Author Archive

What originally motivated you to begin writing poetry?

Girls. I thought it was a great way of impressing girls. Of course
later I found out that having an expensive mobile phone works much
better. The girl I wrote my first poem to just looked at me like I was
crazy. So I got the natural idea that I was probably not good enough
at it yet and started with the vain idea that i could improve these
skills. Of course later on I realized that having a crisp hundred
dollar bill sticking out of your breast pocket is much more effective
if you want to get interactive.

Are all of your poems kind of constructed around a main theme?

No. In fact if you investigate this idea closely you will see that
‘themes’ actually do not exist in the entire corpus of poetry. This is
because of the nature of poetry, which primarily is a tool that tries
to name the unnameable. You could, for example, claim lots of poems
have ‘death’ as a theme. But do they really? The theme itself is often
just a metaphor for something else. And death is an abstract concept,
in this case operating in the abstract environment of a poem. So what
exactly does it mean to call ‘death’ a theme? Nothing much on closer
investigation. A poet could really be talking about anything
imaginable and make it look like a poem about death. Don’t be fooled.
Poets are tricksters.

How do you feel poetry is beneficial to the world of literature, and
the world itself?

The world of literature kind of stinks. It’s full of fools who have
invested a lot of time in ‘cultural capital’ and are very hungry to
get returns on those investments in the form of recognition. Frankly,
only a complete moron would waste his precious time on this planet
with such insane people. In my opinion poetry wants to have little to
do with those people. The stuff they praise always seems pretty random
to me. They praise good stuff and they praise bad stuff, all is the
same to them. If you wanna write poems just keep out of the world
of literature that’s what I say.

As to ‘what beneficial effect does poetry have on the world’ I am not
at liberty to answer that question since this is one of our trade
secrets.

When you pull together a piece of poetry, is it all at once, or do you
begin a piece and return to it later?

In my opinion the most effective way of writing poetry is to get up at
0600 in the morning every day and write, write the poem until the
draft is finished. I have heard this from several great poets – early
in the morning the mind is the cleanest and its most easy to produce
poetry without the mind interfering with itself. Just do that every
day for a few years, then you have like a few hundred drafts. Then
reserve a month or two to rewrite about 50 or 60 good poems from those
hundreds of drafts. And there you go.

Do you have any big inspirations for your poetry?

How exactly does one measure the size of inspirations? How am i
supposed to know if an inspiration is big or not? Sometimes you feel
something, a little tickle in the back of your head. Sometimes you
feel an incredible urge. Is the last ‘bigger’ than the first? Better?
Hell if I know. Big inspirations, little inspirations, I do them all,
dude. I’m an omni-inspirationalist. In my opinion the whole world is
fabricated by inspirations. But now I am getting dangerously close to
those trade secrets again.

Thanks a ton once again, I know you’re likely very busy and It’s very
much appreciated.

Welcome, Lee. I wish you the best of luck with your project. Let me
close this interview with one of my favourite poems from Milosz, which
concerns some of the topics we touched in this interview:

A Confession (1985)

My God, I loved strawberry jam.
And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body.
Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the waitress’s neck.
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,
Able to recognise greatness wherever it is,
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,
I knew what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud,
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

Czeslaw Milosz

Hi folks,

For a while you heard nothing from me because I was busy with various projects. As I have already told you I am working on a kind of tetralogy, and already working on those projects they keep changing under my eyes – it is far from crystal clear how the tetralogy will look like, what exactly it will consist of and whether it will even be a tetralogy as such.

Tetralogy

As it looks now, the series include:

1. A novel that will be called “Bilderberg”.
2. A collection of poems with a yet unknown title.
3. A philosophy book named “Holokapital’.
4. A CD with electrorap in Dutch
5. A CD with arrangements of Rachmaninov.

I think I currently about 25% of project completion is done – but I would not dare predict how long it takes for the entire project is completed. As always for me I definitely do not want to put out mediocre products, which in this case a difficult requirement, because to excel in four different genres is by no means easy. However, I am convinced that I will succeed to create a very special package from this tetralogy. Currently, I put the emphasis on the novel, since the poems already quite far advanced and I have made more than 400 songs in one year, enough material to distil things out later.

