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I build all around the world out of our office in Vancouver and New York. And we build buildings of different sizes and styles and different materials, depending on where we are. But wood is the material that I love the most, and I'm going to tell you the story about wood.
And part of the reason I love it is that every time people go into my buildings that are wood, I notice they react completely differently. I've never seen anybody walk into one of my buildings and hug a steel or a concrete column, but I've actually seen that happen in a wood building. I've actually seen how people touch the wood, and I think there's a reason for it. Just like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood can ever be the same anywhere on Earth. That's a wonderful thing. I like to think that wood gives Mother Nature fingerprints in our buildings. It's Mother Nature's fingerprints that make our buildings connect us to nature in the built environment.
Now, I live in Vancouver, near a forest that grows to 33 stories tall. Down the coast here in California, the redwood forest grows to 40 stories tall.
Buildings are starting to go up around the world. And there was Robert Bly, who was the Pegasus, the poetry editor, on the Advocate. And the braininess showed. But originally, this had nothing to do with either people or paint. UPS devices are very affordable, but because they are so important, use only the best brands for example, APC. Um amigo levou-me logo para o hospital. You can compress all files on which you are working translation, translation memory, glossaries in one file bundle and thus make clean backup packages.
But the buildings that we think about in wood are only four stories tall in most places on Earth. Even building codes actually limit the ability for us to build much taller than four stories in many places, and that's true here in the United States. Now there are exceptions, but there needs to be some exceptions, and things are going to change, I'm hoping. And the reason I think that way is that today half of us live in cities, and that number is going to grow to 75 percent. Cities and density mean that our buildings are going to continue to be big, and I think there's a role for wood to play in cities.
And I feel that way because three billion people in the world today, over the next 20 years, will need a new home. That's 40 percent of the world that are going to need a new building built for them in the next 20 years. Now, one in three people living in cities today actually live in a slum. That's one billion people in the world live in slums. A hundred million people in the world are homeless.
The scale of the challenge for architects and for society to deal with in building is to find a solution to house these people. But the challenge is, as we move to cities, cities are built in these two materials, steel and concrete, and they're great materials. They're the materials of the last century. But they're also materials with very high energy and very high greenhouse gas emissions in their process.
Steel represents about three percent of man's greenhouse gas emissions, and concrete is over five percent. So if you think about that, eight percent of our contribution to greenhouse gases today comes from those two materials alone. We don't think about it a lot, and unfortunately, we actually don't even think about buildings, I think, as much as we should. This is a U.
Almost half of our greenhouse gases are related to the building industry, and if we look at energy, it's the same story. You'll notice that transportation's sort of second down that list, but that's the conversation we mostly hear about. And although a lot of that is about energy, it's also so much about carbon. The problem I see is that, ultimately, the clash of how we solve that problem of serving those three billion people that need a home, and climate change, are a head-on collision about to happen, or already happening.
That challenge means that we have to start thinking in new ways, and I think wood is going to be part of that solution, and I'm going to tell you the story of why. As an architect, wood is the only material, big material, that I can build with that's already grown by the power of the sun. When a tree grows in the forest and gives off oxygen and soaks up carbon dioxide, and it dies and it falls to the forest floor, it gives that carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere or into the ground.
If it burns in a forest fire, it's going to give that carbon back to the atmosphere as well. But if you take that wood and you put it into a building or into a piece of furniture or into that wooden toy, it actually has an amazing capacity to store the carbon and provide us with a sequestration.
One cubic meter of wood will store one tonne of carbon dioxide. Now our two solutions to climate are obviously to reduce our emissions and find storage. Wood is the only major material building material I can build with that actually does both those two things. So I believe that we have an ethic that the Earth grows our food, and we need to move to an ethic in this century that the Earth should grow our homes. Now, how are we going to do that when we're urbanizing at this rate and we think about wood buildings only at four stories?
We need to reduce the concrete and steel and we need to grow bigger, and what we've been working on is story tall buildings made of wood. We've been engineering them with an engineer named Eric Karsh who works with me on it, and we've been doing this new work because there are new wood products out there for us to use, and we call them mass timber panels.
