Tag: interview

Interview with John Julius Norwich

This is an automated transcription of an interview with the late English popular historian, John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich, CVO, recorded in 2011.

VOX DAY: I’m delighted to be able to tell you today that my guest is one of my favourite historians, John Julius Norwich. He’s the author of more than 20 books including A History of Venice, Byzantium: The Decline and Fall, Shakespeare’s Kings, as well as his recently published memoirs entitled Trying to Please. Lord Norwich, welcome to the podcast. Western culture has always been obsessed with the Western Roman Empire, and paid relatively little attention to the Eastern Roman Empire, so to what do you attribute this general lack of attention or interest in the Byzantines versus the ancient Greeks and Romans?

JOHN JULIUS NORWICH: I think largely that… I mean, I didn’t. I had the sort of ordinary interest in the Greeks and Romans, because that’s what you have. If you go to school in England, you know, you go to public school education, you learn a lot about the Greeks and the Romans. But the interesting thing in England is that you never, never get any education at all about the Eastern Roman Empire, about Byzantium. It’s a conspiracy of silence, and it has been for the last 200 years. And I fell in love with the Byzantine Empire really, largely because of my friend, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died last week, who was the greatest archeologist and a scholar of it, and who I went on a cruise around Eastern Mediterranean with. And also when, in 1955, when I joined the Foreign Service, My first post was Belgrade, in Serbia, or Yugoslavia as it was in those days, and I was just sort of swept up in the whole. That seemed to me the sort of the whole mystery and the magic of the Orthodox Church and the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium and all that. I suppose I’ve been swept up in it ever since.

VD: To what do you attribute the fact that it was a mystery to you? I mean, it’s certainly a mystery to Americans, we don’t spend any time learning about it either. Why is there such ignorance of it?

JJN: Why is there a conspiracy of silence? Precisely. I wish I knew. I went through what I’m sure would have been considered a very good English public school education at Eton. And I hardly knew what Byzantium was. I’m not sure that I knew whether it was Christian or Muslim. I’m not sure whether I don’t think I knew anything about it at all. And because nobody ever mentioned it all throughout my schooling. And I think I was not alone in this. I mean, people just didn’t. It was never taken seriously by English educationists.

VD: Constantine’s decision to move his capital from Rome to Byzantium was one of the more monumental decisions in history.

JJN: Yes, it tends to distract the reader, as if Obama had suddenly decided to move the US Capitol from Washington, DC to Mexico City.

VD: What was behind Constantine’s decision to establish a new capital? And why did the eastern half of the Empire survive so much longer than the Western one did?

JJN: Well, the capital had really, to all intents and purposes already left Rome. I mean, what happened already in this, in the second century? The second century AD, the whole focus of political and cultural activity, is moving to the east, is moving east from Rome, to the eastern Mediterranean. I mean, if you read the Acts of the Apostles, or if, if you read any of that stuff, I mean, it is it is in Asia Minor on the eastern Mediterranean, that everything is happening. Rome has become a backwater, it’s too far away. By this time. The Empire’s principal enemy is Persia, Rome to Persia. I mean, it’s, I don’t know, three or four months probably travel. And it was no it was absolutely necessary to move the capitol to where all the action was. Diocletian did it first. I mean, he, he decided to divide the imprint of the empire into four. And each one had a what he called a Tetrarch. But all four of them were in the east. None of them are in Rome, even then. So when Constantine decided in 332, to move to move the Capitol, it wasn’t a terribly new or revolutionary idea at all. I mean, he was really doing what had already happened. He was just choosing a new a new place. You know, I mean, Nicomedia. Antioquia was three or four other places, which had been tried out and they were very successful. So he just found this new place. which was superbly in a superb defensive position, and said, right, this is it, this is going to be in future capital. Apart from that we’re exactly the same Empire we’ve always been, where we’re Romans whether our empire is the empire of Adios, Nero and Hadrian and Trajan and all that lot. There’s no change, except that we’ve moved to a new capital.

VD: Why did the eastern half of the Empire survive so much longer than the Western one did?

