Academia: the larval stage

Yes, this sounds familiar:

Graduate school is not about learning. If you learn things, it’s only because you’ve already internalized the habit of learning, only because you make the effort on your own and in concert with fellow graduate students. You learn because that’s what you do now, that’s your life. ... Graduate school is not education. It is socialization. It is about learning to behave, about mastering a rhetorical and discursive etiquette as mind-blowingly arcane as table manners at a state dinner in 19th Century Western Europe.

Graduate school is cotillion for eggheads.

Ahh. The good old days.

More wisdom available on the question "Should I go to graduate school" available here from Easily Distracted. Something to hand out to those eager young things who enquire about having an 'academic career'.

Matters of Honour(s)

Having never actually read any of his novels (a fact I normally hold in reserve in case I find myself roped into a hard-fought game of 'Humiliation'), I am relatively ill-equipped to judge the merits of the British government's decision to grant Salman Rushdie a knighthood.

I do know, however, that Sir Salman has said a fair number of very sensible things about the world recently. And I recall well the issuing of the fatwa calling for his death, not least since I worked in a bookshop at the time, and the management apparently took seriously the possibility that violence might be visited upon those who sold it. Although the chain that owned the store did continue to sell the book, it was not displayed. We had to keep them behind the counter to be sold only on request. Rather like the porno-mags. In retrospect, I can see this as a small defeat for values I hold dear.

Furthermore, many of the reactions to this announcement (commented upon by Ophelia and Shuggy) are, all by themselves, reason enough to applaud the government's decision, revealing, as they do, the infantile worldview of those would justify murder for fictional 'blasphemy'.

Consider the comments of the Pakistani religious affairs minister, Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, who reportedly said:

"The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title."

The thought that statements like those in his second sentence might be one of the causes of the accusations referred to in his first sentence does not appear to have crossed his mind.

Nonetheless, without wanting to diminish Rushdie's claim on recognition as an artist--and despite my own conviction that 'blasphemy' is among the most pernicious and idiotic concepts ever developed--I couldn't help but think of J. G. Ballard's reaction when, just a few years ago, he was offered a CBE.

He turned it down.

Why? Well, I'll let him explain.

"I might have been tempted had I been entitled to call myself Commander Ballard - it has a certain ring. I could see a yachting cap and a rum ration as perks of the job. If I was French and was awarded the legion of honour, I might well accept. But as a republican, I can't accept an honour awarded by the monarch. There's all that bowing and scraping and mummery at the palace. It's the whole climate of deference to the monarch and everything else it represents. They just seem to perpetuate the image of Britain as too much pomp and not enough circumstance. It's a huge pantomime where tinsel takes the place of substance.

"A lot of these medals are orders of the British Empire, which is a bit ludicrous. The dreams of empire were only swept away relatively recently, in the 60s. Suddenly, we seem to have a prime minister who has delusions of a similar kind.

"It goes with the whole system of hereditary privilege and rank, which should be swept away. It uses snobbery and social self-consciousness to guarantee the loyalty of large numbers of citizens who should feel their loyalty is to fellow citizens and the nation as a whole. We are a deeply class-divided society.

"I think it's deplorable when leftwing playwrights like David Hare, who have worn their socialist colours on both sleeves for so many years, should accept a knighthood. God almighty, this man actually knelt down in front of the Queen.

"I'm in impressive company [in refusing]. Most of them are thoughtful people and people of spirit and independence. It's good to see quite a few showbusiness people, like Albert Finney, a great actor. There were Aldous Huxley, Robert Graves - it suggests there's quite a large number of people who reject the whole notion of honours in their present form. And it might do something towards bringing the whole system down."

(Source: The Guardian)

'Impressive company' indeed: the same year, the excellent playwright and author Michael Frayn not only turned down a knighthood but had also previously refused as CBE; however, he claimed it was out of relatively prosaic motivations:

"I haven't done this for reasons of modesty," he claimed yesterday. "I like the name 'Michael Frayn'; it's a nice little name to run around with. I've spent 70 years getting used to it and I don't want to change it now."

Despite such caveats, however, I do of course wish Sir Salman a long number of years to get used to his new name.

