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BOB POTTER: --is lower in active trading today, pressured by concern sparked by the new unemployment statistics. Analysts say the government report that unemployment dropped to 5.8% in December, its lowest rate since 1979, is being viewed as an indication of a strong economy. But that, in turn, is causing some concern that the Federal Reserve could tighten credit and nudge interest rates higher to fend off inflationary pressures.

So here are the figures as of 11:30 Central time. The Dow Industrials stand at 2,010.11. That's down 41.78 from yesterday's close. 20 transportation issues are down 10.57. And 15 utilities down 2.02.

You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio's Midday program. Minnesota Public Radio is a member-supported broadcast service. This is KSJN Minneapolis, Saint Paul, 1330 on the dial. Sunny skies, 3 above. Northwesterly wind at 13. Wind chill, 24 below. And the time is exactly 12 o'clock.

Mainstreet Radio reports about rural issues are made possible in part by the Blandin Foundation. And the BBC reports that you heard in today's news broadcast were made possible by a grant from the Capital Group, a money management firm investing throughout the world for American individuals and institutions.

Now, the weather forecast briefly for Minnesota. Mostly sunny across the state, with a few flurries possible in the Northeast. High temperatures today, 8 below North to 12 above South. For tonight, clear and cold, with lows from 30 below in the North to 10 below in the South. And highs tomorrow, 4 below Northeast to 8 above in the West with partly sunny skies. In the Twin Cities, high today of 10 above. Partly cloudy tonight, low 15 below. Partly sunny tomorrow, high 5 to 9 above.

Mr. Bill Holm is with us today. He is a Minnesota writer, and poet, and a teacher at Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota. Bill spent a year as an exchange teacher in China. While he was there, he taught American and British literature and writing to graduate students. And he just got back from a three-week trip to China on New Year's day. Bill, exactly when were you in China for the year?

BILL HOLM: I left in August of '86 and came back in August of '87. So I was there almost exactly a year.

BOB POTTER: How did you get into this exchange teaching program?

BILL HOLM: Bob Carothers, who's now the führer of the state college system--

BOB POTTER: Yes.

BILL HOLM: --was, at that time, the president of Southwest and had gone off to China on an adventure. And while there, he had made contact with the school that I eventually taught at.

And I was sitting in my office counting on taking a year off to write a book and had pleasant plans to go to Alaska, sit in a hot tub in Seattle, be comfortable, escape Minnesota winters. And so he comes breathlessly into my office and says, you gotta go to China. There's a job there for a foreign expert. It's wonderful. It's an insane place. You gotta go. I said, of course, I'll go.

BOB POTTER: [CHUCKLES]

BILL HOLM: My joke about that was that if somebody offers you a chance to spend a year in China and you say no to it, then your next call out of your house is to the undertaker because they should pick you up before you start smelling up your own house.

BOB POTTER: You said China is an insane place. What's insane about it?

BILL HOLM: Well, that's hard to describe easily. The old joke was that in elementary school, if you dug a hole through your school room to the exact opposite side of the planet, you would come out in China. And in some odd way, China is a metaphor for whatever is opposite from the West, whatever-- it's absolutely unlike any experience we've ever imagined.

Typical example would be, I was in China on Christmas Eve, and I forgot it was Christmas Eve. The Chinese would frequently ask, what is Christmas exactly? Some sort of God got born? How did this-- do you celebrate winter?

But no Christmas carols, no Christmas trees, no nothing. And people remind themselves that it's Christmas. And you think to yourself, whatever your religious persuasion, that Christmas is so central a part of the culture that you cannot imagine a couple of billion people who have survived 7,000 or 8,000 years of a grand old civilization without having the foggiest idea of what Christmas is.

BOB POTTER: That is amazing. That sort of pinpoints--

BILL HOLM: Yeah.

BOB POTTER: --one of the differences.

BILL HOLM: So many of the things that we think of as being absolutely central in our experience and we don't pay any attention to, yeah. And you go there, and suddenly, they're absent. And you think to yourself, half of the human race has done perfectly all right living without things that are at the very basis and core of everything we think of ourselves as being.

BOB POTTER: Now, it was cold there while you were there, wasn't it?

BILL HOLM: Terribly cold. Not so cold as Minnesota outdoors, but colder indoors.

BOB POTTER: What do they do about heat, and power, and all of that sort of thing?

BILL HOLM: Well, the first words you learn in China as a foreigner are "mei you," which means "not have." It's the answer to almost every question. Do you have canned tomatoes? Mei you. Do you have cold beer? Mei you. Is there heat in this room? Mei you. Is the water working? Mei you. Is there a toilet here? Mei you. Can I get a plane ticket? Mei you.

So there's no heat at all. The Chinese divide the country in their rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtze River. North of the Yellow River, China is heated. South of the Yellow River, there's no heat. And Xi'an is a rather raw, cold place in the winter. The winds come out of the Gobi Desert in Siberia, and it's maybe 10 or 20. And they have bouts of snow and ferocious blasts from the North. And the buildings are cement. And, of course, cement holds cold.

So I can remember winter mornings teaching when I would put on two or three pairs of socks and a pair of heavy shoes, and I would teach, which is a relatively sedentary occupation. And at the end of an hour, my feet would be frozen from being indoors.

BOB POTTER: Bill, put your headphones on and we'll get some folks on the line here who may want to chat with you about your experiences. Bill Holm, Minnesota poet, who spent a year as an exchange teacher in China, is with us today. And if you have a question for him, you can give us a call in the Minneapolis, Saint Paul, area at 227-6000. 227-6000 in the Twin cities. Elsewhere within the state of Minnesota, 1-800-652-9700. 1-800-652-9700. And in other parts, surrounding states, you can call us at area code 612 and 227-6000, that Twin Cities area number.

So you were teaching these graduate students American and English literature and writing. Were they fluent in English so you were able to communicate quite easily with them, or are you fluent in Chinese, or how did that work?

BILL HOLM: I had no Chinese when I went, and I came home with not very much more, partly because they were so terribly fluent. I was amazed at the degree to which they had managed to master the English language. Many of them had never met a foreigner, had never met a native speaker.

And one fellow I had was from Ili, a town in China on the Russian border in Xinjiang. It's far, in absolutely the middle of Asia, the belly button of Asia. He had never seen a foreigner. And he had learned his English from 1947 BBC tapes.

BOB POTTER: Good heavens.

BILL HOLM: So he had a slight British accent, which was rather elegant. And when he heard my accent, it was the first time he had ever heard an American voice. He was too far away to hear the Voice of America. Most Chinese kids listen every day faithfully to the Voice of America, both for English and to get the news, so they hear an American voice. But mine was the first that he had ever heard.

