Disillusioned Lefty

All Aboard to Alibi

2011-07-16T19:10:00.004+01:00

Some of you might be interested to know that I am now writing about books and visual art over at An Allegory of Labour.

Colm Tóibin Interview

2011-04-20T16:52:00.001+01:00

This article originally appeared in Trinity News.

Nearly five years ago, on the way to a first date with a girl who would soon after become my girlfriend, I saw Colm Tóibín, dressed in a long black coat, turning the corner at the top of Grafton Street in the direction of Baggot Street. When I got the pub, I told the girl that I had seen Colm Tóibín and that, noticing that I was carrying a copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Tóibín had looked up at me and said something like: “Oh Eliot, is it? Very good!” In fact, he walked past me without a word.

What I had told was a completely unnecessary lie – the first of many I was to tell the same girl in the two years that followed. My arrival at Tóibín’s house to interview him about The Empty Family – his new collection of stories, in which the poetry of T.S. Eliot just happens to make a minor appearance – represents a small, personal exorcism.

It is now twenty years since Tóibín published his first novel, The South. Set in Barcelona, where Tóibín moved to immediately after graduating from UCD, it won plaudits from such luminaries as Don DeLillo and John Banville. Since then, he has published a further five novels, including The Heather Blazing, The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, all to more or less critical acclaim.

After The Master, his fictional portrait of Henry James and arguably his finest work, Tóibín published a book of short stories entitled Mothers and Sons. It is a form in which he thrives. Now, in the wake of Brooklyn, yet another novel of huge critical and popular acclaim, he has turned again to the short story. A pattern seems to be forming. “The first thing you’ve got to understand,” he says, “is that short stories are of no commercial value. But working with something that is of no commercial value is actually very useful. There’s a great purity about it.”

The Empty Family is a collection of nine stories that are each marked by some concern with the notion of connectedness and disconnectedness. Though the majority of its stories were commissioned and written in the last three or four years, Tóibín underlines the fact that some of these pieces were conceived a very long time ago indeed.

“I’d had a sentence for The New Spain since 1988. I had always planned for it to be a novel – but the only image that stayed with me fully was that the mother would put a chain around the fridge.” Going back even further, the story Silence, depicting the secret affair Lady Gregory had with the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, has its roots in an entry marked ‘January 23d, 1894’ in the notebooks of Henry James – a document full of unwritten James stories which Tóibín plans to pinch from again.

Other stories here seem intensely autobiographical. The protagonist in The Pearl Fishers, for instance, is a gay writer from Wexford, living at an address quite close to the one I visited Tóibín at for this interview. But Tóibín is quick to point out that, though some of the details in these stories may seem autobiographical, their inclusion has more to do with being able to write better about the things you know.

“I could have put him living in a fictional space,” he says, “but I know what that space is like, walking up Kildare Street or Dawson Street. And once the word ‘murderous’ occurred to describe all those buildings filled with ad agencies and auctioneers, that was it. I mean, I’m not sure if the word even slightly accurate. But it still struck me and so it stuck.”

He stops to utter the word once more – “muhrrr-derous” – as if to prove its authenticity. “And so I brought him further along down Pembroke Road,” he continues, “because I have an idea of what that walk is like, which I wouldn’t have if you’d asked me to take him down the North Strand or Dorset Street. You’ve got a repository of images that you can raid.”

The protagonist in Barcelona, 1975 seems to be Tóibín again – a young gay man, who, on finishing his exams at the age of twenty, takes, “the boat first to Holyhead, the night train to London and then the plane – my first plane journey – to Barcelona.” The character subsequently discovers himself sexually and ends up partaking in several gay orgies. “There’s an element of playfulness to it as well. Somebody reading this book of stories in particular could think: ‘Holy fuck! This guy is crazy.’ It would take a lot to explain to somebody just how dull your life is instead.”

Answering a question, Tóibín will often rest his hand ponderously on top of his bald head, his fingers spread out across his scalp as if some strange sea creature were making its home there. Though this meeting resembles it in no way apart from this very minor detail, I cannot help but think of the half-lit scene in Apocalypse Now, where Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) meets the deranged clarity of Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) for the first time. Willard looks feebly across the room at Kurtz who – watch it again, if you can’t recall – spreads his fingers across his moistened scalp in the exact same way. Holy fuck! Maybe this guy is crazy.