Be careful, sir.

Cultures of Violence

I am pleased to announce (a bit belatedly, but no matter...clocks move more slowly in the academic world) the publication of Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective, edited by Stuart Carroll, now available from Palgrave Macmillan.

Along with some other very fine contributions from internationally renowned scholars, it also includes a chapter from yours truly, entitled 'Conceptualizing Cultures of Violence and Cultural Change', which concludes with the words:

In a seeming paradox, cultures of violence are both robust and fragile. On the one hand, they influence some of the most fundamental beliefs of large numbers of people, thereby playing a role in shaping countless individual conflicts and, alternatively, enabling and repressing many kinds of serious and petty cruelties. However, on an almost daily basis, the contemporary world confronts us with evidence of how rapidly the intricate rules and prohibitions imposed by such cultures can break down. Cultural historians of violence would do well to keep such lessons in mind.

Yes indeed.

From the book's blurb:

Thinkers and historians have long perceived violence and its control as integral to the very idea of 'Western Civilization'. Focusing on interpersonal violence and the huge role it played in human affairs in the post-medieval West, this timely collection brings together the latest interdisciplinary and historical research in the field.

A sample chapter (the introduction, as a .pdf ) is also available.

(And amongst other good stuff, it contains two articles in which decapitation plays a prominent role.)

51st State?

I'm not sure which of the following is more discomforting, this:

So eager is the country to accommodate Mr. Bush that Parliament unanimously approved a bill last month allowing “American forces to engage in any kind of operation, including the use of force, in order to provide security for the president.” One newspaper, reporting on the effusive mood, published a headline that read, “Please Occupy Us!”

Or this:

After the visit on Sunday, some people expect to see a rash of babies named George.

And this, I don't understand at all...

“Nowhere else can you find such respect and hospitality for the president of the United States. Even in Michigan, he wouldn’t be as welcome.”

Even in Michigan, huh. Wow, that's saying something.

I think there's going to be some time that needs to pass before Albania joins the EU.

Under a leader, undoubtedly, named either Bill or George.

(From the New York Times, via Atlantic Review.)

The Crimes of Paris

Yep, that just about nails it:

(From A General Theory of Rubbish, via Shuggy.)

Just thinking....

As anyone who stops in here semi-regularly might have noted, things have gotten a bit slow of late.

This has partly had to do with my need to spend a greater percentage of my limited attention span and my sitting-at-the-computer time (there is only so long I can manage to do that these days...the fucking ageing process, as my mother used to call it, I suppose) on work-related projects and writing.

Which have been going well, so there's one gamble that's paid off.

I've also been travelling a bit, including to London last week. It was a very fine trip, not least since a good friend of mine (with excellent taste in such things) had arranged tickets for a comedy show by Daniel Kitson.

I'd never heard of him, but it was a great evening. But it was also an odd one.

Kitson is very funny, but his humour seems to contain more than a slight undercurrent of feelings that range somewhere between melancholy and outright existential despair. It's an unusual mix, but a very effective one.

At the show I saw, this combination of emotions was amplified by the opening set consisting partly of some excellent songs by a friend of his (whose name I've forgotten but whose music I haven't) which had the kind of effortless heartbreaking quality that many songwriters would kill for. (I can speak from experience...and I was myself quite close to homicidal thoughts on the evening in question.) [UPDATE: Ah, it was Gavin Osborn, whose Myspace...um...space...is here. Great stuff.]

In any case, the cycle of songs about a youthful love that was quietly longed for, forgotten, re-found, carefully tended and, ultimately, cruelly obliterated, was a strange (but lovely, really) appetizer for the comedy that followed.

It's also rare to find comedy that makes you think while still making you laugh at a word like 'cock'.

Kitson's website contains some very worthwhile audio and video files.

Speaking of thinking, though...

Some time ago You Are Here very kindly granted me a 'Thinking Blogger Award', an internet meme that started, appropriately enough, at The Thinking Blog and was aimed at recognising those bloggers that...well, that make you think.

The rules are 1) If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think and 2) Link to the original post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme. Winners get to display the nifty award logo.

I like the thought behind this award and I've been terribly remiss in living up to my part of the deal. So, I thought I'd do my duty and pass along the love...