JJN: Well, I mean, it’s survived. Very, very surprisingly, it remained. Except for 50 years in the 13th century, it remained undefeated, I mean, the Roman Empire continued under the new capital in Constantinople, and got incredibly powerful and is by far the richest, by far the most powerful state in the in the civilised world. Until two terrible things happen. One was the the surge of checks, the first wave of tax arrived, and defeated the Byzantine army. This was intense. And more or less flooded all over the whole of Asia Minor, which was where Byzantium got most of its food, and nearly all its manpower. And, and then, and then, that was the that was the first great disaster from which from which you’ve never recovered. And the second great disaster, of course, was the Fourth Crusade when the the Christian armies, who should have done everything they could to protect and defend and strengthen this last great outpost of Christianity in the east, turned against it and destroyed it, and left it a poor, pale shred of what it had been before, to the point where, although it lasted another 250 years, God knows how it did it. It really had completely lost its importance.

Continue reading “Interview with John Julius Norwich”

Be Based, Young Man

An interview with Noor bin Ladin:

By turns, Noor blends optimism and pessimism about the future. “I walk through the streets sometimes and think to myself, ‘My God, so many of these people don’t realise the war we’re in.’” But it’s clear enough to me that her attitude is ultimately one of hope for the future. When I suggest that the pandemic response has been a “great filter” event – an event that decides, quite literally, whether people are going to make it or not – and that most people have failed abjectly, she rebuffs me strongly. However many people have accepted events at face value and gone along with what the good doctor Anthony Fauci has told them, enough people are aware of the “war”, and of the stakes involved, that a globalist victory is anything but assured. Despite the reversals of the last year, what she calls the “Great Awakening”, which began five years ago with the election of Donald Trump, is still going strong. “People are fighting back” – look at the protests in France, the Netherlands and even Australia, which people have been far too quick to write off as totally lost, she says. The increasingly desperate measures taken by authorities, especially vaccine mandates, are a clear sign for Noor that things are not going as planned for the globalists.

And, for all the talk of irreligion, decadence and degeneracy over the past hour – however “far removed from God we are”, as she puts it – she trusts, nonetheless, that “we all have an innate sense of morality” and “people know that what is happening is wrong.”

“But whatever happens,” she adds, “God wins at the end of the day.” This seems like a good place for us to end our conversation.

There’s one last thing, though. Given the gravity of everything we’ve talked about – from Auschwitz to xenoestrogens – it feels almost frivolous to ask Noor the burning question, the question that prompted this interview in the first place. But since we’re wrapping up, I think “what the hell?” and ask it anyway.

So what is it based women really want?

“Oh that’s simple,” Noor replies, with a smile. “Based women want a man who’s even more based than they are.”

The sooner both men and women accept that the entire “Enlightenment” program was the nothing more than the continuation of the religious program of the most wicked of the ancient pagan evils, the sooner they will turn back to Jesus Christ, back to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, and the sooner Man can return to building civilization rather than tearing it down.

If you can’t fight for the Cross, perhaps you can at least summon the faith to fight for flush toilets. If you don’t believe in Rome, perhaps you can at least summon the will to delenda Carthage. If you can’t accept the Truth, perhaps you can see enough of it to reject the Lie.

And it’s a healthy reminder not to hide your intellectual light under a bushel in a futile attempt to avoid female rejection. Instead, give them something to which they can be drawn.

DISCUSS ON SG

Interview with Razorfist

Dark Herald interviews Razorfist for Bounding Into Comics about his new Dark Legion book, DEATH MASK as well as the decline and inevitable rise of pulp fiction:

DARK HERALD: Your Nightvale series appears to be strongly inspired by pulp era adventure stories. Pulp fiction was fairly common through the 1980s, but then interest started to taper off over the next twenty years. Why do you think that happened?

RAZÖRFIST: “Logistically speaking, what killed the pulps were the wood rationing and shortages of the mid-’40s.”

“The Shadow, the most popular of the ‘hero’ pulps for a long while, dropped to a shorter digest format and even cut Walter Gibson’s pay to keep the lights on. He would ultimately quit Street & Smith over it. Most pulp publishers were already dead after World War 2 and just didn’t realize it until the bills came due all at once over the next decade.

