Monday October 18, 2010

Today is ideally the day you write up your interview. However, some folks are struggling with the format, so take a look at the information below. The objective is to take those responses and make the person real for the reader. Your questions were conversation starters, and that is why the questions themselves were so important. Did you note the body language and mannerisms? Hesitantcy or quickness of a response? Facial expressions? Was there any laughter? Length: about 500 words. Check your grammar and spelling. These are graded.

CLASSMATE INTERVIEW DUE TUESDAY 19 OCTOBER
By Wednesday, I need to know who you are interviewing on the outside.

To begin the writing process, take your notes and arrange them in a logical order. Use your notes to create an outline. What will your thesis statement be? What are the main points and how do these support your thesis? What do you plan to tell the audience about the individual? Making an outline will have you in writing the essay.
Begin the introduction paragraph with an anecdote about the person you interviewed. Something funny is a great way to start the essay. However, any anecdote that grabs the attention of the reader is important. The introductory paragraph will tell the name of the interviewee and why the interview was done. Usually this can be done in the thesis statement.
Although some interviewers do a question and answer format to write about the interviewee, your interview should be written in a narrative essay form.
The narrative form of essay uses information from the interview with a thesis statement telling who and why you interviewed the individual. The narrative form can use direct quotes, but it allows more freedom to express your own thoughts. Tell different anecdotes the interviewee shared with you. Use the questions asked during the interview to back up the thesis and to share information about the interviewee. Share any funny anecdotes as well as serious anecdotes about the interviewee.
The last step in writing an interview essay is to carefully proofread your essay. Check for spelling and grammar errors. Have you used smooth transitions from one paragraph to another? Have you checked for quotes for accuracy? Read the essay out loud to check for errors. Rewrite the essay and you will have a great interview essay.

The following are examples to help you get started writing your interview essay. The first excerpt is most akin to what your classmate interview should be like. Read this first before actually writing.
The second is Malcolm X's interview from Playboy in 1963; the third is with the musician Elvis Costello. AVOID THE INTERNET and read them, please. This will take a full class period, which you will have over the next couple of days.

1. Angie, 19 and a criminal justice major, is a freshman who lives in one of the residence halls. She spent most of her life in the Dallas area and went to a large high school. In fact, she explained that she thought her "high school was bigger than the university." She also told me that it was a real culture shock moving here because "there was always something to do in Dallas-lots of theaters, great restaurants, the lake, festivals. You know, interesting places to go. And even if we didn't want to do anything much, we could go to the mall." She continued by explaining that "Here, though, it's a different story. There's nothing to do. The closest mall is in Greenville, and it's not much. And I can't afford to go to Dallas very often because gas is so high." She admitted that she did go to "typical" college parties and had lots of fun there, but she also explained, "there's only so many parties, and they're all the same after awhile." She went on to tell me that she went to the rec center several times a week. I'm not sure if she was serious but she told me, "I'm going to do that rock climbing thing once I get over my fear of heights." She also noted that she takes advantage of the exercise equipment. "I'm not crazy about the pool, but I'm really surprised that this university has that nice of a rec center," she explained.
Working out at the rec center and going to parties, however, only take up so much time, so we talked about how the environment could be improved here. One of the first things she suggested . . .

NEW EXAMPLE FROM A CLASSMATE:

The moment you meet Ashley Stevenson you are met with a smile and a genuine kindness that is often hard to find in today’s fast and impersonal culture. I met with Stevenson on a Thursday afternoon to ask a series of questions. These questions would hopefully offer those who are not quite so acquainted with Ashley a chance to see her as more than just another peer and a get to know an individual unlike themselves and their close friends. Although words between Ashley and I are few and far between as I sat down with her I did not feel uncomfortable asking personal questions mostly do to her warm and inviting personality. As we sat for the first couple minutes preparing for the interview I had a sense that the prepared questions would not be enough but I was also aware that I would have the possibility to ask for elaborations and delve deeper into topics than I had previously imagined.
As the interview preceded it began on a somewhat light and humorous topic. Stevenson begins every weekday morning to the sound of an alarm as many do myself included. The very first thing to come to her mind every morning is how annoying that alarm is and how badly she would like to go to sleep again. Fortunately for her she is able to go back to a blissful sleep until her second alarm comes on five minutes later. The previous luxury is now no longer possible and she forces herself to get up and begin to prepare for school. The house that Ashley Stevenson calls home contains three other family members beside her. Her mother and grandparents also occupy the house. Her family loves and Ashley and treats the only child as the princess of the house. She shares the love with her family but at times wishes that there were sometimes less concentration only on her.
Of the five senses that all of us human being share taste and hearing are the two that Stevenson enjoys most. Taste would come before hearing only because she loves food and her favorite dish, rice and beans, conquers all. Reggaeton is the sole reason that she enjoys hearing. “Reggaeton makes me feel like I’m closer to home. Even though I was born here I did live in Puerto Rico for a big part of my life so it hits home.”
As the interview continued the questions and Ashley’s answers began to reflect more of her character. She spoke about how being with a group of friends makes her feel powerful as well as being the leader and being looked up to. Being able to make decisions for a group of people is one of her strengths. The times she feels most weak are when she does not fit in with a group of individuals as well as when she cries in front of people. Ashley gets a number of qualities from her family as well. For instance both her and her mother tend to procrastinate and be stubborn at times. Others though that are more useful come from her grandparents who are patient, caring and always compassionate.
As I talked with Ashley I asked her what activities she does now could she see continuing doing all of her life. She answered saying that volleyball and dancing were important physical activities to her but she would also like to continue making Reggaeton music. No matter what Ashley Stevenson decides to do with the rest of her life the many great qualities she has will be sure to help to take her there. It was pleasure learning about yet another individual among the hundreds in our school.