It's a difficult choice, since I find things that make me think at many blogs, but if I really had to name those that I consistently find worthwhile to visit they would be (in no particular order):

1. Click opera: Momus's blog was actually one of the first ones I read and the one that suggested to me that there was something worthwhile in the whole phenomenon. A very fine mix of keen observation, art, music, philosophy, politics and appropriate solipsism.

2. 'Notes and Comment' (at Butterflies and Wheels): Butterflies and Wheels is one of the few sites that is literally worth looking at every single day to keep up on how things are going in the battle for reason and sanity. (Usually, they're not going all that well...) At the blog, Ophelia Benson comments on the fray. I don't always agree. But I do mostly. And in either case, I find it to be time well spent.

3. Geoff Coupe's Blog: Next to Ophelia's blog, I think I have found more interesting things to read on a regular basis via Geoff than through any other source. And I think in the ability to surprise me with a truly unexpected gem, Geoff takes second place to no one. (And, unlike your humble narrator, he has learned a useful thing or two about brevity.)

4. Fisking Central: Search as you might, it is rare indeed to find a place where the fine arts of argument and sarcasm are more fully developed. Mainly devoted to taking things apart rather than putting them together again...but as Franz Ferdinand has so succinctly put it, 'What's wrong with a little destruction'?

5. Pharyngula: Hardly an obscure link, I know. But really...this is about as good as it gets, thinking-wise. And I can't put it any better than that.

Thanks, all, for the thoughtful times.

And here's looking forward to many more.

Arguing against the gods

For a quite intelligent journal, this is quite a singularly stupid opening sentence:

SINCE arguments about God have run for thousands of years, it is a little peculiar to ascribe overwhelming importance to the publication of Darwin's “On the Origin of Species” in 1859.

No, no, and no.

'Arguments about God' may have been going on for 'thousands of years', but it's only comparatively recently that the arguments against have gained real evidential force.

(Just as was the case with the 'arguments'--including many fairly stupid ones--which raged about things such as the causes of disease until the mid nineteenth century.)

Before there was evidence of a round Earth, arguments about a flat one were on an equal footing.

Before evidence emerged of a heliocentric solar system, the geocentric vision was a somewhat reasonable one.

Before there was a convincing naturalistic argument to explain the development of life on this planet, there was a good reason to believe in fairy tales.

But no more.

And Darwin was a significant part of that shift.

So what's so 'peculiar' about recognising that?

Besides which, Mr. Collins seems like a deeply confused man:

Mr Collins has no time for intelligent design but conceives God to be of the non-interfering sort, a kind of divine CCTV camera. Yet he believes that Jesus was His son and he prays regularly.

Oh yes, sounds like a man to give serious attention to....

Welcome back Jack

Welcome back to freedom.

And here's wishing you a life, and death (not too soon, I hope), with dignity.

Appalling

Well, among the many offensive things in today's Russia, this still somehow manages to stand out:

"We believe these perverts should not be allowed to march on the streets of Moscow, the third Rome, a holy city for all Russians," said Igor Miroshnichenko, who said he was an Orthodox believer who had come to support the riot police.

"It (homosexuality) is satanic," he told Reuters. One man holding a crucifix threatened to beat up any gay person he saw. [NOTE: a fine lesson in Christian virtue, no?]

Richard Fairbrass, a gay singer with the British pop group Right Said Fred, was punched in the face and kicked by anti-gay activists while speaking to Reuters in an interview.

"We understand this is a gay event and so we came down here today," Fairbrass told Reuters before being hit. Blood dripped from his face after the attack.

Volker Beck, a German Green Party politician and gay rights campaigner, was hit in the face with eggs before being detained by riot police. "We didn't do anything," he told Reuters as he was led away.

The rest is here.

Close your minds

Shuggy identifies a peculiar 'concept inflation' afflicting the notion of 'open-mindedness', and he puts in a few, rather convincing words for something we might call 'appropriate intolerance':

Any sort of context seems to have been lost. Looking for a partner? Then you better discriminate against the under-16s. Is the earth flat? We really aren't obliged to be 'open-minded' towards people who think this. Apart from anything else, open-mindedness like this must surely be rather inefficient.