BOB POTTER: How are the languages structured? Are they quite different?

BILL HOLM: Chinese and English?

BOB POTTER: Yeah.

BILL HOLM: Totally. Chinese is, of course, a language of monosyllables. Each syllable is a word. And there's only about-- there's a couple of hundred syllables in Chinese which make do for, obviously, 50,000 or 100,000 words. Chinese is a tonal language.

So for a couple of hundred years, the West has had a horrible time figuring out how to write down Chinese without an alphabet. And again, we don't think of it. But what do you do without an alphabet? How do you organize a dictionary? How do you organize a library? How do you organize people alphabetically when there's no alphabet?

And of course, the mastery of Chinese involves vast amounts of memorization since there's no alphabet, and each character in the language has a different meaning. So the Chinese are incredibly good memorizers. And historically, of course, if you want it to be an intellectual in China or an educated man, what you did is you memorized Chinese literature. You memorized Confucius. You memorized the histories, and the philosophies, and the laws, and the essays, and the poetry, and you took an examination on what you had memorized.

So to this day, Chinese students are remarkable memorizers. You could walk into a classroom, and you could give them this assignment-- but you would not want to-- and say, we're doing Whitman next week. You will memorize "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." And they would do it, simply go out and memorize the poem.

BOB POTTER: Amazing. Let's take some folks with questions here for Bill Holm. We have some lines fill up. Go ahead, please. You're on the air with him.

SUSAN SCRAN: Hi, this is Susan Scran calling. How are you doing?

BILL HOLM: Well, hi, Susan. I recognize this voice.

SUSAN SCRAN: I spent some time in Xi'an also, and I'd like to know if it has changed since you were there last and what you noticed.

BILL HOLM: Well, going back was a shock to the nervous system. It seemed even dirtier and colder than when I left. Maybe I had forgotten that. But within a couple of days, I was already spitting coal dust into my handkerchief. It was so thick in Xi'an that-- I remembered it as being bad, but it was worse.

The other thing that you would notice, Susan, is-- by the way, one of a group of Saint Cloud and Moorhead students who were in Xi'an last year when I was there-- is that there are no American students and no British students and no Dutch students and very few foreign teachers in our end of town. Many of those programs simply dried up, simply went away. The Chinese discontinued them.

For what reasons, of course, there are wide speculations. But the number of foreigners lurking about is considerably less, and that made things rather lonesomer for the Chinese. The students missed having all those weird people from Minnesota with Norwegian names hanging around.

BOB POTTER: Yeah. What did you like about China? You've talked about some of the less appealing parts of it, everything being cold, and so on, and so forth, and the lack of supplies and the culture being so extraordinarily different. What did you like about it?

BILL HOLM: I think that no one who teaches there for a year comes back without immense praise for Chinese students. Whatever the bureaucratic difficulties of teaching them, the Chinese are simply amazing people. And if you're there for a year, you make friends. You make connections. You get to meet people. And even if you don't have Chinese through translators, you hear stories of people who manage English, who manage to have conversations, and you're simply amazed and delighted at the decency, and the generosity, and the courage of the Chinese at living through their own history.

The other thing that delights me and delights almost all foreigners, and it's a thing never mentioned, is that the Chinese are wonderfully funny. They have wonderful sense of humor. They love farce. They love comedy. They love funny stories.

And an evening in a Chinese house is never without humor. So you're sitting around, and the electricity has gone out, and it's ice cold, and somebody is frying something in a coal-burning wok, and the coal dust is seeping in through the loose windows, and the walls are bare cement, and yet there's some wonderfulness in the evening because of the people in the room.

And I think Americans frequently think of rather tedious evenings in elegant rooms in their own lives. In other words, you can go to Edina and be served a marvelous nine-course dinner and have not one conversation worth having.

BOB POTTER: Not so in China.

BILL HOLM: But I don't think that's possible in China if you're there for a while. Those occasions are real occasions for talk, and the talk is full of humor and feeling. And people who live there for a good while begin to like that intensity, that edge on life. And of course, the discomfort doesn't kill people. It's quite clear that it hasn't killed off 1,200,000,000 Chinese. And after all, other Americans are always amazed that Minnesotans live through the winter and look so healthy and cheerful.

BOB POTTER: True enough. True enough.

BILL HOLM: [CHUCKLES]

BOB POTTER: Bill Holm is with us. He spent a year in China as an exchange teacher. Let's get some more folks on the air with him. Hello, you're next.

ERIC KNUTSON: Hi. Bill Holm, this is Eric Knutson calling. I used to take your class in Marshall. I was the news director at the radio station--

BILL HOLM: Ah--

ERIC KNUTSON: --back in 86.

BILL HOLM: --yes.

ERIC KNUTSON: Remember that outdoor class? A lot of fun. And I just wanted to keep in touch with you. And now I find out you're on the radio. So it was kind of coincidence. And then I just found out you just answered the question I was going to ask. I was going to ask how the Chinese reacted to your sense of humor, since it is such a good sense of humor. I was wondering how they reacted to your guffaws.

BILL HOLM: Well, the Chinese, of course, love it when people are willing to be foolish. They love farce. And if anybody were ever to play the Marx brothers or Laurel and Hardy in China, they'd adore it. So I got on well with the Chinese because, obviously, I like humor also.

One of my favorite scenes from China, having gone out and had intense and intelligent conversations with my students about Melville, and Whitman, and Plato, and Confucius, the conversation suddenly had to stop, and we had to turn on the television set. Chinese are now getting television, and they're wild for it because every Sunday afternoon at 5 o'clock, [CHINESE] Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck, and Goofy Goose come on.

So here are these people who have mastered two or three languages, read hundreds of books, the intellectual future of China. All conversation ceases, and we're watching Minnie Mouse doing the St. Louis blues in a 1939 cartoon-- vintage stuff that nobody's seen in America for 30, 40 years. The Chinese simply adore Walt Disney.

BOB POTTER: Well, I imagine there's a great future over there for some syndicators of old American television programs.

BILL HOLM: They did just buy 50 old American movies--

BOB POTTER: Did they?

BILL HOLM: --and they adore them. Things like Singing in the Rain, The Sound of Music. Things with political content, social content, and sexual content are a little suspicious in China yet and perhaps for a long time to come. But the kind of sweet American movies sell like hotcakes in China.

BOB POTTER: Yeah. They probably have to stop at about the 1940s for that. But let's move on to some more folks with questions. Hello there.

DAVE LITSEY: Yes, my name is Dave Litsey, and I have an interest in teaching foreign languages. I've heard from the University of Minnesota professors who have visited China that the Chinese have been teaching English in the grade schools in foreign language immersion-type program. Do you know anything about this?