Heads up: the following interview is considered one of the best of the 20th century. It gives us deep insight into Malcolm X and the Civil Rights Movement.
2.The Malcolm X Interview
A PLAYBOY CLASSIC:
ALEX HALEY INTERVIEWS MALCOLM X
On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was gunned down in the Audubon Ballroom
in Harlem. One witness to the hail of gunfire that killed him was his then
four−year old daughter, Qubilah Shabazz, who has now, at age 34, been
implicated in a plot to kill her father’s bitter rival, Louis Farrakhan. In light of
the continuing controversy over Malcolm X’s death, and life, we now offer
visitors to the PLAYBOY WEB SITE the opportunity to read the great spiritual
and political leader’s own account of his beliefs, as recounted in a May 1963
PLAYBOY INTERVIEW. The questioner was the late Alex Haley, who would
go on to co−author The Autobiography of Malcolm X before completing his own
masterpiece of African−American literature, ROOTS.
Many will be shocked by what he has to say; others will be outraged. Our own view is
that this interview is both an eloquent statement and a damning self−indictment of
one noxious facet of rampant racism. As such, we believe it merits publication−−and
reading.
PLAYBOY: What is the ambition of the Black Muslims?
MALCOLM X: Freedom, justice and equality are our principal ambitions. And to
faithfully serve and follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is the guiding goal of
every Muslim. Mr. Muhammad teaches us the knowledge of our own selves, and of
our own people. He cleans us up−−morally, mentally and spiritually−−and he reforms
us of the vices that have blinded us here in the Western society. He stops black men
from getting drunk, stops their dope addiction if they had it, stops nicotine, gambling,
stealing, lying, cheating, fornication, adultery, prostitution, juvenile delinquency. I
think of this whenever somebody talks about someone investigating us. Why
investigate the Honorable Elijah Muhammad? They should subsidize him. He’s
cleaning up the mess that white men have made. He’s saving the Government millions
of dollars, taking black men off of welfare, showing them how to do something for
themselves. And Mr. Muhammad teaches us love for our own kind. The white man
has taught the black people in this country to hate themselves as inferior, to hate each
other, to be divided against each other. Messenger Muhammad restores our love for
our own kind, which enables us to work together in unity and harmony. He shows us
how to pool our financial resources and our talents, then to work together toward a
common objective. Among other things, we have small businesses in most major
cities in this country, and we want to create many more. We are taught by Mr.
Muhammad that it is very important to improve the black man’s economy, and his
thrift. But to do this, we must have land of our own. The brainwashed black man can
never learn to stand on his own two feet until he is on his own. We must learn to
become our own producers, manufacturers and traders; we must have industry of our
own, to employ our own. The white man resists this because he wants to keep the
black man under his thumb and jurisdiction in white society. He wants to keep the
black man always dependent and begging−−for jobs, food, clothes, shelter, education.
The white man doesn’t want to lose somebody to be supreme over. He wants to keep
the black man where he can be watched and retarded. Mr. Muhammad teaches that as
soon as we separate from the white man, we will learn that we can do without the
white man just as he can do without us. The white man knows that once black men get
off to themselves and learn they can do for themselves, the black man’s full potential
will explode and he will surpass the white man.
PLAYBOY: Do you feel that the Black Muslims’ goal of obtaining "several states" is
a practical vision?
MALCOLM X: Well, you might consider some things practical that are really
impractical. Wasn’t it impractical that the Supreme Court could issue a desegregation
order nine years ago and there’s still only eight percent compliance? Is it practical that
a hundred years after the Civil War there’s not freedom for black men yet? On the
record for integration you’ve got the President, the Congress, the Supreme
Court−−but show me your integration, where is it? That’s practical? Mr. Muhammad
teaches us to be for what’s really practical−−that’s separation. It’s more natural than
integration.
PLAYBOY: In a recent interview, Negro author−lecturer Louis Lomax said, "Eighty
percent, if not more, of America’s 20,000,000 Negroes vibrate sympathetically with
the Muslims’ indictment of the white power structure. But this does not mean we
agree with them in their doctrines of estrangement or with their proposed resolutions
of the race problem." Does this view represent a consensus of opinion among
Negroes? And if so, is it possible that your separationist and anti−Christian doctrines
have the effect of alienating many of your own race?
MALCOLM X: Sir, you make a mistake listening to people who tell you how much
our stand alienates black men in this country. I’d guess actually we have the sympathy
of 90 percent of the black people. There are 20,000,000 dormant Muslims in America.
A Muslim to us is somebody who is for the black man; I don’t care if he goes to the
Baptist Church seven days a week. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says that a black
man is born a Muslim by nature. There are millions of Muslims not aware of it now.
All of them will be Muslims when they wake up; that’s what’s meant by the
Resurrection.
Sir, I’m going to tell you a secret: the black man is a whole lot smarter than white
people think he is. The black man has survived in this country by fooling the white
man. He’s been dancing and grinning and white men never guessed what he was
thinking. Now you’ll hear the bourgeois Negroes pretending to be alienated, but
they’re just making the white man think they don’t go for what Mr. Muhammad is
saying. This Negro that will tell you he’s so against us, he’s just protecting the crumbs
he gets from the white man’s table. This kind of Negro is so busy trying to be like the
white man that he doesn’t know what the real masses of his own people are thinking.
A fine car and house and clothes and liquor have made a lot think themselves different
from their poor black brothers. But Mr. Muhammad says that Allah is going to wake
up all black men to see the white man as he really is, and see what Christianity has
done to them. The black masses that are waking up don’t believe in Christianity
anymore. All it’s done for black men is help to keep them slaves. Mr. Muhammad is
teaching that Christianity, as white people see it, means that whites can have their
heaven here on earth, but the black man is supposed to catch his hell here. The black
man is supposed to keep believing that when he dies, he’ll float up to some city with
golden streets and milk and honey on a cloud somewhere. Every black man in North
America has heard black Christian preachers shouting about "tomorrow in good old
Beulah’s Land." But the thinking black masses today are interested in Muhammad’s
Land. The Promised Land that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad talks about is right
here on this earth. Intelligent black men today are interested in a religious doctrine
that offers a solution to their problems right now, right here on this earth, while they
are alive.
You must understand that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad represents the fulfillment
of Biblical prophecy to us. In the Old Testament, Moses lived to see his enemy,
Pharaoh, drowned in the Red Sea−−which in essence means that Mr. Muhammad will
see the completion of his work in his lifetime, that he will live to see victory gained
over his enemy.
PLAYBOY: Are you referring to the Muslim judgment day which your
organization’s newspaper, MUHAMMAD SPEAKS, calls "Armageddon" and
prophesies as imminent?
MALCOLM X: Armageddon deals with the final battle between God and the Devil.
The Third World War is referred to as Armageddon by many white statesmen. There
won’t be any more war after then because there won’t be any more warmongers. I
don’t know when Armageddon, whatever form it takes, is supposed to be. But I know
the time is near when the white man will be finished. The signs are all around us. Ten
years ago you couldn’t have paid a Southern Negro to defy local customs. The British
Lion’s tail has been snatched off in black Africa. The Indonesians have booted out
such would−be imperialists as the Dutch. The French, who felt for a century that
Algeria was theirs, have had to run for their lives back to France. Sir, the point I make
is that all over the world, the old day of standing in fear and trembling before the
almighty white man is gone!
PLAYBOY: If Muslims ultimately gain control as you predict, what do you plan to
do with white people?
MALCOLM X: It’s not a case of what would we do, it’s a case of what would God
do with whites. What does a judge do with the guilty? Either the guilty one repents
and atones, or God executes judgment.
PLAYBOY: You refer to whites as "the guilty" and "the enemy"; you predict divine
retribution against them; and you preach absolute separation from the white
community. Do not these views substantiate the fact that your movement is predicated
on race hatred?
MALCOLM X: Sir, it’s from Mr. Muhammad that the black masses are learning for
the first time in 400 years the real truth of how the white man brainwashed the black
man, kept him ignorant of his true history, robbed him of his self−confidence. The
black masses for the first time are understanding that it’s not a case of being
anti−white or anti−Christian, but it’s a case of seeing the true nature of the white
man. We’re anti−evil, anti−oppression, anti−lynching. You can’t be anti−those things
unless you’re also anti−the oppressor and the lyncher. You can’t be anti−slavery and
pro−slavemaster; you can’t be anti−crime and pro−criminal. In fact, Mr. Muhammad
teaches that if the present generation of whites would study their own race in the light
of their true history, they would be anti−white themselves.
PLAYBOY: Are you?
MALCOLM X: As soon as the white man hears a black man say that he’s through
loving white people, then the white man accuses the black man of hating him. The
Honorable Elijah Muhammad doesn’t teach hate. The white man isn’t important
enough for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and his followers to spend any time
hating him. The white man has brainwashed himself into believing that all the black
people in the world want to be cuddled up next to him. When he meets what we’re
talking about, he can’t believe it, it takes all the wind out of him. When we tell him
we don’t want to be around him, we don’t want to be like he is, he’s staggered. It
makes him re−evaluate his 300−year myth about the black man. What I want to know
is how the white man, with the blood of black people dripping off his fingers, can
have the audacity to be asking black people do they hate him. That takes a lot of nerve.
PLAYBOY: How do you reconcile your disavowal of hatred with the announcement
you made last year that Allah had brought you "the good news" that 120 white
Atlantans had just been killed in an air crash en route to America from Paris?
MALCOLM X: Sir, as I see the law of justice, it says as you sow, so shall you reap.