In the ’50s, those old yellow paperbacks (for a time, distributed via vending machine) seemed to replace Pulp as Television and Comics came to the fore. Ultimately, those got thicker and more pretentious until they became the ‘elevated’ gas station literature you see today”

“With thirty different titles ‘written’ by James Patterson, none of which he was ever even dimly aware of. They did sort of morph into the ‘genre fiction’ you’re alluding to throughout the ’80s. And in a weird way, they live on through Star Trek and Star Wars books, Battletech and so on.

These publishing houses are essentially printing pulp. It’s just a bit more bloated and seems to have aspirations to be more than it is. Sorry to say, it isn’t and never will be. Which is exactly the way I like it.”

DARK HERALD: I’ve recently run into a few other authors like you and Sky Hernstrom that have written new Robert Howard style high adventures. Do you think there is pulp revival underway? Also, who else do you know of who is working in contemporary Pulp?

RAZÖRFIST: “Yeah, I’ve read some of Sky’s stuff in Cirsova and enjoyed it. The first ‘New Pulp’ writer I was aware of was Barry Reese, who does a Shadow-esque vigilante series featuring characters like ‘The Peregrine’ and ‘Lazarus Grey’.”

“I think a Pulp Revival is inevitable. Whether it happens now or decades hence. Attention spans have fallen. Smart devices are tucked away in every pocket. Short fiction and bite-sized stories seem the way to go.

Yet, the ‘Phonebook Fantasy’ writers seem to have a minimum page count of 500 and fill the majority of it with worldbuilding bloat. And despite the name, it isn’t all that novel, either. None of them are doing anything terribly interesting to justify it.

Writing straightforward Fantasy is fine – I love it to death – It’s the pretense that it’s anything more that I can’t abide. And the smug superiority as they look down their nose at shorter, more plot-driven fiction.”

DISCUSS ON SG

Interview with Susan Cooper

An illuminating 1999 interview with the author of THE DARK IS RISING series.

RT: The books comprise a series. Did you find that what you had written in the earlier books committed you to directions that you subsequently regretted, or wished you had more freedom to change?

SC: No. It was wonderful. It was like writing a symphony, in which each movement is different and yet they all link together. I wish my imagination would give me another shape like that because there are all kinds of satisfactions inside it. Things link together, an early book leads to something in a later book. When I wrote the first book, of course, I didn’t envision a series, but later, when I first had the idea of writing, not just the second book, but the whole sequence, I drew up a plan on a piece of paper. I had little notes written down: I had the four times of the year–focused upon the solstices, Beltane, and such festivals–I had places, and, very roughly, the characters who were in each book. I remember that under The Grey King there was a boy called Bran, but I didn’t know who he was. So that was the only thing that limited me.

There were things I had to remember from early books that had to be either resolved or referred to in later books. Once in a great while some particularly bright child will write me a letter saying, you never said what happened to . . . . But I didn’t find it restricting. No.

RT: Are there any particular details you would like to change, looking back in retrospect?

SC: I would like to have developed the three Drew children more fully in the first book. They develop as the series progresses, but they’re very corny kids’ book characters in Over Sea, Under Stone, it seems to me. I hadn’t gotten to know them.

RT: As the series progresses, Jane in particular grows more interesting, doesn’t she?

SC: Yes. Jane is someone I always wanted to write about again. Silver on the Tree suffered from being the last book where I was tying up all the ends. It has too much in it. My head was going off in all directions. Its structure is not terrific. There was even more in it, but I took some out. Of course when you’re dealing with the substance of myth, which is the fight between good and evil, I suppose, you have to provide the ultimate, terrific, enormous climax. It’s almost impossible.

I’m not promising anything, not yet, but I am optimistic that we may eventually be able to release a Castalia Library edition of the series. And if so, the bar will be a fairly high one to clear, as the Easton Press edition is arguably the most beautiful set that Easton has ever produced.

DISCUSS ON SG

Interview with an Elder God

While rooting around my WND audio interviews, I discovered an old interview from the 2012 election season with an unlikely political figure.

We are deeply privileged to have the opportunity to speak with another potential candidate for the presidency. He’s been asleep beneath the ice for centuries, but now he’s up, he’s active, and he’s thinking about throwing his tentacles in the ring in 2012! So, I’m pleased to welcome The Thing That Should Not Be himself, Dread Chtulhu! So, Mighty Cthulhu, I understand you’re thinking about a run for the presidency!

