A. C.
Evans was born
in Hampton Court in 1949, and lived in South London until 1963 when he moved to
Essex and co-founded the semi-legendary Neo-Surrealist Convulsionist Group in
1966. Moving back to London in 1973, he currently lives in Mortlake, near
Richmond. Working in the tradition of the bizarre and the grotesque, he also
considers himself a Realist. Influenced by everything on the dark-side, he is
also inspired by the iconoclasm of Dada, revolutionary Surrealism and the
immediacy of Pop. He regards all these as points of departure, none as a
destination – we live in a post avant-garde world.
His individual author collections include The Xantras (Trombone Press), Chimaera
Obscura (Phlebas Press), Dream Vortex (Tabor Press), Colour Of
Dust. Poems And/Or Texts 1973-1997 (Stride), This Sepulchre
(Springbeach Press) and Fractured Muse (Atlantean Publications). The
poetry sequence ‘Space Opera’ was made into a digital film and shown at the onedotzero3
Festival at the ICA in 1999.
He considers creativity to be the indirect effect of irrational drives and
desires; an infinite quest for self-discovery and, inevitably, an indictment of
both established dogma and fashionable orthodoxy. In his extremist,
author-centred, poetry and graphics he uses ambiguity, juxtaposition, irony and
objective chance to question assumptions about convention, identity and reality
– black humour and the absurd are his constant preoccupations.
JeffreySide has had
poetry published in various magazines such as Poetry Salzburg Review,
and on poetry web sites such as Underground Window, A Little Poetry,
Poethia, Nthposition, Eratio, Pirene’s Fountain, Fieralingue, Moria, Ancient
Heart, Blazevox, Lily, Big Bridge, Jacket, Textimagepoem, Apochryphaltext, 9th
St. Laboratories, P. F. S. Post, Great Works, Hutt, The Dande Review, Poetry
Bay and Dusie.
He has
reviewed poetry for Jacket, Eyewear, The Colorado Review, New Hope
International, Stride, Acumen and Shearsman. From 1996 to 2000 he
was the deputy editor of The Argotist magazine.
His
publications include, Carrier of the Seed, Distorted Reflections,
Slimvol, Collected Poetry Reviews 2004-2013, Cyclones in High
Northern Latitudes (with Jake Berry) and Outside Voices: An Email
Correspondence (with Jake Berry), available as a free ebook.
JS: What are your definitions for the words ‘radical’
and ‘progressive’.
ACE: I would define ‘radical’ as pertaining to radix
(root) – getting to the root of things. I don’t think there is a direct link
between radicalism and formalism, although formal innovation might be a kind of
aesthetic radicalism. I don’t think it is useful to tie radicalism to formal
innovation – not all ‘radical’ works of art or poems are characterised by
formal experimentation. Also the idea of ‘experimental’ or ‘revolutionary’ art
is basically a nineteenth century idea – you can trace the use of the term
‘avant-garde’ back to 1825 at least, although it was popularised by Bakunin in
the late 1870s. I find it ironic that one of the few artists who could claim to
be a real revolutionary was Jacques-Louis David – and he was a
Neo-classicist! As it is very difficult
to disconnect the ‘voice’ from a worldview (culture etc.) one has to look
closely at the worldview/cultural background of the voice – how far does the
worldview of the voice credit the transgressive implications of
freedom-to-create? If you evade this question how 'radical' can you claim to
be? To use Eliot as an example, I would define ‘The Waste Land’ as a
reactionary poem, not a transgressive or ‘radical’ poem in the progressive
sense, even though its poetic form might have caused some outrage. In any case
none of Eliot's efforts stand comparison with the ‘radical’ Simultanism of say
Cendrars' 'Trans Siberian' poem, or the works of Apollinaire. I would define
‘radical’ as pertaining to radix (root) – getting to the root of things. I
don’t think there is a direct link between radicalism and formalism, although
formal innovation might be a kind of aesthetic radicalism. I don’t think it is
useful to tie radicalism to formal innovation – not all ‘radical’ works of art
or poems are characterised by formal experimentation. Also the idea of
‘experimental’ or ‘revolutionary’ art is basically a nineteenth century idea –
you can trace the use of the term ‘avant-garde’ back to 1825 at least, although
it was popularised by Bakunin in the late 1870s. I find it ironic that one of the
few artists who could claim to be a real revolutionary was Jacques-Louis David
– and he was a Neo-classicist! As it is
very difficult to disconnect the ‘voice’ from a worldview (culture etc.) one
has to look closely at the worldview/cultural background of the voice – how far
does the worldview of the voice credit the transgressive implications of
freedom-to-create? If you evade this question how 'radical' can you claim to
be? To use Eliot as an example, I would define ‘The Waste Land’ as a
reactionary poem, not a transgressive or ‘radical’ poem in the progressive
sense, even though its poetic form might have caused some outrage. In any case
none of Eliot's efforts stand comparison with the ‘radical’ Simultanism of say
Cendrars' 'Trans Siberian' poem, or the works of Apollinaire.
