An interview with Jim Daly

In the year 2000, I suddenly had to fill a page every day on the new economy in my local newspaper. I didn't know anything about them, so I talked to people, read books and magazines. During this time, someone gave me a list of magazines to read, including Business 2.0 which very quickly became my favourite because of the quirky editor, Jim Daly. Then just as I got to know and love the magazine, Business 2.0 changed hands and lost its magic.

I was googling Jim Daly and came across this interview in 2001, which I thought I'd put here, my happy blog, because that's what it's for.

Exclusive Interview with Jim Daly, founding editor of Business 2.0 (From BizReport.com)

Many of us rode the wave of Internet mania up -- and then right back down. But few have occupied the enviable catbird seat of Jim Daly, the founding editor of Business 2.0, which is credited with fundamentally changing the way the media covers businesses as they were thrust (some unwillingly) into the uncertain abyss of cyberspace. Earlier this year, mass media goliath AOL Time Warner purchased Business 2.0 and kept only three Business 2.0 staffers, choosing instead to fold the staff into its eCompany Now magazine to the new Business 2.0.

by Michael Grebb, Special Correspondent

Daly spent his newfound free time with his family on an extended vacation in the Wyoming wilderness. He's back now -- re-energised and actively weighing options that include book offers and overtures from new "startups". Daly took a few minutes out of his admittedly less hectic schedule to give BizReport his take on the magazine business, the Internet economy, and why the Internet still changes everything.

MG: You've just gotten back from your first real vacation in a while. How did it feel?

JD: It was a little strange, actually. After the sale went down, I had a lot of extra energy built up inside me.

MG: I imagine you haven't taken any time off since becoming founding editor of Business 2.0.

JD: A few days here and there, but when you have a startup, it's kind of like a restaurant in a way. You have to be there to check on the service, the sauce, everything...You have to be there to make sure that all the parts of the magazine are working, especially with one that was growing as fast as we were.

MG: Did the stunning growth of the magazine -- especially around late 1998 and into 1999 -- surprise you at all? The issues were starting to look like Sears catalogues for a while. 

JD: Well, it did surprise us. But we knew the story was a good story, and we knew the magazine was good. I don't think we expected the growth to be as rapid as that. It's a bit unusual for any magazine to grow that quickly -- to go from a startup to a magazine with the eighth highest revenue of any magazine in the United States within two years. That was certainly surprising, but we caught the story just as it was starting to develop and people were starting to get excited about it. The one thing that really worked for us was that the story really generated both a lot of excitement and a lot of confusion. When you have a lot of excitement and a lot of confusion, people look for information. That put Business 2.0 right at that nexus. We knew we didn't have all the answers, but we wanted to ask all of the questions and get down to the business models -- the ones that were working and the ones that weren't working. I think we did a really good job doing that. I think a lot of people realised it. Certainly, AOL Time Warner did. You have the largest magazine publisher in the world buying a magazine that hadn't hit its third birthday. So that was pretty flattering. 

MG: During the boom of the late nineties, how challenging was it to just keep up with so much growth so fast, considering it was probably the toughest labour market in decades?

JD: It was very difficult. You have to remember that when we started out -- the first two years or so -- we only had about a dozen people in editorial, and that included the art staff and the production staff. And that is not a lot of people. It's an adequate number of people to put out a 112- or 128-page issue, but when the issues start to get up to 300 and in our most extreme cases 480 pages...

MG: Well, you used a lot of freelancers.

JD: But you know, everyone was growing, and it was difficult to get good freelancers. In many ways, you had what I call a "citizen army" developing.  Everyone who could write and knew a little bit about business began to write for all these different publications. It was just difficult to get good people. It was even more difficult to get excellent people. You needed to hire 30 people right away, but you couldn't do that because maybe there weren't 30 great people out there that you wanted to contribute to the magazine.

MG: But then everything changed. In the Spring of 2000, the bottom started to drop out for technology business magazines across the board. Considering that you had beefed up the staff in 1999, how did you deal with the new reality?

JD: Well, we had beefed up the staff, but we never beefed it up as much as other people had. Even at the highest level, we only had about 45 people in editorial. Some of those magazines had over 100 or 200 people.

MG: That sounds like The Industry Standard, which just went out of business. As the former editor of a rival publication, what do you think happened there? Did they just get ahead of themselves?

JD: That was one reason. I mean, they had a tremendous burn rate. They were going through a lot of money very, very quickly. They were very ambitious, and you can't fault people for being ambitious. But when the softening began in the spring of last year and the whole market fell off a cliff in November, I don't think anyone expected it to crater as quickly or dramatically as that. Suddenly, if you're bringing in one third of the income that you used to but are spending the same amount you used to, you have some serious challenges.

MG: Someone from outside the publishing world might wonder why a magazine that had such a lucrative two or three years didn't have a stockpile of saved cash to weather an eventual downturn.

JD: It doesn't really work that way. Most magazines aren't even profitable until year five because you have to spend a lot in marketing, a lot in branding, a lot in getting your name out there. So a lot of that money you're bringing in is just going right back into the magazine. We were unusual in that way. We were profitable by the end of our first year because we had such a small outlay. We had a lot fewer people on the staff; we didn't spend as much on marketing; etc.

MG: Obviously, AOL Time Warner noticed that. What's the history of that acquisition? As I understand it, Time Warner was interested in Business 2.0 almost from its inception and before Time Warner merged with AOL.

JD: They had approached us after issue three in early 1998. That didn't happen. They wanted to get into this space, and they did eventually. So they launched their own publication, which was eCompany Now. It didn't do all that well. It was losing a lot of money. But what happened with Business 2.0 is that our parent company got into a serious hole. They had launched a lot of publications and they were getting pretty badly hit. They needed money and the crown jewel of the organisation was Business 2.0. So late last year, the idea was brought up to sell Business 2.0, and AOL Time Warner was still interested.

MG: Considering that AOL Time Warner didn't keep most of the Business 2.0 staff, is Business 2.0 still the same magazine?

JD: No, it's not. It's a relaunch of eCompany Now. You can take the name, sure -- but it's the people that make up the DNA of a magazine. You can put Business 2.0 on Popular Science, and it doesn't make it Business 2.0. The fact is that we had believed and hoped that there was going to be a more equitable split of people -- that it would be 50-50, the best of both teams. But it wasn't. They decided they didn't want to do that.

MG: So now that you're free and clear for the first time in four years, what are your career plans going forward?

JD: I just got back from this trip, which was a great way to refresh my batteries. I've been talking to a lot of people lately about all kinds of things -- working on some new startups or working on some books...

MG: Are there any startups left out there?

JD: (Laughs) Yeah, there still are. What I like the most about Business 2.0 was actually starting it. When you have a small team, it's much easier to get a sense of the unity and mission -- and the zealotry in a way. We were all zealots and put a lot of energy and time and devotion and creativity into the magazine, which you can certainly do with a bigger magazine as well. But when you have a smaller organisation, it's a lot easier to all read from the same sheet of music. I really love that energy. Just as there were three years ago, there's a lot of good ideas and a lot of kooky ideas. I don't want to get involved in any kooky ideas, but there are certainly opportunities for new companies.

MG: Would you stick with magazines or some kind of content business?

JD: I think so. I've been in journalism for 20 years. I love the magazine tradition. I love the art of the magazine craft. It's the most fun for me. It's the most energising area of journalism. I'd like to stick with that because I still get a huge charge out of it, even two decades later.

MG: Of course, it seems to be a thinning field these days. What's your prognosis for the future of technology business magazines?

