Public (E-Journal, York University)

Gomez, Alberto

English

Luz y Memoria / The Illumination of Memory

Kelley, Paul

Procedures for Measuring the Weight of Light

Gass, William H.

On Talking To Oneself

Mosley, Nicholas

A Morning in the Life of Intelligent People

Folland, Tom

Hart, Christine

Interview with Christine Hart 
by Tom Folland 
Tom Folland Hey-it's Tom. 
Christine Hart Hi. .  . 
TF Are you sleeping? 
CH Yeah.. .it's alright though. 
TF I called you earlier but you weren't in. I always forget how many 
hours ahead London is. Are you awake enough to talk? 
CH Yeah, kind of. . . 
TF Where should we start-when did I first meet you? 
CH At the Primal Institute in Judy's group. 
TF Right, that was '93? 
CH No, '94. 
TF Oh, right. I started in '92. Had you already written your book The 
Devil's Daughter at that point, when I met you? 
CH Yes, it was already published. 
TF What would you say the book is about? 
CH Um, my life. 
TF But it's also about Ian Brady, the infamous Moors murderer of the 
1960s. 
CH It's not really about him, it doesn't go into the murders. I dislike the 
fact that the publishers gave my manuscript that title, The Devil's Daugh- 
ter, because I am an orphan who had a relationship with a murderer; 
there was no way I was related. They did this to try and make money. 
TF What prompted you to write the book? 
CH Urn, people were saying in the press that I was related to Brady and I 
wanted to tell the story of how I came to be involved with someone like 
that. I mean, someone in the orphanage had once told me I was born the 
same year that Brady had apparently had a child and that I might be his 
daughter. I wanted someone to read it and explain to me why I had done 
something like that. 
TF Something like that-you mean visit Ian Brady? 
CH Yeah. 
TF Had you written anything before? 
CH No. 
TF Really, that was your first writing? 
110 
Tom Folland 
CH Yes. 
TF What were you doing before you wrote the book? 
CH Working as an investigator. 
TF A private investigator? 
CH Yeah. 
TF Really? 
CH Yeah. 
TF That's interesting. Were you nervous about The Devil's Daughter com- 
ing out? 
CH No, not really, I think I was too neurotic at the time. 
TF Really. 'Cause you'd kind of been through the mill with all the tabloids 
in England doing stories on you and I remember how you told me once 
that people were spitting at you on the tube. Is that true? 
CH Yeah. 
TF And calling you.. .what were they calling you? 
CH I don't know, I can't remember. 
TF I also remember when I first met you, you were staying at  the St. 
James Club in West Hollywood because you were being interviewed. 
CH Oh yeah, for the book, I sold the rights to an English paper. 
TF Oh, like a tabloid paper? 
CH Uh huh. 
TF I also remember you telling me that Ralph Fiennes had tried to pick 
you up in the bar at the St. James and I was jealous-I never got that 
close to stardom in LA. 
CH (laughing) And I saw Rod Stewart in the bar as well, oh, and Anthony 
Quinn; I used to see him at breakfast because he was living there at the 
time. 
TF I saw Sally Struthers once at Helen's Bike Shop in Santa Monica. That 
was my first big brush with stardom. Oh, and I sat next to Morgan Fair- 
child at the Abbey in West Hollywood, the coffee shop. You have a very 
interesting relationship to tabloids and gossip because you were caught up 
in this whole thing in England because of the book. 
CH Oh a lot of that happened before the book.. . 
TF Your involvement with Brady. 
CH Well because I was writing to and visiting a serial killer they [tabloid 
journalists] wanted to know why. 
TF How did they find out about it before the book? 
CH Someone at the prison told them I was visiting Ian Brady. 
TF Did they talk to you before they ran the story? 
111 
Interview with Christine Hart 
CH Yeah. 
TF What did they ask you? 
CH Why are you writing to a serial killer? 
TF And what did you say? 
CH Because I thought he was my Dad. 
TF And then when it hit the newstands, were you surprised at the reaction? 
CH Ah, not really, no. I was surprised they believed it. 
TF Oh, because half of it was fabrications. 
CH All of it was fabrications. 
TF I remember you once told me that there was a point at which you no 
longer believed that Ian Brady was your father but the tabloids still kept 
publishing that. 
CH Yeah. 
TF That was part of the reason you left London, right? 
CH Yeah. But also to do Primal Therapy in California. 
TF You went to  New York for a while before you went to LA. I remem- 
ber that from the book-that whole trip to New York. It's funny because 
it was a really sad story, not so much about Ian Brady but more about 
loneliness to me, a real existential loneliness. 
CH You're kidding? 
TF No, it really struck me. I remember when I first moved to New York 
how lonely and excited I was at the same time. I think it's the same for a 
lot of young people who move there from smaller places. There are all 