In my
terms 'progressive' must have something to do with freedom. Freedom of expression
is closely linked to the concept of the voice – if you deny the voice, you deny
the agent of 'expression'. I think that is a 'reactionary' position, not a
'progressive' position because it strikes at one of the most basic principles
of freedom. There can be no freedom if there is no free agency: the only
sensible definition of a free agency is a free individual. Frazer's Golden Bough was based on an
evolutionary schema that postulated a 'progression' from Magic, via Religion to
Science. Eliot disregarded this because of his own 'faith' position. I would
suggest this points to the fact that Eliot (or the poetic voice we call
'Eliot') was actually an anti-Modernist, not a Modernist or a 'radical', unless
of course you wish to think about a reactionary or conservative form of
radicalism (you can – Margaret Thatcher is often called 'radical'). This
example highlights an issue concerning ‘modern’ and ‘radical’. Rimbaud might be
both ‘modern’ and ‘radical’ but Eliot might be ‘anti-modern’ and ‘radical’. So
these terms are prone to circular interpretation! This is my observation on
confusions or contradictions in general usage.
Incidentally,
it is a commonly held view that ‘innovative poetries’ in the UK originated in
the Nineteen Sixties. In this period we find the literary world separated into
two, symbiotic, warring camps: ‘conservatives’ and ‘radicals’. The
conservatives are ‘the establishment’, usually Encounter magazine (1953-1967), The Movement (1955), their pre-war
predecessors the Georgians, or, sometimes, the more recent Confessional Poets –
the Alvarez/Plath ‘suicide school’. The ‘radicals’ composed what is now known
as the BPR (British Poetry Revival), called at the time the Underground, or the
Children of Albion.
Constructing
timelines can be great fun – one likes to isolate those key moments or
watersheds, those defining episodes or momentous years – here are some for the
Sixties. 1963: the Kennedy Assassination, Wilson leader of the Labour Party,
The Liverpool Scene, Writers Forum, Plath kills herself. 1966: the year of
‘swinging’ London (according to Time Magazine) and the Situationists. 1968:
the May Events in Paris, the death of Duchamp, Bomb Culture. Perhaps 1969:
was a significant year – did Zabriskie
Point symbolise the end of Modern architecture and the birth of
Postmodernism? Of course, in the main, the ‘Sixties’ was – and, for popular
‘folk memory’, still is – a fashion statement. It was a statement defined by
clothes (the Mary Quant mini-skirt, the Cecil Gee suit, the monokini and the
topless dress), James Bond films, Art Nouveau posters (in the style of Mucha)
and pop music – The Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, the ‘acid dandyism’ of Jimi
Hendrix.
JS: So this was, for you, the real impact of the
Sixties not changes in literature and poetic practice?
ACE: Absolutely, however, fashionable Sixties culture
was mainly confined to large urban centres, mainly London and Liverpool: the
rest of the country, stunned by the Profumo affair, traumatised by the death of
Churchill, was still in a state of denial, living in a drab, post-war cultural
desert of Fifties kitsch. The various items of new legislation – the abolition
of theatre censorship, for example – that helped to make the so-called
‘permissive society’ did, of course, have lasting, positive, long-term effects.
At the outset it should be recognised that the BPR was a sideshow for everybody
except its participants: then, as now, very few members of the general public
read ‘innovative’ poetry. If the truth be known the most ‘innovative’
publications of the Sixties were in the field of prose, not poetry – for
example Thomas Pynchon’s novel V
(1963) or Samuel Beckett’s collection No’s
Knife 1945-1966 (1967).