JD: You really have a different ballgame going on right now. In the past, you've seen a lot of independent publications in this space bought up by the major media houses. You saw Wired bought by Conde Nast. You saw Fast Company bought by Gruner & Jahr. You saw Business 2.0 bought by AOL Time Warner. So it's a different battle. It's more the war of the titans. Who can spend more on marketing? Who can really wrap their ad packages in with five other magazines? This is the evolution of successful companies. We were able to sell Business 2.0 because we were an attractive, successful property. Successful properties evolve and mutate and change. I still think the story that Business 2.0 is built on has a lot of legs. AOL Time Warner just spent $60 million on it. They're going to put a lot of inertia into it, and from a marketing standpoint it seems like part of AOL already.

MG: With all of these magazines now in the hands of media giants, isn't it somewhat unrealistic for an independent startup to compete in that space?

JD: I think it would be tough. Someone just asked me the other day, "If you launched Business 2.0 today would it be successful?" And I said,"It would not. It would not be successful if it was launched in the same form." One of the first things we did in our very first issue was look at the 10 driving principles of the new economy. We went to a lot of people and asked what is different about the way business is being done right now in terms of how you market to customers, retain customers, etc. We distilled that down until we figured out our constitution -- our marching orders for the magazine. In the beginning, we had an ad campaign: "Do you get it?" Because some people did and some people didn't. But now I think everyone gets it, and if you went in and launched a magazine that said, "Hey, here's a story you may not have heard of, and it's going to change business in a fundamental way," you'd be laughed out of the room. Also, the economy is in a dumper right now. Ads were down this year in magazines, but I think pretty much everyone is in a lockdown right now at least until the end of year, especially with what happened on September 11 putting a cloud over things. Where is consumer confidence going? Where is spending going? I think everyone is in a bit of a wait-and-see mode. So to generate advertising for a broad-based consumer magazine would be very difficult right now.

MG: It seems like everybody got a little ahead of themselves in the late nineties, but now it seems like the retraction is just as exaggerated. Do you still believe the Internet will change everything?

JD: Yeah. It already has. Do you think companies are going to go back to the way they were acquiring customers, retaining customers, and marketing to customers? Do you think they are going to go back to the way they were doing that four or five years ago? Do you think the growth of the Internet will slow? Do you think the speed of getting online and moving around is going to go backwards? It's not. It's going to go forward. What we've seen is a slowdown or a falter-step here, but the story really does remain very strong. It's kind of like the growth of the PC industry in the eighties: They had a couple of up years, a couple of down years, but the growth still remained strong. Another thing is that you almost have to take out the growth figures form last year because 1999 was such an aberration. Everything had to come down from that. But if you look at the growth rates from 1998 to 2001, you still see it going on an up curve. We had one of the most incredible years of our lives, and then we had one of the worst years of our lives back to back. Hopefully, there will be a leavening of that. People tend to react in extreme ways.

MG: Funny that few seemed to publicly predict this huge crash in 1999.

JD: Well, it couldn't last, but you have to make hay when the sun is shining. That's what we did. We worked ourselves to death because it was an exciting time. In some ways, I miss those days because everything was about possibilities and being able to achieve and reach for the stars. Now, everything is about retrenchment and caution and, "Do we really want to do this?" The energy is really not there.

MG: Back then, it seemed like everyone wanted to be an entrepreneur.

JD: Yeah, and a lot of those guys are back to doing what they used to be doing. There were a lot of cockamamie ideas but people still said, we could do this if we try. I miss that kind of enthusiasm.

MG: Of course, there were a lot of Gordon Geckos out there too.

JD: That's true. A lot of people wanted to do it for the wrong reasons. A lot of companies that were being launched were just stock market plays. I was approached by people who would say, "Yeah, we're going to start this company, it's going to be worth a billion and a half in 18 months." But there are also companies like Amazon and Yahoo! and eBay. You're also seeing the evolution and the creation of companies that are the CBSs and General Electrics of our day -- big companies that are going to be around for a long time. It's a lot of fun to watch that as a journalist.

The Way of Integrity

My favourite author, Martha Beck, has come out with her new book,  The Way of Integrity. Actually, it will be coming out on April 13 next year.

Here's what it says in the teaser email:

Exciting news hot off the presses, possums!

You've heard me talking about my new book for years...well, on April 13, it will finally land on a shelf near you! Publishing is a slow business, but I'm thrilled to have this book's arrival on the horizon at last.

This book, The Way of Integrity, is so close to my heart. It represents the culmination of all that I've written and taught and everything that feels truest to me at this moment in my life. It's my first self-help book in eight years, and I had SUCH a blast writing it!

If you've ever taken a dip into one of my online or DIY "integrity cleanses," you already have some idea what this book is about. It's not a judgemental, Sunday School version of integrity. 

Ew, not at all!

No, it's the idea that we can put our lives into integrity the way an airplane can be put into structural integrity. If all the millions of pieces are functioning together, the plane will fly. If the parts are out of kilter, the plane will crash.

Our lives work the same way. When we're able to stay in integrity (the word simply means "whole" or "intact"), everything in our lives works better. We can do remarkable things, like a massive metal machine that can fly. But when we depart from our true nature, whatever that may be, we get internally divided. The result is immediate suffering, maybe just a little, maybe a lot. If we don't find the problem and bring ourselves back into wholeness, we may nosedive into catastrophe.

You were born in full integrity -- it's your nature. But for humans, nature quickly runs into culture. From babyhood, you were socialised to suppress aspects of your nature to serve social systems. When you forced yourself to do things that weren't true to your instincts (kissing weird Aunt Eugenia, smiling sweetly when you were miserable, and so on), you split away from your real self. You went from being in integrity (one thing) to being in duplicity (two things). If you ever tried to please many people, all with slightly different preferences, you were in "multiplicity" (many things).

Fellow people pleasers, we know how that feels, right?

Total loss of self, constant confusion, self-loathing, anxiety -- oh, it's just a TON of fun.

There's a kaboodle of social science research that shows how going along with culture against our true nature makes us miserable. But all of us live in connection with others, and that means we're subjected to cultural pressures. Cultures are created among every couple, every family, religion, ethnicity, class, nationality, etc., etc.

So how, amid all this cultural pressure, do we find and live in pure integrity?

Funny you should ask, because I just wrote a book about it! 

This book will give you all the instructions for realising where you've split from your true nature and bringing yourself back to wholeness. Seriously, I'm not just being coy. This issue is tricky enough that it took me many years and a couple of hundred pages to spell it out.

Here's a little preview, though -- an experiment you can try right away. One study found that when people told just three fewer "white lies" a week, they reduced negative emotions like sadness or anxiety and had significantly fewer health problems.

Try it: When you'd ordinarily tell a white lie, divert attention or simply stay silent. Watch yourself begin to feel better. It's like magic!

Of course, never betraying your true nature involves much more than just eliminating a few fibs. It can lead you into a completely different life, one where your mind, body, and relationships get dramatically better. So much better it will look like magic.

There's that word again: "magic." The word that sneaks into every one of my books even when I fight it. This book was meant to be -- and is -- completely practical. But it turns out that when we bring our lives into full integrity, magic (or at least phenomena science doesn't yet explain) starts popping up everywhere. What I thought would be the least "magical" book I'd ever written turned out to yield more magic than anything I've published before.

I'd be thrilled if you bought and read The Way of Integrity this April. But until then, experiment. Don't just tell fewer white lies. Try saying "No" to one hated obligation a week. Spend ten minutes a day doing something you love even though you think it's a silly waste of time. Give away objects you've kept only out of obligation. Eat what you really love, and savour the hell out of it.

In short, do something to please your true nature every day. Maybe every day until April 13th.

XO

Martha

–

Finding the Light

I received this in an email from Dan Joseph, a student of A Course in Miracles and writer of the Quiet Mind, the only newsletter I receive which I make a point of reading carefully because there is ALWAYS good value in it. I have decided that from now on, I am going to share his stuff on this blog.

This month marks thirty years since I began studying spiritual teachings. In September 1990, I was back in college after completing a corporate internship in New York.

