 I'm going to put that back on this. So, it's a stereo mic. Yeah, I'm going to put it back on. No, I'm going to test this right here. Oh, you know. It's great. We need 500. Okay, no problem. Thank you. We're going to start with a conversation about 5 minutes. This is most... This is currently portioned. We're not getting anything there. Oh, it's because you're using the black. You're using the green over here. We're going to have to monitor the volume levels through. There. All right, why don't you do that then? Yeah, I just met two of your directors. I went down for my thesis. Congratulations. Oh, I should try to get up with them while I'm there. Of course, my name's... But the last show that we created... So, Magwampan has existed since 2004, and we create all of our work from scratch. We work through an ensemble devising process where we choose a theme or perhaps a person, something that catches our interest and really peaks our curiosity as the basis for creating our work. And then we just do a lot of research on that topic and come into the rehearsal room without a script, without a real notion of what precisely we're going to make and together just start bashing our heads and bodies together until something play-like starts to emerge. And so this year we have chosen as our topic American prophecy, which from the beginning sort of beg the questions, what do we mean by American and what do we mean by prophecy? What are some of those approaches that we could take to those ideas? And very early on, after we selected the theme, we happened to run across a book that Greel wrote, which is... Jeremiah, Isaiah, you know, said, you know, violated the covenant, broken all the promises you made to God. It has nothing to do with predicting the future. It has nothing to do with saying, you know, where we prophecy in America, again going back to the Old Testament tradition, is about judgment. And the Old Testament is God who will judge those who violate the promises they've made to God. But in America you have a situation where people, as you were just saying, have entered into a compact with each other, a compact that finds all the generations to follow. And that as one, you know, becomes, grows up, becomes a citizen, becomes aware of the country that she is part of. And so it's a matter of promises people make to themselves that they break among themselves. But there's no God who's going to judge them. There's no supreme one as we show up in our appointed dates wanting. We have to judge ourselves individually or as a group. It's the name of a fictional group from a movie that was really good. I shouldn't have been, but it was. I don't focus on, and I guess I'm not that interested in prophets. The key figures who I look at and then it, you know, all sorts of people emerge from this are John Winthrop, the founding governor of Massacre Abraham Lincoln, and Alan Ginsberg. And these are all people, it seemed to me, who are wrestling with this question of promises and judgment. And how we as a people work out our own damnation or forgiveness. There's no salvation, there's no, and is a made up country. It's symbolically made up, founded over and over and over again. The founding of the Puritan community in 1630 in Massachusetts is legal and official and real, in a sense, with the Constitution in 1787. The nation is refounded again by, directly, if America is to become a great nation, it's going to have to live up to the promises it made in its founding. There's no equal justice under the law for all. A chance for everyone to find out who he or she, concrete evils are bad. We shouldn't have them, we should get rid of them. Well, it's just not that simple. And, you know, people think of New England as the hotbed of abolitionism in the 1840s and 1850s. It wasn't true at all. New England was as ferocious in its persecution of abolitionists as any part of the country. It's bad as Kansas. And I just don't think that's a useful way of going about any discussion. You know, like I said, I'm prejudiced against Cornel West, you know, I see him saying that the role of prophecy is to name concrete evils. Well, I will be the prophet, I will name the evils. Martin Luther King, when he, in the months before his address to the march on Washington, was giving versions of the speech that he would later give in Washington, D.C., in August, Detroit and in other places. And when you read them today or listen to them because you can hear recordings of them, they are bombast and they are, you know, someone all becomes about him. And he says, I, I, I will drive through the mountain of despair and come out the other side, and maybe you, like the children in the wake of the hole, I blasted through the mountain like John Henry. And, and when he, when he, you know, begins to bring those themes extemporaneously into his, he disappears and he disappears. And that becomes a speech that everybody listening, white, black, young, old, people, you know, who weren't born then, can enter into as they, as that never, that never changes. You know, I've been reading a book called The Stammering Century. It was written by Gilbert Seldies, who was a cultural critic in 1923, I think, called The Seven Lively Arts. And it really was the template for criticism of popular culture in America from that time on down. He doesn't have any books with him. There are no DVDs. There's no internet. He, he doesn't have any material to work with because he's going to write about Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, all of which are still part of the American cultural conversation. I mean, he, he hit the right marks. But he has nothing to work with except his memory. So he writes this book about Charlie Chaplin routines and Sophie Tucker. And it's all, you know, all in his head. So then he writes a book called The Stammering Century, which after the huge success of The Seven Lively Arts is completely ignored. And disappears as if it's never been. And what it's about, it's a history of revivalism, religious cults, utopian communities, and radical reformers in the United States. And then a promise that will ultimately expand