These are panels made with young trees, small growth trees, small pieces of wood glued together to make panels that are enormous: The way I describe this best, I've found, is to say that we're all used to two-by-four construction when we think about wood. That's what people jump to as a conclusion. Two-by-four construction is sort of like the little eight-dot bricks of Lego that we all played with as kids, and you can make all kinds of cool things out of Lego at that size, and out of two-by-fours.
But do remember when you were a kid, and you kind of sifted through the pile in your basement, and you found that big dot brick of Lego, and you were kind of like, "Cool, this is awesome. I can build something really big, and this is going to be great. Mass timber panels are those dot bricks. They're changing the scale of what we can do, and what we've developed is something we call FFTT, which is a Creative Commons solution to building a very flexible system of building with these large panels where we tilt up six stories at a time if we want to.
This animation shows you how the building goes together in a very simple way, but these buildings are available for architects and engineers now to build on for different cultures in the world, different architectural styles and characters. In order for us to build safely, we've engineered these buildings, actually, to work in a Vancouver context, where we're a high seismic zone, even at 30 stories tall.
Now obviously, every time I bring this up, people even, you know, here at the conference, say, "Are you serious? How's that going to happen? I'm just going to focus on a few of them, and let's start with fire, because I think fire is probably the first one that you're all thinking about right now. And the way I describe it is this. If I asked you to take a match and light it and hold up a log and try to get that log to go on fire, it doesn't happen, right?
We all know that. But to build a fire, you kind of start with small pieces of wood and you work your way up, and eventually you can add the log to the fire, and when you do add the log to the fire, of course, it burns, but it burns slowly. Well, mass timber panels, these new products that we're using, are much like the log.
It's hard to start them on fire, and when they do, they actually burn extraordinarily predictably, and we can use fire science in order to predict and make these buildings as safe as concrete and as safe as steel. The next big issue, deforestation. Eighteen percent of our contribution to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide is the result of deforestation. The last thing we want to do is cut down trees. Or, the last thing we want to do is cut down the wrong trees. There are models for sustainable forestry that allow us to cut trees properly, and those are the only trees appropriate to use for these kinds of systems.
Now I actually think that these ideas will change the economics of deforestation. In countries with deforestation issues, we need to find a way to provide better value for the forest and actually encourage people to make money through very fast growth cycles -- , , year-old trees that make these products and allow us to build at this scale. We've calculated a story building: We'll grow enough wood in North America every 13 minutes.
That's how much it takes. The carbon story here is a really good one. If we built a story building out of cement and concrete, the process would result in the manufacturing of that cement and 1, tonnes of carbon dioxide. If we did it in wood, in this solution, we'd sequester about 3, tonnes, for a net difference of 4, tonnes. That's the equivalent of about cars removed from the road in one year. Think back to that three billion people that need a new home, and maybe this is a contributor to reducing. We're at the beginning of a revolution, I hope, in the way we build, because this is the first new way to build a skyscraper in probably years or more.
But the challenge is changing society's perception of possibility, and it's a huge challenge.
The engineering is, truthfully, the easy part of this. The first skyscraper, technically -- and the definition of a skyscraper is 10 stories tall, believe it or not — but the first skyscraper was this one in Chicago, and people were terrified to walk underneath this building. But only four years after it was built, Gustave Eiffel was building the Eiffel Tower, and as he built the Eiffel Tower, he changed the skylines of the cities of the world, changed and created a competition between places like New York City and Chicago, where developers started building bigger and bigger buildings and pushing the envelope up higher and higher with better and better engineering.
We built this model in New York, actually, as a theoretical model on the campus of a technical university soon to come, and the reason we picked this site to just show you what these buildings may look like, because the exterior can change. It's really just the structure that we're talking about. The reason we picked it is because this is a technical university, and I believe that wood is the most technologically advanced material I can build with. It just happens to be that Mother Nature holds the patent, and we don't really feel comfortable with it.
