koffl next back Author : Jan B. Hurych
Title : PARALLAXES
Essay: I ASKED FOR IT (3)



I asked for it.

No, I do not want to complain or look for excuses. I asked for it, I got it. I am talking about my interviews on the Net and let me tell you, I am glad I asked for it . . .

As a young boy, I always had some impertinent questions - or they seemed to be, because I was not getting any answers. My parents, my teachers, my friends, even my boss, they all refused to commit themselves to decent answers. I couldn´t imagine why. It can´t be, I told myself, there must be a way how to make people talk.

Needless to say, I have found the reason for their silence: I had simply asked wrong people. You see, there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. If you want to get right answer, ask the right people. Ask experts! I tried it and the situation changed drastically: I have found people who not only answered my questions, they even liked answering them! And they were all nice, friendly and patient. Yes, when you read some of my questions, you may doubt ´where could they possibly come from´. Let me put you at ease: they all popped up in my head. All it needed was a little bit of thinking and large amount of alcohol - not for inspiration, just for getting enough courage to ask them out loud . . . :-)

It all started with one bet: my friend challenged me that I would not write to certain famous person, ask him few questions and - what´s more important - that I would surely not receive any answers. Well, my friend lost, but I won more than one bet. I repeated the feat again and again, first for web magazine Amberzine, then for my own, called Hurontaria and guess what, people liked it too. Soon I became more daring and inquiring. E-mail interview - whoever heard about that before? Being the inventor of many things that did not work, I was pleased one of them actually did.

Why did it work? Well, not because I am a nice and polite fellow (oh yes, I really can be!), but evidently there were some other forces in play. You guessed it, the main trick was the Internet. I was simply picking experts with their own WEB pages, people I suspected would like answering questions, even my kind of questions. People who knew how important is to publish something on the Net, people who understood that our world has dramatically changed and still keeps changing. And of course, people who liked to be read, to be listened to and to be worked with. People of action. So you can see, it was easy: I also subscribe to that kind of attitude and they must have felt it in me, I suppose. Many of them became my friends afterwards; we still write to each other and that says it all. And guess what: they even copied our interviews on their pages. Maybe it was because I never asked too many questions, gave them full freedom of expression and never ever commented their answers. I find that policy not only fair but rather smart as well. After all, they did it for free and I owe them my gratitude. Let me thank to all of them here sincerely and profoundly.

The reactions of Amberzine (and later Hurontaria) readers were highly positive. They all appreciated the honest and qualified answers - we do not get too many of them nowadays. As far as the subjects of my interviews, I picked them by random, but only those that would interest our readers and inform them about the frontiers of our thinking. To all of them and especially to those who wrote me, I have to thank as well. After all, what good would be a transmitter without any receiver?

Many readers were asking how am I doing it. Well, it takes a lot of magic :-) - but seriously folks, there is nothing to it: just pick the right person and ask him/her right questions. Just don't forget to make your questions unique and entertaining, if possible. Entertaining for yourself as well because, as you might have guessed, it steals a lot of time from you and it really helps if you love doing it.