Turing national poetry contest

I also have two or three poems in the top 100 of the Turing national poetry contest. The exact number is unclear because there is a poem in the top 100 songs of the same title as a poem that I have sent, but with a different registration number. It’s possible that someone sent a poem with the same title, or there is an error in the numeration. In the former case I’m at least represented with two poems in the top 100.

I have sent the organization when it became known the following mail:

Dear Maria Böggemann

Martijn Benders.

And a few days later in the mail, after consultation with my standin:

Marieke, this is Bart, that’s my standin when I do not finish high enough.
Bart says he he’s disabled on the 26th. Could you please reschedule the event.
That’d be great, thanks.

I received a response only today. It was apparently impossible to reschedule the event. Bit weird of course. So much went wrong already in this contest so far. I have sent them the following email:

Dear Marieke Böggemann,

Martijn Benders

Fund of Criticism

Positive news on the Fund of Criticism: that’s going to go ahead. I have already designed a logo for a website and within about a month the Fun will be operational.

The Fund of Criticism

Stop it, Ron.
Stop torturing my website it did
nothing wrong. It isn’t even a poem
just a bunch of digits
in decent form.

I know, I know
you’ve been on the barricades yourself
and you have thousands of precious books
on your shelves but that’s no excuse
so stop it, Ron, my website
is very strong anyway.

My website will never succumb.
So you better give it up, Ron.

If everyone did like you, if everyone
would cherrypick poetry
then nothing, nothing at all
would be new and you know it

so stop it, Ron, stop the debut
of yourself at the expense
of my website. Stop it. Now.

Martijn Benders, 05-08-2010

The Australian microbiologist and éminence grise Frank Fenner claims that humanity will be extinct within 100 years and that the process is impossible to reverse or avoid. Frank Fenner (95) is a professor emeritus microbiology at the National University of Australia and an important member of the Royal Society of London, the prestigious British academy for sciences. His work has won many prices, foremost his research done to extinguish the smallpox virus. He is, to keep it short, an intelligent man.

On what basis does Frank Fenner think humanity will be extinct so soon? What’s his line of logic, what’s the evidence? He claims that humanity as a whole will suffer the same faith as the inhabitants of Easter Island. When that island was discovered back in 1772 the explorers found a small population of people at constant war with each other over a limited number of resources. The island had once been a true civilisation, but had degraded into an eternal war-zone once the resources proved to be insufficient to support everyone.

As humanity keeps on growing and growing and its resources shrink fast its not hard to see where Professor Fenner gets his idea from. He joins a long line of intelligent doomsday thinkers, some of whom I am suspecting of having popularity motives for being such (as is the case with Zizek and his pseudo hip end time phenomenon book) – I don’t think any reasonable person could refuse to admit the chance of this development is high, but let’s for one moment look at the only thing that CAN save us: science. For the last 10000 years we should have learned at least one thing: it is never politics that progresses humanity, it is science, art and culture that do.

Now, we do have a giant resource problem that will quickly worsen. The biggest problem is metals. All those mobile phones, all those laptops, they are all impossible without the use of rare metals and those metals are running out. Forget about the Oil crisis. Don’t even believe all those websites that claim some giant oil crisis is coming for more than 1 nanosecond: the solution to the oil problem has been found. Giant bio-farms with bacteria that produce oil constantly. Its possible and they are working on it. But you cant do that with metals. Those run out. And the ecological system does too. There is one very strange and hopeful development that, if implemented, would save humanity from its bleak future.

Its photosynthesis combined with microbiology. I have seen an interview with a eminent Dutch microbiologist who at this moment is creating fish that can live from sunlight. Yes, its possible and he did succeed in doing so. He claims that within 8 years he will be able to make humans that do not need to eat any more but can simply live from sunlight. The implications of such a development are enormous. Think about it: what resources would we need if no one needs to eat any more?