these great expectations, wanting to escape. It's classic. But yeah, I mean, 
the Ian Brady stuff was part of the book but more, to me, it was a really 
moving story about aloneness and alienation. 
CH Really? Hmm.. .that's interesting. I've re-written it, as you know, 
and I've re-written that part and put it in one big book that includes my 
time in therapy and uh, it's written more from the point of view of an 
outsider.. . not concentrating on a serial killer. It a story about, you know, 
not relating to others, and childhood stuff.. .it's more strongly about that. 
TF About your time in the orphanage. 
CH Yeah, and you know, being abused and shit like that. And how it 
causes you to feel alienated from others. 
TF You essentially re-wrote the first book? 
CH And the second one. An agent has read it and accepted it, and a pub- 
lisher has read it and accepted it. It's called A Few People Murdered by 
Their Parents, because I include others in it. I think they will probably 
change the title. 
112 
Tom Folland 
TF That's interesting, I mean, you've reclaimed your identity from the 
first book and the tabloids by rewriting it. 
CH Yeah, and my writing has matured, you know. 
TF How would you describe your experience with Primal Therapy in Los 
Angeles. 
CH Uh, I would say that it has gotten me out of a lot of darkness; it 
cleared my head of a lot of darkness. It's made me relate to others more. 
It's made me see things more clearly. It's gotten rid of a lot of neuroses, 
actually. I'm sure I've got a lot left but it cleared up a lot, it did, you 
know. 
TF It took me awhile, I felt very fucked-up for the first two years. I mean 
I felt really bad before I started, of course, and then felt bad in a different 
way throughout the course of therapy. Then you get to this point where 
you realize you can't do this therapy without feeling bad. I had this fan- 
tasy that I would be "cured" in six months. 
CH Yeah, so did I. Because of what Janov says in the book (Arthur Janov, 
The Primal Scream). 
TF Yeah, because of what Art Janov said. 
CH I like how it has helped me deal with life. I don't like the fact that I 
am older and wanting a relationship and how hard it is. 
TF Well, I'm still not sure why I am attracted to the people I am, and 
when it doesn't work out, I have a hard time getting over it. Weren't you 
in love with an IRA Terrorist? 
CH Which one? 
TF Which one? (laughing). Maybe I'm thinking of the Irish farmer you 
told me about. 
CH Oh he's down in Crossmaglen, which is kind of, well, I think they are 
all in the IRA. It's IRA territory. 
TF Oh, so he's not active in the IRA. 
CH Well, since he's down there, one can assume that he is active. He's 
Sinn Fein, which is the political wing of the IRA. Right. 
TF You know, it's weird, I was reading this thing about Ted Kaczynski- 
you know the unabomber in America - 
CH Right, yeah.. . 
TF It was an interesting case because his defense team, his lawyers, 
wanted him to plead insanity to avoid the death penalty and he absolutely 
refused, because he saw himself as a political radical and an insanity plea 
would undermine his politics. You know, he had written this manifesto 
about the dangers of science and technology and how they were destroy- 
113 
Interview with Christine Hart 
ing the earth. And it was these political views he feared people would see 
as insanity and here his lawyers were doing that very thing. Oddly enough 
the prosecution was claiming he was sane and that this was a rational 
political program-exactly how Koysiznki saw himself and so he essen- 
tially agreed with the prosecution's view of him and not his own lawyers. 
CH That's interesting. 
TF But, well, this was an interesting article because it was talking about 
his family's attempts to come to terms with his insanity, and I was think- 
ing about this in relation to that whole thing you went through with Ian 
Brady, wanting to see some sort of humanity in him, through all those 
horrendous things he had done, wanting to redeem him. 
CH Yeah.. . 
TF They interviewed his mother on Sixty Minutes and she described this 
incident when he was six-months-old and had hives and was hospitalized. 
Now, apparently in those days babies weren't allowed to be touched in 
the hospital, so Ted Kaczynski was strapped to a table, naked, screaming, 
for a whole week and his mother has said that when she got him back, he 
was all limp and unresponsive. And so his mother thinks that a lot of his 
later troubles stem from this early trauma and you know I think that's 
probably true. 
CH How did you relate that to me trying to see humanity in Brady? 
TF Well, everyone is always trying to figure out what makes someone 
crazy, right, or what makes people become killers or if killers are insane, 
and of course I think they are, but I think they are because of a reason, or 
reasons, and it's that kind of trauma that does it to people. 