Appropriate closed-mindedness allows doctors not to waste time on the possibilities that the patient before them is ill because they were abducted by aliens the previous evening, or they're possessed by a demon, or have been disabled by a witch-doctor or something. And mechanics can fix cars more quickly if they dismiss the suggestion that engine failure is down to fact that the driver's ying was out of sync with his yang.

The topic was homeopathy; the truth is universal.

Be good now...

There are very good, non-theistic reasons for being 'good'. In fact, more than necessary.

As Matt M. explains:

I to – being human – have a number of “immoral” urges. So why don’t I act on them? Hmmm… perhaps because doing so would more than likely leave me friendless, jobless, hunted by the police and wracked by guilt at the misery I’d caused.

At what point does that become attractive?

Immoral acts – i.e. acts which cause pain and/or suffering to others – are attractive only to psychopaths. The rest of us, regardless of our metaphysical beliefs, have plenty of good reasons – internal and external – for avoiding them.

As Stan Lee used to say: nuff said?

Size matters

Rats. Had I been born in one of those many countries with more sensible health-care systems than the US of A, not only would I probably be healthier, but I would also be taller:

Prior to World War II, US citizens were some of the tallest people on the planet, but since then their heights have stagnated; Europeans are now on average between 2 and 6 mm taller, despite the US position as the most affluent nation on earth. Like the previous study, this data reflects the growing disparity in prosperity in the United States, where income inequality is higher now than at any time since the Gilded Age.

The rest, by Jonathan M. Gitlin is worth reading, as are the two studies he mentions.

(The report from The Commonwealth Fund, also suggests to me that Germans should stop griping so much about their health care system: yes, it's getting less generous, but the results remain impressive. Speaking from personal experience, I've found health care in Germany to be fabulous. And all the doctors are so tall...)

(Via Lawyers, Guns & Money)

The play's the thing...

Filled with husbandly pride (and, knowing how much work went into it, no small amount of awe and respect), I am very pleased to announce that The Theatre of Civilized Excess: New Perspectives on Jacobean Tragedy is now available to order.

From the summary:

Jacobean tragedy is typically seen as translating a general dissatisfaction with the first Stuart monarch and his court into acts of calculated recklessness and cynical brutality. Drawing on theoretical influences from social history, psychoanalysis and the study of discourses, this innovative book proposes an alternative perspective: Jacobean tragedy should be seen in the light of the institutional and social concerns of the early modern stage and the ambiguities which they engendered. Although the stage’s professionalization opened up hitherto unknown possibilities of economic success and social advancement for its middle-class practitioners, the imaginative, linguistic and material conditions of their work undermined the very ambitions they generated and furthered. The close reading of play texts and other, non-dramatic sources suggests that playwrights knew that they were dealing with hazardous materials prone to turn against them: whether the language they used or the audiences for whom they wrote and upon whose money and benevolence their success depended. The notorious features of the tragedies under discussion – their bloody murders, intricately planned revenges and psychologically refined terror – testify not only to the anxiety resulting from this multifaceted professional uncertainty but also to theatre practitioners’ attempts to civilize the excesses they were staging.

Available now from Rodopi.

Don't need a weatherman to know which way the (martian) wind blows

Thanks to Geoff, I have discovered a very useful guide to climate change produced by New Scientist.

It's a very good tool for dealing with misinformation.

And it contains an answer to one climate change myth that I wasn't even aware of: apparently, there have been arguments that greenhouse gases have not caused global warming since...wait for it...Mars and Pluto are also warming up (and, as far as we know, neither of them is served by Easyjet.)

Apparently, though, that line of analysis is even less convincing than it initially sounds...

Having grown up in what I was repeatedly told was a nine-planet solar system, however, sentences like the following are somewhat jarring:

Our solar system has eight planets, one dwarf planet and quite a few moons...

Alas, poor Pluto. Vertically challenged, but no less beloved for all that.

(Besides, I thought there were actually, three dwarf planets...)