“You’ve got to raid memory a lot of the time,” he confirms, “and then when memory doesn’t work, you raid imagination. But once you’re working, you’re involved in self-annihilation and self-suppression. The self who might answer the telephone or give interviews to Trinity News ceases to exist. It’s simply not there. The page is blank. It’s not a mirror – if you want a mirror, go and look into one. The page is blank. What you’re doing is filling it. The self might emerge metaphorically or using masks, but what you’re really interested in doing is finding a tone or rhythm.”

The tone and rhythm he finds embodies his narrative’s concern for shadows and half-light. Indeed, the space between what is said and almost-said, what is seen and almost-seen, what is understood and almost-understood plays an elemental role in The Empty Family, as it does in much of his other work. “It seems to me quite satisfying to create images of the light being grey or something or somehow of the end of the day being what they call in Italian l’ora ambigua – the ambiguous hour – when light is ambiguous. In other words, I create a world of shadows rather than a world of meaning. And within that world of shadows, a narrative of shadows in which much is unclear, much is unsaid, much is left in silence and much is half-understood.”

There are only two things in these narratives that come through purely: music and sex.

Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, the last songs of Schubert and the music of a (fictional, so far as I can tell) Pakistani band called Wooee seem to cast light on the half-light and draw truth from the half-truths in these stories.

For all that is merely suggested in The Empty Family, it is also a very explicit book. Three of the stories in The Empty Family contain graphic depictions of homosexual sex. In The Pearl Fishers, for example, Tóibín writes: “I remembered that nothing made him happier when he had had a few drinks than to have me lie on my back while he knelt with his back to me and his knees on either side of my torso. He would bend as I pushed my tongue hard up into his arsehole while he sucked my cock and licked my balls.”

When his last book, The Pregnant Widow, was published, Martin Amis spoke quite a lot about the impossibility of writing good sex. “Novels can do bad sex, or unreal sex, cartoonish sex, insincere sex,” he wrote. “But no one’s ever written well about significant sex.” By the time the writer puts down the first details of the act, Amis believes that it has already become non-universal – too particular, too peculiar. It becomes “embarrassing for the reader and impossible for the writer.”

“It’s difficult to be prescriptive about this,” Tóibín replies. “I think with something like sex, you just have to be very precise. No metaphors, no similes. Just describe a set of actions. I’m not interested in society in the way Martin Amis probably is. I’m not interested in universality. I’m interested in psychology – the psychology of one.”

“But with regard to gay people, the sort of sex you have and how you remember it is surrounded by so much emotion that it’s almost not sexual when you’re describing it. It has more to do with fundamental areas of transgression. Writing it down has a sort of power.”

“But every person’s experience of sex for the first time or with somebody special for the first time is so memorable that it’s really very important. It has nothing to do with gay sex actually. If you’re trying to render truthfully what it’s like to be somebody, their memory of that is probably very important to them.”

“At the same time, with the gay thing, there’s an element of mischief involved. With Barcelona, 1975, I was aware that this had not been done before. You know, instead of saying, ‘they had a really good time; all the things they did were great,’ I wanted to portray just how difficult and embarrassing and strange it is to do these things, especially if you’re an Irish guy fresh from the provinces.”

When Tóibín returned originally from Barcelona, he worked as a journalist for periodicals like Magill, In Dublin and Hibernia. I ask him what sort of effect journalism had as a training ground to his fiction. “Well I made my living that way, which you couldn’t really do now,” he tells me almost apologetically. “It was essential, too, in terms of learning to type and so on. But all of us were looking to America for people who we wanted to – not necessarily to model ourselves on – but to understand in some way. Writers like Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, V.S. Naipaul: these figures writing for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, who were putting as much work into the openings and endings of their pieces as they were into their fiction.” But his intention was never to stay in journalism; he always wanted to write novels. “I never worked in a newsroom. And if I ever came across people who did, I found them very strange people indeed.”

Though he has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker, he has never won it and views the prize as something primarily for those strange people who work in newsrooms. “It’s worth remembering that Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh achieved great fame and huge audiences without the Booker Prize. And, if you think of images of them, there was something about the dignity of those two which mightn’t have been there if they had constantly been wheeled in to make victory speeches for this and that.” Imagine, I suggest, what a nightmare Waugh would have been if he’d won something like the Booker. “Imagine,” counters Tóibín, “what a nightmare he’d have been if he’d lost to somebody like Rose MacCauley or Anthony Powell.”

