No one's reading any more

Dave Eggers Will Prove You Wrong

(From The New Yorker)

May 20, 2009

Posted by Thessaly La Force

At the Tribeca Rooftop the other night, members of the Authors Guild gathered to celebrate Dave Eggers. The mood was light; the crowd young. Previous galas had been held uptown, at the Metropolitan Club, which, according to numerous guests, was stuffy.
Zadie Smith circulated through the room in a strapless dress, a knit cardi, and a turban—looking bohemian with a splash of glamour. I asked her how she met Eggers, whom she’s known for five years. “My memory of how we met was that I paid for a subscription of McSweeney’s. At a certain point, for a hundred dollars, he was giving away McSweeney’s for life, and you could have all the back issues or something. I paid the money, but they never arrived, so I e-mailed the editorial office, saying, ‘Where the hell are my issues?’ ” She laughed. “So, that’s how we met: customer complaint.”
Eggers, who didn’t know that the evening was black tie (“I bought this today at Macy’s," he said, "It's a Donald J. Trump collection tie.”), was being honored for his charity work. The focus was on 826 National, the nonprofit writing and tutoring centers aimed for children ages six through eighteen. The name originates from the first center Eggers founded seven years ago, in the Mission District of San Francisco at 826 Valencia Street. He seemed slightly anxious, but excited, as he took the podium to address the crowd. He spoke with conviction as he twisted a paperclip in his hands:

To any of you who are feeling down, and saying, “Oh, no one’s reading anymore”: Walk into 826 on any afternoon. There are no screens there, it’s all paper, it’s all students working shoulder to shoulder invested in their work, writing down something, thinking their work might get published. They put it all on the page, and they think, “Well, if this person who works next to me cares so much about what I’m writing, and they’re going to publish it in their next anthology or newspaper or whatever, then I’m going to invest so much more in it.” And then meanwhile, they’re reading more than I did at their age. … Nothing has changed! The written word—the love of it and the power of the written word—it hasn’t changed. It’s a matter of fostering it, fertilizing it, not giving up on it, and having faith. Don’t get down. I actually have established an e-mail address, deggers@826national.org—if you want to take it down—if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying (the next issue of McSweeney’s will be a newspaper—we’re going to prove that it can make it. It comes out in September). If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you’re wrong.

The crowd responded with rousing applause. Some rose to give a standing ovation. Others, with guilty looks on their faces, stood up to leave. It was late. But for a night, at least, print lived.
(Photograph: Anna King)

Dave Eggers Reassures

From The New Yorker

Posted by Menachem Kaiser

The next issue of McSweeney’s will be formatted like a newspaper —to demonstrate that newspapers have a future. A few weeks ago, Dave Eggers promised to personally e-mail anybody in despair over the future of print, and now he has (albeit via mass e-mail).
Here’s an excerpt:

We’re convinced that the best way to ensure the future of journalism is to create a workable model where journalists are paid well for reporting here and abroad. And that starts with paying for the physical paper. And paying for the physical paper begins with creating a physical object that doesn’t retreat, but instead luxuriates in the beauties of print. We believe that if you use the hell out of the medium, if you give investigative journalism space, if you give photojournalists space, if you give graphic artists and cartoonists space— if you really truly give readers an experience that can’t be duplicated on the web— then they will spend $1 for a copy. And that $1 per copy, plus the revenue from some (but not all that many) ads, will keep the enterprise afloat. As long as newspapers offer less each day— less news, less great writing, less graphic innovation, fewer photos— then they’re giving readers few reasons to pay for the paper itself. With our prototype, we aim to make the physical object so beautiful and luxurious that it will seem a bargain at $1. The web obviously presents all kinds of advantages for breaking news, but the printed newspaper does and will always have a slew of advantages, too. It’s our admittedly unorthodox opinion that the two can coexist, and in fact should coexist. But they need to do different things. To survive, the newspaper, and the physical book, needs to set itself apart from the web. Physical forms of the written word need to offer a clear and different experience. And if they do, we believe, they will survive. Again, this is a time to roar back and assert and celebrate the beauty of the printed page. Give people something to fight for, and they will fight for it. Give something to pay for, and they’ll pay for it.

Cathcher in the Rye no longer catches...

Posted here by Dave Eggers, one of the best writers today.