But that's the way it should be, nature's fingerprints in the built environment. I'm looking for this opportunity to create an Eiffel Tower moment, we call it. Buildings are starting to go up around the world. There's a building in London that's nine stories, a new building that just finished in Australia that I believe is 10 or We're starting to push the height up of these wood buildings, and we're hoping, and I'm hoping, that my hometown of Vancouver actually potentially announces the world's tallest at around 20 stories in the not-so-distant future.
That Eiffel Tower moment will break the ceiling, these arbitrary ceilings of height, and allow wood buildings to join the competition. And I believe the race is ultimately on. Construo por todo o mundo a partir do nosso gabinete em Vancouver e Nova Iorque. Se olharmos para a energia, passa-se o mesmo. Posso construir uma coisa grande. Quando puserem o toro no fogo, claro, ele arde, mas arde lentamente. Isso equivale a cerca de carros fora da estrada num ano.
Talvez este seja um contributo para reduzir isso. Philosophy Source text - English I was a young drug dealer with a quick temper and a semi-automatic pistol. In fact, it was beginning, and the 23 years since is a story of acknowledgment, apology and atonement. But it didn't happen in the way that you might imagine or think. These things occurred in my life in a way that was surprising, especially to me.
But things went dramatically wrong when my parents separated and eventually divorced. At the age of 17, I got shot three times standing on the corner of my block in Detroit. My friend rushed me to the hospital. Doctors pulled the bullets out, patched me up, and sent me back to the same neighborhood where I got shot. Throughout this ordeal, no one hugged me, no one counseled me, no one told me I would be okay. No one told me that I would live in fear, that I would become paranoid, or that I would react hyper-violently to being shot.
No one told me that one day, I would become the person behind the trigger. Fourteen months later, at 2 a. I didn't want to take responsibility.
I blamed everybody from my parents to the system. I rationalized my decision to shoot because in the hood where I come from, it's better to be the shooter than the person getting shot. As I sat in my cold cell, I felt helpless, unloved and abandoned. I felt like nobody cared, and I reacted with hostility to my confinement.
And I found myself getting deeper and deeper into trouble. I ran black market stores, I loan sharked, and I sold drugs that were illegally smuggled into the prison. I had in fact become what the warden of the Michigan Reformatory called "the worst of the worst. One day, I was pacing my cell, when an officer came and delivered mail. I looked at a couple of letters before I looked at the letter that had my son's squiggly handwriting on it. And anytime I would get a letter from my son, it was like a ray of light in the darkest place you can imagine.
And on this particular day, I opened this letter, and in capital letters, he wrote, "My mama told me why you was in prison: Jesus watches what you do. They made me examine things about my life that I hadn't considered. It was the first time in my life that I had actually thought about the fact that my son would see me as a murderer. I sat back on my bunk and I reflected on something I had read in [Plato], where Socrates stated in "Apology" that the unexamined life isn't worth living. But it didn't come easy. One of the things I realized, which was part of the transformation, was that there were four key things.
The first thing was, I had great mentors. Now, I know some of you all are probably thinking, how did you find a great mentor in prison? But in my case, some of my mentors who are serving life sentences were some of the best people to ever come into my life, because they forced me to look at my life honestly, and they forced me to challenge myself about my decision making.
Prior to going to prison, I didn't know that there were so many brilliant black poets, authors and philosophers, and then I had the great fortune of encountering Malcolm X's autobiography, and it shattered every stereotype I had about myself. For 19 years, my father stood by my side with an unshakable faith, because he believed that I had what it took to turn my life around. I also met an amazing woman who is now the mother of my two-year-old son Sekou, and she taught me how to love myself in a healthy way. When I got that letter from my son, I began to write a journal about things I had experienced in my childhood and in prison, and what it did is it opened up my mind to the idea of atonement.
Earlier in my incarceration, I had received a letter from one of the relatives of my victim, and in that letter, she told me she forgave me, because she realized I was a young child who had been abused and had been through some hardships and just made a series of poor decisions. It was the first time in my life that I ever felt open to forgiving myself. And so I started talking to them about some of their experiences, and I was devastated to realize that most of them came from the same abusive environments, And most of them wanted help and they wanted to turn it around, but unfortunately the system that currently holds 2.