I had spent the previous summer sitting by myself in a back office, uncomfortable in my suit and tie, researching ways to sell laundry detergent. The whole thing had felt utterly meaningless.

So here I was, back in college, searching for a new path in life. I began reading the western philosophers, then selections from the world's religions and mystics. Soon thereafter I bought a copy of A Course in Miracles, and started a more formal spiritual practice.

As I turned to those spiritual teachings, I envisioned myself setting out on a journey – a climb up the mountain to enlightenment. In contrast to my business work, this felt profoundly meaningful. Exciting, even. I plunged into the spiritual journey with intensity.

However, there was a basic lesson that I didn't understand then. In fact, I didn't grasp it for a very long time. It is this:

The spiritual experience – the experience of our inner light – is not something that we journey toward. It is something that we simply open to.

The light is with us at every moment, clear and bright in the present moment. There is no spiritual distance to travel; no spiritual mountain to climb. The light is here, always, and we can never truly separate ourselves from it.

We can obscure our spiritual light from our awareness, of course. This is the basic situation of the world. But our awareness can shift at any moment back to the light.

This one lesson could have saved me a great deal of time. However, I was so caught up in striving and achieving that my mind misperceived the situation. Enlightenment seemed like something that was earned at the end of a long battle or struggle. But that is not how things work.

Everything beautiful is with us at this moment, shining as a reflection of the light. The experience of safety, connection, innocence, peace – these, and more, arise in our awareness as we open to them. These experiences are with us in this present moment, simply awaiting our acceptance. There is no journey to the spiritual light; there is only acceptance of what is already there.

Now, I often share these thoughts with people and they say, "Dan, I have no idea what you're talking about! My present moment is nothing like that. My present moment is filled with a bunch of stress and agitation – not peace and light!"

They are right, of course, that their awareness is currently filled with those things. But in my work as counselor, I've seen over and over how dramatically and quickly awareness can shift.

In this newsletter article, I'd like to share a variety of "distractions" that keep our awareness focused away from the light. As we identify these distractions, we can express our willingness to let them go. This creates room for the light to emerge – not in some distant future, but now.

The Four Points

To begin, let me cover four of the most common distractions. I call these the compass points.

Imagine looking north, south, east, and west within your awareness. In these four directions lie some common distractions.

To the north we have any critical or otherwise unloving thoughts about the people in your life. Thoughts like:

     "My boss doesn't respect me! She is so full of herself!"
     "My partner really isn't being fair to me. He needs to change."
     "That politician is the bane of my existence!"

And so on. Any of these thoughts will inhibit your awareness of the inner light, and all its rewards – a sense of joy, security, peace, and so forth.

As you notice these types of thoughts, you can simply express your willingness to let them go. You can say:

     "I have no interest in this thought.
     It's interfering with my awareness of my inner light,
     and I am willing to let it go."

That's it! If the distracting thoughts persist, simply rest in your willingness to let them go. Your willingness can always outlast the thoughts.

To the south we have a parallel group of distractions: any self-critical or unloving thoughts toward yourself.

People who are more prone to anger may find the northern thoughts easier to find; folks who are more attuned to shame or guilt will probably find these southern thoughts more accessible. In truth, they're the same.

These southern thoughts might be clearly self-attacking, or they might be much more subtle. For example, you might find self-pressuring thought-sequences like:

     "I don't think I did a great job on that project."
     "I really need to do a better job next time."
     "People are counting on me; I can't mess up again."

Many people consider this type of thinking to be harmless – even helpful in a self-motivating way. However, any therapist will tell you that self-critical, self-pressuring thinking is at the root of many of their clients' misery. Taken to extremes, this type of thinking can lead to self-destructive tendencies.

For our purposes, we simply treat these southern thoughts as distractions. They are unloving, and therefore they will inhibit our awareness of the light. As with the northern thoughts, we express our willingness to let these thoughts go.

To the west are unpeaceful thoughts about the past. Although these may take the form of statements like the above, it's far more likely that they will simply arise as memories.

For example:

     You may recall something unkind you did to someone last year.
     You may remember a statement someone made to you that felt disrespectful.
     Or you may have fairly basic memories of work or personal activities.

Because our goal is to experience the fullness of the spiritual light, these memory-recalls can distract the mind. As with any other interfering thoughts, we simply express our willingness to let them go. You might want to envision them as clouds or leaves floating by – thought-forms that are not worth your engagement.

To the east are distracting thoughts about the future. For example:

     Worries about a situation that is going to take place next week.
     Concerns about your retirement strategies.
     Or even plans about what to eat for dinner.

There's nothing wrong or bad about any of these types of thoughts. However, they can obscure our awareness of the light – and during this practice, it is the light we seek. As with the others, we simply express our willingness to let each one of these go as they rise in our awareness.

Note that the thoughts can be mid-way between the compass points: A self-critical, guilt-filled memory contains both the western and southern directions. An angry expectation about what someone in your life might do is mid-way between the eastern and northern points.

There is no need to categorize these, of course – and you can choose different "directions" as you wish. But the goal is to notice the interfering thoughts in whatever form they appear, and hold a willingness to let them go.

Two Subtle Ones

Those four points (and the ranges between them) cover a lot of ground. By identifying those type of thoughts, you'll likely be able to clear away quite a bit of interference to the light.

However, there are more subtle forms of distraction as well. Let me briefly share two of these that I referenced in my previous story.

1. The thought that the light needs to be "earned."

As I mentioned, when I began my spiritual studies, I figured that I had to work my way toward enlightenment – by acting nobly, or understanding metaphysical ideas, or perhaps something else. I wasn't sure. But the experience of the light seemed like a reward to be won.

What I didn't realize is that this was just another distracting thought. It took the form of a background "belief," so it was less obvious than things like worries and resentments. But it effectively obscured the light for a while.

If you find that you have this thought in some form, you can treat it like the others. Simply note it, express your willingness to let it go, and invite your inner light to arise in your awareness.

As an aid, you may also want to introduce a new set of beliefs designed to replace the old. You can say:

     "The spiritual light is given to everyone, including me."
     "There is nothing that I need do to earn it."
     "It is given freely, and simply awaits my acceptance."

Or you can choose others. Once those new thoughts have replaced the old, you can express your willingness to move into the experience of the light itself.

The second of the subtle distractions is a parallel to the first.

2. The thought that the light is in the future.

This, again, is just a distracting thought, or belief. As before, you may want to correct it by saying:

     "The spiritual light is with me at every moment."
     "There is never a moment that I am without it."
     "I may not always be aware of it, but the light is here, right now, for the accepting."

In both of these situations, we're correcting the mind's belief that there is distance between us and what we seek. We are acknowledging that our awareness might be obscured, but this does not mean that the light is actually gone.

You deserve to experience all the facets of your inner light – a feeling of being loved, cared-for, safe, and at peace; a sense of your worth, innocence, and beauty; an experience of connection, joy, abundance, and boundless giving. You deserve all these, and more. Not in the distant future, and not after you've accomplished anything – but right now, in this present moment.

By identifying any distracting cloud-thoughts, and allowing them to pass by, we make room for these experiences to arise in our awareness.

The world needs miracle workers – channels for the light. All that is needed is for us to open our awareness to it. As we do that, one moment at a time, the light pours forth on its own.

Nostalgia

This is from Shaun Bythell's book Confessions of a Bookseller. I've been bad about updating this blog, but thought I should forgive myself and get back on that wagon.

I say that these old fellows are the very backbone of the book trade. As they drop off one by one, like leaves from a tree, there is a gap which no modern pushful young salesman can fill, and they leave a memory that is a good deal more fragrant than the smelly hair-oil of those Smart Alecs who come asking me for a job in the confident tone of one who is quite prepared to teach me my own business. I salute old McKerrow and his colleagues as they pass from our midst.