to include all sorts of people who maybe it was never contemplated to include. But once the cat's out of the bag, there's nothing you can do about it. And that's what Martin Luther King is saying. And Alan Ginsberg in the middle of the Vietnam War in 1966, traveling across Kansas in the very center of the country. He's there, you know, giving poetry readings at colleges and universities. He's not, he's not making a heroic quest, except he is. That's what he turns it into in his great poem, Wichita Vortex Sutra, which he's composing as he's riding in a Volkswagen van around Kansas and Nebraska. You know, pulling in stuff off the radio, whether it's songs or news reports. And he says, I come to Kansas, he is the only one of Lincoln, Winthrop religious figure. You know, it's a long, varied poem with many different kinds of voices. And, you know, in different times, Ginsberg, when he performed it, it would become a very different kind of poem. I once taught a class about this poem, and in fact, I didn't exactly teach it. I turned it over to the students that you teach the class. We reached a point in the course where students could pick up that ball and run with it. And I invited, as a class at Princeton, I invited Bruce Springsteen to come. He had wanted to come to a class, and this was the only one that was going to work. So I said, okay, you know, I've got to read the poem, got to listen to this recording. And he came and, but then immediately the mask of cool comes down and, you know, no one is going to oo an ah. And Bruce came into this room with an argument he wanted to make about the meaning of the poem and the idea of profiting people at ease and drawing people out and not, you know, he's the opposite of a blow hard. So he never said anything except in response to something someone else said. But the argument he came into, you know, I come here lone man from the void to Kansas to make prophecy. What that argument is about is that I come to you, to Kansas, come to you as a Jewish, commie, queer, dope fiend, to claim full citizenship, to claim that I have the right to speak this. The ambition to speak prophecy, to prophesy, to prophesy about the United States or anything else is grandiose, but it's also modest. So it's just saying this is what we as citizens have to do. This is part of our obligation. Motives are always mixed and confused. There are executioners and victims, and the lines aren't always as clear as they might be. I think, you know, I'm not a big fan of Cornel West, and I don't trust people whose mode is self-promotion. And I think that's a lot of what Cornel West is about. And so to say Matthews, but who renamed himself Matthias and proclaimed himself Jesus Christ and the king of the world, and who ruled over what he called his kingdom, which was a single house in New York City with six disciples. And yet in this tiny little, you know, almost cell, he became a national figure, a subject of incredible scandal. His only legacy after the whole thing blew up, he committed to murders, like so many American religious cult leaders, he realized the community belonged to him. It's something you see happening over and over again, not just with Joseph Smith or Brigham Young, but David Koresh, Jim Jones, fell apart once his victims died. The only one who never renounced him, the only one who never turned her back on him even after he disappeared, which was a community that was completely communistic that involved the spiritual wives, the polygamy, or rather all people held in common with everyone else and was enormously successful, I mean successful monetarily in real American terms, they made a huge amount of money. And held together in a really astonishing way. And at one point, Saldis, after laying out all the spiritual principles that are binding these people together and that are guiding them towards salvation, he says it's not that the doctrine is hard to understand because it makes absolute sense within its own frame of reference. What's hard to understand is that anybody believed it. But by this time, he has so sucked you in that you're saying, yeah, right, he just lulled you into this trance. You know, when you start a country with a declaration of independence and you put in there that it is not only your right, but your obligation to pursue happiness alone, together, there's no limit to what that could possibly mean. And then when you say in the preamble to the Constitution that the purpose is to form a more perfect union, you are going to have people as long as that country lasts saying, yes, and I can create a more perfect union than the one everybody seems to think is okay. And that's why I'm going here and we're going to start this community and we're going to create our own nation symbolically that will save the world. And that's going to happen over and over again. And Saldis is telling the story of how great tradition, great deep impulse, you know, collapses into degradation and self-parody and corruption and manipulation over the course of 100 years. And he says, so I've told the story of failure after failure after failure and, you know, maybe all of this should just be forgotten. Maybe we should burn every manuscript I've quoted. And then he sort of ends the book by saying, but, dot, dot, dot. And what he means is I love all these people. I want to be there in every moment. I want to see this happening. And, you know, it becomes a very inspiring story. I mean, the shakers, mother Ann Lee coming over from Manchester in I guess the 1770s or maybe 1780, bringing her little tribe of heretics, people who are acting out a heresy, a Christian heresy that goes back to the 13th century, comes over to America. And what is this about? That there's sin in the world. And the only way, and yet we can all be, not like Jesus Christ, we can all be Christ. It's possible for all of us to be free of sin. But the only way for us to be free of sin is to create a world in which there will be no more sin. And since human beings are by nature sinful, the only way to create this world and ensure the second coming of Jesus Christ is to create a world where there will be no more people. And thus she creates a community of celibates who are going to spread and spread and spread until finally all people are part of it and no more children will be born in the world and then Jesus will return. You can't really come up with anything crazier than that. You can't come up with a doctrine less likely that sounds like a really good idea. And yet it was enormously successful. In the 1820s, 1830s, even the 1840s, there were shaker communities all over the eastern part of the United States and particularly in the south they kept on growing. And there may even be half a dozen left, people, five communities in the country. There's one community left in Maine and there are five of them lost. Although two people joined last year. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know. I mean, I have developed a little obsession with this kind of how fascinating the shakers are and in particular the way that they were actually sort of spreading their message and Mother Anne was traveling around New England and upstate New York converting people during the Revolutionary War and that was sort of the context in which she was doing her work and yet they were being constantly persecuted for a number of things within that context. And it just, I don't know, it's something, I think it resonates for me with what you talk about in your book about the promise, the betrayal of the promise of America being embedded in the promise somehow. Well yeah, I mean when you founded a nation on promises that are so vast that all people should be free. That all people are free to pursue happiness as they define it. That all are equal under the law. But those promises are so great and so limitless that their betrayal is inevitable. Their active betrayal, you can say even people's betrayal or simply the failure of people to bring within themselves the notion of a compact between people that those kinds of promises imply and thus treat other people with the respect and deference that they deserve just to put it on the most personal level. But it's because those promises are so vast and because they were expressed in language that is so beautiful that they never lose their luster and they never lose their glow. And so the betrayal of the promise becomes the engine for its fulfillment. It's only when people say, no this isn't what America is supposed to be. No, America promised me this and it's all been taken from me my entire life. I believed in America but America lied to me. That's something that's being said from the 1780s to this very day over and over and countless different languages and what happens is people then say I'm going to make this country live up to its promises. I'm going to act out this in my own life I'm going to work with other people I'm going to stand on the street and rant I'm going to stand up at the pulpit of my own church or run for office and say these things I'm going to publish a newspaper like William Lloyd Garrison the great abolitionist editor whatever it takes and so that becomes it is the betrayal that becomes the engine of fulfillment we look at the United States today and it's very easy to see particularly in things like the Patriot Act and all the laws and legal doctrines that have grown up around it or flowed from it we can easily make an argument I think it would be a false argument but it's easy to make that we are living in a time that is less free or more unfree than ever before in the history of this country and that a president can order American citizens killed without trial without anything and people are now debating well yeah certainly it's okay in Yemen but what about Indiana well who knows maybe that on the order of the president any individual can be held indefinitely without charge forever those are big things those are absolutes so we can make that argument that not only has America betrayed its promises that it's a government of laws and the laws that we all have to respect and we all understand what their meaning is but given our situation today that had to be a fraud from the beginning you can also look at the United States today you can point to all the different kinds of people who in years past whether it's 100 years past or 200 years past or 10 years past did not have the legal rights that they have today did not have the visibility in society that they have today did not have not only the opportunity but the expectation that there was no profession that was closed to them no form of human endeavor that was closed to them where in the past that prohibition would be absolute and you can go down the list you can say women black people former slaves the Irish Jews homosexuals and thousands of groupings stigmatized groupings within that kind of list and you're looking at a very different kind of country than would have been imaginable in 1800, in 1850, in 1900 in 1950, in 1970 and you can say this country has you know against all odds and with people giving up their lives and with battles resisted at every turn and no battle ever finished and no victory ever ever finally won or lost that we are living in a country that has more fully kept its promises and is more free today than it ever was before I'm not saying that's true that's an argument that you can make with real force so it's an open question it seems to me that the sanctions against the freedom of George Bush initiate the terror attacks in Citadel or are they still involved? What do you think about the global crisis? Well the question was did the sanctions I'm going to use your wording the sanctions against freedom promulgated by or in the time of George W. Bush after the terrorist attacks in 2001 are they still operative? And yeah, they all are just about all of them as a black man has seen a defundination it's been taken up you know against his birth certificate also if there's an obvious statistic the powers that the people who fought for Bush to have are now opposed to the president having much more power because it's not due to his birth No, I don't think so I think it's simply because there's a black man in the White House period it doesn't