So I made it up in my mind that if I was ever released from prison that I would do everything in my power to help change that. Now imagine, if you will, Fred Flintstone walking into an episode of "The Jetsons. See, when I went to prison, our car phones were this big and required two people to carry them.
So imagine what it was like when I first grabbed my little Blackberry and I started learning how to text. But the thing is, the people around me, they didn't realize that I had no idea what all these abbreviated texts meant, like LOL, OMG, LMAO, until one day I was having a conversation with one of my friends via text, and I asked him to do something, and he responded back, "K. I have a fellowship at MIT Media Lab, I work for an amazing company called BMe, I teach at the University of Michigan, but it's been a struggle because I realize that there are more men and women coming home who are not going to be afforded those opportunities.
I've been blessed to work with some amazing men and women, helping others reenter society, and one of them is my friend named Calvin Evans. He served 24 years for a crime he didn't commit. He's 45 years old. He's currently enrolled in college. And one of the things that we talked about is the three things that I found important in my personal transformation, the first being acknowledgment.
I had to acknowledge that I had hurt others. I also had to acknowledge that I had been hurt. The second thing was apologizing. I had to apologize to the people I had hurt. Even though I had no expectations of them accepting it, it was important to do because it was the right thing. But I also had to apologize to myself. The third thing was atoning. For me, atoning meant going back into my community and working with at-risk youth who were on the same path, but also becoming at one with myself.
Anybody can have a transformation if we create the space for that to happen. So what I'm asking today is that you envision a world where men and women aren't held hostage to their pasts, where misdeeds and mistakes don't define you for the rest of your life. I think collectively, we can create that reality, and I hope you do too. Essas coisas aconteceram na minha vida de uma maneira surpreendente, especialmente para mim.
Mas as coisas falharam dramaticamente quando os meus pais se separaram e depois se divorciaram. Um amigo levou-me logo para o hospital. E, sentado na minha cela fria, senti-me desamparado, com falta de amor e abandonado. Vi algumas cartas antes de ver a carta que tinha a caligrafia rabiscada do meu filho. Sempre que recebia uma carta dele, era como um raio de luz no lugar mais escuro que possam imaginar.
Fizeram-me examinar coisas da minha vida em que nunca tinha pensado. Foi a primeira vez na minha vida em que realmente pensei sobre o facto de que o meu filho me iria ver como um assassino. A primeira coisa era: Essa foi a primeira vez na minha vida em que me senti predisposto a perdoar-me a mim mesmo.
Fiquei desolado ao perceber que a maioria deles viera dos mesmos ambientes violentos e a maioria deles queria ajuda e queria mudar. Risos Era exatamente assim que a minha vida parecia. Pela primeira vez, tomei contacto com a Internet, as redes sociais, carros que falam como o K. Sabem, quando fui preso, os telefones do carro eram deste tamanho e eram precisas duas pessoas para os carregar. Imaginem como fiquei ao segurar pela primeira vez no meu pequeno Blackberry e comecei a aprender como mandar mensagens.
A primeira foi o reconhecimento. Eu tive que reconhecer que magoara outros. Aplausos English to Portuguese: Computers general Source text - English 8 Tips for secure files No one wishes to lose important files that contain the result of hard work ready to be delivered to the customer. We can, and should, do something to prevent the loss of data.
There are several things we could consider doing, and they range from regular saves to online backup services. Let us see our 8-tips list. Save often Obvious, is it not? That is why it is our number one. Also, check if your text processor is set to autosave In Word: Edit carefully This is also one of the more obvious tips in this list. Edit your documents carefully. Do not just select all content in the Word or row in the Excel and then edit. Also, be aware that improper and careless use of Search and replace can make a havoc of your hard work: The rule of the thumb is: Compress, copy, backup The quickest way to make a backup is to copy the files onto another location.