Perhaps,
on our imaginary timeline, the defining moment or year for the BPR sideshow was
1965. This was the year of the Cultural Revolution in China: Maoism was to
become very trendy over the next few years after Godard made La Chinoise. 1965 also saw the death of
T. S. Eliot, and, coincidentally, the beginnings of an ‘anti-permissive’
backlash in the shape of the NVALA (National Viewers and Listeners Association)
founded by Mary Whitehouse. The International Poetry Incarnation (at the Albert
Hall), organised by the Poet’s Cooperative, was the big literary event of the
year. The abiding image of the Incarnation is preserved in grainy film of the
nudist buffoonery of Allen Ginsberg, semi-official envoy of the American Beat
Generation. ‘Albion’ was all about the Beat Generation.
According
to Kerouac the Beats were the generation that came of age after World War II,
their aims, expressed in ‘spontaneous prose’ and vernacular, freeform poetry,
were the ‘relaxation of social and sexual tensions’ and the espousal of
‘mystical detachment’. This ‘mystical detachment’ seemed to mean a fascination
for Zen and, in sharp contradiction with British Pop Art, rejection of
capitalist consumerism in the cause of unworldly anti-materialism. William
Burroughs, a distinguished London resident of the time, and one of the few
writers associated with the Beats whose work has any lasting value, dissociated
himself from the mystical stuff but this went largely unnoticed. On a technical
level, Burrough’s Naked Lunch (1959)
far outstripped the work of his Beat contemporaries.
JS:
Historically what route do you see British poetry as having traversed to
get to the point it is at now?
ACE: I suspect there is no clear historical trajectory
for British poetry in the modern era, which I define as 1890 to the present. I
would say that the most 'radical' innovations of the Eighteen Nineties (due to
'Symbolist' influences) were (a) the formal understanding that a poem must be
short (no more epics) (b) urban themes and subjects (c) subjects from popular
entertainment (e.g. Music Hall). (d) a problematic approach to religion and
morality. I see the fin de siecle as
the defining watershed for modern British poetry.
JS: I always thought points a, b, c, and d were not a
result of Symbolist or Decadent influences. These points seem grounded in
naturalism and realism, something that Symbolist poets would not have
comfortably endorsed. The Symbolists were dedicated to pseudo-romantic notions
of ‘truth’ and the ‘Ideal’; they were against plain meanings and matter-of-fact
description. The points you mention are more overtly identifiable in the work
of Eliot than in Symbolism per se.
ACE: I think this is a stereotypical, post hoc view of
Symbolism – the actual poems and practices of key 'Symbolists' (e.g. Mallarmé,
Verlaine, Laforgue) don't evade naturalism/realism. The godfather of
'Symbolism', Baudelaire pioneered the 'modern' urban poem of gritty realism,
alienation, fetish sex, and a number of other things. His ‘Correspondences’ is
a kind of mini ars poetica for later
writers, but I don't think his inheritors actually referred to themselves as
Symbolists at the outset. The crystallisation of Symbolism as a movement was
quite a late development (circa 1886). The Symbolist concern for 'vagueness'
and the ephemeral is really an inflection of Impressionism (itself a mode of
realism concerned with the fleeting experiences and perceptions of everyday
life) and a realisation that poetry is intra-subjective experience. This
concern with interior subjectivity is very important. However, one has to
realise that terms like Symbolism, Decadence, Impressionism and so on were
quite fluid and not well defined at the time. Idealism (Ideism) was a sort of Neo Platonic occult doctrine about 'higher'
realities, the basis for much Abstract Art (Kandinsky, Brancusi). But I don't
buy the idea that the Symbolists were
'pseudo-Romantic'. Symons’ models were Huysmans, Whistler and Degas.
Again, it’s just using ‘Romantic’ as a pejorative, bogey word.
JS: On the point of the short poem; surely, it was
Edgar Allan Poe in his essay The Poetic
Principle (1850) who initiated the idea of the short poem as being true
poetry. Poe believed that the important thing was for the poem to have an
effect on the reader, this effect can normally only be sustained for a short
period hence the longer the poem the less lasting the effect. Baudelaire was
influenced by Poe and translated him into French. Poe’s influence on French
poetry was therefore significant, so much so that you could say that Symbolism
was essentially an American invention.