January 29, 2010

Remembering Salinger: Dave Eggers

Posted by Dave Eggers

I first want to say that I think this is a very sad week for American letters. Howard Zinn was the embodiment of the term “living legend,” and his effect on how we see and teach history is immeasurable. And the man worked till the very end, it seems. He’d just done work at Mission High School here in San Francisco last year. He was an astonishing guy; it’s hard to think of what the landscape would look like without him.
To lose Salinger the same week is odd, given that his work and life serves as an interesting counterpoint. If Zinn was the archetypal engagé writer-historian-activist, Salinger was his opposite. And for decades I’ve wondered what exactly happened to Salinger to drive him away from publishing and people, from much of an active participation in the world. Clearly he was wounded by the attention he received, and I’ve always wondered exactly what the breaking point was.

I read “The Catcher in the Rye” the average number of times for a young person my age—which is to say, every few years between when I was sixteen and twenty-six or so. When I was about twenty I read the rest of the books and stories, and when I began to teach, about ten years ago, I usually included a Salinger story in every syllabus, usually demonstrating the use of dialogue to illuminate character. His is still my favorite dialogue, the dialogue that rings truest, that’s at once very naturalistic and musical; it’s really remarkable how difficult it is to do what he does between quotation marks.

I like to think that had he continued to write and publish, he would have continued to evolve in bold new ways. The man was an artist, no doubt about it, and his work was always growing in new—darker, stranger, more wonderfully obsessive—directions. And always, no matter where the stories go (or don’t go), his sentences are so beautiful, and so unlike anyone else’s. A few years back, when he backed out of the publishing of “Hapworth,” I wanted so badly to write to him, to say that we’d publish that and anything else he saw fit, and that we’d do it in whatever quiet and respectful way he sought. It’s clear he wasn’t so crazy about the splashy aspects of publishing on a certain scale, and I can identify with that—with the desire to just have the book look like you want it to, on the scale you feel comfortable with. But I don’t think he ever could strike that balance between the public and private worlds of writing and publishing his work.
To me the question of whether or not he continued to write strikes at the heart of the nature of writing itself. If he indeed wrote volumes and volumes about the Glass family, as has been claimed, it would be such a curious thing, given that the nature of written communication is social; language was created to facilitate understanding between people. So writing books upon books without the intention of sharing them with people is a proposition full of contradictory impulses and goals. It’s like a gifted chef cooking incredible meals for forty years and never inviting anyone over to share them.

My own pet theory is that he dabbled with stories for many years, maybe finished a handful, but as the distance from his last published work grew longer, it became more difficult to imagine any one work being the follow-up; the pressure on any story or novel would be too great. And thus the dabbling might have continued, but the likelihood of his finishing something, particularly a novel, became more remote. And so I think we might find fragments of things, much in the way “The Original of Laura” was found. But there’s something about the prospect of actually publishing one’s work that brings that work into focus. That pressure is needed, just like it’s needed to make diamonds from raw carbon.

Of course, the possibility most intriguing—and fictional-sounding—would have Salinger having continued to write for fifty years, finishing hundreds of stories and a handful of novels, all of which are polished and up to his standards and ready to go, and all of which he imagined would be found and published after his death. That, in fact, he intended all along for these works to be read, but that he just couldn’t bear to send them into the world while he lived.
I guess we’ll see.

Howdy folks. 

I am at work at the moment, so there's no time for ya di da di da... but I am administrating our website - meaning the Festival Maribor website and I came accross many articles about the Festival Maribor... and I need to share an amusing one with you.

It was posted here and written by Laurence Vittes.

Festival Maribor (1):Hell Breaks Loose Ligeti, Bartok and Sculthorpe at Maribor Festival, Slovenia

September 6, 2011

Richard Tognetti (violin), Festival Maribor Orchestra, Marko Letonja (conductor). Maribor (Slovenia), Union Hall, 02.09.2011 (LV)

Peter Sculthorpe: Earth Cry (1986)
György Ligeti : Violin Concerto (1992)
Béla Bartók : Concerto for Orchestra (1943)

Ligeti’s massive and somewhat scary Violin Concerto of 1992, a sophisticated blend of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz and Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre, has rightly assumed the title of a 20^th-century masterpiece. Like all of Ligeti’s music, hearing it live brings you far closer to the music’s purpose and soul than any recording could. Over a carefully constructed and dramatically superb structure, Ligeti drapes musical adventures of the most amazing sort, a bewildering pastiche of the hip, the traditional and the definitely intoxicated. The whole is compounded by a battery of unique instrumental effects including one violin and one viola each sitting by themselves playing deliberately mistuned instruments.