Yes, America has tried voting for the lesser evil and you’ve seen how that’s worked out. It’s time to vote for the Greater Evil!

And that would be you?

Yes, of course. Unless Hillary gets into the race again.

But you haven’t made up your mind yet.

Not yet. There are some issues.

Issues?

Potential problems.

Like what?

I’m afraid there may be a few indiscreet tweets.

Really?

Hey, when you’re sleeping beneath the Antarctic Ice, things can get a little slow, you know what I mean?

You’re on Twitter? Who were you tweeting with?

Arianna Huffington. That is one NASTY greek goddess. She’s got a mouth that I can only describe as FILTHY. Nice lady.

Arianna Huffington, wow. Okay, anyone else?

Well, I sent a picture to that little singer girl, Justin Beeber, but she didn’t hit me back.

I think Bieber is a boy.

IS HE? Oh… well, wouldn’t that have been embarrassing.

You said a picture? What kind of picture?

Yeah, well, you want to talk about some RIDICULOUS BULGES. I got ’em. Lots of ’em.

I’m not sure America is ready for a naked tweeting president, Cthulhu.

Who said anything about naked? I was wearing silk boxers.

Classy. But still….

Let me set one thing straight. When the American people vote for Cthulhu, they will get the promised evil. The Greater Evil. Nonstop, full-time, pure and dedicated evil. I will devour puppies. I will tear the heads off foreign heads of state, and I will make America FEARED again!

You don’t think that sounds too much like Mitt Romney’s platform?

Does it? Hmmm, perhaps I’ll have to rethink my position on healthcare then.

So you’re in?

First we have to see if this Beeber girl goes to the press or not.

What about Arianna?

We’ve got a date this weekend. We’re going to see the Hangover 2. I love that little naked Japanese guy. Makes me laugh every time.

Thank you, Great Cthulhu. America’s next president or long-deceased elder god worshipped by mad homicidal cultists? Only time will tell.

DISCUSS ON SG

COVID and Climate Change

A three-way conversation between Daniel Sanderson, Steve Keen and me, in which we somehow manage to avoid discussing either COVID or climate change.

DS: That’s a project that we’re releasing in January and I wanted to include in that academy, a course from Steve as well on economics.

VD: That’s going to be intriguing because Steve is not generally what one would consider to be Econ 101 material.

DS: No, it’s not, but we’ve talked a little bit about the show and I think the best thing is to try and summarize what he’s saying and then build off of that. That’s kind of the idea and the course just takes shape.

VD: I can write that for you in five minutes. In 30 seconds, I can summarize everything you need to know about Steve Keen’s work in economics.

DS: Okay here we go! Yeah, here we go.

VD: It’s very simple. Everything you’ve ever read is wrong.

To be clear, I still don’t do interviews. But I absolutely will make the occasional exception on behalf of requests from Castalia and Arkhaven authors, particularly if the Castalia/Arkhaven author happens to be the greatest living economist.

DISCUSS ON SG

Four game designers, two interviews

My recruitment efforts for high-quality additions to the DevGame site have already been rewarded beyond my reasonable expectations, as two veteran game developers have already agreed to become regular contributors. Restitutor Orbis, a game designer who is the newest contributor to DevGame, interviewed Chris Crawford, legendary game designer and founder of the Game Developers Conference, in 2005:

Eastern Front (1941) was one of Crawford’s most noteworthy creations so I decided to press him for details. “Eastern Front was a creative implementation of an obvious idea. ‘Let’s do a good wargame on a computer!’” he said. “Pulling it off involved an awful lot of creativity, but it required tactical creativity as opposed to strategic creativity.”

I was puzzled by what he meant. Crawford has a reputation for being outspoken, but it’s a cryptic sort of outspokenness, profound to the point of incomprehensibility. Talking to him can be like reading A Brief History of Time at 120 words a minute. You always feel like you’re missing something.

“Tactical creativity is implementation creativity. How do we build a good map? How do we move units around? How do we build a good AI system? You already know where you are going and you are just figuring out how to get there.”

