#This is the book The Woman From Italy is reading in episode 39 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thebritishteapot · 8 years

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Tagged by @lazynbored

Thank you sweetheart!

1. Are you named after someone?

Nah

 2. When was the last time you cried? I cry every time I watch a movie so. Sometimes ever during commercials so... I don’t know, 10 minutes ago? 3. Do you like your handwriting? Sometimes, but most of the time I don’t really care 4. What’s your favorite lunch meat? Mmmh.... not great fan of meat honestly. Maybe italian prosciutto? I hate lamb though. 5. Do you have kids? Nope!  6. If you were another person, would you be friends with yourself? I guess I would be that kind of friend that texts you once a year to check on you and maybe ask for a favour 7. Do you use sarcasm? Pfff no? 8. Do you still have your tonsils? Yes 9. Would you bungee jump? LOL NO THANKS  10. What’s your favorite kind of cereal? Coco pops but just with yogurt, not milk, I hate it when they melt and everything tastes like chocolate. I need contrast in my life. I also like good muesli but it’s expensive. 11. Do you untie your shoes when you take them off? Nah I’m a busy woman 12. Do you think you are a strong person? Eeeeeeeeeeerrrrr no 13. What’s your favorite ice cream flavour? As I said before, I need contrast, so my favourite flavor is a combination of flavours, I don’t like them separately: cookie dough and natural yogurt (I’d take my yogurt with anything okay)

 14. What’s the first thing you notice about people?

Whether they’re judging me

 15. Red or Pink? Pink  16. What is the least favorite physical thing you like about yourself?  Can’t pick one honestly. I can see on my face that I’m ageing now and that’s kind of depressing but can’t really do much about it. Right now I hate my upper arms, but those would be easily fixable if I did some goddamn exercise.  17. What colour pants and shoes are you wearing now? Light blue denim and *checks* pink socks 18. What’s the last thing you ate? Nutella from the jar (refer to “upper arms”)  19. What are you listening to right now?  My flatmate watching tv in the next room

 20. If you were a crayon, what color would you be?

Don’t know. Probably the shitty one that never fits in any drawing  21. Favorite smells? Uhm...don’t think I can pick one. Probably winter, pine tree, beef stock cooking, coffee (but I don’t drink it), and generally food 22. Who was the last person you talk to on the phone? My brother I think? 23. Favorite sport to watch? I don’t watch sport but the least boring ones for me are ice skating and diving 24. Hair color? Brown dyed blonde 25. Eye color? Brown 26. Do you wear contacts? Occasionally, but they don’t really work one me ‘cause I’m very lucky and I’ve got genetic cataracts  27. Favorite food to eat?  As you can guess I’m very bad at picking favourites... but I usually answer risotto. I also love sushi a lot and edamame beans oh my god  28. Scary movies or comedies?  Thrillers  29. Last movie you watched? The Butterfly Effect  30. What color shirt are you wearing? Grey  31. Summer or Winter? Probably winter but I don’t mind summer either if it’s not too how and I’m not working  32. Hugs or kisses? Hugssss?

 33. What book are you currently reading? None I’m horrible I know

34.Who do you miss right now? My dog? But I’ve missing my auntie every day for the past few years  35. What is on your mouse pad? Don’t have one, I use my wacom tablet  36. What’s the last tv program you watched? Meaning show? Uhm I guess the last Supernatural episode  38. The Rolling Stones or The Beatles? I don’t know shit about any of these but I only know I don’t really enjoy The Beatles  39. What is the furthest you traveled? A lake near Stockholm I can’t remember the name of  40. Do you have a special talent? Complaining probably. And I try to convince myself I’m creative  41. Where were you born? Near Verona, Italy