The 30-minute, 5-movement concerto begins with a movement that is neither fast nor slow before continuing on to a series of encounters between the orchestra and the soloist. Requisite to a deeply human experience that is also a virtuoso concerto, it poses immense difficulties, both showy and subtle, concluding with a brilliant cadenza that, after a short final respite, brings the music to a close.

In addition to showing off the chops and charisma that have made him a superstar, violinist Richard Tognetti “sold” the concerto with a performance that stressed not only the obviously dazzling theatrical elements but also those meant to communicate.

For their part, the sold-out Festival Maribor audience particularly enjoyed the music’s fierce and unyielding technical challenges, the effects of which were perhaps compounded by bouts of thunder raining outside the hall – as if extra percussion instruments had been written into the score. Led by Marko Letonja, the Festival Orchestra delivered the demanding Concerto after only a few hours’ rehearsals – an astounding testament to what world-class musicians can produce under pressure. (As an aside, in 2012 Letonja arrives in Strasbourg where he will lead the over 100 musicians of its Orchèstre Philharmonique, and embark on an ambitious program including hopefully, a new recording initiative.)

After intermission, Letonja and the ensemble returned to give a reading of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra that for once had a feel of the composer’s Eastern European roots and studies, coupled with playing from the horns and winds that handled the Concerto’s virtuoso aspects with glee, clarity and triumphant power. The rich, full sound of Union Hall again made clear the virtues of a live concert.

Peter Sculthorpe’s Earth Cry, borrowing harmonic principles from the astronomer Kepler and evoking nature with the help of an indigenous Australian instrument or two, was a comforting starter to the concert before Ligeti’s hell broke loose.

Laurence Vittes

And here's another article that I found amusing....

Rock 'n' Roll (written by Aljaž Zupančič)

Editor’s note: “Rock ‘n roll” was written by Aljaž Zupančič in a prose review style dedicated to Laurence Vittes that surrounds  the Maribor Festival 2011, Boundless Creativity and Song project No. 2, with Giovanni Sollima on cello and Marino Formenti, piano. Author Zupančič was born in 1988 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. After finishing grammar school in Kočevje, he went to study at the University of Ljubljana, where he is now a senior member of the musicology program in the Faculty of Arts. Currently he is also president of the student section of the Slovenian Musicological Society. Besides writting reviews for various publications, he is also active as a composer.

Giovanni Sollima; Photo Dejan Bulut; Festival Maribor 2011

Rock ‘n Roll
It was a rock concert.
A man who plays Vivaldi and Nirvana.
A man who plays Stravinsky and Nirvana.
It was a rock concert.

It was all about Sollima.
Sollima is a rockstar.
One feels a desire to start dancing.
Nirvana sounds better with Kobain’s guitar, but his cello almost became one.
It became obvious: music sounds better, when it looks good.
During the break, a woman in a black dress shouted: »This was the best concert of all!«
 If you weren’t there, you missed a lot.
Giovanni is not only a hard-core guy, he is also sentimental:
Wild plus romantic equals Italian: I wouldn’t be able to say no to him…
… if he was selling shoes.
 He can play without glasses.
He can play and walk at the same time.
He can walk and play at the same time.
He can play one cello with his friend – cello for four hands.
He can play two cellos at once (for a price of a thread of a bow).
Sometimes other musicians were a little bored.
Sometimes they seemed like bass players, who only have tonic and dominant to play.
But most of the time, they were infected by his energy.
It became obvious: someone who doesn’t like rock music is missing a lot.
It became obvious: someone who doesn’t like rock music doesn’t get much sex.
Sometimes, things were too cheesy.
But that comes with the Sollima package.
And how could an Italian be any different? He opens his mouth and fills it with the sounds of his cello.
He reminds me of Glenn Gould.
(in a certain way)
He is a show-off.
He is multipersonal though.
He reminds me of Vinko Globokar too.
(in a certain way, of course)
The cello becomes an extension of his body. Marko Letonja just helped – the ego wasn’t there.
Someone might say that Violoncelles, vibrez is an empty piece, that it lacks musical substance.
Some other piece with the narrator reminded me of music of the French composer Luc Ferrari.
He was also a crazy guy.
After the concert a woman shouted: »This was the best concert of my life!«
I wouldn’t like to hear it again, but this one time it was awesome.
It was a rock concert.
It was also a jazz concert.
A rock-jazz concert.
A jazz-rock concert.
It was all about Formenti.
Formenti is a jazz-rock star.
He tried to show the power of non-classical music.
He rushed onto the stage and immediately started playing – it was a bombastic beginning.
Nothing he did later was comparable.
Sitting next to an Australian woman, drinking cold beer and listening to Kurt Weill’s music was a special experience.