(Augustus Muir, The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller)

Old McKerrow and his colleagues have largely passed from our midst, but a few of them remain. What they've been replaced by, though, is not Smart Alecs, slick with smelly hair oil, but a faceless behemoth that has sucked the humanity out of second-hand (and new) bookselling. The backbone of the book trade of which Muir speaks is all but gone, and the business is in danger of becoming an inveterbrate. I write this just a few hours after an old friend from Edinburgh dropped in to say hello with her elderly father. He wandered through the shop with a look of nostalgia, occasionally touching a book, and looking wistfully around with the amazement of a child who has entered a sweetshop for the first time. As they were leaving to go for lunch with some mutual friends, he came to the counter and said: "You know, Edinburgh used to be filled with places like this. I spent my life wandering about them and building up my library. I bought a sixteenth-century copy of Holinshed's Chronicle -- you have a later edition, I see -- in a bookshop in Leith in the 1940s. I remember it clearly. They're all gone now, all but a small handful.

Collecting books was clearly an important part of his life, and without bookshops there is little joy to be found in this pursuit. The serendipity of finding something you didn't know even existed, or asking a bookseller what they could recommend on a particular subject, isn't really possible online yet, although I expect it will come. A couple of years ago I approached Napier University with an idea for that very thing: a 3D model of the shop through which avatars could wander, controlled by online customers, and look at the actual stock on the shelves and even interact with one another. They told me that it would require technology that has yet to be developed. In a way I'm glad it isn't there yet, but I doubt if it will be long before it is. Still, the smell, the atmosphere and the human interaction will remain the exclusive preserve of bricks-and-mortar bookshops. Perhaps, like vinyl and 35mm film, there might be a small revival, enough to keep a few of us afloat for a bit longer. 

How Wolves Change Rivers

Indian MP Mahua Moitra 7 sign of rising fascism speech wins plaudits

This and that

It's almost the end of January. We start the year with such hopes and lose steam somewhere in the middle of the first month. I realise that if I don't bother about results, if I just track my habits and see the ticks where ticks are supposed to be, I am more likely to climb back up on that bandwagon.

Today, I started out going to the gym and sweating profusely. Which made me feel saintly and flushed with ...I don't know, endorphins?

Anyway, I am listening to The Waves by Virginia Woolf on Audible:

I bind my hair with a white ribbon, so that when I leap across the court the ribbon will stream out in a flash, yet curl around my neck, perfectly in its place. Not a hair shall be out of place.

I listened to Wind in the Willows twice. Now I realise I luxuriate in the beauty of the descriptions, the whimsical flights of fancy, as well as the description of all that good food. It's what I listen for in The Christmas Carol as well. My favourite description there has to do with fat onions that resemble Spanish friars.

I think I may listen to The Secret Garden next. But I have yet to find a recording that I like.

This is my message from The Universe today.

Do you know what I'd really, really like, Jennifer?

For you to know that I think about you every moment of every day.

K?

The Universe

And that your happiness is the point of this all, Jennifer. And that chocolate was not an accidental discovery.

I'm back at work after a lovely four-day holiday. During that time, I went to Backyard to see in Mark's birthday with him and give him his presents, decided to make achari chicken tart (still haven't assembled all the ingredients - what on earth are nigella seeds?), visited my father twice, got back on the treadmill and exercise bike and made the 10,000 steps every day.

Read a book or two.

Went to Bookexcess to get a heap of presents (and wrapping paper).

Met Anita for tea to give her (finally) her Christmas present.

I've been a busy bee. And I thought I just spent my holiday sleeping.

Cha-no-yu

The four great qualities which the Seikasha -- the Tea Drinker -- was to celebrate and cultivate over the sacred cup were hospitality, courtesy, purity, and tranquility. The apartment must be plain, but elegant, with spotless mats and simple joinery; the utensils must be uncostly, but exquisite in shape and fitness. Temperance must be absolute; if food and wine mingled with the little feast nobody must exceed one bowl of rice and three saucers of sake. Nor was it solely for love of grace and the four chief virtues of the tearoom, Ka-kei-sei-jaku, that the famous tycoon inaugurated the cult of the tea leaf. His great mind saw that if he could give Japan a national and tranquil habit, easy of practice for the poor and attractive to the rich, he would do as much to sheathe the sword and humanise his people, and so it has turned out. Never, in truth, had a statesman's subtle device such grand success. The teacup, as I have said, is today the central fact of this fair and gentle land. It decides the architecture, binds together the societies, refreshes the fatigue, and rewards the day's work of high and low in Japan. The perspiring jinriksha man is satisfied with the warm infusion; the Minister and the Mikado himself are only happy when the "honourable tea" exhales its delicate fragrance from the hands of the kneeling musume. And there are little gracious ceremonies even about the most ordinary tea drinking in humblest houses, which everywhere elevate it above a mere beverage. Good manners in Japan prescribe a soft sort of solemnity whenever the little cup is being filled, and no hut is so lowly but it's kettle, it's teapot, and its tea equipage display something about them of distinction, taste, and the love of a chaste and perfect art.

But the Cha-no-yu, as Hideyoshi and Sen-no-rikiu settled it forever, carries these ceremonials to a grave perfection. To be quite orthodox the tearoom must be very small, one of but four and a half mats, roofed, if possible, with a single finely grained plank, or else thatched with bamboo grass. The few honoured guests should be called to the pavilion by wooden clappers, washing their hands first in pure water. No discontented person must be present, nor any scandal, or unkind words be heard. The host himself should mend the fire, light the incense, brush the mats, fill the white-pine ewer, and lay the ladle of red-pine; as well as see that the single picture is hung and the single flower-pot fairly set in its place. The tea should be of the finest green powder, from a beautiful but common little jar; placed in a cup of ancient design holding, perhaps, half a pint. The 'honourable' hot water is poured upon it, and then stirred in with a small bamboo whisk, which article itself, like the tiny spoon of the same material used for taking out the tea powder, must be of a certain form, and if possible, ancient, and famous for its artistic origin.

Even about the boiling of the water there is orthodox tradition, there is solemnity, I had almost said there is religion. The sumi in the brazier must be piled up in the outline of a glowing Fuji-san. The kettle of beaten iron must have no touch of modern vulgarity in its shape, the water must be drawn from the purest source, and -- at the moment of use -- in the third state of boiling. The first state is known by its low murmuring, and the appearance on the surface of the large slow bubbles distinguished as "fish eyes", gyo-moku; the second is when steam comes with quickly rising foam; the third is when the steam disappears in a tranquil, steady simmer, and the fluid is now "honourable old hot water." This is the propitious moment for the admixture, which being compounded appears in the guise of a light-green frothy compound, delicately fragrant and invigoratingly hot, contained in the antique cup, which, neatly folded in a fair cloth, should be handed now to the principal guest. Drinking reverently from it, he should tenderly wipe the rim at the spot where he has quaffed, but the next guest must drink at the very same place, for such is the "Kiss of brotherhood", in harmony with the friendly inspirations of this ceremony. The last guest must be heedful to drain the bowl to its dregs; then he passes it round to be examined, criticised, and made the subject of pleasant talk about the old days, the cannons of true art in pottery, or any other topic lightly arising from the graceful moment, as the tender fragrance of the tea leaf wafts itself about the air of the little spotless chamber and among the kneeling, happy, tranquil companions of the occasion.