BILL HOLM: I had heard that this was done. And there's, of course, great debate on how early to start the teaching of foreign languages. As you surely know from the university, everybody gets the news that the Chinese are simply wild to learn English at the moment. So it's quite easy for Americans to get jobs there and for English and Australians and New Zealanders, almost any native speaker. And they go at it with great intensity.

And the parents, of course, want their children to learn English as quickly as possible. Because of the economic reforms, English is the language of business. And parents who have suffered through the last 30, 40, 50 years of Chinese history think that if their children are fluent in English, they'll be able to do better than the parents. It's a way to have a prosperous life, to travel, to get good jobs, to have opportunities, simply to move around, and to have some flexibility in your life that the parents didn't have.

But I don't know of any schools in the immediate area where I was that were teaching English to small children. There are English classes on television for children, sort of Chinese version of Sesame Street, where kids will learn the alphabet, and counting, and that sort of thing in animated ways. But there's always the Chinese classroom teacher who drills students on memorized exercises, even on television.

BOB POTTER: I'm just going to ask you, Bill, if you got the sense from the people you visited with there that they are anxious to see more Western influence, that if they're anxious to see more material kinds of things, to have their houses hot, the electricity on, the water running, and this kind of thing, and if they are, they think they can maintain their unique culture.

BILL HOLM: Well, sure, they're anxious for those things. Some things they cannot even conceive in their own lifetime or in their children's lifetime. They can't conceive, for instance, having a hot shower. I mean, hot water seems many centuries away in China. A car seems dynasties away.

But the things that are popular at the moment are color television sets-- everybody is anxious to have those-- and Japanese tape recorders. They don't trust Chinese goods because of the poor quality control. But to have a Japanese tune box with a copying machine on it and a big speaker, that's living.

Refrigerators are also hot items. Remember, the Chinese have never had refrigerators. So it's funny to walk into a relatively prosperous Chinese apartment, which will maybe be one room. Here will be a new television set with a velvet cover on it with embroidered dragons on the front of it.

So they'll tell you, of course, that, well, we keep the cover on it because it's so dusty around here. But it also is a kind of sacred object. I mean, that television set represents big sacrifices, and that's a sign that you're getting modern. The refrigerator will be right in the middle of everything, a sort of prominent piece of furniture in the middle of the room, as if to say to the neighbors, look, we have a refrigerator. So of course, they want the goods, but their imagination of what's possible is limited.

BOB POTTER: Do they value their own culture at the same time, though, very much?

BILL HOLM: For about 40-- well, for the 35 or 40 years now of Mao's regime in China, there was a concerted effort to destroy the old Chinese culture, to tear down the buildings, to destroy the ideas, to get the books out of print. And in the cultural revolution, that went haywire. I mean, it was worse than Nazi Germany. Stories of ransacked libraries, destroyed paintings, houses methodically gone through, and anything that was feudal or bourgeois being destroyed.

But of course, the culture also exists inside human beings. You can't kill off all the grandparents, and you can't kill off all the brain cells, and you can't kill off all the habits of 4,000 or 5,000 years. A lot of the material culture in China is gone. They're trying desperately now to rebuild models of it for the tourists.

But in the interior sense, many of the old Chinese cultural things are still there. And in the last four or five years, when China has loosened up, you can feel those things coming back-- livelier celebrations of the Chinese New Year, more old Chinese music being taped and listened to. Chinese funerals are becoming more like old Chinese funerals with the elaborate dragon coffins, and the white robes, and the marvelous music. So as China loosens up, more of Chinese culture will come back to life. But a lot of it, materially, is gone.

BOB POTTER: The phone lines are full with people wanting to ask Bill Holm questions about his experiences in China. So I promise to shut up and just move on here. Go ahead. Your turn. What's your question?

SARAH MASON: Yes. I'm Sarah Mason, and I also taught in China last year in South China. And I wondered if there were student demonstrations in Xi'an in December and whether the situation for foreign teachers changed during the anti-bourgeois liberal campaign.

BILL HOLM: Xi'an was without demonstrations last year. There was an effort, obviously, by the Chinese media to keep news of what was going on in Shanghai, and in Anhui, and in Beijing away from students for fear that things would spread.

I did feel a change afterwards. Things tightened up politically. There was much more fear. People were expected to go to political meetings. The Chinese are used to this, these swings every three or four years, when the old Maoists decide to reassert authority. But foreigners are not, of course. And you get used to a certain amount of looseness, and then, suddenly, everything disappears.

An example of that would be this. A couple of students of mine had worked on translations, and they had gotten contracts from local magazines. One of the things was an essay by Barbara Tuchman, an old essay where she found some papers indicating that Mao had offered to go to Washington to talk to Roosevelt at the end of World War II. And the thing had never been translated into Chinese. And I helped them a bit, and they got the thing translated, and the magazine was going to print it.

They had also translated-- and this is germane for the other reason I'm in the cities-- a couple of chapters of one of Fred Manfred's novels, Lord Grizzly, into Chinese and had gotten it taken by a Chinese magazine. Fred is going to be-- is having his 76th birthday party tomorrow night at The Loft, which is what makes me think of this. Fred almost appeared in Chinese.

Well, they had contracts for these things. And the moment the anti-bourgeois liberal thing started, the magazine simply sat on the manuscripts. They called them up and said, well, we're sorry. We had almost gone to press, but there's no way we can do these things now. So just hold them until the next time it loosens up. And it might be 10 years, and it might be 15 years, and it might never loosen up sufficiently.

And these two had worked their tail off for maybe six weeks to get these rather hard things translated into Chinese. What I was most sorry about is I wanted to bring Fred back, a couple of chapters of his prose, in Chinese, in a Chinese magazine.

BOB POTTER: We have Bill Holm with us today. He's a Minnesota writer and poet. He teaches down at Southwest State University in Marshall and spent a year in China in 1987 as an exchange teacher. Now, it's your turn. Go ahead, please. What's your question?

LARRY CARPENTER: Yeah. This is Larry Carpenter of Minneapolis.

BILL HOLM: Hi, again.

LARRY CARPENTER: How you doing? I'd like you to comment on the intellectual abilities of those that were educated before the revolution, during, and after the revolution.

BILL HOLM: Well, there are two revolutions in China, of course, the 1911, the 1949, and then the Cultural Revolution. But I think what you mean is the Cultural Revolution. The universities were closed for 10 years.

And people my age now, mid 40s, early 40s, late 30s, early 30s, that 10 to 15-year stretch, got a bad deal on education. The universities were closed. They were poorly educated. And many of them do not have good jobs. And the degrees that they did get are not taken seriously. So they're resentful at the Cultural Revolution and at Mao for having cost them the possibility of a good education.