 He reminded me of Glenn Gould.

(He hummed a lot.)
 He demanded applause for the pretty girl who was then turning pages of his scores.
(Every rock star has a pretty girl somewhere around.)
 Marino is not only a hard-core guy, he is also sentimental:
Wild plus romantic equals Italian: I wouldn’t be able to say no to him…
… if he was selling shoes.
 He had lectures between the songs.
That was great.
 If you weren’t there, you missed a lot.
 He was a show-off.
He played a lot of tangos.
He said that tangos are erotic.
Sometimes, things were too cheesy.
But that comes with the Formenti package.
He does not know what rest (a pause) means.
No waiting, no time for metaphysics to come!
 Monday, 5th September 2011 was a great evening.
Tango is erotic music.
Erotic music is hot.
The cellar where the concert was became hot as well and it was hard to breathe.
Formenti suggested voting if we should turn on the air conditioning, which was very loud, so then it wouldn’t be possible to play beautiful music. We would have to wait for a bit.
But some woman shouted: »Just play!«
Women in Slovenia shout a lot.
He played Coldplay.
He played Nancarrow.
He played Nirvana.
Nirvana sounds better with Kobain’s guitar, but his piano almost became one.
His Nirvana had an interesting prelude – he was hitting the piano strings with a glass, I think.
I thought it would be great if he would continue experimenting with that.
But then he started playing chords and melody.
There was no music, there was only theatre.
But it was awesome!
 Before the last song of the evening, the doors of the restaurant upstairs opened and the noise from there was heard downstairs: the festival staff ran to close them to stop the noise. They did it. But only a few moments later the loud air conditioning system started.
All that happened while Marino was already playing the last song of the evening.
There was no music, there was only theatre.
I wouldn’t like to hear it again, but this one time it was awesome.

Coming of Age: This World

I watched an interesting documentary titled (This World) "Coming of Age". Ok, I always moan and groan about globalisation and what drastic changes it has been causing to this world....but this documentary is the proof that cultures still differ greatly. Check it out.

Produced by Kiran Soni, a 90-minute documentary "Coming of Age: This World" provides an insight into lives of teenagers from different parts of the world, who take a journey that marks their coming of age.

The documentary begins by introducing eight teenagers from eight different cultures: a 15-year old Chan Lu from Beijing, Andre from Moscow, Yukina, a girl from Japan, a 15-year old Monica from the Dominican Republic, a 16-year old boy from Uganda, Kamoti, Appak, a boy from the Canadian Arctic, and others.

After introducing the teenagers, the film zeros in on their rites of passage from childhood to adulthood. We get a glimpse of life of a teenage Beijing girl, who fights the enormous competition in education and is facing a relentless pressure to succeed.

Parallelly, Kamoti in Uganda has to go through a ceremony, which tests his courage and makes him a man. He gets circumcised at the end of the ceremony, standing still in the middle of his village surrounded by his people, while a man circumcises him.
Andre in Russia joins the nationalist party and becomes a neo-nazi; In Jerusalem, we see Adam, age 13, who is nervous of leaving his boyhood. He is going through Bar Mitzvah, which signifies the cut from boyhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, in the Canadian Arctic, Appak is learning how to hunt, since this is the rite of passage for the Inuit boys. Last, but not least, there's the 11-year-old girl in Malasia, who's been studying Koran since she was four and finally graduates at the age of 11.