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ripstocking · 6 years

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We wait to buzz until 2.21pm, the exact time we have been appointed. Fernando receives us with his usual double pair of glasses covering his forehead. ‘Nothing is true or false, it all depends on the colour of the lenses you look through’, he says. Arrabal is considered one of the most important playwrights alive in France, but in his home country of Spain he is still remembered for a TV episode in which he appeared drunk in front of the cameras. He started drinking when he was 60 years old, so he didn’t have a notion of how much alcohol he could handle. After the program he had to be hospitalised. Maybe because of that, he feels very comfortable in his self-chosen exile in Paris. He was born in 1932, in Melilla; when he was 10 years old he won the Spanish national prize for exceptionally gifted children. During the Spanish Civil War his father stayed faithful to the Republic and was condemned to death, but escaped from a hospital and was never found. Fernando is missing a lung from a tuberculosis operation. He says he actually breathes better like that. In 1955 he moved to Paris, where he met Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor, with whom he would create the Panic Movement; before that he spent time with the surrealists. His apartment is testimony to such a multiplicity of influences. Fernando Arrabal is not the easiest person to interview. He talks with scattered quotes and references. At the end they somehow make sense, but always taking into account the limitations of the listener. I think some of the references flew over my head, but I did my best to put them together and make some sense: controlling the chaos by letting it be. Wasn’t that the premise of the Panic Movement? How did you sleep? I slept pretty badly actually. And you? I slept well. May I offer you some wine? Let me open a bottle. I see you have a very professional set-up for visits and interviews here—a few bottles of wine and chocolates. I really like interviews, they are good for me. I think out loud and audit myself, sometimes even surprise myself. I may in fact hold some sort of interview world record, because I’ve done a lot. By the way, you have a pretty nice house. Spacious, high ceilings, maybe a little overwhelmingly decorated though. Being an artist is, in part, generating spaces of creation. I like to be surrounded by ordered chaos. You know, most artists, especially playwrights, live in deplorable conditions. André Breton lived in a janitor’s room, Samuel Beckett in a tiny apartment, the list goes on. I’m extremely lucky with this place; almost no artist has an apartment like this. Milan Kundera lives in 60m2, and so does my friend Michel Houellebecq, although he lives on the top floor of a tower with his wife. He can’t move too much now and needs police protection every time he leaves home. He is pissed. I’m lucky I can walk around freely after some of the things I’ve said. I see a tower of chessboards there. What do you think about the fact that machines are beating men at chess? I think it is absolutely normal, we’ve always known that would happen. How about that garrote? That’s a torture machine. You know that’s how the Spaniards condemned to death were executed. Do you want to sit there? Many writers do, some of them have even asked me to kill them with it. Are you ready to die? Do you go to church? Not really, just the Christmas Eve mass. Only once a year? That’s unacceptable. I hope you are at least baptised; otherwise you’ll just hang around in limbo for eternity. The sacred is essential to understand life. The sacrum bone is the closest to the butthole. Sacred and shit have a lot in common, as Dalí insisted. I see a lot of irreverent sacredness in the artwork that hangs on these walls. Like this Last Supper with Beckett, Borges, Wittgenstein, Kafka—and you as Jesus. I have a question about your presence in so many paintings. Is it sheer narcissism? You should stop asking the questions you brought, and stop recording this. OK. I stop the recorder and put my notes aside. Your name is Pau, right? That’s Paul in Catalan. The apostle Paul was like a secretary, a bureaucrat. Each of the gospels is a version of Jesus; you should do the same with this interview, just write your version of me. The gospel writers didn’t follow Jesus with a recorder! But Pau is a weak name, it sounds like a joke, you should change it. Oh yeah? What do you suggest? I like Jordi, George in Catalan. I like the connection with the dragon; he is the dragon that kills the dragon. Or just go with your last name: Guinart. It’s powerful. Mr Guinart. I really like that