Speaking of Graham Greene, when the Paris Review came to his house to interview him in 1953, he spoke to the two journalists for about twenty minutes before essentially kicking them out. After moreover an hour talking to Tóibín, the interview draws to a close, not because I no longer feel welcome – in fact, I feel the complete opposite – but because I have quite simply run out of questions.

As I turn to walk out the door, Tóibín promises that, next time he sees me walking down the street, he’ll say: “Hey, that’s an interesting book you’ve got there!’”

“Then,” I reply, “I’ll make sure it’s interesting.”

Geoff Dyer Interview

2011-02-17T09:10:00.005Z

This article originally appeared in Trinity News.

Faced with an inability to remain focused on any one particular interest, I find some consolation for my consequent academic mediocrity in a line from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. “I love brief habits,” says Uncle Friedrich, “and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitterness.”

There can be few writers whose back-catalogue alone expresses this Nietzschean love of brief habits as clearly as Geoff Dyer’s. He has written a book about the First World War. He has written a book about DH Lawrence. He has written a book about jazz. He has written a book about photography. He has even written a book about fucking yoga. His success is an enormous source of encouragement to me.

Born in 1958, Dyer is a self-described intellectual gatecrasher. Typically, he develops an interest in a specialist subject, writes about to huge acclaim both within and without the milieu of the chosen subject, before quietly losing interest and moving on. (We will return to this, as Dyer so often parenthesises.) With a further four novels to his name, the only stains on his work are the ringing endorsements he receives and reprints from the housewives’ favourite philosopher: Alain De Botton, Prince of Platitude.

Yet it is not his books, but his essays and reviews that he claims to be proudest of. In his first collection of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes, he writes: “There were times when it was only the prospect of one day being able to publish my journalism that kept me writing ‘proper’ books.” Ten years on from that, Dyer’s second collection, Working The Room, has just been published. Divided into four sections – Visuals, Verbals, Variables and Personals – the collection reigns in the disparate immensity of Dyer’s interests. “With all the books I’ve written, it’s quite difficult to know where to start. But I’d say the essays are a pretty good place to do so.” Dyer is not a writer who believes in the necessary superiority of the novel, steeped as he is the writing of Roland Barthes, John Berger and Milan Kundera.

It was a review of Kundera’s The Farewell Party, in fact, that marked his entry into the world of paid-for publication. The commission came following “a certain amount of subterfuge,” whereby Dyer lied about the amount of work he’d previously had published – none – to the person standing in for the holidaying literary editor at City Limits.

“I wasn’t calling up out of the blue, of course. At Oxford, we stopped at Samuel Beckett. But I’d caught up on my reading in the few years after, and I’d begun to grow increasingly frustrated by reading book reviews. In that not untypical way, I thought: ‘Shit, I know as much as this guy. Why should I be sitting here reading his opinions, when he could be there reading mine?’”

He pauses for a second. I look down to read my next question, but hesitantly he recommences.

“There seems to me something here worth saying about ambition. We imagine it as operating on this rather grand level – ‘I want to be Prime Minister, ‘I want to play for Man Utd’ – but ambition is almost always manifested in these very actionable increments.”

This is typical of Dyer. Reading his work, one finds him analysing the efforts of a particular writer or photographer with an engagement that would allow it to stand alone as a fine piece of writing. Without ever expecting it, though, one notices Dyer very quietly drawing some more general truth from the particular topic at hand.

So, in ‘The Moral Art of War’, an appraisal of books of reportage on the Iraq War, Dyer concludes that the history of storytelling is moving beyond even the non-fiction novel, towards “different kinds of narrative art, different forms of cognition.” Likewise, in a piece for Vogue about Paris Fashion Week, he wonders if, “the costumes with their amazing surfeit of plumage and jewels,” and “the models with their unnatural, clippy-cloppy, equine walk,” don’t play on some psychic residue left over from ancient religious ceremonies.

“One principle of editing Working The Room was that every piece should have something in it that made it of more general interest than the thing it was ostensibly about. So I’d hope that, for example, each of the book reviews included either add up to an appraisal of the writer’s career or raise some more general point about writing and literature.”