The white man has reveled as the rope snapped black men’s necks. He has reveled
around the lynching fire. It’s only right for the black man’s true God, Allah, to defend
us−−and for us to be joyous because our God manifests his ability to inflict pain on
our enemy. We Muslims believe that the white race, which is guilty of having
oppressed and exploited and enslaved our people here in America, should and will be
the victims of God’s divine wrath. All civilized societies in their courts of justice set
a sentence of execution against those deemed to be enemies of society, such as
murderers and kidnappers. The presence of 20,000,000 black people here in America
is proof that Uncle Sam is guilty of kidnapping−−because we didn’t come here
voluntarily on the Mayflower. And 400 years of lynchings condemn Uncle Sam as a
murderer.
PLAYBOY: To return to your statement about the plane crash, when Dr. Ralph
Bunche heard about it, he called you "mentally depraved." What is your reaction?
MALCOLM X: Iknow all about what Dr. Bunche said. He’s always got his
international mouth open. He apologized in the UN when black people protested
there. You’ll notice that whenever the white man lets a black man get prominent, he
has a job for him. Dr. Bunche serves the white man well−−he represents, speaks for
and defends the white man. He does none of this for the black man. Dr. Bunche has
functioned as a white man’s tool, designed to influence international opinion on the
Negro. The white man has Negro local tools, national tools, and Dr. Bunche is an
international tool.
PLAYBOY: Dr. Bunche was only one of many prominent Negroes who deplored
your statement in similar terms. What reply have you to make to these spokesmen for
your own people?
MALCOLM X: Go ask their opinions and you’ll be able to fill your notebook with
what white people want to hear Negroes say. Let’s take these so−called spokesmen for
the black men by types. Start with the politicians. They never attack Mr. Muhammad
personally. They realize he has the sympathy of the black masses. They know they
would alienate the masses whose votes they need. But the black civic leaders, they do
attack Mr. Muhammad. The reason is usually that they are appointed to their positions
by the white man. The white man pays them to attack us. The ones who attack Mr.
Muhammad the most are the ones who earn the most. Then take the black religious
leaders, they also attack Mr. Muhammad. These preachers do it out of self−defense,
because they know he’s waking up Negroes. No one believes what the Negro preacher
preaches except those who are mentally asleep, or in the darkness of ignorance about
the true situation of the black man here today in this wilderness of North America. If
you will take note, sir, many so−called Negro leaders who once attacked the
Honorable Elijah Muhammad don’t do so anymore. And he never speaks against them
in the personal sense except as a reaction if they speak against him. Islam is a religion
that teaches us never to attack, never to be the aggressor−−but you can waste
somebody if he attacks you. These Negro leaders have become aware that whenever
the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is caused by their attack to level his guns against
them, they always come out on the losing end. Many have experienced this.
PLAYBOY: Do you admire and respect any other American Negro leaders−−Martin
Luther King, for example?
MALCOLM X: I am a Muslim, sir. Muslims can see only one leader who has the
qualifications necessary to unite all elements of black people in America. This is the
Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
PLAYBOY: Many white religious leaders have also gone on record against the Black
Muslims. Writing in the official NAACP magazine, a Catholic priest described you
as "a fascist−minded hate group," and B’nai B’rith has accused you of being not only
anti−Christian but anti−Semitic. Do you consider this true?
MALCOLM X: Insofar as the Christian world is concerned, dictatorships have
existed only in areas or countries where you have Roman Catholicism. Catholicism
conditions your mind for dictators. Can you think of a single Protestant country that
has ever produced a dictator?
PLAYBOY: Germany was predominantly Protestant when Hitler −−−−
MALCOLM X: Another thing to think of−−in the 20th Century, the Christian
Church has given us two heresies: fascism and communism. Where did fascism start?
Where’s the second−largest Communist party outside of Russia? The answer to both
is Italy. Where is the Vatican? But let’s not forget the Jew. Anybody that gives even a
just criticism of the Jew is instantly labeled anti−Semite. The Jew cries louder than
anybody else if anybody criticizes him. You can tell the truth about any minority in
America, but make a true observation about the Jew, and if it doesn’t pat him on the
back, then he uses his grip on the news media to label you anti−Semite. Let me say
just a word about the Jew and the black man. The Jew is always anxious to advise the
black man. But they never advise him how to solve his problem the way the Jews
solved their problem. The Jew never went sitting−in and crawling−in and sliding−in
and freedom−riding, like he teaches and helps Negroes to do. The Jews stood up, and
stood together, and they used their ultimate power, the economic weapon. That’s
exactly what the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is trying to teach black men to do. The
Jews pooled their money and bought the hotels that barred them. They bought
Atlantic City and Miami Beach and anything else they wanted. Who owns
Hollywood? Who runs the garment industry, the largest industry in New York City?
But the Jew that’s advising the Negro joins the NAACP, CORE, the Urban League,
and others. With money donations, the Jew gains control, then he sends the black man
doing all this wading−in, boring−in, even burying−in−−everything but buying−in.
Never shows him how to set up factories and hotels. Never advises him how to own
what he wants. No, when there’s something worth owning, the Jew’s got it. Walk up
and down in any Negro ghetto in America. Ninety percent of the worthwhile
businesses you see are Jew−owned. Every night they take the money out. This helps
the black man’s community stay a ghetto.
PLAYBOY: Isn’t it true that many Gentiles have also labored with dedication to
advance integration and economic improvement for the Negro, as volunteer workers
for the NAACP, CORE and many other interracial agencies?
MALCOLM X: A man who tosses worms in the river isn’t necessarily a friend of the
fish. All the fish who take him for a friend, who think the worm’s got no hook in it,
usually end up in the frying pan. All these things dangled before us by the white
liberal posing as a friend and benefactor have turned out to be nothing but bait to
make us think we’re making progress. The Supreme Court decision has never been
enforced. Desegregation has never taken place. The promises have never been
fulfilled. We have received only tokens, substitutes, trickery and deceit.
PLAYBOY: What motives do you impute to PLAYBOY for providing you with this
opportunity for the free discussion of your views?
MALCOLM X: I think you want to sell magazines. I’ve never seen a sincere white
man, not when it comes to helping black people. Usually things like this are done by
white people to benefit themselves. The white man’s primary interest is not to elevate
the thinking of black people, or to waken black people, or white people either. The
white man is interested in the black man only to the extent that the black man is of use
to him. The white man’s interest is to make money, to exploit.
PLAYBOY: Is there any white man on earth whom you would concede to have the
Negro’s welfare genuinely at heart?
MALCOLM X: I say, sir, that you can never make an intelligent judgment without
evidence. If any man will study the entire history of the relationship between the
white man and the black man, no evidence will be found that justifies any confidence
or faith that the black man might have in the white man today.
PLAYBOY: Then you consider it impossible for the white man to be anything but an
exploiter and a hypocrite in his relations with the Negro?
MALCOLM X: Is it wrong to attribute a predisposition to wheat before it comes up
out of the ground? Wheat’s characteristics and nature make it wheat. It differs from
barley because of its nature. Wheat perpetuates its own characteristics just as the
white race does. White people are born devils by nature. They don’t become so by
deeds. If you never put popcorn in a skillet, it would still be popcorn. Put the heat to
it, it will pop.
PLAYBOY: You say that white men are devils by nature. Was Christ a devil?
MALCOLM X: Christ wasn’t white. Christ was a black man.
Scripture do you baPLAYBOY: On what se this assertion?
MALCOLM X: Sir, Billy Graham has made the same statement in public. Why not
ask him what Scripture he found it in? When Pope Pius XII died, LIFE magazine
carried a picture of him in his privatestudy kneeling before a black Christ. What was
the source of their information? All white people who have studied history and
geography know that Christ was a black man. Only the poor, brainwashed American
Negro has been made to believe that Christ was white, to maneuver him into
worshiping the white man. After becoming a Muslim in prison, I read almost
everything I could put my hands on in the prison library. I began to think back on
everything I had read and especially with the histories, I realized that nearly all of
them read by the general public have been made into white histories. I found out that
the history−whitening process either had left out great things that black men had
done, or some of the great black men had gotten whitened.
PLAYBOY: Would you list a few of these men?
MALCOLM X: Well, Hannibal, the most successful general that ever lived, was a
black man. So was Beethoven; Beethoven’s father was one of the blackamoors that
hired themselves out in Europe as professional soldiers. Haydn, Beethoven’s teacher,
was of African descent. And Solomon. Great Biblical characters. Columbus, the
discoverer of America, was a half−black man. Whole black empires, like the
Moorish, have been whitened to hide the fact that a great black empire had conquered
a white empire even before America was discovered. The Moorish
civilization−−black Africans−−conquered and ruled Spain; they kept the light burning
in Southern Europe. The word "Moor" means "black," by the way. Egyptian
civilization is a classic example of how the white man stole great African cultures and
makes them appear today as white European. The black nation of Egypt is the only
country that has a science named after its culture: Egyptology. The ancient Sumerians,
a black−skinned people, occupied the Middle Eastern areas and were contemporary
with the Egyptian civilization. The Incas, the Aztecs, the Mayans, all dark−skinned
Indian people, had a highly developed culture here in America, in what is now Mexico
and northern South America. These people had mastered agriculture at the time when
European white people were still living in mud huts and eating weeds. But white
children, or black children, or grownups here today in America don’t get to read this
in the average books they are exposed to.
PLAYBOY: Can you cite any authoritative historical documents for these
observations?
MALCOLM X: I can cite a great many, sir. You could start with Herodotus, the
Greek historian. He outright described the Egyptians as "black, with woolly hair."