have anything to do with his having more power than a black president would have had 10 years ago I don't think so I'm wondering if any members of the ensemble have any questions that they want to I'm just curious I mean because President Obama has brought up just now and the fact that the book was published before he was elected and because you speak very pointedly about Lincoln's second inaugural address and the things that he says in that that nobody would say now in terms of basically how are we ever going to make reparations for the evil I'll use that word I'm completely paraphrasing but evil of slavery and will we ever be able to do it and just I don't know whether you would have any reflection on the things that you speak about in the book in light of now having an African-American in the White House well it's not just an African-American it is an African-American in a way that we don't normally use the term in other words the son of an African father and an American mother and his father was never an American citizen so you know it takes on a new wrinkle not that most people think about it that way no reason why they necessarily should but Barack Obama as a senator and as a candidate you know prophecy is about eloquence prophecy is about language prophecy is about how you put words together in a way that tell people something they already know but in a way they never before even glimpsed saying something that in anybody else's hands anybody else's words might seem obvious might seem matter of fact might seem unimportant suddenly becomes of transcendent importance and you desperately want to understand this concept this argument even just this phrase to its bottom and that was something that Barack Obama did both at the Democratic Convention before he ran for president and then in his speech when he was being attacked for his association with Jeremiah Wright in Chicago you know where he essentially invited the whole nation to a campfire talk about racism and the whole nation sits around this campfire listening really listening and actually hearing what's being said because what's being said is has you know it becomes a story that everybody not only is part of but wants to be part of and that storytelling aspect that to me you know I'm not alone I haven't heard that since Obama became president and you know that that was true with Bill Clinton too he was much bigger as a candidate in 1992 than he was as a president in 1993 or 1994 and it was only when the republicans shut down the government you know that he could become Captain Ahab and actually rise to a new occasion so you know Barack Obama had and probably has within him that prophetic strain that ability to speak of things and to say who are we what is this about Bill Clinton did that after the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995 when he went to Oklahoma City an extraordinary address where he he attacked and he said you know there's something wrong here and there's specific people who are doing the wrong and we have let this country get away from us and and it was a frightening speech in a way that a prophetic address has to be you know when Obama was elected on election night when he gave his acceptance speech in Grant Park in Chicago he managed to weave together quotes from or allusions to George Washington Abraham Lincoln Martin Luther King Sam Cook in a way that you know I think some people said my god did he just quote Sam Cook and other people were saying that's so familiar that reminds me of something and he was you know taking people into a collective American memory and yet the country was no less racist the day after he was elected than it was the day before he was elected that was not going to change maybe many people like me were naive in thinking that you know their reaction would not be so complete and total you know when the supreme court ruled in 1954 against school segregation very very quickly the south applied itself and declared a policy of massive resistance we will resist this in every way possible you know they they didn't actually come out to say and we will you know kill people burn churches and drive people out of their houses which of course they did along with every kind of legal and illegal official act but I wasn't expecting the Republican party would immediately go back to massive resistance because you know not just a Democrat in the White House but a black a Democrat that's just too much and that's the battle we're fighting not to say what side anybody should be on I'm wondering you want to ask about the root mechs oh yes I would love to talk about that so the the root mechanicals is that their full name or is it just root mechs they've been going by root mechs for quite a while yeah they're a company in Austin, Texas root mechanicals is a term referred to street preachers in England in the 16th and 17th centuries 17th century who would just be there on the street you know just spouting dogma and doctrine to the point where people called them rude mechanicals because they were rude and obnoxious and they were like automatons just machines of prophecy so that's what their name is about and they create they create work in a very similar way to how we do without necessarily a script but through collaborative creation and they in 2000 did you say created a show based on another one of Greil's books called lipstick traces and the subtitle is a secret history of America is that it? the 20th century it's a little modest and yeah that just fascinated me because I've met with them before and talked about work before and I would just would love to hear about what your process was like and working with them and how involved in the process you were I had nothing to do with it at all the rude mechanicals in 2000 were theater group that had been going a number of years three or four I guess and the principals in the company were Sean Sides and Lana Leslie and Kirk Lynn who was the main writer and that was 12 years ago and that company is still together that nucleus and nucleus of other people too you know they're still part of that group they have really founded