Why not do more? You can compress all files on which you are working translation, translation memory, glossaries in one file bundle and thus make clean backup packages. If you use WinRAR archiver, secure your archive with "Recovery record" and strong password protection. Of course, always have a fresh backup, and if you make several backups, be sure to label them properly. For those willing to experiment, I recommend installing SVN: It also protects the computer from fluctuations in electrical power and from electrical shock.
In the worst scenario, you will have enough time minutes depend on the model to save your work and turn off the PC. By clicking Join Now, you agree to our Terms of Use , Privacy Policy , and to receive our email communications, which you may opt out at any time. Learn how to greet people. You've finished everything on your pathway.
Add a new path? Lessons Advanced Lesson Search. Dictionary View All Dictionary Results. Start Your Free Trial. Hello, and welcome to PortuguesePOD So Braden, please tell us what we'll be learning in this lesson. In this lesson, we'll be learning talking about your family Camila: Where does this conversation take place and who is it between? This conversation takes place in the afternoon, on TV, apresentadora, dona maria, jorge, Camila: What's the formality level? Let's listen to the conversation. Ele sempre foi assim? Antes ele era atencioso comigo, ele vinha pra casa todas as noites, nunca dormia fora, me contava tudo.
Vamos receber Jorge, o filho de D. E vamos conhecer a esposa, Eliane. Maria, what's wrong with your son? The problem is that my son is very rebellious. He doesn't talk to me anymore, he doesn't tell me where he's going, I don't know if he's eaten, where he is. Was he always this way? No, this started about three months ago. Before, he was attentive with me, he came home every night, never slept out, told me everything.
Now, deep breath now he's different. Let's have Jorge, Mrs. Hello Jorge, what do you have to say about what your mother said about you? Deep breath I think it's time for my mother to understand that today I'm married, and have my own house and a wife. And let's meet your wife, Eliane. This actually didn't happen in the dialogue but something I always found interesting about Brazilian family relations is how you name your relations. Yeah, I know there are many listeners on the site that have experience with Asian cultures and the complex familial naming systems used there but the Brazilian one isn't anywhere nearly as complicated.
Could you explain it to use a bit? Basically you name the child with your relationship to them. Did you catch that? Gender is only relative to you not to the child. Girls they call by their names. How does this work in your family? Let's take a look at the vocabulary for this lesson. The first word we shall see is: Let's have a closer look at the usuage for some of the words and phrases from this lesson. And what does this mean? The reason we used "anymore" in the translation is actually an English quirk.
Example - Talk to me more. Then the more just switches places, as we have learned before. Example - Fala mais comigo. And our last phrase is? Pedido de casamento Braden: Pedido de casamento literally translates to "order of marriage" or "request of marriage" but it is the correct way to say "marriage proposal" in Brazilian Portuguese.
If it's already understood by the context you can usually just shorten it to pedido "proposal. So , what's the focus of this lesson? In the dialogue, we heard the phrase That's a long sentence. The meetings that formed this interview took place in the Manhattan apartment. Indeed, when presented with the transcript of the proceedings of the first meeting that used equipment, he complained of its quality and asserted that it bore no relation to the discussion that had taken place.
Brodkey continued to be an elusive though solicitous subject. The text that follows is based on five meetings that took place over the past three years. Some of this additional material has been added to the text. Conversation with Brodkey - whether in person, or on one of the many long phone calls he makes daily to friends and publishing types to check on the progress of culture, as one might inquire about the weather before venturing outside - can be an adventure.
By turns immensely charming and socially clumsy, offering observations of acute honesty with an air of Delphic significance, or an opinion with the genial guardedness of a con man. Brodkey is always intelligent and engaged - often with a declarative and emotional urgency reminiscent of an actor trained in the Method school.
Hallways extend toward the kitchen and pantries in one direction and bedrooms and studies in the other. Before we get started I just want to say one thing.
When I was a kid I really did think that people would someday cheer for me, a kind of acknowledgment of what I would do as a writer. Then, when I was in my mid-thirties, I was running at the West Side Y in New York, on the track that goes around up above the basketball court, and as I ran, I watched the basketball game being played below. McBurney School was playing someone or other. They came from behind and the game went into overtime, and they won; there was this huge outburst of cheering, screaming, kicking, and stamping on the floor.