In the line of fire

I've much admired Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's reports from Iraq (and two of them have featured in posts on this site), so I was sad to hear that he had been injured by a grenade in recent fighting in Lebanon between the government and Islamic radicals. (From the Guardian, scroll down to the bottom of the article.)

He had followed soldiers into a building on the outskirts of Tripoli when a grenade was hurled down the stairwell, injuring him and one of the soldiers. He was released from hospital last night after being successfully treated for wounds sustained when three small pieces of shrapnel lodged in his arm and thigh. Abdul-Ahad, who studied architecture at Baghdad University, has been twice shortlisted for foreign correspondent of the year at the British Press Awards. He has won a number of awards for his reporting from Iraq, including the Martha Gellhorn prize last year, in which judges praised his "vivid, humane, independent and brave" reporting.

Here's wishing him a quick and full recovery.

Domino Dancing

Somewhere along the line, I picked up this song from Fujiya and Miyagi (a band from Brighton, England, as the name would lead you to believe) and quite liked it.

Now I see there's a video.

Which is also interesting.

Help the aged

There is quite an enormous amount of material I now have backlogged with regard to Recommended Reading, but I so far haven't gotten around to posting it. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps next week. Perhaps never. Alas....

In the meantime, I would like to recommend something dealing with a topic I've not referred to in a while: design.

More specifically, the aesthetic of 'old', 'used', 'authentic', 'second-hand', 'resale', 'antique' stuff.

The sort of stuff that, I think, maybe with...um...age, I'm coming to appreciate more and more. But I'm also, as it were, coming to appreciate the complexities of my appreciation.

In his post 'Secondhand best: the point of not designing at all', Momus takes a look at some old stools and along the way makes some intriguing comments about 'the patina aesthetic', class, ethnicity and contradictions.

A sample:

At a barbecue in Gorlitzer Park last weekend I got talking to an Israeli girl about generation gaps which are also class gaps. Our parents think they're higher class than we are because they have newer furniture, clothes and so on. What they don't realize is that we think we're higher class than them because we've moved past consumerism as the be-all and end-all of life. We wear our secondhand clothes -- and present our retro furniture -- as a badge of honour, a cache of cultural capital. You don't spend your way to a better future when spending is precisely what's going to cancel the future!

In Berlin, at least, the style of the progressive bourgeois class is totally defined by patina. Most cafes for these people have mix-and-match retro chairs, shabby and comfy. People's houses have 50s, 60s and 70s furniture, often communist ostalgie pieces, each one with a tale to tell. The less you paid, the cleverer you are.

In Berlin, at least, this is essential class signalling. What distinguishes a cool cafe from McDonald's, or a cool house from a house furnished by Ikea, is patina. Busy working people often admire your handpicked thrift clothes apologetically: "I'd love to wear that kind of stuff, but I just don't have the time to hunt it down, so I just buy new." New has become second-best, secondhand best. It may be hard to explain to your parents, but to your peers it's second nature.

[...]

Of course it all gets very complex and contradictory. The creative class in Neukolln are slumming Slow Lifers, whereas the immigrants are on the up-and-up, enterprising, hard-working, stressed. One group is pre-materialist (in other words, aspirational and ambitious), the other post-materialist (so over Rolexes and bling). They pass each other midway without so much as a nod.

There's also a fascinating paradox in the attitude to work -- the dignity of labour -- that emerges in the patina aesthetic. Sure, old stuff is cool because you can see how it's been worked and reworked. You enjoy -- and fetishize -- labour in the piece. Other people's labour. People you never met, people far away in space and in time. Dead craftsmen, previous owners. Yet you opt out of consumerism, and buy pre-owned stuff, as part of opting out of precisely the kind of productive culture that created this stuff in the first place. You admire, from your Slow Life, the "fast life" of someone overworked, back in 1920, or over in China.

Do read the rest. It's better in context.

'A bigot, a reactionary, a liar, and a fool.'

There I was, just about to move on into the next and more demanding stage of mourning (due the passing of Jerry Falwell), when I was rescued at the very last minute by Timothy Noah, at Slate.

Noah not only provides what might be a perfect epitaph for the late founder of the Moral Majority (the words that adorn the title of this post), but he also does the great service of assembling a list of the great man's wit and wisdom.