ACE: True! In this respect Poe must be counted an
honorary Frenchman. I don't think his poetry was much appreciated in America!
The modern American poetic 'canon' dates from Whitman, I would guess – not Poe,
who is usually dismissed as a minor curiosity and an inconsequential poet. The
English Nineties poets inherited the principle of the short form poem from Poe
(partly) via the French influences – but they could read him for themselves no
doubt. Poe is definitely a precursor of Symbolism (whatever we mean by the
word) although his own poetry was Late Romantic. It’s an overstatement to say
that Symbolism was an American invention on the strength of Poe. (Poe's poetry
was translated into French by Mallarmé, while Baudelaire was known for his
earlier translations of the Tales of Mystery and Imagination.) Also the short
poem principle was not the only formal feature of Symbolism as a movement. Vers
Libre, the Prose Poem and Open Field were all 'Symbolist' innovations before
WWI.
JS: What do you mean exactly by ‘naturalism’?
ACE: When I say Naturalism I mean specifically the
Naturalist Movement associated with Zola and Huysmans, the plays of Ibsen and,
in Germany, the work of Gerhart Hauptmann. It means something quite specific
involving 'exposure' of difficult social truths, not a loose real-life
descriptiveness or picturesque nature poetry (evocations of daffodils or
mountain scenery). Naturalist Realism was considered ‘decadent’ and
'degenerate' by its opponents – because it questioned the status quo it was subversive.
Decadence celebrated modernity, low life, physical sensation and the
'artificial'. In many respects quite different from Symbolism in the narrow
sense, the Decadent Movement elevated technology over nature. What we call
'symbolism' is a loose bucket-term that encompasses all these things: a lineage
of writers and artists influenced by Baudelaire.
JS: To the extent that your own poetry (whether you
intend it or not) enables readers to bring meaning out of the text indicates
that you have some connection with the experimental, however tenuous.
ACE: This 'reader' thing is political correctness. It's
a truism isn't it? Of course the reader brings meaning out of the text – I bet
Sappho would have agreed that her audience functioned at a level of creative
engagement with her work. But then to assert that only the reader is important, removing the author from the picture
altogether, is just ridiculous – it’s a kind of pseudo-democracy, a populist
dodge – its just ‘gesture politics’. So far as my own poetry is concerned, I
like to 'tease rather than tell' and I think poetry works primarily on an
irrational level. I like the idea that the reader can identify with the poem or
text on a level of emotional empathy as well as on a level of ambivalent, oblique
psychic symbolism or imagery. Surreal elements of ‘objective chance’ enhance
the shared nature of empathic engagement with the reader, because they can
derail expectations but I don’t think this engagement is concerned with simple
issues of semantic meaning. It is quite possible that a truly ‘poetic’ poem
might be incomprehensible on the rational level. I certainly don't think poetry
(or any art) should be didactic – if you want to deal with ‘issues’ become a
journalist.
JS: How do you define the individual voice in poetry?
Surely to insist upon one is didactic.
ACE: I'm not insisting on it, I'm saying you can't
surgically remove the individual ('voice') from the creative process without
destroying the mechanism of the creative process itself. But to define the
voice is very difficult – I would be the first to agree. There are all sorts of
pitfalls here. For instance when Barthes proclaimed the ‘death of the author’
in 1968 he did so on the premise that the omnipotent author was a surrogate for
God. The death of the author was also the death of God. It was an act of
liberation. I can certainly see his point. Without going into too much detail I
would suggest that, beyond all the textual analysis and critical theory that
can be directed towards a specific poem the ultimate defining characteristic of
the work is the unique 'signature' (strong or weak) of the writer. The
essential difference between a poem by Stevie Smith and poem by, say, W. H.
Auden, is ultimately a difference of personality, irrespective of literary
theory. I would say this is self-evident. It is also true of poems written by
poets who tell us they deny the voice – all you hear is their voice. A poem
without a voice is an impossibility (obviously a voice can be unobtrusive, boring
or inconsequential, but that is beside the point). This becomes a complicated
matter of psychology and philosophy (masks, multiple personality, false
identity, alter-egos, selfhood and instability, automatism, fictional
personalities and characters) and not a literary question at all.