Not unless you climb into the ring, the sports arena. So Veronica said, But Harold, Dwight Gooden goes out and delivers exaltation on a regular schedule to a great many people on a reliable basis. All of a sudden, when Stories in an Almost Classical Mode came out, I moved from being a kind of amiably well-regarded nobody to being not exactly an often hated somebody, but close.
It would be nice, though, if more people would give you that opportunity to be gracious. You really spend an awful lot of your time in New York just being confused about how to act. Someone like Elaine, who runs that restaurant, she helps because she places you in the hierarchy. And I would think, What do I do? Do I really like this? It was bloody goddamn strange. On Broadway once I saw this guy about ten yards in front of me with a lively, educated, great face, smile at me.
Then he began to applaud. Now, first of all, he was handsome and ironic, so I thought it was a joke. Or he was mad.
But I thought, Hell, go ahead, believe it. You too, I said stupidly. And I applauded him—I had no idea what I could do to thank him. Then there was this guy who followed me into Burger King, he asked for an autograph. He had about three coats wrapped around him, a homeless guy. He said, Sign it. I stopped trying, because I got this sense, you see, that there was this trap, that you had to merchandise yourself, be cute on cue. It was the same with James Dean when he got killed, and Marilyn Monroe. But I had this sense when I was a young man that you got famous and then, one way or another, you killed yourself.
Or you retired—deadened, burned-out, cynical, sour. And yet at the same time I was determined that no one was going to say I was a great writer and catch me that way. I was interested in escaping all that bullshit. It was necessary that everything I did be good of its kind but that it not present greatness as an issue. When that is attached to the aura of a writer, you get two writers, one the narrator and then another—an in-between persona, the rumored immortal running for office, the office of rumored immortality.
And he would say that this was despicable. He would say that the work was fantastic, that it had influenced him, but unfortunately he would say , I was a middle-class drag, not serious about becoming famous and influencing the world. William Maxwell said many of the same things to me. I practiced evasion until I was forty. Of being an honest, wholehearted, fame-spurred writer. A writer—and eaten up by it. Then, when I was forty, I gave up. I stopped being evasive. I clumsily wanted to be known. A neighbor called me to congratulate me on winning the Nobel Prize.
I had to tell her no, that was Joseph Brodsky. Years ago, Susan Sontag made up an aphorism in conversation, and it went like this: This induces a kind of recognition-vertigo, a career-sickness, I think. When did you first think about getting involved in all this? The first time was when I was about eight or nine years old. It was a bad time for me. I was extremely unhappy.
I was living with my adoptive parents, the Brodkeys. My father by adoption, Joe Brodkey, fell ill. We had no money anymore. I lost two friends, a guy who went to Hollywood and became a child actor, later a philosopher, and a girl I liked a lot who, though she was only eight, wanted to be a nun and who switched from private school to parochial school. Then I got this idea of being a writer someday.
Then life, despair, became things I could study, like arithmetic or geometry, or Time magazine. To a reasonable extent. So just as you read on, you might live on, cross the road to get to the other side. You have some reason for going on, which was: No, or not often. I wrote a poem when my father died, and later I wrote a choral poem for twenty voices and soloists.
It was performed in the school auditorium. I remember the opening lines: Well, I certainly did think when I was a child that I would be famous someday. I expected to write best-sellers and to be beloved and happy. Most people who grew up with books in their house grew up with best-sellers but not with literature. I knew that distinction; nearly everyone did when I was young. We had light opera and opera. I remember getting into fights with teachers over literary craft, technical stuff—the structures and the seams, the variables of narrative, lowbrow, middlebrow, and highbrow stuff.
The three books I read over and over, partly to see how they worked, but also because I liked them, were Gone with the Wind, The Three Musketeers, and Pride and Prejudice. I did read Emma and Persuasion and Thomas Mann and Steinbeck and Hemingway and Cervantes, but the three others are the ones I adopted as setting the basic levels of narrative—the chronicles of one person and an unsentimental view of women, the interplay of men, and betrothal stories.