The filmmakers managed to make the subject fresh, atmospheric and eloquent, linking the stories of teenagers very well. Since the documentary is quite long (90 minutes), it would perhaps be a good idea to use different narrators instead of only one. That would liven up the narration a little. However, the music accompanying scenes is carefully chosen. It is always suitable according to the specific ethnicity - Chinese when in Beijing, Japanese when in geisha training school, violent when watching Andre's initiation, and sounding cold when watching ice and mountains in the Canadian Arctic. Photography work deserves special appraisal when showing the beautiful scenery of the Arctic and the close ups in the geisha training school.

Different ways of coming of age are contrasted on many levels, which are: contrasting traditional with popular when changing the scene from Yukina's training to become geisha to Monica's shopping in a mall to prepare for her dance; contrasting hot and cold, or bright and dark when first changing the scene from the beautiful sunset observed by Monica in Cuba to the foggy sunset in the Canadian Arctic and then from Appak's hunting in the dark, foggy Arctic to the Kamoti's ceremonial dance in the sunny Uganda. A horrible link is introduced when Kimoto refuses to have sex before circumcision, the following shot showing a dead bloody catch of Appak's father. This is probably trying to signify Kimoto's state of mind concerning sexual intercourse in Uganda. Have sex and you're dead.

Contrasting the rites of passage of those eight teenagers suggests cultural differences in the world, but all of them seem to have a common idea. Namely, growing up, unlike in most Western cultures, is one specific moment that marks the passage from childhood to adulthood. In addition, in some cultures, as in Inuit, Malasian, and Chinese, parents put a heavy load of taking care of the family on their children as soon as they become adults.

The documentary is most surely a very interesting outing for anthropologists and the teachers of international cultures, since it offers diverse examples of symbolic rites of passage, both religious and secular, that are built into every culture.

The deep south and the Afro-Americans

Needs revising
So, there I was with a bag full of interests in my closet waiting to be opened, to seek adventures and to see what the world out there is hiding. I felt like I was in a pimple on God's ass - totally removed from everything wild, crazy, and fun.

In 2003, I decided to go to Arkansas. It wasn't me who came up with the choice of that state. Arkansas sounded like Kansas at the time and I was prepared for the worst, but I didn't really care. To be honest, I didn't know anything about the state but that it was in the deep south and that is where I wanted to go.

You see, when I was kid, it wasn't only the 'Indians' I was obsessed with. It was also Afro-Americans and blues and jazz. This admiration also has roots in the stories my mother told me. I can't remember the title of the story, but it was about an African boy who one day sat on a whale and traveled the world on its back. Then, my dad told me about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Then there was Jim who escaped from the plantation and sailed on the raft with Huckleberry Finn.

Then, my father introduced Miles and Coltrane and old blues men records that he brought from his sea adventures.

There was something about these stories....I felt it when I was little although I couldn't name it...it was more a subconscious thing. But there was something powerful that I felt. It was this strength in the characters, in the blues men sang, in the jazz musicians playing so deeply immersed in their feelings and thoughts...there was something that is not SAD, hopeless or miserable, but strong, wise, and mysterious.

The romantic naivety of the story atmosphere soon broke apart when I dived into the history books about the Afro-Americans and found what the white race did to Africans, who even after building "America" in horrible conditions as slaves and degraded people never became Americans but a hyphenated minority, just like all other minorities there. So much for your melting pot! As far as I see it, nothing in America melts. Maybe on the surface, but the inside is still a salad of particles oiled by the white race, and will never melt.
Those books really made me want to puke on the human existence....

Anyway, I was not allowed to watch much TV as a kid- especially not in the evening, when it was bed time. But I remember once, years and years ago, we had this channel in Slovenia. Just for a few months and then it got canceled. It was Sky One - an American or a British channel, I can't remember which. But I remember as freshly as if it was yesterday...One Sunday evening, a series of films began, and it was called Roots. The films were inspired by a novel of the same name, Roots, written by Alex Haley. It started out with a black man running into the dark jungle somewhere in Africa, trying to escape from people who were after him with ropes and chains. He could not escape and was transported to America on a slave ship. That man's name was Kunta Kinte. I will never forget it. Memories come back vividly now. I had goose bumps then and I have goose bumps now. Anyway, he was enslaved on a cotton plantation in Virginia. Soon, he tried to escape, but was caught. His punishment disabled him from ever escaping again - his master cut off his foot.
The series of films were about Kunta Kinte's descendants trying to survive in the cruel world ruled by white Americans. They tried to abolish slavery, they fought for their rights after the abolition, fought the Jim Crow laws and the ugly claws of segregation...all this while trying to keep their dignity and pride. Haley, through a history of one family, captured the history of an entire race of people whose names and identities were stolen from them.