And the American archaeologist and Egyptologist James Henry Breasted did the same
thing. Read Pliny. Read any of the ancient Roman, Greek and, more recently,
European anthropologists and archaeologists.
PLAYBOY: You seem to have based your thesis on the premise that all nonwhite
races are necessarily black.
MALCOLM X: Mr. Muhammad says that the red, the brown and the yellow are
indeed all part of the black nation. Which means that black, brown, red, yellow, all
are brothers, all are one family. The white one is a stranger. He’s the odd fellow.
PLAYBOY: Since your classification of black peoples apparently includes the
light−skinned Oriental, Middle Eastern and possibly even Latin races as well as the
darker Indian and Negroid strains, just how do you decide how light−skinned it’s
permissible to be before being condemned as white? And if Caucasian whites are
devils by nature, do you classify people by degrees of devilishness according to the
lightness of their skin?
MALCOLM X: I don’t worry about these little technicalities. But I know that white
society has always considered that one drop of black blood makes you black. To me, if
one drop can do this, it only shows the power of one drop of black blood. And I know
another thing−−that Negroes who used to be light enough to pass for white have seen
the handwriting on the wall and are beginning to come back and identify with their
own kind. And white people who also are seeing the pendulum of time catching up
with them are now trying to join with blacks, or even find traces of black blood in
their own veins, hoping that it will save them from the catastrophe they see ahead.
But no devil can fool God. Muslims have a little poem about them. It goes, "One drop
will make you black, and will also in days to come save your soul."
PLAYBOY: As one of this vast elite, do you hold the familiar majority attitude
toward minority groups−−regarding the white race, in this case, as inferior in quality
as well as quantity to what you call the "black nation"?
MALCOLM X: Thoughtful white people know they are inferior to black people.
Even Eastland knows it. Anyone who has studied the genetic phase of biology knows
that white is considered recessive and black is considered dominant. When you want
strong coffee, you ask for black coffee. If you want it light, you want it weak,
integrated with white milk. Just like these Negroes who weaken themselves and their
race by this integrating and intermixing with whites. If you want bread with no
nutritional value, you ask for white bread. All the good that was in it has been
bleached out of it, and it will constipate you. If you want pure flour, you ask for dark
flour, whole−wheat flour. If you want pure sugar, you want dark sugar.
PLAYBOY: If all whites are devilish by nature, as you have alleged, and if black and
white are essentially opposite, as you have just stated, do you view all black
men−−with the exception of their non−Muslim leaders−−as fundamentally angelic?
MALCOLM X: No, there is plenty wrong with Negroes. They have no society.
They’re robots, automatons. No minds of their own. I hate to say that about us, but it’s
the truth. They are a black body with a white brain. Like the monster Frankenstein.
The top part is your bourgeois Negro. He’s your integrator. He’s not interested in his
poor black brothers. He’s usually so deep in debt from trying to copy the white man’s
social habits that he doesn’t have time to worry about nothing else. They buy the most
expensive clothes and cars and eat the cheapest food. They act more like the white
man than the white man does himself. These are the ones that hide their sympathy for
Mr. Muhammad’s teachings. It conflicts with the sources from which they get their
white−man’s crumbs. This class to us are the fence−sitters. They have one eye on the
white man and the other eye on the Muslims. They’ll jump whichever way they see
the wind blowing. Then there’s the middle class of the Negro masses, the ones not in
the ghetto, who realize that life is a struggle, who are conscious of all the injustices
being done and of the constant state of insecurity in which they live. They’re ready to
take some stand against everything that’s against them. Now, when this group hears
Mr. Muhammad’s teachings, they are the ones who come forth faster and identify
themselves, and take immediate steps toward trying to bring into existence what Mr.
Muhammad advocates. At the bottom of the social heap is the black man in the
big−city ghetto. He lives night and day with the rats and cockroaches and drowns
himself with alcohol and anesthetizes himself with dope, to try and forget where and
what he is. That Negro has given up all hope. He’s the hardest one for us to reach,
because he’s the deepest in the mud. But when you get him, you’ve got the best kind
of Muslim. Because he makes the most drastic change. He’s the most fearless. He will
stand the longest. He has nothing to lose, even his life, because he didn’t have that in
the first place. I look upo myself, sir, as a prime example of this category−−and as
graphic an example as you could find of the salvation of the black man.
PLAYBOY: Could you give us a brief review of the early life that led to your own
"salvation"?
MALCOLM X: Gladly. I was born in Omaha on May 19, 1925. My light color is the
result of my mother’s mother having been raped by a white man. I hate every drop of
white blood in me. Before I am indicted for hate again, sir−−is it wrong to hate the
blood ofa rapist? But to continue: My father was a militant follower of Marcus
Garvey’s "Back to Africa" movement. The Lansing, Michigan, equivalent of the Ku
Klux Klan warned him to stop preaching Garvey’s message, but he kept on and one of
my earliest memories is of being snatched awake one night with a lot of screaming
going on because our home was afire. But my father got louder about Garvey, and the
next time he was found bludgeoned in the head, lying across streetcar tracks. He died
soon and our family was in a bad way. We were so hungry we were dizzy and we had
nowhere to turn. Finally the authorities came in and we children were scattered about
in different places as public wards. I happened to become the ward of a white couple
who ran a correctional school for white boys. This family liked me in the way they
liked their house pets. They got me enrolled in an all−white school. I was popular, I
played sports and everything, and studied hard, and I stayed at the head of my class
through the eighth grade. That summer I was 14, but I was big enough and looked old
enough to get away with telling a lie that I was 21, so I got a job working in the dining
car of a train that ran between Boston and New York City.
On my layovers in New York, I’d go to Harlem. That’s where I saw in the bars all
these men and women with what looked like the easiest life in the world. Plenty of
money, big cars, all of it. I could tell they were in the rackets and vice. I hung around
those bars whenever I came in town, and I kept my ears and eyes open and my mouth
shut. And they kept their eyes on me, too. Finally, one day a numbers man told me
that he needed a runner, and I never caught the night train back to Boston. Right there
was when I started my life in crime. I was in all of it that the white police and the
gangsters left open to the black criminal, sir. I was in numbers, bootleg liquor, "hot"
goods, women. I sold the bodies of black women to white men, and white women to
black men. I was in dope, I was in everything evil you could name. The only thing I
could say good for myself, sir, was that I did not indulge in hitting anybody over the
head.
PLAYBOY: By the time you were 16, according to the record, you had several men
working for you in these various enterprises. Right?
MALCOLM X: Yes, sir. I turned the things I mentioned to you over to them. And I
had a good working system of paying off policemen. It was here that I learned that
vice and crime can only exist, at least the kind and level that I was in, to the degree
that the police cooperate with it. I had several men working and I was a steerer
myself. I steered white people with money from downtown to whatever kind of sin
they wanted in Harlem. I didn’t care what they wanted, I knew where to take them to
it. And I tell you what I noticed here−−that my best customers always were the
officials, the top police people, businessmen, politicians and clergymen. I never forgot
that. I met all levels of these white people, supplied them with everything they
wanted, and I saw that they were just a filthy race of devils. But despite the fact that
my own father was murdered by whites, and I had seen my people all my life
brutalized by whites, I was still blind enough to mix with them and socialize with
them. I thought they were gods and goddesses−−until Mr. Muhammad’s powerful
spiritual message opened my eyes and enabled me to see them as a race of devils.
Nothing had made me see the white man as he is until one word from the Honorable
Elijah Muhammad opened my eyes overnight.
PLAYBOY: When did this happen?
MALCOLM X: In prison. I was finally caught and spent 77 months in three different
prisons. But it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me, because it was in
prison that I first heard the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. His
teachings were what turned me around. The first time I heard the Honorable Elijah
Muhammad’s statement, "The white man is the devil," it just clicked. I am a good
example of why Islam is spreading so rapidly across the land. I was nothing but
another convict, a semi−illiterate criminal. Mr. Muhammad’s teachings were able to
reach into prison, which is the level where people are considered to have fallen as low
as they can go. His teachings brought me from behind prison walls and placed me on
the podiums of some of the leading colleges and universities in the country. I often
think, sir, that in 1946, I was sentenced to 8 to 10 years in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
as a common thief who had never passed the eighth grade. And the next time I went
back to Cambridge was in March 1961, as a guest speaker at the Harvard Law School
Forum. This is the best example of Mr. Muhammad’s ability to take nothing and
make something, to take nobody and make somebody.
PLAYBOY: Your rise to prominence in the Muslim organization has been so swift
that a number of your own membership have hailed you as their articulate exemplar,
and many anti−Muslims regard you as the real brains and power of the movement.
What is your reaction to this sudden eminence?
MALCOLM X: Sir, it’s heresy to imply that I am in any way whatever even equal to
Mr. Muhammad. No man on earth today is his equal. Whatever I am that is good, it is
through what I have been taught by Mr. Muhammad.
PLAYBOY: Be that as it may, the time is near when your leader, who is 65, will
have to retire from leadership of the Muslim movement. Many observers predict that
when this day comes, the new Messenger of Allah in America−−a role which you
have called the most powerful of any black man in the world−−will be Malcolm X.
How do you feel about this prospect?
MALCOLM X: Sir, I can only say that God chose Mr. Muhammad as his Messenger,
and Mr. Muhammad chose me and many others to help him. Only God has the say−so.
But I will tell you one thing. I frankly don’t believe that I or anyone else am worthy to
succeed Mr. Muhammad. No one preceded him. I don’t think I could make the