How very insightful he was.

A selection:

On Sept. 11 [links to an mp3 audio file]: "The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.' "

On feminists: "I listen to feminists and all these radical gals. ... These women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men; that's their problem."

On global warming: "I can tell you, our grandchildren will laugh at those who predicted global warming. We'll be in global cooling by then, if the Lord hasn't returned. I don't believe a moment of it. The whole thing is created to destroy America's free enterprise system and our economic stability."

On Jews: "In my opinion, the Antichrist will be a counterfeit of the true Christ, which means that he will be male and Jewish, since Jesus was male and Jewish."

So long Jerry, you will be missed.

By somebody.

I'm sure.

Somewhere.

Thinking about...zombies

Although not really a fan of the horror genre, I loved 28 Days Later, and am very much looking forward to seeing its sequel 28 Weeks Later when it is finally released in Germany.

While the film certainly looks exciting, viewing the trailer and other excerpts that I've been able to find online, inspires feelings of...well, dread, I suppose. And an odd sadness.




Perhaps it's the real-world references to the situation in Iraq, for instance (the deceptive security of a green zone, the seemingly inevitable slide toward chaos and destruction, the free-firing snipers), or perhaps it's contemplating an apocalyptic plague loosed upon a city I know relatively well and which has increasingly seemed haunted by a latent aura of vulnerability.

OK, I know, we are only talking about a zombie film here.

But 'zombies' have always been excellent symbolic tokens representing all kinds of real processes, fears, and darker corners of human psychology. The very notion of the 'undead'--not quite living, not quite dead--is inherently ontologically disquieting. Great horror films (or fiction, such as that from H. P. Lovecraft) have always generated a feeling that is really...unheimlich ('uncanny').

This is a feeling that, in another sense perhaps, underlies Haruki Murakami's fascinating book Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, which I'm currently reading. As Murakami notes in his preface, he was partly inspired to write the book by a letter he ran across in a magazine from a woman whose family had been affected by the sarin nerve gas attack carried out in 1995 by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

'How on earth did this happen to us...?' she wonders, a question that Murakami recalls 'stuck in my head like a big question mark.'

And indeed, it is the essential everydayness of the stories of the people affected by the attack (along with the sinister fact that, unlike in a sudden explosion, it took hours for many victims to realise what had happened to them) which makes reading their experiences so...uncanny. That, as well as the maddening contingency of the semi-random circumstances that brought certain people to certain subway cars at certain times.

For their part, the perpetrators of the attack, the members of the Aum cult, seem strangely detached in their methodical, affectless determination.

Indeed, at times they resemble nothing so much as...zombies.

Perhaps its the very impersonality and relentlessly all-devouring nature of the killer virus (and its carriers) in the '28' films which makes them so shattering to contemplate. No negotiation is possible; reason is powerless.

The same could be said about death cults.

Philip French concludes his review of the film this way:

But the movie is ruthless and not only in the way it spares no one from plague and bullet. The chilling theme is that the road to hell on earth is paved with good intentions, starting with the well-meaning scientists and the animal activists who light the fuse, and continuing with those inspired by compassion and moral decency.

As in so many things here in the real world: there is no pony.

Which is, indeed, dispiriting.

Perhaps I should wait for the DVD.

So, it's maybe a good thing that Jonathan Coulton is around to add some much-need levity to the whole topic of brain-eating zombies. Here is his excellent song, 'Your Brains'.

I wish I had answers to random questions that were this cool

Perusing the excellent blog Some Men are Brothers I ran across a reference to an interview with Will Sheff, the lead singer of the band Okkervil River. I happen to have a song by this band on my mp3 player ('Black'...and quite a rocking little number it is). So, I was intrigued.

The first question in the interview was the following:

'So the first thing I wanted to ask you was if you’ve ever been in a fight.'

Fair enough...I mean, it's nice to start out with something unexpected, something that, the interviewer thinks, might nicely break the ice and usefully unsettle the interviewee.