I watched the movies as a kid, and tried to read the book when I got a little older. I quit,though. Over 600 pages takes some of your motivation away...It takes a hell of an exciting story for me to finish if it has over 600 pages....

But to come back to my story...I needed to see the old south. And these stories from my childhood strongly enhanced my travels.

Coming to the deep south, I was first shocked by the humidity and the heat. I thought I would die at first. Just imagine slaves and workers working through the day on the fields for hours on end...day by day...IN THIS UNBEARABLE HEAT!!!! .... Nowadays, people stay in more than they are outdoors. I learned to like the heat of the South. Somehow, my body liked the heat and the humidity, so I wandered around constantly, having the streets all to myself, cars honking at me, people yelling out of their windows how crazy I was to walk...There were no sidewalks...but that didn't stop me from exploring....Soon, I found those supposedly extinct juke joints where Afro-Americans play their music and just sing sing sing...no pompous lights or tables....no stage or lights...no mike...no speakers...no toilets...no nothing. Just pure music and soul. And fun, of course.

The Mississippi Delta was just as I expected it would be. Mississippi and Alabama are the poorest states in America...but certainly my favorite - next to Louisiana and California. ....

But more about that in the next post.

See ya there.

A prelude to my adventures

NOT FINISHED

I used to be a nasty kid (you would never guess, would you??!!) We lived right next to a river and my sister, our neighbors' daughter, and I were the only girls in the neighborhood. My sister liked New Kids on the Block, Jason Donovan, and pink dresses, so she was seldom my 'hang-out-and-play buddy'. Our neighbor Spela was her best friend, so, my only option for wild adventures was turning to the remaining kid population of our neighborhood - boys. Preferring playing with insects and animals to dull dolls, I already had a good predisposition to becoming something that is not what the society names 'a girl', I became a tom-boy of the neighborhood. I always had a boyish hairstyle, cut very short; I was wearing torn and dirty jeans, and I rode that cool BMX bike, and the good old Kekec, of course.

As you can imagine, in a neighborhood packed with boys, dolls, tea parties, playing teachers, and wearing mother's high heels were out of question. Especially for a tom-boy. Even if I had the desire to play with toys of the kind, I didn't because I needed to keep my reputation. So, most of the times we played 'Indians' in a ruined bunker from the WWII. We built tee-pees, slept in them if our parents allowed us (which happened close to a zero), we colored bird feathers and wore them in our caps or tied them to our heads; animals were our main attraction. My mother would find snakes and lizards in my pockets when doing laundry. Sometimes I came home having a strange and mysterious smell, walking through mud and this strange type of grass that has a terrible odor and she would take me out of the apartment and wash me with the garden hose. I escaped home several times, starting when I was 5. All of this not because my family would be unloving or uncaring (on the contrary!), but simply because in my imagination, I was Huckleberry Finn. Vinetou. I was Geronimo. I was Crazy Horse and Pocahontas.

I didn't care for anything but maps and stories when I was a child. My father sailed the world twice before I was born. He would read maps to me when he put me to sleep. My mother would tell stories. Lots and lots and lots of stories. She is an amazing story teller and I wouldn't let her away without at least one. Huckleberry Fin and Winetou were my favourites. They also offered a lot of wild ideas that I did not think crazy at the time. This is why my friends and I built our own raft and wanted to escape down the river. We got caught before we did it and there was some serious spanking going on. The neighborhood was not far from the power station where my father worked at the time, and he constantly warned us about the dangers of that part of the river.

Playing 'indians' was a lot of fun. ...Those men with bows and arrows, speaking with low and calm voices made such an impression on me that I decided, as a little girl that I wanted to be an 'Indian'....Little did I know about the real situation. Growing older, I was more and more interested in the spiritual brave 'Indians', and searched for information and ways to get to them somehow. Of course, what was in my imagination did not turn out to be the truth. Karl May never even saw an Indian when he wrote the book Vinetou. And even worse, 'Indians' practically didn't exist anymore....