their own community and it has lasted you know no one has gone off to other opportunities you know whether God I've really got to make some money and start teaching school or maybe I should go back to graduate school or I've got this offer from a company in Boston none of that has happened these people are still working together and they one play one person will be the director and another an actor and in the next play their roles will be switched there's a rotation of tasks that's just essential to you know bringing out the best in everybody and one of the company Kirk Lynn I guess contacted my agent and said they wanted to do a theatrical adaptation of this 500 page book which just seemed to me totally insane so I said sure I don't want to have anything to do with this I don't want to read the script I don't want to prove anything if you have a factual question I'll answer it but I don't want to I don't want to discuss it I don't want to talk about the true meaning of this or that I just want to see what you make of it and when I finally saw it this 500 page book boiled down to I think 70 minutes they had staged the book I had wanted to write and failed to it was just the most it brings tears to my eyes to even talk about how gratifying it was and how thrilling and that was really true there was a spirit that I could never quite get into the book and they did I had nothing to do with it I made no contribution at all and one of the most remarkable things about it it premiered in in Austin and played in Austin and then in Houston over I guess a two year period and then it went to New York for six weeks and I guess in 2002 and there was a New York actor named David Greengrass who played Malcolm McLaren and he was just uncanny as Malcolm McLaren and his unctuousness and his accent and his superiority and his sort of hidden gleefulness it was really something so the next morning after the premiere I got a phone call and my wife said it's someone's saying he's Malcolm McLaren and so I took the phone and I'm talking to this person who's raving about what a great performance David Greengrass had given it was me and I know it's Greengrass calling up as a prank call to sort of praise himself no but it turned out it was Malcolm and he wanted to mount a production of this play in London where he would play himself and so inspired so that's that's how good these people these people are never happened but it really does and in our last few minutes I want to open it up to questions for any guests who are here as well if you have any for Greil or for us about our process you could probably tell if you ask me how many pennies it takes to make a nickel that I'll go on for 20 minutes I can also answer briefly and talk about small things so when I read your email inviting me to this then there's a little sidebar would you contribute ideas so I was thinking what would I say some of the images of modernity that just always sticks in my mind is this a shore bird wading in a pond in a parking lot and so it's doing what it instinctively knows how to do it's like in the gutter or it's on so and then I'm thinking putting that forward a friend of mine who is a musician has redone the website and and she's sending it to people but most people have like little iPhones and with these small monitors and she says they're not even paying any attention to the bulk of the website because it doesn't fit in the window and most people are not really reading email texts because it takes too long to scroll through it so the question I guess is is social media satisfying social instincts I mean in other words this group seems very satisfying for a social animal but when I write to friends on my Facebook some communication goes across but is the water too shallow are we really getting nourished and sustained in this kind of thing I appreciate the benefits of it like to see what somebody is doing in the Sahara or at the same time checking with somebody in Iceland so there's this kind of bringing together our disability to look around and see what lots of other people are doing but so I guess and then since I'm on the stage I want to know the friend of mine this morning and because what are some of the anecdotes or what are some of the old ways of doing things and she says well the quilting people used to get together we will and then it came like sewing beads and she said get together and sew and now she's a knitter so she gets together three or four times a week and they have tea in the night and they sit down in the circle and they chat with each other about things so that's a kind of a working social network so I guess that's all I wanted do you have any idea like how to I guess I'll go back to that image of a short period of time it's like so beach has been paved over our ability to to seek nourishment out of our environment is substantially limited are we really going to get the nutrients we need to make helping psychic helpful psychological decisions I mean where do we get healthy nourishment in this environment well I mean that's a big question I can't obviously answer it but it's funny when you told your template story of the shore bird in waiting in a puddle you can see that as you characterize it but you can also see it as the persistence of an impulse that can't be denied and that is incredibly inspiring I mean I spend a lot of time in Minnesota and there are a lot of lakes in Minnesota and when Minnesota says it has 10,000 lakes some of them are about the size of this table and there are birds of all kinds in around these lakes there is something that's not much more than a puddle it's kind of like just a socket of water between a freeway off-ramp and a city street and there are always geese in it always and it's like what are they doing in this godforsaken puddle when half a mile over there's a real big expansive lake well this is their puddle this is their lake and I think there is a human instinct to communicate and to to say forbidden things say things you're afraid to say because you desperately want to know how someone is going to react and you hope and fear what that reaction will be I