People educated in the '50s, of course, after the revolution, were frequently educated in Russian. And you find many older middle aged people in China who are fluent in Russian.

One of the things always that every communist country does do, and they must get credit for it, in contrast to any right-wing dictatorship, is literacy rates always go up astonishingly in communist countries. That's a priority, and it really is done. There's much more literacy now in China than there was in 1949.

Mao and the party decided to simplify the Chinese character and to print Chinese not in the old way, which is exactly opposite from the Western way, in columns up and down, but to print it from left to right, and to print it from front to back, and to print simplified characters, and to make simplified texts, and have a kind of literacy drive throughout the country.

The problem is, at the same time, they were quashing the top level of intellectual life and were brutalizing their own writers and intellectuals. So you've got a drying up of the very best of Chinese intellectual life. At the meantime, you've got a broadening of simple literacy beyond what it had ever been in Chinese history so that now your average Chinese peasant can read and write a little.

BOB POTTER: But there isn't very much good stuff to read.

BILL HOLM: No. During the Cultural Revolution, there was nothing in the bookstores but Lu Xun, Mao, and the works of Marx, Lenin, and, amazingly enough, Stalin's collected papers. They still think Stalin is a valuable thinker. He never got demoted in China.

But there are books in the bookstores now, many of them pirated from the West. And always, in foreign language bookstores, there are two sections. There's a section with glossy coffee table books in translation and picture books for foreigners only. Chinese not allowed. Foreign currency accepted. And then there's another door off to the side saying, foreigners not allowed.

I love it. A country without a class structure, and even a bookstore has got a rigid class structure. But in the foreigners-not-allowed section, of course, they've got pirated editions of American textbooks, English textbooks, bestseller novels, that kind of thing, reprinted quickly and cheaply for people who can afford them.

BOB POTTER: All right. Let's move on to another caller with a question or a comment for Bill Holm. Hello there.

SPEAKER 1: Hello.

BILL HOLM: Hello.

SPEAKER 1: Hi, Bill. I would like to hear you talk a little bit about Chinese music. So I have a two-part question for you. The first part is, I know that the boxelder bugs down in Minnesota live in your piano.

BILL HOLM: [CHUCKLES]

SPEAKER 1: And I'm wondering if the fact that the Cultural Revolution destroyed so many pianos in China has caused a problem for Chinese boxelder bugs.

BILL HOLM: [CHUCKLES]

SPEAKER 1: The second part of my question is, would it be possible to take the six notes found in boxelder bug and write a Chinese variation to be included in the upcoming stage production that's going to come up for boxelder bug variations?

BILL HOLM: Yep. Those are the six notes in the Chinese scale. Actually, there's one more. The Chinese scale has only five notes, the old one. There's a story connected with this.

Odd question. I wrote a book about boxelder bugs. Best book about boxelder bugs in the last 10 years, as a matter of fact, and I took it to China. And my students wanted to translate some of my work into Chinese, but they couldn't find the Chinese character for boxelder bug.

BOB POTTER: [CHUCKLES]

BILL HOLM: So we looked for eight months. And finally, we were in a little farm town with a farm college about 60 miles outside of Xi'an and went into a bookstore, agricultural bookstore. And I thought, a-ha, this might be it. And we got a Chinese/English/Latin etymological dictionary and took it.

I wasn't going to buy the thing. I just wanted to steal one, two Chinese characters out of it. And I had one of my students with me. So we looked up boxelder bug, and, lo and behold, there it was. And he looked at it, and he said, that's Chinese, but it is the oddest Chinese I have ever seen.

The boxelder is, of course, a Chinese tree, and I found the bugs in China. I also found music in China. And I found pianos in China, but they were hard to come by. The Chinese are-- this is too much of a generalization, but based on my experience-- amazingly musically talented people, and they have a great taste for music of all kinds, both their own and foreign music.

But pianos were a Western bourgeois instrument. So most of them were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, and China found itself at the end of that horrible 10 years with no pianos. It's a poor country. Even conservatories and colleges had no pianos.

So there are three piano factories in China now making pianos, and they export them. And they're not bad. They're not so good as Japanese pianos. But most of them are available to foreigners, and to institutions, and to Singapore and Hong Kong, and that kind of thing, rather than to the Chinese.

There's something like a four-year waiting list for a piano. And a piano will cost you three or four years' salary. So it's an enormous sacrifice to get one. And then very hard to maintain them when you get there.

So I'm a compulsive pianist who gets up every day and plays a half an hour of Bach before I do anything else. And that's the one thing that was difficult for me in China. You can live without heat, water, light, and various other things, but you can't live without pianos.

BOB POTTER: It's about a half past the hour with Bill Holm with us. He is talking about his experiences in China as an exchange teacher in the past year. And you're next. What's your question for him?

BARRY: Good afternoon. My name is Barry. And I just wanted to ask Mr. Holm about a question he addressed probably earlier. With the Cultural Revolution, I was wondering if things like the Chan teachers of Buddhism had disappeared. And is there anybody there who might be called a Daoist? And could you see that in the people, the Daoism?

BILL HOLM: There was a concerted effort, obviously, during the Cultural Revolution to shut down all religions. The Chinese really don't worry very much about Christianity. The two religious and philosophical notions that the government regarded as dangerous, because they represented the old China, were Buddhism and Daoism, which are connected in an odd way. One can be both a Buddhist and a Daoist.

Many of the temples were wrecked. Many of the monks were persecuted, sent out to clean pig yards. The temples are open again now. And there are a few monks as window dressing sitting in them. People who go out into the mountains will still find very old monks who were so far in the woods that they escaped everything, 90-year-old Daoist monks up in the mountains, still living by themselves and meditating.

I think the important survival of those ideas was not so much in the buildings or in the monks, but it was in the minds of the Chinese themselves. I mean, people who had Buddhist grandmothers and Daoist grandfathers, and who were raised with those ideas and listening to them.

And of course, those ideas, like the ideas of Christianity in our language, have become a part of the Chinese language, a part of the Chinese cultural baggage of clichés that people use to deal with everyday life. So they're still there inside the Chinese. And you can feel the operation of some of those ideas simply in Chinese that you meet.

The government has presumably loosened up now, and it's all right to be a Buddhist monk, and it's all right to spend your life meditating, and it's all right to live in a temple. You can even get a salary for it, little socialist salary for being a monk. But, of course, there's some contradiction there with the real ideas of Buddhism. The Buddhist monk must finally separate himself from everything. And it's hard both to serve the state and one's ideas. But the Chinese are amazingly good at making do with the situation that they find themselves in and surviving.