'Expression'
is coming under attack every day.... check out the PEN website. As Terry
Eagleton has pointed out in one of his critiques of Postmodernism, significant
transformative action – artistic creativity counts as transformative action –
in the real world requires the participation of an integrated unified, human
individual/subject. Postmodernism usually denies this possibility. Eliot, if he
were still with us, would be quite at home with all this self-denial stuff. What
would he make of all the other related fads of radical chic? These include
social constructionism, reader response theory, linguistic determinism, ethical
criticism, post-colonialism and eco-criticism – whatever intellectually
hypertrophied school of thought the current wave of ‘radical’ poets use to
advance the next generational revolt – theory as power dressing. There is major
issue of identity here, all bound up with a stereotyped Anti-Romanticism (T. E.
Hulme via T. S. Eliot).
JS: Hulme’s attack on the Romantics was based on his
mistaken belief that they were not writing poetry that was particular and
descriptively accurate. He thought them flowery and vague. In fact, his call
for more precision in poetry was ironically the same one that Wordsworth
advocated. Both Romantic and Modernist poetry have more in common than is often
recognised.
ACE: I'm sure your description of Hulme's position is
quite correct – I agree – actually I think Modernism is a development of
Romanticism. You could argue that some aspects of aesthetic Postmodernism are a
development of or amplification of, the idea of Romantic Irony – Byron saw a
close link between Romanticism and burlesque. However the ‘modern’ or most
recent form of anti-Romanticism is an authoritarian attack on the so-called
‘paradigm’ of self-expression. Yet this is not so contemporary as one might
think – Orwell noticed a tendency to conflate ‘Romanticism’ with a negative
interpretation of ‘individualism’ in the Thirties and Forties as well. Not much
has changed since those days, unfortunately.
JS: Are you advocating a sort of neo-Romantic poetic
aesthetic?
ACE: Perhaps this use of the term neo-Romantic conforms
to the dictates of the anti-Romantic propaganda line. What is Romantic? I tend
to find that anti-Romanticists don't really know what Romanticism is/was.
JS: My understanding of what Romanticism is that it is
about self-expression via a stable authorial voice or ego. Keats criticised
Wordsworth for his self-obsession and coined the term ‘Egotistical Sublime’ to
describe it. In principle I’ve nothing against an individual voice in poetry
but I think that the text is, and should be, ultimately in the control of the
reader.
ACE: I think this is just far too narrow – Romanticism
is or was (historically) a diverse, widespread phenomenon – it can include
everything from the Gothic novel to science, philosophy and politics.
Romanticism was a tendency or movement that affected all parts of society and
all the arts. Also, I suggest that associating the idea of a ‘stable’ authorial
voice or ‘ego’ with ‘self-obsession’ is unnecessarily tendentious – it sounds
like a thinly disguised moral agenda. It’s like saying Romantics are/were ‘bad
people’, because bad people are self-obsessed and nice people are not
egotistical. This is not the Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, it is the political correctness of the late twentieth century.
Schlegel described Romantic poetry as ‘continually becoming, never complete and
infinitely free’. I would affirm Romanticism, or a form of Romanticism, as a
movement about freedom, revolution and transgression – the dogma against
Romanticism is a dogma against change, against the ‘voice’, against the
individual. Where Romanticism is for the individual, count me in!
JS: But don’t you find it ironic that the concept of
the authorial voice disallows the reader the freedom to make of the text what
he/she will? Surely, the text under such conditions becomes dictatorial. How is
one to find personal significance in a text that claims itself as being only
applicable to the ‘voice’ that wrote it? Surely, this leads to didacticism.
ACE: I just don't agree with any of this – the mere
existence of a 'voice' disallows nothing
– the existence of the authorial presence in no way implies interpretative
exclusivity of signification in the way that you say – why should it? Also,
didacticism is not dependent upon the 'voice' in any way. It is a quite
separate matter, I think. Propaganda is often disembodied, anonymous and
impersonal. Mind you, I guess there might be conflicting views on the nature of
the didactic. My ideal poem would always resist clear-cut interpretations or
didactic messages. Protest poets might have a different view. What has happened
since the Seventies is that theorists have replaced the iconic (‘Romantic’)
personality cult of the artist with a personality cult of academic gurus, a
pantheon of celebrities drawn from the post-Structuralist intelligentsia (e.g.