don't think that is going to be denied you know when I was growing up I was told when I got old enough to read more than Jack and Jill I would constantly read that watching television as much as people my age were doing was going to actually change brain chemistry and was going to shrink the ability to apprehend broader realities and that which could be presented in a 25 minute sitcom and so on and so forth and you know when I was about 21 or 22 and I would talk to people my age in college and we talk about TV shows that we watched when we were kids and I realized that there probably wasn't a show on in the 1950s there were only a few channels that I didn't see because it never happened that someone would say did you ever see such and such episode of whatever and say no I didn't see that yeah sure and my brain somehow had an attitude I think it's very easy to overrate the present let's put it that way whatever the present might be a lot of our explorations in our rehearsals have been regarding the ecstatic state and ecstasy and sort of a profit or a prophecy's relationship with it and that always hasn't presented itself in terms of language or words and you you reference prophecy being related to eloquence and something about making something specific giving people a sense of something that sounds familiar to them and it reminded me of a definition I've heard for poetry and I might not be pronouncing his name right but Irwa Sawade said making the poetry is making the unique universal they sounded very similar to me and I just wondered if you could speak to the relationship of poetry and prophecy and how they're different than each other well it's a really wonderful question I mean so often in the revivals in the 19th century when the preacher or the prophet people so often present themselves as I am the prophet when they preached they sent their audiences into such frenzies that the descriptions again from Gilbert Selda's book The Stammering Century are absolutely terrifying and hard to believe and yet you struggle to believe there's what people went through the kind of states of ecstasy, transportation that people went through it's like watching the exorcist as something that thousands instead of Linda Blair we've got thousands of people and this is the best event of their whole lives they don't need to be exercised they've already met Jesus they've already become Jesus that's what's going on Normano Brown was a great philosopher in the 1950s and 60s he wrote two important books Love's Body I mean Life Against Death which is about the death instinct and Love's Body which is about the human instinct to express itself through poetry and he argues like so many people at the end of the 19th century the symbolist poets argued that the goal of poetry is silence to reach a point where words are so perfectly balanced that they almost don't speak they are like air and language becomes something that we breathe and not something that we ever speak there is a strain of prophecy that obviously goes in the same direction that's what speaking in tongues is about where you have to transcend language and you have to reach a point where what you were saying is absolutely untranslatable and yet completely clear to everyone who's listening and you know those are far mystic realms and I think for the project that you have there is attention there is a conflict there is a war going on between eloquence the eloquence of Lincoln in his second inaugural address which is one of the great religious addresses in our history and the urge to get beyond language the only way to say the unsayable to speak the unspeakable is either to reach a point where the only decent communication the only communication that shows your respect for those you're speaking to and the respect you hope to get from them is to say nothing to appear and say nothing and yet you know that doesn't seem to show up and I'm not talking to that it is a spiritual quest and I could see a wonderful scene where you have on the one hand somebody speaking with fabulous eloquence you can't turn away from with such tremendous beckoning power and yet his audience or her audience dissolving into into a state beyond or even before language and in a certain sense ceasing to be human you know when you read the descriptions what people did at revivals in Kentucky and and Missouri and Tennessee in particular in the stammering century you have you know in some ways like Bonnaroo you've got like six stages you've got creatures on different stages and people wandering around going from one preacher to another and reaching a point where you know not only are people coming forward shouting that they're saved that they believe but it starts there and then as the night goes on people begin to bark like dogs you see packs of people on all fours running around and grabbing other people stripping off their clothes you have orgies going on they're people dancing possessed by the spirit to the point and Seldas is quoting this eyewitness account and I just didn't believe it I still don't believe it where a man is dancing shaking his head around and pounding his hands into the dirt and he's doing flipping over on his back and finally he's whirling his head around with such strength that his neck cracks he snaps his own neck you know he really is and I just well put that on stage I've done it sorry sorry and you were talking about definitions part of this is a question to go back to because when I hear prophecy maybe it's from doing a lot of Latin taking my class I think about the future pointing aspect a lot of the discussion we've had here has been about things that I would more think in the class of cults and with a prophetic aspect to the rhetoric around it but I'm curious about and as such a lot of these things have to do with rules in the now for the followers of the prophets so I guess I'm curious maybe one, zero maybe what brought this thing to mind other than whether we're in the book or you're searching for two of those various strains of what the prophecy can mean well I mean so the first part where it came from really I mean we last year we sat