However, the answer was far more interesting than -- I assume -- the questioner expected:

WILL SHEFF: Oh. I was in a knife fight just a couple months ago, believe it or not. I was at a party—kind of a hipster party in Austin. It was New Year’s Eve. And there were lots and lots of people there. I dropped Scott [Brackett, Okkervil’s trumpet and keyboard player] off and I drove back to the party for no good reason. I was really drunk, walking around, and I turned a corner and saw two gentlemen having a fight. One of them pulled a hunting knife out of his jacket. It was like a ten-inch-long hunting knife, and he swung it at the other guy’s throat! And the other guy turned his head at the last minute and he got cut on the back of his neck. But if he hadn’t turned his head he would have gotten his throat cut.

The guy who got the back of his neck cut shouts, “He’s got a knife! He’s got a knife!” So I see this guy swinging this hunting knife around and in a blind, drunken impulse I grab the guy’s hand—the guy with the knife—and I was going to try and pull the knife out of his hand. But the instant I grabbed his hand, I looked down at this knife and I realized that this is a real, very sharp, very metallic knife—and it could very well stab me in the gut or something like that. And so I thought, All right, well, I really have to pull this knife out of this guy’s hand or else something bad’s going to happen. He was holding it really, really tight and for just a second, he loosened up his hand. I saw that as my window, so I pulled as hard as I could to get the knife out of his hand—I actually cut my hand in the process of it. I pulled so hard, and it was such a crowded party, that in the process of pulling the knife out of his hand I stabbed somebody in the leg.

BLVR: Oh my god.

WS: So I stabbed this guy in the leg and he goes [abruptly] “Ow!” And I said, “Hold on a second—I’ll be right back.” And I ran and hid the knife somewhere the knife’s owner wouldn’t find it. But where, in the morning, the person who had been assaulted could find the knife and use it as evidence.

BLVR: That was very responsible of you.

WS: When I got back, the guy who had pulled the knife was long gone. The guy who I stabbed was still there. And he was just sort of drinking a beer. And I said, “Man, I’m really, really sorry I stabbed you in the leg, but a guy pulled this knife…” And the guy said, “Oh, no, no, it’s OK. I’m fine.” And his girlfriend said, “No no no, you’re not fine—you have blood all over your hand.” He had his hand over the wound, and when he lifted it, his hand was slick with blood. There was blood all over his hand.

As it turns out, he was on ecstasy, so he didn’t really care that he had been stabbed in the leg. So I said, “Well, go to the bathroom, look at the wound, and see if you have to go to the hospital, I’ll pay for it or whatever.” So he goes to the bathroom and the news quickly spreads that this guy’s been stabbed in the leg. No one realizes that the other guy actually was assaulted and there was a fight. They just heard there was somebody who pulled a knife and stabbed somebody in the leg.

BLVR: It was you.

WS: Yeah. So I go to the bathroom to check on this guy and there are all these girls in the bathroom and they’re all like [girl voice], “We’re taking care of it! We’re taking care of it! Go away!” And then the host of the party comes out and goes: “Everybody out. Somebody pulled a knife. Everybody out of here.” He’s called the police. I say, “I don’t want to leave. I’m the person who actually inflicted the wound and I feel I should pay for it if he has to go to hospital.” And he says: “You’re the one with the knife?! What kind of sick fuck brings a knife to a party? What the fuck is wrong with you? Get out of here!” And I was like, “But it wasn’t my knife!” And he said, “I don’t want to hear it. Just get the fuck out of my house.” And then the police showed up, so I was like—I’m not sticking around. So I left.

It turns out that the guy who pulled the knife now has criminal charges pressed against him. And the guy who I stabbed was not that gravely injured.

So that was the last fight I got in and it involved a large hunting knife on New Year’s Eve.

BLVR: And for the rest of your musical career, every song will be based on that.

WS: Well, the funny thing is, it’s become this thing in Austin that people talk about—and nobody really knows the story. People think that I brought the knife to the party. And one person said to Travis, our drummer, “Hey, I heard your boy was trying to get fresh with some girl in the bathroom at a party and she wasn’t having it, so he stabbed her in the leg with a knife.” So in a sense I have been typed, now, as a kind of knife-wielding psychopath.

Read the rest at The Believer if you like. But I think the remainder is rather a let-down after this.

Texas is a lot more interesting than I thought.