At a glance, it will be seen how imperiously these elegant ceremonies, once established and received, have dictated to Japan the pure simplicity of her ceramic and metal work, and how they have passed down into all ranks of the people, constituting a standard of sweet and simple manners and of high-bred tastes which they were quicker to accept than any other nation. Perhaps nowhere except in Japan would it have been possible even for the great Hideyoshi and the astute Sen-no-rikiu to have indoctrinated a whole people with so pure and refined a passion. But the commonest Japanese have this charming tendency to a delicate sobriety of appetite and taste; they love the touch of art which elevates, the glimpse of grace, which dignifies. They have the nature rather of birds and butterflies than of ordinary human beings, and when you send out to your Kurumaya a cup of tea and a saucer of boiled rice, and hear afterwards his grateful words, you wonder whether he is of the same race as that which you left quaffing half-and-half and eating rump-steaks on the banks of the Thames. Of course the austere etiquette of the Cha-no-yu is special; but its spirit, as the central ceremony of tea drinking, has palpably passed through all Japan, where everything begins and ends with the tetsubin and the teacup. Nor is it too much to declare that to Buddhism, which brought in her religious ideas and the tea leaf, and to Hideyoshi, who taught her how to honour, enjoy, and infuse it, is due much, if not most, of the existing aspect of social and civic Japan.

(From Sake and Tea by Sir Edwin Arnold, Tokyo, Japan, Dec 19,1889)

The humanity of captors and torturers

China's most famous artist, Ai Weiwei, was arrested and detained for 81 days. When he was released from jail, he refused to talk to journalists. In fact, he refused all interviews about his experience inside, until he was approached by Barnaby Martin, who wrote, not an article, but a book, Hanging Man, named for one of  Weiwei's most famous pieces of art.

Here, at the end of the book, he talks about the humanity of his jailers and how they were victims themselves, trapped in a system they no longer believed in. 

It was a chastening realisation.

And so, the book ends on a note of hope.

"By the way," I say, "last night in the youth hostel, I went through all we said yesterday and I kept thinking that it would make a great play one day."

"Yes," says Weiwei. "When I was in there, I sometimes thought that too. The whole situation was so dramatic, it was so full of paradoxes. I was a prisoner of course but so were the guards who had to stand by me day and night, and so were the people watching me from outside, trying to figure out what to do with me. Everyone was stuck. It was a very dramatic situation. And we talked so much about the meaning of art, about politics, about freedom and all the time I tried to answer their questions but at the same time I had to be on my guard because you always have to be very cautious and very careful because you don't know what's really going on. You only know that you are in absolute danger but at the same time you are desperate to limit the danger and even though you are in absolute danger and cut off from reality, you must still make sure that you don't hurt somebody on the outside or make the problem even bigger by saying the wrong thing. And there was so much confrontation, so much hostility, and the interrogators were not allowed to get to know me or even to say anything that would make me a person. I was just a number. Number 1135. That's my room number. But even this becomes completely dramatic and surreal because the soldiers who are guarding me are young and they have their own past, their own lives, and nobody cares about them at all. They are just soldier A or B or C or D. So confusing. The situation really examines the very essential questions, the very philosophical questions. How this esoteric society maintains itself and how it will now work and what happens to human nature in those circumstances. It's significant that sooner or later all the soldiers, except one -- their leader didn't talk to me -- but all of the others all secretly talk to me. But though they all secretly talked to me none of them know that the other ones were also secretly talking to me because of course it's not allowed. They were so bored, wanting to pass the time somehow. They said, "Weiwei, can you tell us a joke?? This was such a crazy situation. How can I tell them a joke?  I am in jail; I have no idea what is about to happen to me -- I might end up in jail for twenty years. I said, "I'm very sorry. If I had known that I was going to be arrested I would have memorised two hundred jokes!"

"Time passes so slowly, for you and for them, and you try to memorise everything that happened  in your life but after twenty days you have nothing left, it's completely empty! You have remembered every detail, no one has more than that. I remembered every person, every occasion, every meeting, every conversation, from when you are very young right up to that day and then suddenly you are completely empty. It's crazy. Then I try to hold on to something, to think about my son, my wife, my mum. Just to hold on. But then that becomes so painful to think about because they are just as completely innocent as you are and it is unbearable and the outside world also seems like a jail because you can never really communicate to them. So then every time I think of them there were tears pouring down my face and the soldiers say, "Are you thinking about your wife, your son again? Don't do that. You have to forget about this. You have to forget it all." So I think I really do have to forget about this otherwise I cannot go on. It's so painful, thinking ten years in jail...You know, it's just like that...So many conflicts about reality, imagination, crime. The whole thing is a paradox. And it continues, even when you leave. It has infected your outside reality. So two of the soldiers were meant to go home by this 25 December. I gave them my number. They already called me.

"No. Really?"

"Yes. They said, "Are you out?" Because they don't know -- they don't have any news in the army. One day they are moved to guard another room and they would never know then what happened in this room. They said, 'We were so worried about you, we kept thinking about you, we are so happy you are out...' It was so shocking. And after my release, the interrogator sometimes comes to see me. It's very strange. I said to him, 'Why do you do this, you shouldn't monitor me now.'"

"But he is coming to check up on you?"

"Yes. And he says, 'Weiwei, just let this one year pass. Come on! You will not die if you don't say a word for one year. Let it pass, then everything will be fine.' And I wonder if that's how this nation will change because now there are a lot of individuals who have their own sensibilities and they have their own judgement. Even after all the kingdoms and dynasties of China, this has never happened before. But now people are beginning to have their own judgement, their own opinion."

"So this is partly to do with the passage of time. Twenty years ago the individual in those roles would still have had a belief in the ideology. Why is it that nowadays these relatively senior people, even if they are not actually in a revolution, they personally, don't want to tarnish their integrity? What is it that's changed?"

"I think that the only reason for the change is because there is so much more information. So much information happens every day and even with such censorship people can still receive a lot of news from the world. Basically I believe a person is a container of all this information, knowledge, judgements. The state of course is still so strong but the Party cannot limit the information any more. There are too many ways round. And with this information people start to form their own view of the world."....

"But you know, from the very first second I realise even here there is humanity. Even when they put the black hood on me, when the two soldiers were holding me, one soldier grabbed me very tight but the other just pretended to grab me but in fact he held me very loose. So even sitting there, they try to give me more space, not to really hurt me..."

"Really?"

"Yes! So then you realise that there are two people sitting here, two other human beings. One obeys the command, the other just tries to use his own judgement and thinks, 'I don't see why we have to do this.' And that small thing, that tiny sense of humanity, certainly made me much more comfortable in this one-hour road to that secret place. And every time, when they put a handcuff on me, some of them just did it so carefully, first one tooth, then two teeth, so it's very loose, still comfortable. So loose in fact that you even can take your hand out. And somebody would even very carefully put my shirtsleeve under the handcuff so that the metal would not directly touch my skin. They didn't have to do all those things. It's just a job, why should they care? I didn't even care. But they carefully did that. It shows a lot of humanity, it shows they're different. It shows they think and they decide that they don't believe in this. And some police would always say,"Do you want tea?" They would keep asking. I don't want tea at the start but they keep pouring tea, trying to make me feel good. There was a lot of nice or warm situations there. A lot of humanity."

Giorgio Morandi

Like so many Chinese artists and writers of his generation, Weiwei is very knowledgeable about the early Soviet experiments in art. We talked about Tatlin and the constructivists and the lives of Malevich and Lissitzky and then we moved onto Giorgio Morandi, the Italian painter who died in 1964, whom Weiwei greatly admires. On the face of it, Morandi was not at all a political painter, nor was he involved in any kind of radical or conceptual work, so it would be easy to assume that Weiwei had no strong views on his work and that there was no connection between the two artists. Today, to most people, or rather to most non-painters, Morandi is not a household name and even within the international art world his reputation was not cemented until late in his career.