BOB POTTER: Let's move on to your question now. Hello. You're on the air--

JULIE PANGER: Hey.

BOB POTTER: --with Bill Holm.

JULIE PANGER: This is Julie Panger.

BILL HOLM: My goodness. This is a name I recognize, yes.

JULIE PANGER: Yeah. How are you?

BILL HOLM: Well, I'm just getting over my Chinese cold, and I'm not spitting coal dust anymore.

JULIE PANGER: Oh you're kidding.

BILL HOLM: This must mean I've recovered, right?

JULIE PANGER: Uh-huh. Yeah. It takes a while. I was wondering if you were aware of any kind of particular mood in China during the political unrest in Tibet as far as news coverage. Or did the students react in any particular way?

BILL HOLM: Tibet is a hard one. Tibet is closed now. Nobody can go there. Or you can go there on tour and stay at the Holiday Inn and be very carefully managed. But the thing that many of the Minnesota students did, which was very brave and very wonderful, which is simply to buy a Chinese bus ticket and go through the wildest country in the world, into Tibet, for three days, going over Himalayan mountain passes at 40 below 0 with no heat. Trying to burn yak dung with wet matches is not possible. You can't do that anymore.

Even liberal-minded Chinese don't understand the Western to-do about Tibet. For them, Tibet is like an Indian reservation. It would have been like talking to Andrew Jackson about the Cherokee. The word "minority nationality" has, in Chinese, the connotation of somebody who's uncivilized. So the Chinese are trying to present a good face to the third world, as indeed the Americans and the British do, too, when they're dealing with their minority nationalities.

But finally, inside the Chinese are something that thinks, well, the Tibetans really ought to be grateful. We're bringing them Chinese civilization, and it's so vastly superior. I mean, the Tibetans are dirty and primitive. But whatever one thinks of the Tibetan culture, I mean, you-- another way of looking at it is that people simply must be left alone. But it's hard for the Chinese to understand how anyone could decline to be part of the greatest civilization in history and choose to practice their own idiosyncratic way of being in the world.

So Tibet is a tough one. And the Chinese government is terribly sensitive about it. It's a subject that really does not come up. And the Chinese press, the managed Chinese press in English, The China Daily, of course, has editorials fulminating against troublemakers.

And the funniest incident, which was reported in the paper, was that a British woman was wearing a Sergeant Bilko T-shirt. And a Chinese policeman came up and began ripping the T-shirt off her. And she said, what's going on here? And started fighting him and protecting her T-shirt.

Well, evidently, Sergeant Bilko looks a lot like the Dalai Lama. And he thought she was wearing a Dalai Lama sweatshirt and fomenting revolution. So the incident became comic, though I suspect, as the policeman was grabbing away at her T-shirt, she didn't find it quite so comic.

BOB POTTER: Certainly not at the time anyway. All right. We have another questioner for Bill Holm. You're on the air with him now. Hi there.

SPEAKER 2: In a vast country like this, I'm geographically trying to figure out where Xi'an might be if you didn't have any heat. And the two main concerns are foreign language and food. My association was studying Japanese and finally getting to Japan. And if you've got ideograms of thousands, you can't make a typewriter. That's why they do their business in English, OK. But with the three main divisions of the Chinese language and the fact that it's an inflected language, I can imagine the difficulty. But what was your food like?

BILL HOLM: Well, let me see. We've got food, language, and where is Xi'an? China is a bit bigger than the United States. If you superimpose the two on top of each other, Xi'an would be at about the latitude of somewhere between Oklahoma City and Wichita. But remember that Xi'an is also in the middle of a vast continent. So it's subject to winds right out of the middle of Siberia, blowing over the Gobi Desert. So that makes it colder than its latitude seems.

But Xi'an is the Midwest of China. It was the old Silk Road trading town, the big-- the goal of the Silk Road. The Silk Road was the trading road that ran through Central Asia to Europe for a thousand years for goods moved back and forth. Samarkand in Afghanistan was another linchpin on that thing.

So I was in the Midwest. And Xi'an is the southern end of Northern China. The Qinling mountains, about 20 miles south of town, are a rugged range of mountains, maybe 10,000, 12,000 feet, but very naughty, and steep, and close together. And they block off many of the northern winds from Southern China, and they block many of the moist winds from Southern China from getting to the North. So rice has grown South of those mountains, and wheat is grown North of it.

BOB POTTER: What was the summer season like?

BILL HOLM: Dreadfully hot. 100, 105. Real continental climate. I will never complain about Minnesota again. Never. We've got an amazingly sweet-tempered, even about 25 below zero, so long as the heat works indoors and the car occasionally starts.

BOB POTTER: Yeah.

BILL HOLM: So that takes care of language--

BOB POTTER: All right.

BILL HOLM: --or the geography. As to the language, many people don't know this. Chinese is written the same all over the world. But if you go 50 miles away from your home, you can hear different Chinese. There are dialectal variations. Different words have different noises. And the big division in China, of course, is between standard Chinese, Mandarin in the north, and Cantonese in the south, the language spoken by most Chinese immigrants to America.

To give you an example, even the numbers are different. The number "yi" is 1 in North Chinese, but it's 2 in Canton. So when a Chinese travels, they always count with their fingers, not aloud.

One of my favorite little jokes about this, the number "wu," is 5 in standard Chinese. But in Shanghai, which has its own dialect, it's "ng." The word "yú" is fish in standard Chinese, and the word "ng," with a different tone, is fish in Shanghai. So if you want to buy fish in Shanghai, you say, [CHINESE], [CHUCKLES] which makes a wonderful noise as spoken by a Shanghai Chinese, not by me.

So the language difficulties are great in traveling around China. And the government has obviously tried to superimpose standard Chinese. But as elsewhere in the world, people are attached to their own dialect. They're attached to their own language. And no matter what you teach them in school, when you get home and talk to grandma, you're going to talk to grandma in grandma's language.

And so the Chinese do a lot of writing on each other's hands. Somebody would say something to me in Chinese. And I'd say, "bu dong," don't understand. And they take my hand and trace Chinese characters in the palm and say, "Dong?" Understand? Well, of course that was even worse. But it works with so many Chinese. So they're always grabbing each other by the hand and writing characters in case you miss somebody's Chinese.

Third thing was the food.

BOB POTTER: Yeah.

BILL HOLM: Chinese are still wonderful cooks. Lutefisk is unknown in China, and we want to keep it that way. The worst food in China is the food that tourists on tours get generally, the stuff at hotels, which is sort of Westernized, and overpriced, and not very interesting. But if you go out into the street in China, you can find marvelous food.

