I was in my twenties in what was Yugoslavia at the time when I saw a black-and-white documentary about a quarry on the island of Brac in the Adriatic. It showed a group of five or six workers detaching a large block of stone from the hill. They each dug small holes along a line that followed the grain of the stone. Then they inserted large steel wedges into the holes and started striking them with huge hammers with long handles. To coordinate their strikes so as to make them more powerful, they chanted in unison. “Strike hard,” one line went. “It must break,” went another. As a refrain of sorts, they all chanted: “Hop jan!” The “j” was pronounced like the “y” in “yen.” After so many strikes, the block dutifully detached itself from the hill. I was deeply impressed by the documentary, which I saw only once. For me, it symbolized the need for coordinated action to destroy the old and create a new world. I was in my thirties when I returned to Yugoslavia for a while, and I soon started writing against the then socialist regime. Many of my writings would land me in jail at the time. I published a few batches of my writings in the States, but I used a pseudonym to fool the secret police. The pseudonym was Hop Jan. Unexpectedly, it came to my mind yesterday. Perhaps I should use it once again to publish my writings against the capitalist regime in Croatia. The Yugoslav secret police never gave me any trouble, but the Croatian political police paired with political courts gave me much trouble soon after my “return” to the country. So many years later, I am still lingering in the courts. Perhaps the only way around the twain is a pseudonym, and Hop Jan strikes me as a felicitous one.