sacrifice he has made, or set his good example. He has done more than lay down his
life. But his work is already done with the seed he has planted among black people. If
Mr. Muhammad and every identifiable follower he has, certainly including myself,
were tomorrow removed from the scene by more of the white man’s brutality, there is
one thing to be sure of: Mr. Muhammad’s teachings of the naked truth have fallen
upon fertile soil among 20,000,000 black men here in this wilderness of North
America.
PLAYBOY: Has the soil, in your opinion, been as fertile for Mr. Muhammad’s
teachings elsewhere in the world−−among the emerging nations of black Africa, for
instance?
MALCOLM X: I think not only that his teachings have had considerable impact even
in Africa but that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad has had a greater impact on the
world than the rise of the African nations. I say this as objectively as I can, being a
Muslim. Even the Christian missionaries are conceding that in black Africa, for every
Christian conversion, there are two Muslim conversions.
PLAYBOY: Might conversions be even more numerous if it weren’t for the
somewhat strained relations which are said by several Negro writers to exist between
the black people of Africa and America?
MALCOLM X: Perhaps. You see, the American black man sees the African come
here and live where the American black man can’t. The Negro sees the African come
here with a sheet on and go places where the Negro−−dressed like a white man,
talking like a white man, sometimes as wealthy as the white man−−can’t go. When
I’m traveling around the country, I use my real Muslim name, Malik Shabazz. I make
my hotel reservations under that name, and I always see the same thing I’ve just been
telling you. I come to the desk and always see that "here−comes−a−Negro" look. It’s
kind of a reserved, coldly tolerant cordiality. But when I say "Malik Shabazz," their
whole attitude changes: they snap to respect. They think I’m an African. People say
what’s in a name? There’s a whole lot in a name. The American black man is seeing
the African respected as a human being. The African gets respect because he has an
identity and cultural roots. But most of all because the African owns some land. For
these reasons he has his human rights recognized, and that makes his civil rights
automatic.
PLAYBOY: Do you feel this is true of Negro civil and human rights in South Africa,
where the doctrine of apartheid is enforced by the government of Prime Minister
Verwoerd?
MALCOLM X: They don’t stand for anything different in South Africa than
America stands for. The only difference is over there they preach as well as practice
apartheid. America preaches freedom and practices slavery. America preaches
integration and practices segregation. Verwoerd is an honest white man. So are the
Barnetts, Faubuses, Eastlands and Rockwells. They want to keep all white people
white. And we want to keep all black people black. As between the racists and the
integrationists, I highly prefer the racists. I’d rather walk among rattlesnakes, whose
constant rattle warns me where they are, than among those Northern snakes who grin
and make you forget you’re still in a snake pit. Any white man is against blacks. The
entire American economy is based on white supremacy. Even the religious philosophy
is, in essence, white supremacy. A white Jesus. A white Virgin. White angels. White
everything. But a black Devil, of course. The "Uncle Sam" political foundation is
based on white supremacy, relegating nonwhites to second−class citizenship. It goes
without saying that the social philosophy is strictly white supremacist. And the
educational system perpetuates white supremacy.
PLAYBOY: Are you contradicting yourself by denouncing white supremacy while
praising its practitioners, since you admit that you share their goal of separation?
MALCOLM X: The fact that I prefer the candor of the Southern segregationist to the
hypocrisy of the Northern integrationist doesn’t alter the basic immorality of white
supremacy. A devil is still a devil whether he wears a bed sheet or a Brooks Brothers
suit. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches separation simply because any forcible
attempt to integrate America completely would result in another Civil War, a
catastrophic explosion among whites which would destroy America−−and still not
solve the problem. But Mr. Muhammad’s solution of separate black and white would
solve the problem neatly for both the white and black man, and America would be
saved. Then the whole world would give Uncle Sam credit for being something other
than a hypocrite.
PLAYBOY: Do you feel that the Administration’s successful stand on the integration
of James Meredith into the University of Mississippi has demonstrated that the
Government−−far from being hypocritical−−is sympathetic with the Negro’s
aspirations for equality?
MALCOLM X: What was accomplished? It took 15,000 troops to put Meredith in
the University of Mississippi. Those troops and $3,000,000−−that’s what was
spent−−to get one Negro in. That $3,000,000 could have been used much more wisely
by the Federal Government to elevate the living standards of all the Negroes in
Mississippi.
PLAYBOY: It is a matter of record that President Kennedy, in the face of Southern
opposition, championed the appointment of Dr. Robert Weaver as the first Negro
Cabinet member. Does this indicate to you, as it does to many Negro leaders, that the
Administration is determined to battle the forces of white supremacy?
MALCOLM X: Kennedy doesn’t have to fight; he’s the President. He didn’t have any
fight replacing Ribicoff with Celebrezze. He didn’t have any trouble putting
Goldberg on the Supreme Court. He hasn’t had any trouble getting anybody in but
Weaver and Thurgood Marshall. He wasn’t worried about Congressional objection
when he challenged U.S. Steel. He wasn’t worried about either Congressional reaction
or Russian reaction or even world reaction when he blockaded Cuba. But when it
comes to the rights of the Negro, who helped to put him in office, then he’s afraid of
littlepoc kets of white resistance.
PLAYBOY: Has any American President, in your opinion−−Lincoln, FDR, Truman,
Eisenhower, Kennedy−−accomplished anything worthwhile for the Negro?
MALCOLM X: None of them have ever done anything for Negroes. All of them
have tricked the Negro, and made false promises to him at election times which they
never fulfilled. Lincoln’s concern wasn’t freedom for the blacks but to save the
Union.
PLAYBOY: Wasn’t the Civil War fought to decide whether this nation could, in the
words of Lincoln, "endure permanently half slave and half free"?
MALCOLM X: Sir, many, many people are completely misinformed about Lincoln
and the Negro. That war involved two thieves, the North and the South, fighting over
the spoils. The further we get away from the actual incident, the more they are trying
to make it sound as though the battle was over the black man. Lincoln said that if he
could save the Union without freeing the slaves, he would. But after two years of
killing and carnage he found out he would have to free the slaves. He wasn’t
interested in the slaves but in the Union. As for the Emancipation Proclamation, sir, it
was an empty document. If it freed the slaves, why, a century later, are we still
battling for civil rights?
PLAYBOY: Despite the fact that the goal of racial equality is not yet realized, many
sociologists−−and a number of Negro commentators−−agree that no minority group
on earth has made as much social, civil and economic progress as the American Negro
in the past 100 years. What is your reaction to this view?
MALCOLM X: Sir, I hear that everywhere almost exactly as you state it. This is one
of the biggest myths that the American black man himself believes in. Every
immigrant ethnic group that has come to this country is now a genuinely first−class
citizen group−−every one of them but the black man, who was here when they came.
While everybody else is sharing the fruit, the black man is just now starting to be
thrown some seeds. It is our hope that through the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, we
will at last get the soil to plant the seeds in. You talk about the progress of the
Negro−−I’ll tell you, mister, it’s just because the Negro has been in America while
America has gone forward that the Negro appears to have gone forward. The Negro is
like a man on a luxury commuter train doing 90 miles an hour. He looks out of the
window, along with all the white passengers in their Pullman chairs, and he thinks
he’s doing 90, too. Then he gets to the men’s room and looks in the mirror−−and he
sees he’s not really getting anywhere at all. His reflection shows a black man standing
there in the white uniform of a dining−car steward. He may get on the 5:10, all right,
but he sure won’t be getting off at Westport.
PLAYBOY: Is there anything then, in your opinion, that could be done−−by either
whites or blacks−−to expedite the social and economic progress of the Negro in
America?
MALCOLM X: First of all, the white man must finally realize that he’s the one who
has committed the crimes that have produced the miserable condition that our people
are in. He can’t hide this guilt by reviling us today because we answer his criminal
acts−−past and present−−with extreme and uncompromising resentment. He cannot
hide his guilt by accusing us, his victims, of being racists, extremists and black
supremacists. The white man must realize that the sins of the fathers are about to be
visited upon the heads of the children who have continued those sins, only in more
sophisticated ways. Mr. Elijah Muhammad is warning this generation of white people
that they, too, are also facing a time of harvest in which they will have to pay for the
crime committed when their grandfathers made slaves out of us.
But there is something the white man can do to avert this fate. He must atone−−and
this can only be done by allowing black men, those who choose, to leave this land of
bondage and go to a land of our own. But if he doesn’t want a mass movement of our
people away from this house of bondage, then he should separate this country. He
should give us several states here on American soil, where those of us who wish to can
go and set up our own government, our own economic system, our own civilization.
Since we have given over 300 years of our slave labor to the white man’s America,
helped to build it up for him, it’s only right that white America should give us
everything we need in finance and materials for the next 25 years, until our own
nation is able to stand on its feet. Then, if the Western Hemisphere is attacked by
outside enemies, we would have both the capability and the motivation to join in
defending the hemisphere, in which we would then have a sovereign stake.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says that the black man has served under the rule of
all the other peoples of the earth at one time or another in the past. He teaches that it
is now God’s intention to put the black man back at the top of civilization, where he
was in the beginning−−before Adam, the white man, was created. The world since
Adam has been white−−and corrupt. The world of tomorrow will be black−−and
righteous. In the white world there has been nothing but slavery, suffering, death and
colonialism. In the black world of tomorrow, there will be true freedom, justice and
equality for all. And that day is coming−−sooner than you think.