CH Oh yeah, when I wrote about it again in the book and during ther- 
apy, I-as I was having therapy-I was, in the book, flashing back to the 
serial killer's childhood and doing his memories and seeing his memories. 
I mean, I'm doing it using my imagination, from what he told me, and 
I've got some scenes from when he was a child and stuff, um, you know, 
how he would come to kill. It turned out pretty well, actually. 
TF But he never told you about his childhood did he? 
CH Well, he told me different bits, yeah.. .about his mother leaving his 
rabbits to die when he went away and stuff. 
TF It's a weird debate, that whole debate about what makes someone kill 
someone. I think it's insane to believe a sane person could kill someone 
under normal circumstances.. . 
CH I think he's the same as Fred West, it's the same type of killing. Fred 
West, uh, he uh, his mother introduced him to sex when he was eight and 
114 
Tom Folland 
his father buggered him and beat him and then he started keeping people 
in the cellar. Interesting thing was he used to bandage them all up and put 
straw in their nose and stuff and uh, yeah, well the only thing left of them 
was the straws in the nose, and I think it was kind of symbolic -that he 
wasn't seen as a person, but as an orifice. 
TF By his parents? 
CH Yeah, yeah.. . and he kind of re-created it. It's not facing it that 
causes all the, you know, the mental instabilities. I mean, it's bound to 
have some kind of effect, isn't it? 
TF Oh yeah, it has to. I mean, I had an abusive childhood, not like that, 
but it was bad and it has taken me a long time to get over it. I know that 
lying to yourself about it doesn't help. I mean, I did that and i t  didn't 
work. 
CH I was talking to this little twenty-two-year-old that I know who read 
the Primal Scream and he said, "I don't like this, you know, I don't like 
the way it's like 'Oh, you're neurotic, you're neurotic.' I don't like the way 
I am supposed to  be neurotic all the time," and I was like, Well, you are, 
you are, you are.. . 
TF You are neurotic! 
CH Face it baby - you're neurotic! I mean, oh . .  . and he said, "I don't 
think it's a good thing to dwell on your past." 
TF Oh, so many people say that, I'm sick of hearing it. My family said 
that when I went into therapy. 
CH It's so annoying. And so, well, all he was saying to me-I had a drink 
with him in the pub-and he said, "I am really out of touch with myself, 
I'm out of touch: and I said, "well, look-let me do a diagram, and I got 
a lighter, an ashtray and a cigarette package and I said, "There's you; 
there's your real self, right, here's the ashtray, that's your real self," and I 
put the lighter in the middle and said, "There's all your old feelings and 
it's the old feelings that are preventing you from being your real self. Get 
in touch with your old self (your self as a child) and you can start to feel." 
And he said, "No, no, I don't think you have to do that. It's just a ques- 
tion of me getting in touch with myself." And I said, "You can't under- 
stand me, there's something blocking it." 
TF People have a lot of difficulty with the concept of feeling pain in order 
to feel better. 
CH Oh, really? 
TF Oh, I think so. I do sometimes myself, when I'm feeling really bad, I 
think it hasn't worked for me. 
115 
Interview with Christine Hart 
CH Hang on a sec, Tom, there's someone at the door, which is unusual. 
Can you wait a sec. . . 
(Long pause) 
TF Are you going to be in LA this summer? 
CH I want to, yeah. If you're there we could share a place. 
TF Yeah we could. I want to meet your friend Brent. 
CH I want to see him. He sent me his address a while ago and I lost it. 
I'm going to have to write to Judy to get it. 
TF Judy will give you his address? 
CH Well she gave me Mike's, or she passed on a letter he had written me; 
this absurd letter; I didn't reply. But yeah, she passes letters on, she's okay 
that way. 
TF I've thought about her recently. You know, she was my primary thera- 
pist there. I miss her. 
CH Yeah, yeah.. . I  thought about Barry the other day; I had this weird 
dream about this really aggressive guy with this Brooklyn accent who 
was, like, really awful and I thought, God I had a real connection with 
him, and then it was Barry. 
TF Hey, did you know that Gretchen and Nick went out for a while? 
CH Yeah I did. 
TF I was talking to Gretchen about stuff, relationship stuff-you know, 
can you be friends with someone you're interested in-and she said, 
"Well you know I went out with Nick for years and now we're best 
friends." Although she had been telling me it's not a good idea. 
CH I should go because someone's here. 
TF Oh, okay, I might have.. . 
CH Sorry I wasn't in earlier but someone phoned me and the sun was 
shining and I was like, yeah, I'll go.. .it's so rare for the sun to shine. 
TF Okay, bye, I'll see you later. 
CH Bye, Tom, 1'11 talk to you later. 


