance II i: A cloak to skulk in a-night, and a pair of piss-burned shammy breeches. 1691 N. Ward ‘The Authors Lamentation’ in Writings (1704) (2 edn) 23: My coat it is turn’d, with the Lappets Piss-Burn’d. 1742 H. Fielding Joseph Andrews (1954) III 274: A long piss-burnt beard served to retain the liquor of the stone-pot. 1788 Grose Classical Dict. of the Vulgar Tongue (2 edn) n.p.: Piss-burned. Discoloured: commonly applied to a discoloured grey wig. 1796 in Grose Classical Dict. of the Vulgar Tongue (3 edn). 1811 in Lex. Balatronicum [as Grose 1796]. 1823 in Egan Grose’s Classical Dict. of the Vulgar Tongue.

piss-easy (orig. N.Z.) very easy.

1988 Viz Oct./Nov. 2: Oh, fuck that Tom! It’s piss easy. 2000 J. Connolly Layer Cake 9: I reckon it [i.e. drug dealing] must look very inviting, like piss-easy money, which it is when all goes well. 2003 in McGill Reed Dict. of N.Z. Slang.

piss-in-the-wind pointless, time-wasting.

1997 Simon & Burns The Corner (1998) 474: The politicians and profesionals are still offering up the kind of piss-in-the-wind optimism that compels any rational mind to recall another, comparable disaster.

piss over teakettle head-over-heels.

1998 in Guardian Sport 2 Oct. 16: A nice sharp right-hander on the chin, sent him piss over teakettles, spark out on the greensward.