As to the scientific side, its a question of making the skin of even just the hair have photosynthetic qualities by mingling it with the right plant DNA.

So, ironically, in the future we might all be LITERALLY green. If we want to survive. These are strange times, aren’t they? The risks are enormous, but hopefully with some right decisions we will actually be able to overcome this rather infantile stage of self destruction.

In another new development at what seems to be the latest rage, companies firing employees over tweets or status updates, let me for a moment pontificate about the philosophical consequences of these new developments. If you haven’t heard the person fired in this case was CNN reporter Octavia Nasr and her crime was expressing a condolence for some Muslim cleric that passed away. I wont go into that as to an intelligent reader its already obvious that the whole ‘might is right’ policies regarding these definitions are so absurd that it even becomes kind of unphilosophical to keep talking about them, let us instead ponder about what the consequences of this sort of policy are for humanity in the long term.

A ‘tweet’ or a ‘status update’ is not an official publication. It is a quick thought you pen down to a network of supposed ‘friends’. We have learned now that such ‘quick thoughts’ are enough reason to lose your job. I can think of circumstances where such would even be somewhat justified, but in this case the expressing of condolences seems to me perfectly legal.

But what are the real ramifications here? Isn’t it that companies through these media now have large control over our thoughts? How much time will it take before companies can fire employees not because of what they express but because of what they think? If you think that idea is far away, you are not very up to date about the developments in human-computer interfaces.

It is very well possible to create an interface that directly links the brain to the computer. Such interfaces have already been build. Think about the enormous implications of that, especially if the computer learns to execute commands of the brain. You could simply think of a book and the computer would write it at the speed of your thoughts. You could visualise a website and the computer builds in in 3 nanoseconds.

Think also of the enormous dangers: viruses now do not only destroy your computer but can also directly effect your brain. You could be remotely controlled without even knowing it. And: in a company where everyone is hooked up to such a brain-computer device the employer could simply fire you for thinking something.

We are not far from that point at all if we fire people for a quick thought via a tweet or status update. I am all for responsibility and I don’t think an employee can make official publications that would seriously downgrade his company, but that is not what we are discussing here. We are talking here about giant corporations that think they have the right to determine what you can and cant say in your private life, not about the company but about a political matter. Think about it. That is very serious and very wrong.

The lesson, for now, seems to be mostly not to add your employer to your list of ‘friends’, but unfortunately it isn’t as simple as that. There’s always people who will rat you out, and show your tweet to your employer anyway. No, the solution here, especially in sight of the enormous risks of interface developments, is new legislation about what governments, companies and other institutions can do with our personal lives. There are too many unguarded and unthoughtful and very very risky scientific developments going on at the moment, and without some serious monitoring we will all live to see the day that we regret not having acted now against the dangers these developments imply.

Martijn Benders

Martijn Benders is a philosopher and a member of Novo Universalis, a centralist Think-tank that aims to help humanity evolve.

According to a CNN report a law has now been passed in the Gulf of Mexico that makes it illegal for any media or journalist or blogger to come within a visible distance of any oil-cleaning operation. Is this is potent handling Obama was supposed to be all about? Just ban the media so no one sees whats going on? And what a flimsy excuse for this law: ‘the oil operations are supposed to be hindered by the presence of the media’ – yeah, right, and dictators are hindered by the presence of free media as well. Do these people actually have a brain?

Don’t believe this news? It even made the NY Times: See here

“Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials.”

The new law states that journalists, media and bloggers could be fined 40.000 dollars and prosecution for a federal offence if they are caught within a certain radius of an oil cleaning operation.

Absurd, utterly absurd. And a very strong signal that the States are still heading the wrong way, in spite of the more friendly Obama appearance. Its just an appearance, unfortunately. To forbid media access to one of the largest ecological disasters that has ever occurred on this planet is the act of either a lunatic or an evil man.

What is going on here? Why cant these people be honest about what is going on? Are the American people simply accepting this sort of censorship? It’s obvious that Obama is not very happy with the whole disaster but banning journalism seems an oddball way of handling the situation.