3.Vancouver, on a sun-dappled Saturday afternoon, seems an unlikely place to meet Elvis Costello. It feels too much at ease, too lacking in sharp edges. All morning, I've been walking in Stanley Park, dodging the joggers and cyclists circling the waterfront with its tethered yachts and pleasure boats, while relistening to a selection from Costello's 33 albums on a loop through my headphones. The soundtrack doesn't fit, quite. Though he is capable of the full range of human emotion, the staples of "guilt and anger" that he identified once early in his career "after 14 Pernods" as his songwriting stock-in-trade remain dominant themes. The voice is not always used in the attack mode that has long made it such an insistent weapon, but it still carries an unrivalled degree of hurt and vitriol when required.

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Buy the CDDownload as MP3Elvis CostelloNational RansomDecca (UMO)
2010
You'd hesitate, in this sense, to suggest that Costello had mellowed; he still, no doubt, has little desire to venture in the vicinity of Chelsea; even so, when I meet him in a cafe near the water, he cuts a chipper figure – all gap-toothed smiles and heavy specs and winklepickers and carrying his silver fedora in a toughened box. Contrary to appearances, as he sits down among the latte drinkers in their chinos and leisurewear, he says he has rarely felt more at home than he has here.

Most of that has to do with his third-time-around marriage, to the Canadian jazz singer Diana Krall. After our interview, he explains, he has to dash home to look after his twin four-year-old boys. Krall is playing in Lima, Peru, so he is the stay-at-home dad for a weekend. They have been married seven years now and absences still seem to be making hearts grow fonder.