down together and said well what are we going to create next year 2012 and immediately it was like apocalypse and we talked about that briefly and it felt way too on the nose for us but it developed into what is that about and why does this sort of apocalyptic aside from just the end of the Incan calendars Mayan, thank you but there seems to be a lot of rhetoric in the air right now about we are hurtling towards a precipice of some kind and it seems to be particularly strong in America I mean you know there was Harold Camping in Oakland who was saying that the world was going to end a number of months ago and they didn't know a number of months later a lot of people didn't notice well and then he had a stroke and I sort of didn't notice that the world ended so probably you know to kind of gestalt yeah absolutely he was anticipating his own world ending exactly yeah like he was he says he's saying the world is going to end and in a way it was just his own world that was coming to an end and then going to be slower and quieter than I thought it was and he also said maybe I'm just not a very good prophet that's great it's a pretty that's pretty rude but I'm sorry remind me Michael so to what extent is the future looking aspect of it to what extent is the potential doom or what extent maybe because again some of the things we talked about today I think there's a lot more active function or focus on the now I've shown towards the future of the prophet it's now because of that now I own all the women well it makes me think of a book that you've referenced before that was inspiring for you as the American Jeremiah which I've only looked at very briefly it's another earlier book from the 70's was it late 70's yeah by Sacvan Sacvan it was one of the most interesting names in all of American history his parents were very active in the fight to save Sacco and Benzetti and so they named him after Sacco and Benzetti like Sacvan but he says he quotes an early I guess minister or preacher named Danforth saying that and I'm totally paraphrasing here and probably getting it somehow wrong that prophecy is just history seen in reverse and history is just prophecy seen in reverse and there's a there's a way that I think that we're feeling interested in you know in both sides of that lens and we've talked a lot about how there seems to be a tendency in America through this constant self-reinvention that means that there's sort of sloughing off of history and and that part of what prophecy has to say perhaps is a reminder of the history that's come before and then perhaps the consequences that we're living through now and that extend into the future that's one idea of an approach I think that we're taking but we're definitely interested in in yeah the present moment as the meeting of history and the future and that's interesting is because it's been sort of leader-focused sort of these there's also this sort of thing where it is and it could still be leaders I guess but it's sort of the individual way for an individual to process something is to go into this aesthetic prophetic sort of thing one thing you might want to check out is Kenneth Patchen's book The Journal of Albany and Life which is basically a journal a fantastic journal that he kept during whatever the summer was the summer that World War II was breaking out are you really a I don't know the book yeah so we're either talking about 39 or 41 yeah 41 I believe yeah well it's been too long so I've read the but it's interesting because he goes into this aesthetic spastic he's a big like guy and so he's channeling some prophetic and you know things are I don't know it's but he kind of explodes outside the lines of what a normal novel are and we both kind of in every way and it's so it's a similar kind of of thing it's not and so it's less about successfully predicting anything necessarily it's about seeing visions of what could happen based on current events but it's ultimately maybe like the fellow critic in the world as well well Donald calls the one day I haven't read the book you're talking about but it sounds you know like it has great kinship with that because it is you know it is the most static the most static and horrific visions that are just appearing in the most prosaic and ordinary situations and that just loom up like monsters on the freeway it's tremendous stuff did you have a question? I actually wanted to ask you a follow up question what you're saying earlier about Mr. Trace's staging one what was it that made you feel compelled about this they had accomplished with the book you had meant to write you elaborate on that because too I was at the performance in New York several times and every time I was there were really just absolutely static afterwards and many friends of mine were in successful bands started as a result so it had this kind of full circle of seeing six pistols in this right and so there's this mise en scene happening where the play does your boat explaining to the audience see life is theater we don't really like no doorway and it happens and this kind of magical thing happens so I don't know if you've had scenes of Montreal and if that resonates because your film knowledge is so obvious I don't know that but never mind if I'll just take a point one well you know they had a spirit of look here I am trying to write this book about radical nihilist movements throughout the 20th century and going back to the brethren of the free spirit in the middle ages just all over the place and I've done the research and I sort of have my fingers in a a dozen different pies and I have no idea how this is going to be a story what it's about and I sat down one day and I wrote a play where where all the characters in the book appear in the same nightclub at the same time and they're constantly fighting with each other over the stage and leaping on the stage pushing somebody off and the person fights their way back you know it wasn't very long but it got everything together and it had a spirit of just don't give a damn I'm not trying to make a point I'm not trying to prove anything I just want to make something