one. Names are very important. Like Arrabal. Why can’t everybody have a great name like Arrabal? I guess we would all be the same then. Are you satisfied with the life you had as Arrabal? Of course I am. How could I not be? I had the extraordinary privilege of living. Modernity has endowed me with the responsibility of celebrating figures like Benoît Mandelbrot, the great mathematician to whom I recently gave the Prize of Transcendent Satrap. Take into account that when he came up with his theory of fractals, Europe started dividing up, whereas when the Bourbaki group studied set theory, Europe came together—it was the origin of the unification of Germany, Italy, and the union of southern Slavs: Yugoslavia. Isn’t that interesting? Geopoliticians have no idea about that, but these theories do have an influence on reality. You mean that these abstract theories somehow apply to the real world? How about the most important logician since Aristotle: Kurt Gödel? He is an extraordinary figure. His two incompleteness theorems in many ways represent the state of the spirit of the 20th century. Man unable to understand itself. Did you know he believed in ghosts? Many of the greatest men of science believe in angels, demons, and all sorts of unscientific stuff. To me that need for transcendence is utterly fascinating. Do you think that with Gödel humankind definitively gives up on understanding itself through reason and logic? I would use a simpler term to explain that: tohubohu. It’s what preceded creation, which in the Bible is understood as the chaos before God gave order to it. It is chaos with the mathematical rigour of confusion. I’m not sure if I’m following. You mean like a controlled madness? No, we can’t control anything, we can’t even control ourselves. But at least we have maths to try to understand. However, tohubohu is always beyond. ‘Tohu’ is an inhabitable desert, commotion, and agitation before God’s intervention, and ‘bohu’ is the confusion of the moment of creation. Where there’s no confusion, there’s nothing. There’s no point in trying to understand everything. That all sounds very confusing. Is it because you like spreading chaos? Excuse me if I offend you, but I can’t help but see a deliberate Dionysian enactment in your performance. Not so much Dionysus, but Pan. He makes you laugh, but when you turn around he is totally unpredictable. That’s why he creates panic and madness. Dionysus is too round, cyclical, circular, like the seasons. Pan is more confusing, and therefore more interesting. He reconciles contraries with the mathematical rigour of confusion. With the Panic Movement there is something like a rationalised frenzy, controlled by mathematics and logic. Tohubohu. What is pataphysics? It is what is beyond metaphysics, a science of imaginary solutions. A branch of a branch of fantastic literature. According to its founder, Alfred Jarry, the world is an exception to the exception, that is why there can be regularity. Underneath reality there is only chaos. That has to do with Wittgenstein threatening Popper with a poker in Cambridge. We basically try to make sense of chaos. You always refer to Cervantes as your inspiration. Who else has inspired you? Salvador Dalí, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, Miguel de Unamuno— If you undust any part of Dalí, it is huge. What he says in 1937, ‘38, ‘39—it’s huge! His relationship with sex, for example—people like Unamuno or Valle-Inclán are tiny figures compared with Dalí. How about Pedro Calderón de la Barca or Federico García Lorca? About Lorca, Dalí said the exact precise thing. When Lorca, who was in love with Dalí, read out loud his Romancero Gitano to Luis Buñuel and him, Buñuel, who always told the truth, said the book was horrible. Lorca turned to Dalí with despair, asking him how Buñuel could not like that book when it had been so successful all over Spain. Then Dalí responded with the essential, as usual: this book is not bad, but it lacks trains. It’s like writing a book today without speaking of the internet. He was always so precise! It lacks trains. I see you are very connected with the present. Is that an iPhone 6? Yes. I’m 84 and I try to keep up with the times. But I also handwrite notes on the phone case. I use both analogue and digital. How about the rest of the European tradition? What inspires you? Our civilisation, which is extraordinary, has only created two myths: Faust and Don Juan. The monk Tirso de Molina did a great job with that last one. The world of seduction—Dalí actually wanted me to seduce his wife, Gala. He wasn’t really interested in sex, but in my presence he did very sexual things. Like what? He liked to be surrounded by weird people—mentally, sexually—like