Perhaps his relatively modest standing has something to do with the obscure lifestyle that he forged for himself. By today's standards he appears at first glance to be thoroughly uncharismatic. He was neither a socialite nor a womaniser, he was never in the public eye and he wasn't particularly interested in commenting on anything that was happening in the outside world. His father died when he was eleven. He never married. He lived with his mother and his three sisters in the same house for fifty years. He habitually dressed in a formal suit; his hair was short, parted on the right. He was the sort of man whom one might expect to find in the same seat at the same restaurant every day, ordering the same meal. It is true that he was professor of etching at Bologna University for some years and that in the summers he would make it up into the hills of Grizzana, but there is nothing in his biography that would justify a biopic. Morandi was interested in one thing -- painting his next picture. When he was asked by a curator towards the end of his career about the whereabouts of some of his works, his reply captured his ethic perfectly:

I cannot give you any indication because I'm afraid I have never made a note of where my paintings have ended up ... I am always at work and work is my sole passion. And unfortunately I have become aware that I must always start from the beginning, and ought to burn what I've done in the past.

Consequently, for many years Morandi was mistaken for a dry, religious, almost insipid man of monkish habits and few outside interests. To make matters worse, his work appeared to some foreign curators and collectors to be thoroughly repetitious and provincial. Day after day, year after year, decade after decade, he painted the same handful of pots, bottles, jars, clocks, compote bowls and mannequins, occasionally running off the odd landscape, though these were equally repetitious. Carefully, and over decades Morandi built up a collection of these humble objects, finding them in junk shops or making them himself, allowing them to stand for months to gather dust. Like Duchamp, Morandi believed in dust. Along with the elaborate system of curtains and blinds that he employed in order to create a uniform zenithal light, the dust dulled the edges of the objects and helped them on their way into the solitude and obscurity that he prized so highly. Eventually, after a lengthy period of repose, an object might finally be picked out from among the crowd and moved carefully onto a shelf, nearer to the drama of the stage, Selected objects were then arranged on a table, rearranged countless times, over weeks, until Morandi felt that the balance was right. Later in his life he worried that three weeks was never enough time to arrange a natura morte and he regretted his impatience, wishing that he had spent longer, months possibly or years, making sure that he had the light just right and the perfect selection of objects.

Here, it must have seemed, was a slightly weird, reclusive man of modest talents and little originality -- in short, a minor painter who would not leave any kind of mark on the world. Today however those who become acquainted with Morandi's work are usually astonished by what they discern within it.

Like Ai Weiwei, Morandi is a political artist in the sense that he was trying to capture his own vision of reality, a vision that was radically at odds with that of his time. And like Weiwei, he found inspiration in the ordinary or the banal. In Morandi's case, this exercise of his freedom of expression didn't put him in danger, it just meant that it took several decades for audiences to begin to fully appreciate his work, but his urge to paint springs from the same source as Ai Weiwei's -- from the urge to renovate our vision of the world and to find new meaning. And this gets to the heart of the inevitable conflict between artists and repressive regimes. In the past, I had talked with Weiwei about the great icon painters of Russia and Weiwei emphasised this same point. The forms of art are endless, what counts is the individual's engagement with the world, and their own personal attempt to find meaning.

For Ai Weiwei, or Morandi, or any other artist practising today, perspective, or realism in general, is of course a series of conventions. It is not reality. It is a schema and that is all. One schema among many. An orthography that we can choose to use, in the same way that for millennia the priests of Sais chose to use their own canonical orthography, with crocodile-headed deities and ibis beaks and the whole plethora of dynastic symbols all rendered without perspective but with something else, and some other fifth element. The cave painters of Lascaux or the conceptual artists of the late twentieth century used another. But the idea that realism is merely one way of seeing among many is anathema to Maoism.

Totalitarian regimes, like the regime in China (though it is rapidly becoming less totalitarian, not voluntarily but because its censorship mechanisms fail to cope with the internet and civil society continues to expand), cannot abide alternative articulations of reality. Mao, as an accomplished poet himself, understood very well the link between form and content, and that if you limit the forms of art you also limit the possible content. He knew full well that by controlling forms of artistic expression you are able to control people's inner lives. But it couldn't last forever. Art doesn't stand still. As time passes the old ways of seeing grow stale and only new ways of seeing will do, and there was nothing Mao nor any of his successors could do about this.

"I believe," said Morandi, "there is nothing more surreal and nothing more abstract than reality. What has value in art is an individual way of seeing things: nothing else counts at all."

"Morandi," began Weiwei, "has been very influential on so many artists, not only painters. There are so many characters in his painting. It's very -- how can you say -- religious. And also he is like Van Gogh. Because the act itself is so believable, so pure, so purified, so cut off from others. He paints what he sees. The reality he sees. We have to catch up. So he leaves us a perfect example. Yes. You can always take that kind of action as the perfect kind of quality, the most convincing quality. Everything is related to integrity. The persistence to believe, to never get confused."

"And so Morandi persisted but he wasn't in danger as you are. You find yourself in a different position because you're not just being ignored by a critical establishment, you are coming up against people who don't want to know about your way of looking at the world and instead of just traducing or ignoring your art, they are putting you in jail."

"We all somehow have to be honest enough to face our condition and of course the artist always, always is the one who recognises a certain kind of reality and tries to announce it. You know poets, writers or artists, at first they are the only ones who see it. They have to announce it. They hear a kind of voice or they see some possibilities so clearly. But that all comes from the inner core, from the kind of nature they have. If there is anything valuable then it comes out because their nature perfectly reflects everybody's nature or instinct at that time."

From Hanging Man, Barnaby Martin

 

Liao Yiwu

Liao Yiwu, the writer, has a lot in common with Ai Weiwei so I thought that by talking to him I might be better able to put Ai Weiwei and his fellow dissidents in some sort of context. For one thing Liao Yiwu has been arrested because of his writings and he has spent time in jail, in his case more than three years. He is also from the same generation as Ai Weiwei and so he and his family went through all the horrors of famine and the Cultural Revolution. And also like Weiwei, he understands the power of the most simple gestures and his unadorned writing, which is banned in China and which so infuriates the authorities that he has suffered imprisonment and torture, really consists of nothing more than pointing out: "Hey! Listen to what this perfectly ordinary person has to say about tehir experience of life in China today." He is like the little boy who points out that the emperor has no clothes; the Chinese Communist Party cannot bear it.

Like Ai Weiwei, he is constantly at loggerheads with the regime because he speaks his mind and rejects the Communist Party's view of reality, instead articulating his own vision of Chinese society and the vision of the people that he meets. He is indefatigable and personally courageous.

At the time I went to find him, in April 2011, Liao was living in Dali, an ancient and extremely beautiful city that sits on the shores of Lake Erhai, at the base of the sacred Mount Cangai. One of the most amazing things about China is its vastness and consequent incredible variety: variety of languages, of peoples, of landscapes. There are jungles, there are deserts, there are glaciers; there is the Tibetan Plateau, the oasis towns of the northwest; there are villages without electricity and then there is Shanghai's Bund. China is diverse in its diversity because it is one hundred countries yoked together.

Dali, in the province of Yunan, is as different from Beijing as a small town in Romania is from London or Frankfurt. Its city walls are short by Chinese standards, only six kilometres long. The landscape here is mountainous but the vegetation is subtropical -- forests of emerald green -- and the soil is as red as the face of Mars. Flying into Kunming, near Dali.

It was Liao Yiwu's epic poem 'Massacre', composed in response to the 1989 student uprising, that landed him in jail. A howling dirge -- part funeral oration, part shamanistic chant -- it was passed around literary circles in Beijing on old-fashioned magnetic cassette tapes. Magnitizdat, this was called in the Soviet Union: the technological extension of the samizdat culture. From the perspective of the internet age it was unbelievably labour-intensive.

When Liao finally got out of prison and made his way home to Chengdu, he discovered that his wife had left him and taken their infant son; his former friends were too frightened to speak to him; his registration permit had been cancelled, so he couldn't find work and he could at any moment he expelled to the countryside. He was penniless and his only possession was a wooden flute that he had made in prison. So began Liao's new life as an itinerant busker on the streets of Chengdu.

