Interview with a Luddite
In 1995 I attended a conference, “Technology and Its Discontents,” at New York’s Learning Alliance on Lafayette Street. I was there on Saturday and so did not see the play presented on Friday night. But I read Chellis Glendinning’s description of it:
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Kirkpatrick Sale and I decided to put on a play called Interview with a Luddite. It was to be the Friday-night highlight of the conference.
The conference featured ourselves, Bill McKibben, Langdon Winner, Andrew McLaughlin, and Stephanie Mills. When Steph arrived at Kirk’s basement apartment on 11th Street, we decided she would be in the play too.
Flyers for the event were plastered around the Village, and various newspapers and radio stations were carrying ads for it — and yet, here it was the day before and we had neither script nor set. Putting our heads together over Earl Grey tea, with occasional forays into the mossy bricked garden out the screen door, we plotted that a modern-day Luddite (me) would go to a psychiatrist (Stephanie) concerning her distress that the publishing industry now required her to submit her writing from a computer. The doctor would recommend that she sleep on it, and she would flop down on the consulting couch. And so, from a dream state, would enter the original Luddite from 1811, Lancashire, England (Kirk). First he would regale her with the conditions and history of his times. Then curiosity would overtake him; he would ask the modern-day Luddite about her times and struggles. “Did we make an impact?” he would press. “Did we lay the ground for an easier time for you?” After she would tell him about the 20th century, she would awaken only to find her 19th-century companion still with her — and at laying eyes upon his first computer in the office of the psychiatrist, he would take his hammer and, as in days of yore, smash the machine.
I knew Kirkpatrick as a wry, earnest, and somewhat introverted intellectual — so nothing in my experience prepared me for what I then saw. We never actually practiced the play. We spent the morning of the performance setting up the stage at the Learning Alliance and then retreated to our respective apartments in the Village to get dressed.
Looking purposefully au currant in my black rip-stop jumpsuit, I sat waiting for him at the window table of the French Roast at 6th Avenue and 11th. Given that I was about to appear in a theater performance before a New York audience — for which there was no script and had been no rehearsal — I was inappropriately calm. Maybe it was like the time during an anti-war protest when the Berkeley police with their batons, mace cans, and rage were rampaging at my heels — and my mind unexpectedly switched to an English garden amid daisies, roses, and white trellises, with me leaping in the slowest of slow motion across the trimmed green grass. Maybe it was like that. The crowds were crossing 6th like geese in lockstep rhythm with the WALK signal when, all of a sudden, the gaggle parted and I glimpsed a … a … whaaaa? … a highwayman with clipped beard, commanding black cape, billowing white poplin shirt, and pants tucked into high-laced boots.
Kirk!
We were off to a magical night at the theater. The play went — dare I say it? — smashingly well, due in large part to Kirk and Steph’s dramatic prowess. Afterward Emerson Blake, editor of Orion magazine, said to me, “Amazing. You memorized that whole script!”
A few weeks later the Village Voice ran a cartoon making fun of us for being foolhardy in challenging modern technology, and New York magazine published “Die, Computer, Die” cynically trashing Kirkpatrick’s book, Scott Savage’s Plain magazine, Jeremy Rifkin’s anti-genetic engineering efforts –- and featuring a reference reeking of urban superiority to the “mud hut” (read: adobe house) that was at the time my home in New Mexico.
New York, I guess, was still swirling with the headiness of its Streamlined Days.
http://ludditeluddite1812.blogspot.com/2012/10/viii-interview-with-luddite.html