You grew up in St. Louis, which has a reputation for spawning writers—Eliot, Inge, Williams, Burroughs. Louis talked, oddly enough, like simpler Eliots, inhibited William Burroughses, and shy Tennessee Williamses. Williams and I had the same high school English teacher. She said he was a horrible person. I found his name carved into the wooden desk where I sat.
Tennessee Williams was the obverse of Eliot, and at the same time was like him. All of the writers from St. Louis have a vaguely similar dependence on metaphor. I use the past but not as memory so much as what I know. Often I make a conscious decision not to remember. Ordinary memory is dangerous to me. I had an operation when I was eight years old and I had a very bad reaction to the anaesthesia—I went into convulsions.
They had to hold me down and pack me in ice. The anaesthesia gave memory free run, and that was unbearable. It was always clear to me where the dangerous things were in memory. I am always aware that I am not remembering. I started to write in college when I was sixteen; I began to take writing classes. But I had no interest in memory stories. I was truly private, or anonymous, if you prefer. As a freshman at Harvard I felt young and dowdy and poor for the first time in my life—an outcast—and fatuous and stupid.
I had real friends for a while, a kind of easy and untwisted interchange with people—that sort of thing. I was so happy I went a little crazy. A guy at Harvard named Amory, bright, talented, well-connected, told me I was lucky to be an outsider—pathetic, unfamilied, shabby, nonsectarian, unmonied. It was a reality, and it was a role too. I could be talented, I could starve to death, I could sleep with whom I wanted—whereas he always had a number of other things to consider in those matters. He said I was lucky and I always ought to distrust the thing of being accepted. He felt superior but tragic—I think he was sincere.
Harold Bloom tells me many of the same things still: It may be the realest and trickiest and most violent thing you can do—to be published. Were there any teachers at Harvard in particular you remember? His favorite writer was A. Guthrie, who had recently written something called The Big Sky. The word for Faulkner was outrage. The word for Stendhal was altitude. I was rude to MacLeish because he read Rilke in translation with an Irish accent.
He was actually quite a good teacher, well informed. They were ahead of me. They were already wicked and grown-up, and tremendously bright, of course. A cousin of mine at Harvard took me to meet Frank. Frank was at the piano playing something weird. I said, What is that? Do you know it? I said, No, but I can spell Scriabin. Even before Ashbery switched to Stevens there was in his writing this evasiveness, this sense that God was dead and meaning was impossible to come by; the same elegance that you find in him now.
And there was Robert Bly, who was the Pegasus, the poetry editor, on the Advocate. But I was personally evasive and not close to any of them. At Harvard, then, everybody suffered. I refused at that time to undergo the kind of self-examination and despair and alienation that most people did then in college.
I took a year off and went to Europe. I gained a little culture, was offered a couple of jobs. I wanted to have adventures. I wanted to drive across Africa in a Jeep. I wanted to go parachute jumping, though not enough to do it. I practically became a spy. At the same time I had this strong feeling for certain writers—Rimbaud, Fitzgerald. Characters who all wrote well young and who died young. I expected to die young. I was strong physically. I thought about becoming an actor. I had a chance to start as a script boy in a company of actors that Olivier was starting up in London.
I had a screen test in Paris. I was a very bad actor, but the face was usable; it was confident in some odd way, normal. I was naked-faced, even transparent, and obvious—it was sickening—but I looked American as hell. To whatever extent Europeans wanted to maintain any culture from the past, they were anti-American, but mostly they were drawn to American types.
I looked like a drugged and melted Henry Fonda. And I was tall—they were interested in that. And the braininess showed. So I was a tall, semischolarly American type. Sort of noticeable, and undefended looking. Anyway, when I saw the rushes, the test, I started to throw up and run a fever. The reality of being that person, of having to learn to act, made me ill.
My first wife and I married the day before commencement, and we went out west. We wanted to get away from everybody. She had seen a copy of a magazine called Arizona Highways. I had asked her what she wanted to do, and she was surprised I was willing to do what she wanted and not drag her along with me where I wanted to go.
I wanted to go in the Army.