One of the characteristics that most defines Liao is his incredible resourcefulness, or rather not so much resourcefulness as his ability to continue his work without any resources at all. Just prior to his imprisonment, Liao's writing had taken a new turn: he had begun to interview ordinary Chinese people, people with poor chances in life, the diceng as the Chinese call them: those on the bottom rung of the ladder, the innumerable dispossessed and hopeless whose stories no one ever hears. The reality of everyday life for the mass of ordinary Chinese citizens is not something that the government wants to see portrayed. Prison was intended to bring to an end Liao's subversive activities but instead he simply began to interview his fellow inmates, and when he was finally released to wander the streets of Chengdu he quickly befriended the prostitutes, beggars and restaurateurs of his new milieu and set about interviewing them as well. It is a shared characteristic of many of the brave and inspiring people I met in China that even in the depths of despair they still attempted to preserve their individual voice (though I should point out that while in jail, Liao was subjected to such inhuman treatment that he did attempt to commit suicide on two occasions). One month before I met Liao the government had imposed yet another travel ban on him to prevent him from attending the International PEN Festival in New York.

Today, Liao's writing only has an audience at all because of the efforts of a handful of total strangers, devoted people who have ever even met Liao but who found themselves deeply moved by his work and who were determined that it should see the light of day. Wenguang Huang, a Chinese American, first heard of Liao's stories on public radio in 1990 and immediately recognised its freshness and significance. He wrote to Liao and offered to translate his work, and to find it a publisher in the west. For years, they collaborated without having a chance to meet. But they were both crystal clear about what they were trying to do: show China as it really is, not as it is presented in the government-controlled media. Then came Peter Bernstein, a New York literary agent and the son of Robert L. Bernstein, who founded Human Rights Watch and Human Rights Watch China. Though Wenguang Huang and Liao Yiwu were unknown in the US, Peter Bernstein took Wenguang's approach seriously and instantly recognised the quality of Liao's work. The third angel of serendipity was Philip Gourevitch, a New York-based writer who at the time had just been made editor of the Paris Review. Gourevitch read a story by Liao that Wenguang sent him and decided that it had to be published. None of these three men has met Liao but thanks to their efforts on his behalf, Liao's work has now been widely disseminated. His collection of interviews with diceng, with the translated title The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up, was published in the US in 2008 by Pantheon Books (a division of Random House), translated by Wenguang and with a foreword by Gourevitch. The interviewees include "the professional mourner", "the leper", "the peasant emperor", "the retired official", "the mortician", "the former red guard", "the Tianamen father", "the Falun Gong practitioner", "the illegal border crosser", "the grave robber", "the safecracker", "the migrant worker" and "the survivor". As Gourevitch writes in his foreword:

[Liao Yiwu] is a medium for whole muffled swathes of Chinese society that the Party would like to pretend do not exist: hustlers and drifters, outlaws and street performers, the officially renegade and the physically handicapped, those who deal with human waste and with the wasting of humans, artists and shamans, crooks , even cannibals -- and every one of them speaks more honestly than the official chronicles of Chinese life that are put out by the state in the name of the "people."

It is no exaggeration to say that Liao is a totemic figure among certain sections of the community of Chinese writers. And thanks to Bernstein, Wenguang and Gourevitch, and others who have backed his work in the west, he is now rated, as Gourevitch explains, with writers "as diverse as Mark Twain and Jack London, Nikolai Gogol and George Orwell, Francois Rabelais and Primo Levi".

On the way to Dali I had been overtly followed and as we made our way to a cafe, we were joined by two secret service agents. It was only Liao Yiwu's aloofness and utter contempt for them that steeled my nerves. The interview, which I had hoped to conduct in the same way that Liao conducts his own interviews with the diceng -- that is to say, in an informal manner that encourages the interviewee to explore even the most troubling aspects of his or her life -- ended up being somewhat surreal, and not just because it was being overheard by two members of the secret police. 

Because Liao's English is even worse than my Chinese, and I didn't want to misrepresent his words in any way, I had decided that we would need a translator. There was no way to arrange this from Hong Kong so I had gambled on finding someone in Dali. It is a tourist resort, so I hoped there would be plenty of English speakers around. However, this was a risky strategy for two reasons: first, I only planned to be in Dali for a few hours. The light aircraft that I'd flown in on, bumping over mountain tops like a rollercoaster, was returning to Kunming at midday. The second problem was that there was a distinct possibility that as soon as anyone started translating Liao's words they would realise who he was and the risks they were taking in helping him to talk to a foreigner, and they would stop. The two secret policemen weren't helping either. We made a strange-looking group as we shuffled through the old city searching for a translator: Liao slightly hunched, with a permanent expression of weary defiance; myself tall, white, more and more paranoid as the minutes passed; and then the two policemen skulking along behind us.

Thankfully, as this was Yunan province and we were far from Beijing, the police were comparatively relaxed. Liao told me that occasionally, depending on who was tailing him, he could persuade them o have a drink with him. After half an hour, just as I was beginning to panic, we found a youth hostel in a large, elegant old Qing dynasty-style villa, threadbare but copiously decorated with carved wood and red lacquer. I approached the manager, a middle-aged man with a kind, sensitive face. Although the weather was mild he was wearing a heavy brown leather jacket. His English was excellent and he agreed to translate. However, at this point, he still didn't know who Liao Yiwu was, though I did try to explain, to give him the chance not to get involved if he didn't want to risk it.

We sat down at the coffee table. The police agents, who hadn't taken off their coats, sat down at the next table. "Can you tell me your earliest memory?" I asked Liao. It's a question that he often asked his own interviewees. The translator duly translated the question, Liao nodded and paused and then said something back in Chinese. The translator, looking a little shocked, turned to me:

"He says his earliest memory is almost dying of starvation during the Great Leap Forward. Famine came and he was only four years old and he swelled up like a loaf of bread. Everyone thought he was going to die but then his mother took him to see a doctor and the doctor held him over a boiling cauldron filled with herbs. The herb steam cured him."

The translator glanced at Liao again -- who was sitting patiently, waiting for the next question -- and then he turned back to me and said, "Who is this guy?' I tried to explain again that he was a writer who had suffered at the hands of the government and whose work had been censored and suppressed. I thought that the interviewer would now call it a day but he didn't; he only became more interested, and he too was strangely unmoved by the presence of the secret police.

The questions continued and Liao's stories became more and more incredible. "The corpse walker," he said, "whose job it is to carry the dead body back to its final resting place in its home village, has a special code for communicating with hotel owners in rural Sichuan. They knock on the door and then shout out in a loud voice, "The god of happiness is here." That way the hotel is warned that the prospective guest has a dead body strapped to his back, hidden under a cloak, and he can either turn the corpse walker away quietly, or give him a room at the back and charge some extra dough. After the Cultural Revolution the Communists tried to crack down on this but of course it still goes on all the time because it is very important that they take their dead home for burial, whatever the Communists like to think."

I asked Liao about the people that he had interviewed. Several of his interviewees had made a particularly strong impression on me. Two of them he had met while in jail; one 'the peasant emperor', was an old man who claimed to be the emperor of China and insisted on everyone, prison staff included, addressing him as 'Your Highness'. He explained to Liao that he was in prison voluntarily as it was the only way for him to escape the constant and exhausting sexual demands that were otherwise made on him by the young women of his kingdom.