Interview

Ritchie, Christina

Wren, Jacob

Introduction 
The issue you are about to read focuses on the opportunities for informal 
and spontaneous talk-talk that is not directed towards a particular 
objective or designed according to a specific agenda or within the para- 
meters of a pre-existing discourse. This kind of talk is sometimes, never- 
theless, "important" in the subjects it addresses and the impact it has on 
its participants. 
We begin, perhaps a little bit too obviously, with a conversation be- 
tween the editors. 
Christina Ritchie So, we should try to  make this as concise as we can, 
because in the book I don't think it should be more than a couple of pages. 
So I'm going to ask you, Jacob: how do you like the contents we've col- 
lected for Talk. [laughter] 
Jacob Wren It seems to me, well, I always look at any project or enter- 
prise as a kind of chasm between the reality and the ideal. But for me, or 
not even for me, it seems that a kind of ideal expression of the notion of 
talk in a printed form would come out of a group of people who all knew 
each other and were friends and socialized. And out of some sort of social, 
conversational activity would come ideas for articles and artist's projects, 
and there would be this kind of life, which I've never experienced, this 
kind of energy of socializing.. . 
CR You mean socializing or collegiality of some sort.. . 
JW Some sort of peer environment. But most of the way material has 
been solicited for Talk has been writing formally to people we don't know 
-though maybe for you there's been a few more people you know-so in 
a way it seems like it's the exact opposite of the ideal. I consider talk to 
be a more informal process and yet we've used a basically formal process 
to gather material about it. But still a lot of the material.. .it seems more 
about informal talk then coming out of, or of, informal talk. Which is 
interesting. 
CR Well, what's interesting to me is that the contents we have put to- 
gether.. . I mean, I love it that we've got two days to deliver the manu- 
script to the copy editor and there are still a number of people that we 
haven't heard from. . . 
10 
Christina Ritchie 8 Jacob Wren 
P (laughter) People who aren't talking to us at the moment.. . 
CR And putting it together reflects the kinds of things that happen in a 
conversation. I don't know if that's going to be reflected in the character of 
the issue, but what I mean is that there are people who have mis-spoken; 
there are instances where people change their mind; there are instances 
where people contradict each other even though there was no actual con- 
versation between them. You know, from Dave Hickey's interview to the 
essay by William H. Gass, there's a total contradiction there. And I like 
the way someone like Emily Vey Duke has used the opportunity to speak 
the unspeakable. So I think that some really nice things have been done. 
Whether or not it's.. .you know, if I had a more comfortable lead time in 
which to put the material together, I don't think it would be the same 
issue. But that's kind of beside the point. 
JW Something else I've realized over the course of this process, or pro- 
ject, is that in a way the original impulse was both about talk and about a 
lack of talk. And I think the contents very much reflect that. But also, in a 
way, there's the thinking that you can't have a sort of vibrant conversa- 
tional tone without a kind of longing for it, or a feeling that you're lack- 
ing it; that it's a void that has to be filled. It's a void before it's a reality. 
And maybe as it becomes a reality, the void remains. 
CR Yes, and that feeds into the idea of talk as a kind of paradoxical 
experience where to speak, in a public sense, is, in fact, to come into 
being socially, and yet the product of such an act is ephemeral-unless 
we happen to be running a tape recorder or some other mechanism that 
freezes it, and then it is no longer what it started out being. There is that 
sort of tension, which is perhaps what is longed for. In one conversation 
that we had, I don't know if we were particularly depressed that day, but 
we talked about talk as an antidote to lunacy. And I'm not sure why.. . 
JW Because when you talk you realize everyone's just as crazy as you are 
and suddenly it doesn't seem so abnormal. 
CR 1t7s totally normal. And it takes up an incredible amount of our time. 
And most of the talk that we talk is pretty innocuous and predictable yet 
nonetheless necessary and fascinating. So we probably talk a lot more 
than you acknowledge. And it's just those very specific kinds of conversa- 
tions where there is an idea that is based in an ethical or moral position 
that is nonetheless open and subject to  alteration through action and 
interaction; well, that might happen just by discussing the price of beans, 
it doesn't necessarily have to be exhilarating. But I think it's that kind of 
eh la ra t ing  thing that you're looking for, right? 
11 
Introduction 
JW Sure, but also, well.. .the exhilaration, I think, comes just from the 
feeling that it's possible. And the deadening quality, that maybe I whine 
about, just comes from this feeling that you can talk endlessly with any 
number of people and nothing of any significance will ever be said. And 
just a moment, even if nothing is said, where it seems suddenly that it's 
possible, not just to speak your mind in an honest way-or to speak 
about ideas in a complex way-but to say something that you haven't 
thought before, a kind of social interaction in which a space is opened up 
where, because of what other people are saying, suddenly you can say 
something that hasn't occurred to you before. And even if you don't, 
that's the kind of rare, but I think essential, quality. 


