A non-hermitean particle in a disordered world

There has been much recent work on the spectrum of the random non-hermitean Hamiltonian which models the physics of vortex line pinning in superconductors. This note is loosely based on the talk I gave at the conference “New Directions in Statistical Physics” held in Taipei, August 1997. We also give an expression for the spectrum within the WKB approximation.