Baudrillard, Foucault, Lyotard, Kristeva, Cixous, precursors such as Levinas,
and a number of others). It is in the interests of theorists to deny the
crucial role of the artist and elevate the ‘reader’ to a central position in
the discourse, but it is their
discourse – a discourse of academic command and control using the ‘reader’ is a
propaganda ploy. I would assert that most readers relate to the ‘voices’ of
their chosen authors living or dead, and this intimate, one-to-one relationship
is a defining aesthetic experience for most readers most of the time.
JS: Do the US Beats and the British ‘Children of Albion’ poets confirm or
deny the idea of an authorial voice/subject in poetry?
ACE: In my scheme of things I suggest the 'denial of
the voice' is a characteristic of Postmodernism. Barthes' ‘Death Of The Author’
article was first published in 1968. The Poetry Incarnation was 1965 so the
British Beats pre-date Barthes in this regard. Barthes himself cites the prime
Symbolist Mallarme as 'the first to recognise' that language should be the
prime element of a poem. Closer to home, I always quote Olson as the main US
initiator – all that 'wash out the ego' malarky. However, as I observed
elsewhere, the Beats seem to me to conform to the Romantic concept of the
artist-poet. The decisive break was the Language Poets (c 1971) who I see as
Postmodernists: they quite specifically attacked the 'workshop aesthetic of
individual expression'. 1971 is usually quoted as the beginning of
Postmodernism in literature. The historical origins of Postmodernism in the
arts generally are confused (but that is another story I guess).
JS: In your writings you use phrases such as ‘defected
to Americanism’, ‘literary Americanism’, and ‘like their American friends’ the
tone of which may make people think that your poetic viewpoint is insular and
anti-American because of political considerations. Can you expand on exactly
what you mean?
ACE: I realise the implications of using a term like
‘Americanism’. I'm not being narrowly political here – in this context I would
define Americanism as an academic trend or ethos – high-level interaction
between academics and others that conforms to The Fall of Paris scenario. The
idea that, after WWII, the centre of cultural innovation moved from Paris to
New York. The assertion that New York in particular and the USA generally has
set the pace and the agenda for innovation in the arts since 1945. I don't deny
the reality of the geopolitical shift, but I feel that the situation is
compromised by the rise of the global mass media – this Fall of Paris idea is
another highbrow propaganda ploy. Avant-garde innovation was a nineteenth
century concept. By the middle of the twentieth century the idea of the
avant-garde (and Modernism as a movement) has been completely trashed and exhausted,
mass-produced and commodified. Academia and critical theorists have to keep
these myths going – too many jobs depend on such cultural histories.
Americanism is a kind of academic Historicism. This is only indirectly related
to 'hard' politics and foreign policy. In any case I am only applying this
critique to poetry.
JS: Some of the references to the ‘Children of Albion’
in your writings suggest you see them as ‘selling out’ on the authorial
voice/subject. If they did so, why was this?
ACE: From my frankly cynical viewpoint I would suggest
it was susceptibility to academic trends. Even Jeff Nuttall ended up working
for a University. I would say that the Academic Left consolidated a position
based on Post-Structuralism and similar tendencies (e.g. Social Construction
Epistemology) influenced by Thomas Kuhn's The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). This book had a tremendous
impact and precipitated what is known as the 'science wars'. Key themes were
denial of objectivity and the idea that the individual is a 'cultural
construction' not an innate entity. I don't think this mode of thinking really
filtered into the 'counter-culture' until the Seventies. Having said that I
might also observe that there is – at a deeper cultural level – a correlation,
or a form of family resemblance, between traditional mystical ideas of
self-denial, including puritan asceticism, and ‘the death of the author’
mystique as interpreted by Postmodernists. Such mystical ideas did permeate the
Sixties Beat counter-culture and helped to prepare the ground… well, kind of.
Incidentally,
if one looks among the poets of Albion and their successors for that absolute
non-conformism (non-conformisme absolu)
demanded by the First Surrealist
Manifesto such a ‘radical’ disconnection from established norms is present
only in the form of an emotional stance. It was a mere posture or, more
appropriately, one might say, a poetical imposture. And even that imposture has
been vitiated by the fashionable orthodoxy of Postmodern theorists. Which is
why, for many years now, English poetry has been – literally – going nowhere.
(c) Jeffrey Side & A C Evans 2006
This interview first appeared in The Argotist Online