Introduction

A conversation between Henrik Håkansson and Terry R. Myers

Contributors 
John Barlow is a widely published Toronto 
poet and editor of Oversion. 
James Car1 is a visual artist who lives in 
Toronto and New York City. His work Fozcntain 
was featured in the Toronto Sculpture Garden 
in 1997. 
E. M. Cioran, the reclusive Romanian philoso 
pher published over fifteen books, often being 
compared to such wrlters as Beckett and 
Borges. He died in 1995 at the age of 84. 
Hans-Peter Feldmann, though llttle known In 
North Amer~ca, is something of a cult figure 
In his natlve Germany where his rigorous 
conceptual oeuvre is considered one of the 
most Important efforts of the 1960s and '70s. 
Tom Folland 1s a Toronto-based independent 
art crltic and curator and teaches art history 
part-time at the Ontario College of Art and 
Design. 
Christine Hart is a London journalist and 
author of The Devil's Daughter. She is cur. 
rently writing a book on the IRA. 
William H.  Gass is an American novelist and 
literary critic and is head of the International 
Writers Center at Washington University. 
Henrik Hikansson is a Swedish artist dedicated 
to the creation of communications channels 
between humans and other species, attempting 
to transcend human isolation. He has realized 
projects in a number of European museums, 
including the Louisiana Museum in Denmark 
(NowlHere, 1996). He is represented by 
Galleri Andreas Brandstrom in Stockholm. 
Dave Hickey is a writer on art and culture and 
Associate Professor of Art Criticism at the 
University of Nevada, Las Vegas. After running 
art galleries in Austin, Texas and New York 
City, Hickey served as Executive Editor for Art 
in America magazine. He has written for most 
major American cultural publications. 
Nicholas Mosley won the Whitbread Award 
for his novel, Hopeful Monsters in 1990. 
"A Morning in the Life of Intelligent People" 
is from his 1968 novel, Impossible Object. 
Terry R. Myers is a critic based in Los Ange- 
les. He has written for artltext, Arts Magazine, 
Blocnotes, Flash Art among others. He is 
Associate Professor and Critic-in-residence at 
Otis College of Art and Design. 
Jan Peacock is a video artist living in Halifax, 
where she teaches at the Nova Scotia College 
of Art & Design. Her work has recently been 
featured in exhibitions-at the National Gallery 
of Canada, The Western Front in Vancouver 
and St. Norbert Arts and Cultural Centre in 
Winnipeg. A catalogue is forthcoming from 
her 1988 exhibition at Presentation House 
Gallery in Vancouver. 
Christina Ritchie is Assistant Curator of 
Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of 
Ontario In Toronto. 
David Shrigley lives and works in Glasgow. 
His work has been seen in a number of group 
and solo shows in Europe and he has pub- 
lished several books of his drawings. He is 
represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery in 
London. 
Emily Vey Duke is currently enrolled in a BFA 
program at the Nova Scotia College of Art & 
Design in Halifax. Most of her work is for 
printed formats but she has also made perfor- 
mance, installation and video works, which 
have been exhibited nationally and published 
in Mix and Fuse magazines. 
Jason Weiss, an American writer, spent the 
1980s in Paris where he was the first writer to 
be granted a full interview with E. M. Cioran. 
Jacob Wren is a Toronto-based writer and 
theatre artist. He is artistic director of Candid 
Stammer Theatre. 


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Luz y Memoria / The Illumination of Memory

Procedures for Measuring the Weight of Light

On Talking To Oneself

A Morning in the Life of Intelligent People

Interview

Introduction

A conversation between Henrik Håkansson and Terry R. Myers

Contributors

"I'm Sitting With Solipsists Thinking How" and "The Happy Idea"

Interview

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