Xi'an is like the Midwest in the United States, the center of the worst cooks in China. So what you must do is look for cooks from Sichuan who are wonderful. The reputation of Sichuanese cooking is not exaggerated. When you go to cities in Sichuan, even in the poorest, dirtiest street stall, somebody will be a genius with a wok.

And the genius of Chinese cooking, of course, is not of having splendid ingredients, and prime rib roasts, and fresh asparagus, and delivery trucks arriving promptly. The genius of Chinese cooking is taking nothing and making something elegant out of it.

It's a little like the old genius of Chinese culture. It's a starvation culture. When you take a couple of pig ears, and a couple of cauliflowers past their prime, and a bottle of soy sauce, and maybe a garlic bud, and whatever else you can find in immediate sight, even if it may not look edible, and you make something out of it. And your genius as a cook is to use simple implements and whatever you've got at hand, and it makes something marvelous. And China is still full of cooks that can do that.

BOB POTTER: As a practical matter, Bill, where did you-- I mean, how were your own living arrangements like? Did you have to try to do your own cooking and marketing, or did you did you live with people that took care of this for you? Were there restaurants you could go to? I mean, I can't imagine trying to cook with a pig's ear and an old cauliflower head.

BILL HOLM: [CHUCKLES] Well, you can-- the food was readily available in markets in China. One of the reasons American farmers are going broke is that farmers, even in Asia, and in India, and in Bangladesh, and in China, certainly, have managed to grow their own food and produce food surpluses.

So I did have a little kitchen. And I bought a wok, and I even bought a little oven. The Chinese have tiny little ovens with one setting, high. And I tried making roasts because, while I make fun of lutefisk and pot roast, I am, after all, a Scandinavian Midwesterner. And at least once every couple of weeks, I have got to have an overcooked roast and mashed potatoes--

BOB POTTER: [CHUCKLES]

BILL HOLM: --and pour mushroom soup on something, or somehow, some button doesn't click in my soul. And I--

BOB POTTER: Kind of suffer mushroom soup withdrawal. It's terrible.

BILL HOLM: But the Chinese market is fun, except that you have to bargain for everything. The farmers will bring their produce and their meat. And so you go out, and somebody's just cut up a pig. And the night before, you've heard the pig being butchered, and the squeals of the pig, and the hide being singed. And here's fresh pork in the morning.

So you go up and you point out how much pork you want, and where you want it cut, and then you dicker with that thing. Or you go buy green peppers, and you say, give me a jin of green peppers. And they say, 6 mao. And you say, no, 3 mao. They say, 5 mao. And you say, 4 mao. And you agree on 45 fen or something. This is not the way it's generally done, say, in Willmar.

BOB POTTER: No.

BILL HOLM: Not a lot of bargaining in the supermarket.

BOB POTTER: No.

BILL HOLM: They say, Lloyd, that's too much for that pot roast you got down there. You're charging $1.49. But I'll tell you, it's not worth a bit more than $0.99 a pound. Do you see all that fat in that roaster and all that bone? And he says, but I'll lower it to $1.29. Nope, not a penny more than $0.99. You haven't heard that scene in Willmar lately, have you?

BOB POTTER: No.

BILL HOLM: [CHUCKLES]

BOB POTTER: You don't find that at the Red Owl in the Twin Cities either, I'll tell you. Let's move on to your question. We have about 15, 16 minutes left with Bill Holm. Hello there. You're on with him now.

SPEAKER 3: Good afternoon. How does one finance a trip to China? Do you get a scholarship or stipend? Or do they pay you enough for your work there to finance it?

BILL HOLM: Well, if you're a citizen of Minnesota, in a way, you helped finance it. I was working for the state system at Southwest State in Marshall, and it was an exchange. The Chinese paid my ticket to China, and they paid me a salary, which was a thousand yuan a month, about $250, which, in Chinese terms, was princely, but wouldn't go too far even in Minnesota. And the college had paid for the plane ticket and a small salary for someone Chinese to come here.

These programs are wonderful, and everybody learns a great deal by them. It's unfortunate that the school I was at has seen fit to cancel so many of its programs because I encourage every college in Minnesota to spend the money to have an exchange program with China and to have a Chinese teacher or graduate student around. Fascinating experience, and fascinating for somebody from the faculty to go.

I mean, you cannot but help come back a more confused, but probably more intelligent and more thoughtful person. I mean, the rest of your life, in some way, will be a little confused if you go to China. So you've gotta accept that. But almost nobody would pass it up that had done it.

So in terms of financing the thing, that's the way I did it. Many young people who simply decide to teach in China will apply for work with a Chinese University and will sign a contract where the Chinese will pay their way back if they pay their way there. And then they'll work for somewhat smaller salary. And that's not on an exchange program.

Chinese universities are fairly shrewd negotiators. And obviously, they try to get as much out of you for as little as possible. And Americans sometimes have to learn to get tough and to sell their services for something of what they're worth in that way.

BOB POTTER: Sounds like good old labor management relations in the United states, doesn't it? All right. You're next. Go ahead. Bill Holm is listening for your question.

SPEAKER 4: Yes. Good morning. I'm enjoying your talk. I have a question. How can I get information on this exchange program? What are the requirements? Can couples go? And also, once you had been there a while, was there anything you wish you had brought with you?

BILL HOLM: [CHUCKLES] When you get into the middle of it, the thing I missed most was lemons, of all things. Lemons are unknown in China. So I would have them smuggled in from Hong Kong.

I don't suppose you can bring enough lemons to last a year. It's like the Franklin Arctic expedition. But I'd bring a whole bag of lemons, and I'd sort of dole them out to be like some crazy dope peddler. You can have half a lemon and make it last a week.

But I'd get to the last lemon, and it would be gradually drying up. And I'd think to myself, I can't eat this because if I squeeze this lemon and it's gone, there's no more lemons in China. So I would have it there on the counter. And I'd pick it up, and I would watch it shrivel, and rot, and become inedible by anybody. But I could not eat the last lemon in China.

The other advice that everybody gives you, and it's absolutely dead right, if you're going to China, even as a tourist, take a Swiss army knife and hang on to it. You'll need it. And the bigger and the more comprehensive the Swiss army knife-- this is not a commercial. If you want to buy a Bulgarian army knife, do that, too. But take a good knife with a lot of tools on it. There are, for instance, no can openers in China.

BOB POTTER: Are there cans?

BILL HOLM: Oh yes. So they open them with a knife, or just like that.

BOB POTTER: OK.

BILL HOLM: And I had a little $0.39 can opener from the hardware store, and it was the technological hit of China. I mean, in addition to the-- they managed to create a nuclear bomb, but they haven't made a can opener. What does this mean? The toilets don't flush. What did I miss?