"We have a lot of time apart, which makes for a lot of longing," he says. "Monday night will be great when Diana is home and we can be a family with the boys until one of us has to leave again. That seems to keep things alive, for us anyway."

He appears, I suggest, for someone who, in his public persona at least has always looked a little at odds with the world, to be more content than he has ever been. He flinches a little at the thought. "I don't know if content is the right word," he says. "Content is a word that has never sat well with me. Like 'maturity'. They are two words I've never liked. I think they imply some sort of decay. A settling."

How about happiness? I ask. For a long while, in his songs at least, simple happiness seemed to be the state he most distrusted.

"Not now," he says. "I think when I was younger I experimented on myself in various ways and with various poisons. But now I look after myself all I can." Costello is 56. "Obviously, when you have four-year-old sons at my age you hope you'll be around as long as possible. And my wife is 10 years younger than me, so I don't want her to be dragging me round in a wheelbarrow at any point. You've got to be on your toes a bit."

Costello warms easily to his theme of domestic bliss. Over the summer, he says, every week or so his and his wife's tour schedules would cross. "I'd get to see the lads on her bus, and travel with them for a day or two, then peel off and go to do my show. It was a bit like The Partridge Family. She was David Cassidy; I was Shirley Jones. Anyway, our life here is the opposite of moving out to the sticks and closing the curtains and thinking: that's me done now."

To prove the point, even by his own workaholic standards, Declan Patrick MacManus is currently in a rich moment of productivity. His new album, National Ransom, will be his third in as many years. Over the summer, he has been performing live with his two "regular" bands, the Imposters (an evolution of his original Attractions) and the Sugarcanes (the wild and whirling bluegrass-tinged group he assembled for his last album, Secret, Profane & Sugarcane). There have also been recent stage outings with the Brodsky Quartet, the classical ensemble he has worked with for 15 years now, and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. In June, he was in the UK for a brief tour; I saw him play a memorable solo show at the Royal Festival Hall in London for Meltdown: two hours with only half-a-dozen guitars for company.

In between times, he has also developed his alternative career as a chat-show host in two series of Spectacle, a sort of The Old Grey Whistle Test meets Parky, in which he interviews and plays with a musical hall of fame: Smokey Robinson, Bruce Springsteen, the Police (who he also supported on a comeback tour), Elton John and so on.

Having over the years followed particular passions one after the other – writing orchestral music, collaborating with the likes of Paul McCartney and Burt Bacharach – Costello now seems to be pursuing everything all at the same time. Is that how he likes it?

"Just to do rock'n'roll shows would seem like a confinement to me," he suggests. "I like not having to choose one thing or another. Life for me is about movement. I do what my dad and my grandfather both did. I'm a working travelling musician, but just on a bigger scale..."

Costello refers to his troubadour heritage several times in our conversation; as he gets older, he likes the idea of himself as having inherited the family firm; it roots him. His grandfather spent decades in the orchestras at northern concert halls until the arrival of talkies ended his career. His father was the lead singer with Joe Loss's big band in the 1950s. Some of Costello's earliest memories are of hearing his father practise that week's new songs in their front room.

"He'd have a bunch of things to learn and I have a very vivid sensory memory of feeling the glass door to the front room vibrating when he practised them over and over."

Costello's mother ran the record section of Selfridge's in London, so there was always a variety of music in the house. I wonder when the 60s first became apparent at home, when he first heard Bob Dylan (with whom he has toured a couple of times in recent years)?

"It would have been 1962," he says. "Strangely enough, this English lord brought us the first Dylan record to hear. This man was the brother of our neighbour and a Labour peer. I don't recall his name, but he came to visit this spinster who lived downstairs from us and he insisted on bringing this record up to play to my father."

What did his old man make of it?