happen and it doesn't have to have any meaning at all and I was never able to get the spirit of that afternoon fully into the book their moments but the book became something else and the people in the Root Max read the book and what they read what spoke to them were these filaments of anarchy and nihilism in my own writing and arguments rather than the arguments themselves and so that's what they drew on and they said well if we're going to tell this ridiculously complex and false story taking place over all this time well we obviously have to do it simultaneously and we have to have characters who not only never met each other never heard of each other but who lived in completely different eras and one is dead before the other is born we're going to have to show them sitting around in a table and talking or getting into a screaming match and how do we show what went on at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916 there's a lot of poetry readings there's some dances there's sort of little plays and they come up with something that is visually absolutely you can't take your eyes off and it's moving so fast you have no idea what is going on and you forget the fact that nothing like this would have ever happened in the Cabaret Voltaire the idea is to think of the things that the data has forgot to do or didn't get around to and that's just what they did and there was nothing cheap for example what I mean by cheap Phil Kaufman had a movie on HBO recently called Hemingway and Gellhorn it's about the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and the war corresponded Martha Gellhorn in the mostly in the 30s and I think it's an absolutely wonderful picture but there's one moment something in the Spanish Civil War some soldier does something and the Hemingway character says well that's really grace under pressure taking this famous Hemingway line making it into dialogue and it just sticks out like someone raised the red flag up the pole it's so obvious and hokey and there was nothing in their play like that there was no key to the audience something the audience would know we know that in reference I don't mean to the book nothing like that at all it was too fast it was fast didn't you think? yeah I have a question does anyone know open class action lawsuit against Google for stealing all intellectual information since the Sanskrit text putting it online for free so you can either read half my book for free with the Google app or you can buy it and guess what people aren't buying it it's just so Eric I mean it's like I saw the Sergio Grin on the the evolution show and he just donated $145 million to some scientific research you know and so this to just take all intellectual information and put it online for free without anyone's knowledge I had looked at the website where my book is with ex-leaders for like a year and a half and it was so disgusting with the digital van press nightmare and then I find 70 pages of the novel are online for free so sales were never great to begin but Jesus that's it I mean it's like and so every work of intellectual property is online for free and I don't see people riding the streets you know they're just absolutely inferiority and then I've talked to some people who have tried to reason with me saying well maybe if they read 70 pages of the 235 pages they'd be prompted to buy it but I don't think so and this one class action suit Office Guild New York is closed I pleaded with them for me to be including that but I mean this is just you know internet fraud internet nightmare you know does anyone have any questions I mean I've heard a lot of grumbling more than grumbling a lot of outrage about that and I mean it does make me think of something that we were talking about in rehearsal yesterday of like you know what is the thing that might push one personally so far that they make it a decision to go to just go all in basically to really radicalize like what is that what is the thing that's going to allow somebody to sort of go all in to go past this sort of a point where they leap off that cliff where from I'm just going along in my comfort and in society and something is just one step too much and I have to I have to just face the fear of throwing myself all the way in I mean I think that there are so many things right now that could inspire somebody to that could inspire somebody to ride in the streets and that's yeah I mean I understand the only way to fight the behemoth and fat nature is with a class action lawsuit so I mean I will file one myself because I'm such a frustrated old queen the publishing industry is so frustrated to begin with to get anything but I mean this just absolutely blows me away and I did not get involved sooner because of my own just advocacy and I never thought well look up your own book you idiot and that's why why bother and then here it is 70 pages there is you know cute little google app thing to push a little button and there's the whole thing you know at least half of the book of our lives it's not that we need to question also but yeah but we do need to make this the last question my question is this idea of prophecy and what do you think what are we asking of people and versus where we are today with democratization of information and social media and how do you think that relates on how who are looking to as prophets whereas we all have access to so much information yeah that's an unanswerable question people will always find ways to say things in a manner that seems revelatory and new and some of these people are going to be charlons and some of these people are going to be possessed by their own ecstasy and some of these people are just going to be trying to get something across and we will respond in different ways I really believe that's a human instinct it can't be it can't be suppressed but you know I'm always my most optimist when it comes to questions that large but I am going to have to get back thank you all for being here and thank you so much to Gril Marcus for being here thanks a lot and Gril has to go but if anybody has any questions for us we'll probably stick around