Another interviewee whose story had particularly compelled me was 'the safecracker'. His account of his own life was especially moving because it was quite clear that he was a highly intelligent, sensitive human being who had fallen into a life of crime because of a complete lack of opportunities. He was a very good safecracker and he was also charismatic and highly resourceful. At one point in his colourful career he was caught and sent to prison. It was one of the old prisons built by the Nationalists during the war and it had high, strong walls but the safecracker was determined to escape. Finally he figured out how to do it. Over the wall, he could hear the cleaners when they came to empty the prison toilets. He deduced that the cleaners didn't need to enter the compound because the cesspit beneath the toilet holes extended right under the walls, so that it could be accessed from the street outside. Unappealing as the prospect was, it was obvious to him what he would have to do to escape and so the next day, during the exercise period, he went to the toilet and then squirmed his way through the toilet hole and dropped like a bomb into the murk below. Luckily his theory was correct and he only had to swim for twenty feet, although he said that it felt like a lot further than that at the time and he thought he was going to go mad. He clambered out the other side onto the street, ran down the mountainside and eventually found his way into a student dormitory where he showered and stole some clothes. He went back to safecracking and became a rich man, with lots of villas in the north and more money than he knew what to o with. But he was bored and depressed. Because he was an intelligent, thoughtful man, he felt his life was shallow and worthless. Eventually, on a job in Beijing he had to crack the newest and best kind of safe. Naturally, he succeeded, but for some reason that he couldn't explain he just sat there with the safe door open, slowly setting fire to the bundles of money. When the police arrived, he went with them without complaining.

I asked Liao what had happened to the safecracker -- was he still in touch with him?

"He was executed," said Liao bluntly, drawing his finger across his throat.

As the interview went on, the translator became more and more involved. I would ask a question and he would translate it for Liao and then Liao would answer back in Chinese, but instead of immediately translating Liao's answer back into English, the translator would ask his own question and after a while the pair of them would be deep in conversation. Occasionally, they would remember my existence and the translator would turn round and summarise some aspect of Liao's life or thoughts for me.

"Lao Liao [lao means old and is a mark of friendly respect] says that many of the dissidents today start out as ordinary people with an ordinary gripe. Take for example the protests over the polluted baby formula milk. The parents who dared to complain and insist that the government do something were slapped down but they had lost their children and so they were angry and they didn't care any more about government threats and instead of being quiet they began to support other people's causes as well. You see the government creates dissidents out of people who have legitimate local grievances. Lao Liao says that they do this again and again because they can't handle even very minor criticism and so they end up turning anyone who opposes them into an extremist, even though all these people wanted in the first place was to complain that their cooking oil was full of shit or that the local Party had sold off a corner of their field to a property developer or something simple like that. It's the same with the case of Ai Weiwei. He was so shocked by the earthquake that he went down to Sichuan and spoke to the mothers and fathers. He heard about the poor-quality tofu-dregs houses and about the corruption and kickbacks to local politicians. He got involve and tried to help. Then the police attacked him and gave him a beating and he almost died and because of this he became even more of a rallying point and everyone wants to listen to his criticisms of the government. They are control freaks who can't handle criticism.

"Lao Liao says all he wanted to do, the only thing, was to describe what he saw around him every day. He wasn't calling for the overthrow of the Party, or demanding for the laws to be changed. He is just a historian a chronicler. A chronicler in cold blood who will say what he sees. But the government hated that so much that they threw him in jail. So then he wrote about what he saw in the jail. That made them even more mad. All he wanted was to be like Sima Qian, the old historial who wrote Records of the Grand Historian. Sima Qian was very objective and he wrote the first good history in China and he wrote lots of honest biographies of people. Nothing more. But the government can't bear Lao Liao saying out loud what is happening in front of everyone's noses. They are embarrassed  and ashamed. And when Ai Weiwei started to do it they couldn't bear him either. First they beat him, then when he doesn't stop but instead starts to criticise them for other things as well, they arrested him. But all they had to do was listen in the first place, then they wouldn't have created an international dissident."

Liao said he would show me his rented room, which was in a block a little way up the hillside. The translator came with us, but strangely the secret police didn't follow us there. When we left the cafe, I expected them to come along, but after a while I realised they had gone elsewhere. Liao's room was very peaceful, and from the balcony there was a view over the old city, all the way to Lake Erhai. At my request, Liao took out the bamboo flute that he had made in prison and played us a couple of tunes. I asked him how well he knew Weiwei and he said that he didn't know him well at all but he he met him in Chengdu in 2008, just after the Sichuan earthquake, when they had both gone there to investigate what lay behind the official government story. A mutual friend had introduced them.

"The mutual friend has since been disappeared," said Liao, matter-of-factly.

It was time for me to leave. I thanked Liao and then walked back with the translator to the youth hostel.

"He's an incredible man," said the translator. "That generation has been through so much."

With the help of a Chinese lawyer, Liao Yiwu is now suing the government for human rights abuses. His determination is undimmed: "I am trying to overcome, little by little, the fear that has been inflicted on me," he is quoted as saying in Wenguang Huang's translator's introduction to The Corpse Walker. "By doing so, I try to preserve my sanity and inner freedom."

Not long after our meeting, Liao left Dali and went by bus to a small village near the Chinese border with Vietnam. Following in the footsteps of one of his most famous interviewees, 'the border crosser', Liao packed a bag with supplies and headed off into the jungle. The border crosser had stumbled into a camp filled with remnants of the ultra-red Chinese forces, preparing for the next leg of a war that ended decades ago. He was forced to become a soldier until he finally managed to retreat back to China. Liao had obviously learned from this unfortunate man's blunder: after a journey the details of which have still not been fully clarified, though it includes transfers in Hanoi and Warsaw, Liao arrived in Berlin on 6 July 2011.

Artful

I've just finished reading Hanging Man by Barnaby Martin. It's about the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and it's utterly fascinating, especially if you would like to know about the art scene in China. Of course, this book was written in 2013 so much has happened since then. Over tea today, I learned that Weiwei has left China and is in exile. But this book introduced me to the sturdy spirits in China, who after a lifetime of Communism and being asked to subjugate their thoughts and feelings continue with heads bloody, but unbowed. Here, I excerpt some of my favourite parts of the book, which I will be running over the next few days.

The Stars group was founded by two factory workers, Ma Desheng and Huang Rui -- but to say that it was "founded" over-formalises its initial inception. It began as a small group of friends and acquaintances discussing the strange ideas that they held so dear, among them the possibility that there were better ways to gain access to reality than through revolutionary realism.

The story of the Stars group is an essential episode in the history of contemporary Chinese art. Although many of the Stars participants are still alive and can easily be tracked down and interviewed, and although many of the poets and writers who were part of the same extended social milieu are also happy to share their thoughts, it is nevertheless very difficult to piece together any kind of objective, reliable historical account of those early days. Over the intervening years many of the people involved have fallen out, some have travelled to the other end of the political spectrum and they all remember the key events very differently.

The group took their name from one of the concepts that regularly came up in their meetings, ziwo back into art after decades spent following the depersonalising rules of revolutionary realism. They believed above all else in the inalienable right of human beings to express themselves as they pleased. As Ma Desheng said: "Every artist is a star ... We called our group 'Stars' in order to emphasise our individuality. This was directed against the drab uniformity of the Cultural Revolution."

Together, they would meet and discuss their illegal counter-revolutionary ideas: their belief in the necessity of cultivating an individual outlook, of subjectivity and freedom of expression. 

So I missed a day....

I wasn't in the mood yesterday. And I was out till late. Which is not an excuse and I don't offer it as one.

And I was wondering whether to continue. Then I read this today, my daily Note from the Universe....and I thought, why not?

If you can get that there was once a "time" before "space", Jennifer, when all that existed was "Divine Intelligence..."

Then you can also get that there could never, later, be anything that wasn't "Divine Intelligence." Because what would it be made of? Where would it have come from?

Then you'd get that you must therefore be pure "Divine Intelligence" yourself and that there's only one explanation for you being you, here and now:

From the pinnacle of your royal magnificence, the zenith of your heavenly godhood, as pure "Divine Intelligence," you, exactly as you now are, with every freckle and blemish, are exactly who you, God, most wanted to be. And you knew exactly what you were doing.

Thy kingdom come,
The Universe