Now, as to exchange programs, those are generally run through universities. Minnesota, two colleges in Minnesota at the moment are running a student exchange program with Tianjin Nankai University. So you might drop a postcard to Saint Cloud or to Moorhead and ask them about that.

My guess is that the University of Minnesota also has exchange programs with China. But I'm so far away, I don't really know what goes on up at the big university stuff. It's kind of the city. But Saint Cloud has a marvelous program going on in Moorhead. So drop them a postcard and I'm sure they'd be happy to let you know about that.

BOB POTTER: Let's move on to another caller with a question here. Bill Holm is with us today, talking about his experiences in China as an exchange teacher last year. Hello there.

SPEAKER 5: Hi, Bill. I had a question about-- my wife and I are traveling to Beijing in March. We are not on a tour, just staying in town there. While there, we are going through friends, actually, a professor at the U, meet up with a professor from Beijing University.

The two questions I had were, what are a few of the things in Beijing that I absolutely should not miss to see? And I had heard about they're enamored with gifts from America. Gift ideas maybe to this person for being our host. One suggestion I already had was if the VCR tape is available, bring Bernardo Bertolucci's new movie, The Last Emperor.

BILL HOLM: Yeah, that'll get by Customs too. Almost certainly, Customs will stop, and they'll confiscate those and look at them. The Chinese, I've never had any problem with Chinese Customs. But people who bring in VCR tapes, they stop them all. They're paranoiac about pornography mostly. The Chinese are terrible Puritans. So it's as much sex as it is political stuff that they're looking for.

So you will get stopped by Customs, but it is a marvelous gift to bring a VCR tape. Other things are, of course, cassette tapes of American music. The Chinese adore classical music. They don't have compact disc players, but they do have cassette players.

Swiss army knives are great gifts for the Chinese. They're just amazed and delighted by them. I mean, that's a kind of Chinese tool chest, an ostentatious and wonderful gift. For any young people, the gift that I brought that went over best, I brought Mickey Mouse sweatshirts at Southwest State University bookstore that had the old Southwest State, Marshall, Minnesota, and a picture of Mickey or Minnie Mouse or Donald Duck, and people just loved them. And young girls just thought that was marvelous.

You'll have a good time in Beijing. But as for things to see, I think Beijing is an awful city. It's been mostly wrecked. So whatever the charm and the magnificence of Beijing was, it isn't anymore. There's no use getting nostalgic about it. It's a rather cold cement city.

You must see Tiananmen Square, which I think is one of the ugliest places on the planet, where the big rallies were held and Mao's tomb is, partly to feel the cement emptiness of that thing. And then walk in one of the little hutongs, the little neighborhoods with curving roads, where real Chinese life is lived and there are old people out in the street, and people bargaining, and shooting pool, and playing Chinese chess, and arguing and telling stories.

So walk from Tiananmen Square, which is a symbol of power and of something inhuman. Walk back into one of those little hutongs. And if you're lucky, somebody will speak English in the neighborhood and say, well, welcome to China, and start up a conversation with you. But if not, the Chinese are very nice people, and you're very safe there. And then you will see what, in my judgment, is the great tourist attraction of China, and that's Chinese life lived by Chinese human beings.

I thought the Great Wall was like something out of Walt Disney. I'd just as soon see-- what are the cliffs out in Laverne? The Buffalo Jump in Laverne. The Great Wall is a tourist attraction, quite obviously. And in my judgment, a picture of it will suffice. But you cannot get the experience of wandering around in real Chinese neighborhoods, getting to know someone Chinese, being invited for dinner at the house of a university professor, and simply having an evening of conversation. That's the true tourist attraction in China.

BOB POTTER: Were you relatively free to move around the country as much as you wanted while you were there?

BILL HOLM: Yeah. I got into some trouble this time on that. China is the most open communist country at the moment, and vast stretches of it have been opened. Many provincial officials, many people in Beijing would like to see even vaster sections of it opened because that means foreign currency. Tourists go there, and they spend money. And there's really not very much to spy on anymore. But the local police, of course, love to have something to do. So there's a great quarrel in China between the provincial bureaucrats who want to make money on tourists and the police who love to enforce regulations.

My students took us out in a minibus on this trip into the country. And because I'd been in China for a long time, I'd seen lots of things around there. So they said, we'll show you something new. We went out to some limestone caves in the country in a rural county in the foothills of the mountains.

And we got there, and the fellow at the gate said, what are you doing here with foreigners? This is a closed town. Oh well, they've got here this long. You drove this far. You may as well go through the caves. So we go into the caves. He sells his tickets, and then he calls the police.

And we'd walked up maybe a 500-foot mountain, and we came down, and I got out of that damn cave, and I saw the police surrounding the minibus. And I wasn't so much worried about me. There's a minimum amount they can do to foreigners. But the recriminations against the Chinese, I mean, politically and in terms of their career, I felt so terrible.

So it involved us in a whole day in a police station, being interrogated, and it was-- they confiscated the cameras and the passports. The next day, amazingly enough-- I went out to lunch, got up in the morning and went out to lunch with a friend. And we were sitting there and got up to leave. And I had a blue Mr. Peanut bag that I carried papers and notebooks and that kind of thing and had a little money in there. I got up, forgot the thing, got a half a block down the road, and then went back and realized that it had been stolen. So I spent the second day in a police station. And then I was going to alternate police stations for the next three days trying to clear these things up.

Most of China is open. But you're still-- if you have Chinese friends, and you move around, and you don't pay attention to bureaucratic regulations, you're likely to run into some trouble like this, and it's terribly unpleasant. Not so much for you as for the Chinese who have gone with you. So you must-- if you travel around in China, particularly with Chinese friends, you must try to be courteous to them and keep them out of trouble. I mean, Americans can get out of their own trouble, for heaven's sake. You don't worry about them. But the Chinese are stuck in it.

BOB POTTER: We have less than five minutes left. I don't think we can get all of you on who are waiting with questions, but we'll try one or two anyway. Go ahead, please.

KAI: Hi. Good afternoon. This is Kai, and I'm a Chinese too. So I would like to note, just concerning about one question about you talking about-- thank you for saying that the Chinese is a remarkable people. We can memorize all the things, especially about the character, the language.

And I think we do have a language character system which is very systemized and not just by memorize all the character. And if you have a chance and take a look at our dictionary, I think you can find some regulation that we arrange our dictionary by the radical of each character. So just like American, you have radical too. That's why I say that. And also, just want to remind that every Chinese character is a picture, like a dragon.

BILL HOLM: Yeah.

BOB POTTER: Yeah. So there's a little hint for you, Bill, on how to--

BILL HOLM: Yeah. I'm aware of the fact that when I say these things, I'm generalizing terribly. I knew that. But the first time that a Westerner looks at a Chinese dictionary, he doesn't know that, and it seems mysterious to him.