"I think my folks were a bit bewildered by it, because it wasn't like anything we had heard. By that point, I had missed rock'n'roll completely. If it came on the radio, my dad would turn it off – not because he didn't approve or anything, just because he didn't think it was any good. It wasn't hip. He was listening to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. By the time I had control of the radio, rock'n'roll had passed us by: Chuck Berry was in jail, Jerry Lee had been thrown out of the country, Elvis was in the army. We were left with Cliff."

Costello believes music is a commitment to openness, to never stopping hearing. His mother, now in her eighties and one of his keenest critics, will still listen to anything. "I had grown up with the names Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, for example," he says. "So when I got to the point I might be disposed to them, I understood it. The same with classical music – you have to live with it for a few years until it works on you."

Not surprisingly, given his unique education, his latest album references at least a century of song. As if to prove the point, he is releasing versions both on 78rpm vinyl and digital download. It makes tacit links between the Depression era and our current financial apocalypse – the "national ransom" of the title track – and stops off at many places in between.

To emphasise this journey, Costello has added the time and place of his songs to his sleeve notes. Thus "Jimmie Standing in the Rain", a poignant little song about a cowboy singer in the northern clubs, is footnoted "Accrington, 1937"; "One Bell Ringing", meanwhile, carries the note "London underground – 22nd of July 2005" which alerts you to the fact that it is a lament for the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes. In the past, Costello has allowed his songs to be more loosely allusive, so why the sudden specificity?

"I've always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location," he says. "That's true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow. I'm not sure I started writing any of them with exactly those times and place in mind, but that's where they seemed to want to end up. It's an unconscious process a lot of it, but I thought it was interesting to note it."

The album has an apocalyptic feel in parts, particularly on tracks such as "Stations of the Cross", which alludes to the New Orleans floods and Bible Belt preachers in Costello's impacted poetry. Listening to him over the years, I've often wondered how much the language and texture of his youthful Catholicism influenced his writing – he has suggested elsewhere that the "smell of frankincense" has never really left his clothes; is he a frustrated sermoniser at heart?

He laughs. "I went to Catholic school and went to church as a kid and – perhaps unusually – I only have good memories of it. The people in cloth I knew were mostly gentle and dedicated, and not some sort of conflicted, twisted people who were trying to frighten you or worse. I was named after a priest, I look a bit like a priest, I wear black a lot, but I think I had worked that one out by the time I was 10. Maybe I'd be more a fallen priest, a priest in a Graham Greene story."

Does the aforementioned "guilt and anger" have its root in some of those years?

"Certainly when I was younger I used to like to think that those emotions were the forces working on me, partly because it gave me ways of thinking about things that were perhaps harsher than my actual life. That's useful for a writer. It's like going on the lash when you are 13 and not being old enough to buy a drink."

He can still summon that anger, for a song such as "National Ransom", which drips contempt for the carnage wrought by Wall Street; does he feel it just as strongly?

"Well," he says, with the air of a connoisseur, "anger isn't just one thing, is it? I mean, there is dismay, which we all experience, then there's more violent anger, and then there is a grumpiness that we might go in and out of. Anger covers a lot of ground. Some of it is very useful, some of it completely useless. I think I can recognise the distinctions."

His Menezes song plays with a lot of those shadings; it's not a protest song exactly, more an attempt to get inside the paranoia of the event. Is that the tone he was looking for?

"It was one of those songs that wrote itself," he says, "and I realised what was being said as I wrote it. Some of the images in it have nothing to do with the specific case. It is more the fact that this killing by the police could have happened to any one of us and that is a strange place for Britain to have got to. It wasn't trying to place blame, just to capture that state that we live in."

Does he still feel, living away from Britain, that it is his subject?

"I read the news," he says, "like we all do."



Listening to Costello play the Royal Festival Hall in the summer, I was struck by the idea that Costello always sounds better under a Tory government. It's where he found his voice. Songs such as "Shipbuilding" – his complex, lyrical response to the Falklands war and the implications of our industrial heritage – both defined and deconstructed their era. His relationship with his home country in the years since has been troubled. He was widely reported in 2005 as saying that he never wanted to play in Britain again, that his audiences there didn't warm to him or respect him. Does he still feel that way?

"That was a sort of game of the media," he says. "It was something about me forsaking the country to come here. But in fact it is 20 years since I lived in the UK. I left for Dublin 20 years ago. Some flippant remarks I had made became exaggerated to 'I hate Britain' in the press. Which was both comical and not much of a surprise."

Costello, perhaps, was not forgiven by the music press who wanted him to stay forever as a kind of lyrical punk agitator and not go off to write for string quartets. "If you depart from what people know you for, then of course you run the risk of horrifying them," he admits. "But that's not the end of the world." His productivity has in many ways counted against him in this respect. Everyone has to buy your first or your second original album. But your 33rd?

If Costello has never made it to the national treasure status he deserves at home, he is, however, fast acquiring it in North America. Spectacle was a primetime hit in most of the world; bizarrely, in Britain, it was scheduled at midnight ("I guess they only thought it was fit for drunks to watch," he says. "Which struck me as odd.") One of his guests, a long-term fan, was Bill Clinton. In August, Costello also had the privilege of not only meeting Barack Obama, but also playing for him. The event, at the White House, was in honour of Paul McCartney; Elvis played "Penny Lane" with the Beatle and the president facing him in the front row. No pressure there then?

He smiles. "Paul was great. He sat in that room all afternoon while we were rehearsing, so that cut down the intimidation factor by about 50%. But still it was pretty weird playing 'Penny Lane' to him in that room with George and Martha Washington on the wall and a marine in full dress uniform playing the piccolo trumpet."

Even so, and whatever your view of Obama's policies, it was, he suggests, an infinitely more enjoyable occasion than that experienced by his wife at the White House when she was invited to play in honour of Tony Bennett by Obama's predecessor. "There was to be a cocktail party in the evening with George W and Condi and the gang. Diana remembers looking in at the gym in the basement when it was about to start and seeing everyone else who was due to go on also hiding down there, unable to face it like her. So, it was better than that."

When he set out, 30-odd years ago, did he ever imagine he'd be playing the White House – 1977 must seem like another life entirely?

Recently, he says, the BBC wanted to make a documentary about the strange journey of his career, but he wasn't convinced. One of the oddest things, he says, was that they had no real footage of him playing until about 1989. "All the Top of the Pops stuff before that they didn't trust anyone to play their own instruments. I mean, there is a certain kitsch appeal to that, but not much."

He'd prefer to tell the story through his own famous lenses. He's working on a memoir, which is progressing slowly ("every day I write the book" would be stretching it, he suggests). "I have lots of sketches," he says. "But it won't be an exhaustive kind of thing. I really liked Bob Dylan's book. It may have been fantastically exasperating for the kind of fan who wanted the map reference for the 'Gates of Eden', but it told the story of how he became himself and how he became himself again."

In looking for a way to structure it, he is half-thinking about using the songs he has written as chapters. That, though, may present problems of its own. "Many people build a career on just one or two songs," he says, with a degree of pride and self-mockery. "I have 400 of the fuckers."