“So would you say in today’s game industry we have a lot of tactical creativity and less strategic creativity?” I asked.

“Nowadays the stuff we call creative is tiny, tiny stuff. It’s hard to even call it creative at all. Technically, yes, I see a lot of creativity. But I see almost no design creativity in the stuff that’s coming out there.”

What was beginning to become apparent in 2005 is now completely obvious to everyone 15 years later. Read the whole thing. For my part, I interviewed Brad Wardell,  designer of Galactic Civilizations and publisher of Sins of a Solar Empire and Sorceror King, as part of the 2016 DevGame course:

VD: You’ve moved from doing science fiction with Galactic Civilizations into doing 4X fantasy with Fallen Enchantress and Sorcerer King. What were some of the challenges that were involved in moving from science fiction to fantasy?

Brad: The biggest one for us was going from a space-based game like Galactic Civilizations II to a land-based game like Fallen Enchantress. Specifically, the terrain. You are dealing with the ground. And that turned out to be a huge challenge for us because we had never had to deal with it before. We had never really run up against things like video memory or the limitations of DirectX in terms of how to make a mountain. You think about it, of course, but how you make something like a mountain can be limiting based on DirectX, because there’s only so many points you can put on there. So that turned out to be a huge hurdle for us, and that really bit us in the butt, because, at the time, we didn’t do our homework on what we could and couldn’t do with the current technology.

VD: Interesting. That’s very timely because we’re going to be getting into things like polygon count and so forth when we talk about art later today. Now, in the publishing world, the market for fantasy is considerably larger than the one for science fiction. Is that true in games as well, or do you find that science fiction usually outsells fantasy?

Brad: I read mostly science fiction myself. In the game arena, I would say science fiction tends to be a bit ahead of fantasy, only because the problem people run into with fantasy is that they think fantasy means medieval Europe with magic. And that’s not a just a problem in terms of the designer’s limits, it’s more the expectations of the public. If you move too far outside the box, you are punished for it in the marketplace. Whereas in science fiction, you have a little bit more room to breathe.

Even if you’re not a game developer, or a wannabe game developer, there is a good chance you’re going to learn a lot of interesting information from these interviews. And if you’re a gamer, you’re definitely going to want to add DevGame to your daily bookmarks list. 

The last interview

I initially declined the interview request, but since I read the Unz Review myself and the interviewer only had a few substantive questions tangential to his very positive review of Alt-Hero, I took a few minutes to email him back. It’s not his fault, but in retrospect, I should have stuck with my instinctive reaction and declined to answer them, as a commenter here noted.

The comments on the UNZ article are a testament to moderating comments as they do here. It’s like a gamma bomb went off under the article.

Precisely. The way the anklebiters who stalk this place and the Darkstream in vain will immediately rush to any media mention of any kind is yet another good reason not to talk to anyone, media or not. Even when the interview is friendly, positive, and substantive, there’s always at least some degree of nonsense and negativity that results from it.

This little gamma bomb is orders of magnitude smaller than the fallout from my previous interview with Bleeding Cool, but nevertheless underlines the point that there is zero net benefit to me from bothering to talk to anyone who isn’t on Unauthorized. So, this little Kersey interview will likely be the last one I give to anyone for the time being. I have my own channels of communication; I have no need for anyone else’s. Anyone who wants to know what I think has dozens of books, hundreds of columns, hundreds of videos, and thousands of blog posts available to them that are more than capable of satisfying their curiosity.

And for those who believe my decision has anything to do with being thin-skinned or unable to take criticism, all I can say is you’re far too short for this ride. What I’ve learned over the years is that all answering questions does is to raise more questions, and that talking to anyone in any form of media, no matter how friendly, places you into an endless cycle of feeding various false narratives even as you attempt to counteract them. There is simply no reason to devote even a modicum of time to activities that are neither productive nor enjoyable.

So, the answer to “will you talk to X?” is an unambiguous NO. It doesn’t matter who it is, whether I like them or not, that you sincerely believe our views are harmonious, or what the purported subject is. While I may interview the occasional author on the Darkstream, I do not plan to publicly speak to anyone who is not on Unauthorized.