I started to learn Chinese, and I can maybe make a hundred characters. What always amazed and delighted my Chinese friends was that I would do it with my left hand. They'd say, that's impossible. You can't make Chinese characters with your left hand. Of course, Chinese has a system to it. And obviously, one uses dictionaries, and that can be learned. And people do learn it.

And some of the Minnesota students who were there last year did amazing jobs of beginning Chinese. And I met many foreigners, particularly Belgians, who were fluent in Chinese, and who had mastered classical Chinese, and who were working for Belgian companies. Many Belgian companies insist that their executives learn Chinese.

I don't want to frighten any people away from learning Chinese. I'm 44 years old so I think-- and not a good language student anyway. So it's unlikely that I can take the time in my life to master Chinese as it ought to be done.

I mean, the reasons for mastering Chinese are multitudinous. You can speak to half of the planet in their own language, and you can read the greatest literature ever written on the planet. I mean, Chinese literature is of such magnitude that it makes English literature seem a bit small potatoes, unfortunately. It humbles us to think of it.

But my guess is that for your average run-of-the mill bloke, it's about five years of your life really to master Chinese. And when you tell Americans that they'll have to study very hard and do a lot of drudgery work, and work very hard on making noises and on mastering characters, and that it'll take them about five years before they're really able to have conversations and to read, that frightens them a lot.

But particularly for young people, if I were 20 years younger when I had done this, I think I would have changed my life and been not a writer and an English teacher, but a sinologist of some sort. I would have come home, and I would have put my shoulder to it, and said, I'm stupid, and it's difficult. But if I'm going to do this, I must master it, and then taken five years and done it. The sad thing was, of course, when I was that age was the Cultural Revolution, and I was sitting in the middle of rural Minnesota. So one didn't suggest that Chinese was one of the possibilities.

BOB POTTER: Bill, we could obviously go on because there's a lot more to be said. Unfortunately, the clock will not allow. Are you by any chance going to write some articles about this? You certainly got the material for it.

BILL HOLM: Oh yes. I've got half a book shipped off to an agent, and I've published a couple of articles. I can't really say anything about China. I can generalize on the air when somebody asks me questions because, often, I know a little more than the person asking the question. So I can give them that information, but they must not trust me to say anything intelligent about China.

But when you go to China and you come back to Minnesota, Minnesota looks a lot different to you. And I know Minnesota intimately. And looked at from that angle, you learn things about Minnesota and your own life, which is, of course, one of the reasons for going to China.

BOB POTTER: Bill Holm, Thank you so much for coming in, visiting with us. Let's listen to Gary here very quickly.

GARY EICHTEN: Good afternoon. Gary Eichten here, inviting you to stay tuned for news throughout the day, including regional news on MPR Journal this afternoon. Today, as always, we'll have a summary of the day's news. We'll take a look at the updated weekend weather forecast. And we'll hear from Dennis Hopper, actor, director and now the subject of a film festival at the Walker. MPR Journal is broadcast at 5:00 on FM 530 on 1330 AM.

BOB POTTER: And that's Midday for today. This is Bob Potter. KSJN, Minneapolis, Saint Paul.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

PAULA SCHROEDER: Hi. I'm Paula Schroeder, and this is Takeout. Today, a conversation with a Hollywood legend, a film critic, and an author who looks at despair with a compassionate eye. We'll hear from Dennis Hopper, whose films have rocked the Hollywood establishment and fascinated audiences for more than 30 years. The Walker Art Center has just begun a month-long Hopper film retrospective and exhibition of his photographs. Village Voice critic, Jim Hoberman, discusses the brilliance and unevenness of Hopper's career. And author Richard Ford will talk about his book of short stories, Rock Springs. We'll be back in just a moment with a conversation with Dennis Hopper.

[STEPPENWOLF, "BORN TO BE WILD"]

(SINGING) Get your motor runnin'

Head out on a highway

Looking for adventure

And whatever comes our way

Yeah, darlin', gonna make it happen

Take the world in a love embrace

Fire all of your guns at once and

Explode into space

I like smoke and lightnin'

Heavy metal thunder

Racin' with the wind

And the feelin' that I'm under

Yeah, darlin', gonna make it happen

Take the world in a love embrace

Fire all of your guns at once and

Explode into space

Like a true nature's child

We were born, born to be wild

We can climb so high

I never wanna die

Born to be wild

Born to be wild

The music, of course, from Easy Rider, written, directed by, and starring Dennis Hopper. All this month, the Walker Art center in Minneapolis is presenting a retrospective of Dennis Hopper's films, from Rebel Without a Cause, in which he played opposite James Dean, to Blue Velvet, in which he's cast as the satanic, violent Frank Booth. The retrospective includes Hopper's cinematic flops, like The Last Movie, as well as his triumphs, such as Easy Rider.

Dennis Hopper is an actor and director who has walked the creative edge, testing his skills and talents to the limit. He's tempted death in his personal life, drinking rum and shooting cocaine to the point of institutionalization. He's been sober now for some time, but continues, as Rob Rosenbaum called him in a Vanity Fair piece, an elder statesman of sensory derangement and avant garde decadence.

Hopper will introduce tonight's screening of Easy Rider at the Walker. And this morning, he walked through the exhibit of photographs taken during the 1960s with reporters. MPR reporter Euan Kerr and I talked with Hopper about his films and why he no longer takes photographs.

EUAN KERR: Dennis Hopper, welcome to the Twin Cities. We are here to have a look at the photographs that you've brought with you and also some of the movies that are going to be shown at the retrospective over the next couple of weeks.

We just walked around the exhibit with you, looking at some of the photographs. And it's a tremendous array of artistic talent from the '60s that Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein-- you mentioned them pretty much. They're there.

Having obviously spent a lot of time in this artistic community, having obviously, it seems to me, enjoyed taking the photographs of these people, spending time on your work, why was it that you decided to give it up? Or was it even a question of making a decision?

DENNIS HOPPER: Why did I decide to give up taking photographs?

EUAN KERR: Yeah.

DENNIS HOPPER: Well, in 1967, when I stopped, I started directing Easy Rider. And acting, and writing, and directing was impossible just to carry a camera around or even think you'd know what you did with it if you put it down somewhere. And I used to just carry it everywhere I went.

So when I was acting, I could leave it in the dressing room and go pick it up later. But as a writer, director, it was impossible. Also, as a director, I was using a movie camera. And I just stopped. Also, I had really-- I felt that I'd done everything that I really wanted to do in taking still photographs, except to go to Vietnam. And I--