Amanda Lear. Dalí paid for Lear to go to Casablanca as a man, and she came back as a woman. But he wanted me to seduce Gala, and I still don’t understand why, because seduction doesn’t really exist. What do you mean? I see it everywhere, especially in literature. Seduction is a lie. The monk Tirso de Molina tells the truth: Don Juan wants to fuck four girls, and in order to do that, he lies to them, but none of them falls in love with him. When other European authors understand that, they copy it, and make it better; one of them is Molière, and the other is Mozart with his opera Don Giovanni. But seduction is still a lie, and thus it is never real. It is a contradiction in itself. How does seduction work in Dalí, if there is anything like that? Dalí was interested in the possibility of an explosion. This is a long story, but worth telling: Gala and Paul Éluard live with Max Ernst and have a love triangle. Éluard sends a letter to Ernst saying that he loves Gala because she is a formidable woman and she incarnates all the Russian spirit, but that he loves him even more. The surrealists, with Breton leading the group, couldn’t stand that. Until the last moment Gala keeps writing letters to Éluard, who has other women, but when he writes back to Gala he ends his letters with things like, ‘I make love to you’ or ‘I penetrate you’. And Dalí doesn’t give a damn about all that, because he is not attracted to Gala per se, but to the bizarre situation that the whole thing generates. He likes the fact that something strange is created, something that can unleash a hurricane at any point, but doesn’t. What he likes is masturbating, and that’s what he talks about in his real biography—the one he wrote when he was 17. Tell me an anecdote about you and Dalí. Once I visited him with five chained women. They were lesbian Maoist revolutionaries and came from Lyon to interpret my play Fando and Lis. I received a call from Dalí saying he wanted to perform a cybernetic work at midnight. When the five women heard it they went wild, they really wanted to come with me. I said, ‘Fine, but we can’t just show up there. It has to be somewhat special; you have to come chained. I’m going to chain you!’ But chaining someone is not as easy as it seems. We had to go to a department store, the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, where we bought five metres of chains, and the concierge lent us a few locks. I can imagine Dalí really liking your idea. Of course! He absolutely loved it. He was at the luxurious hotel Le Meurice, where the Nazis had their Kommandantur when they occupied Paris. When we got there, before I even asked, the doorman said, ‘Suite 103’. We went up to the room and Dalí was ecstatic. ‘They are my five slaves!’ he shouted. But I wasn’t sure, so I told him that none of them were at his service, that they wouldn’t do anything against their will. But then one of them took her pants off and said, ‘I want you to slap my butt!’ I was surprised, but decided to just enjoy the spectacle of Dalí hitting her with a nard. As hard as it is to find a nard in Paris. And what happened next? He said the ‘slave’ and I should go to an orgy with him that night. I then said that I was a chaste man and that I wouldn’t get involved. He got even more enthusiastic and assigned me the role of ‘chaste voyeur’. Do you identify with that role? I see you are very interested in sex. How about that painting with a naked man embracing a huge penis? It is very simple: men have a small penis and they wish they had one as big as that. We all wish we were bigger, in every sense. What do you think about life? I am extremely lucky for not having to fight for anything except for dreaming. The time is up. I tell him that I will have to do a lot of hermeneutics in order to write something worth reading. I quote Dalí, ‘Let them talk about me, even if what they say is good’, expecting his complicity. He gives me a dirty look, which I interpret as, ‘Don’t you dare write nonsense for my interview’. I tell him I’ll send him a draft before publishing it—but I won’t, it would be too risky. OK, thank you very much for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, it’s been my pleasure. I hope I can compose something interesting out of this chaos. You’d better. Otherwise I’ll whip your arse. The interview ends at 3.37pm. The artistic director of an opera and his assistants enter the apartment punctually. They want to propose an adaptation of Fando and Lis. He stares at me with condescendence as I begin to leave. Then he stands up, walks across the whole room and hugs me warmly. He looks up. I see a little child in his playroom: Arrabal as a self-made child.

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