It’s a trait he shares with his mentor John Berger, the art critic and novelist whose magisterial ‘Selected Essays’ (which Dyer edited and introduced as a good starting-point with Berger) was in fact my starting-point with Dyer. Berger is an intellectual giant whose influence on art criticism cannot be overstated. After university Dyer began reading his work, interviewed him for Marxism Today and eventually wrote a book about him entitled Ways of Telling. Somewhere along the way, Berger became his mentor, providing Dyer with much encouragement, which, says Dyer, “is often the most valuable thing a mentor can do.”

“I was so in awe of him,” he says. “But then there’s a long history of the disciple going to meet the idol, only for the idol to turn out to be self-important and disappointing. When I met Berger, though, he was perhaps even greater than the books had led you to believe. He has the most incredible reservoirs of kindness and generosity and thoughtfulness. Ordinary qualities like these are not generally the preserve of extraordinary people. To this day, he still seems to me the greatest person I have ever met.”

It would be a lie to say that, in asking him about his relationship with Berger, I wasn’t hoping on some level that Dyer would offer to be my mentor. I have read Dyer’s books. I’ve interviewed him, too. And, so far, he has been hugely encouraging about my questions. So I venture another one which, were it to appear in that scene in Annie Hall where subtitles spell out what the characters actually mean, would read: Geoff Dyer, will you be my mentor?

“Do you have an ideal reader?”

There follows a pause which seems to me pregnant with some beautiful future.

“No,” he replies. “Definitely not. Sorry.”

This comes as a crushing blow. But already my thoughts are of moving on from the brief habit of Dyer – and somehow this seems appropriate. I’ll return to read his next book on Tarkovsky, of course. For the moment, though, there’re plenty more fish in the sea.

Now, who has Alain De Botton’s number?

Parrot and Olivier in America

2010-07-28T19:16:00.003+01:00

“‘From where will they get their culture?” he cried. “the newspapers? God help you all.’”

The Booker Prize is an award oft-disparaged. A media and publishing event more than anything, even the ceremony’s acceptance speeches have been known to criticise it. On receiving the award in 2005 for The Sea, John Banville remarked that it was nice to see the award go to a work of art for once. In his 1972 acceptance speech, John Berger noted that, “the whole emphasis on winners and losers is false and out of place in the context of literature.” Martin Amis, whose father Kingsley won the prize in 1985, has written that the Booker Prize, which “demystifies and declasses the writer,” is only given to books that create consensus.

Nevertheless, given the influence it has on book sales, the prize deserves our divided attention at least. It's worth noting, therefore, that Peter Carey, author of the newly published Parrot and Olivier in America, is one of only two novelists to ave won the award twice.

Based partly on the American experiences of Alexis De Toqueville, Parrot and Olivier is an odd-couple novel jointly narrated by its eponymous heroes. John Larrit is a middle-aged English servant with artist ambitions, nicknamed Parrot for his skill as a mimic. Olivier de Garmont is a myopic young nobleman, sent by his parents to safety in America ostensibly to study its prison systems.

Before going any further, I should say that Parrot and Olivier stinks. Pages and pages pass by, and still Carey's prose stinks. “The smell was strong, even on the poop, a great stinking cloud of cheese.” “Beekman Street stank like a shit heap, worse than the faubourg Saint-Antoine.” “The air was thick with the smell of coffin wood.” Indeed, for a novel whose primary concern is often art and forgery, it is at least as stimulating to the olfactory as it is to the aural or ocular senses. “Today it is my sweetest memory of Henriette-Lucie, the jasmine escaping from its paper shell.” Perhaps there’s a greater truth in smell. Parrot can mimic any voice, and forge notes and works of art, but can smell be mimicked? When it recurs, as does the jasmine of Olivier’s mother and Parrot’s lover Mathilde, the connection is somehow stronger. “I smelled her,” Parrot sighs. “Her jasmine.” The richness of life is smelled, and it is no coincidence when Olivier discovers that, “each cell is aired by a ventilator, and contains a fosse d’aisance whose construction makes it perfectly odourless.”

Parrot’s is an involuntarily nomadic existence, and his character is a valuable study of displacement. Born in England, he is orphaned when, in the first great literary set-piece of the decade, Parrot loses his father when a pyrotechnic disaster befalls the illegal printworks where he and his father are employed. The link between the novel’s heroes, the part-noble, part-criminal Monsieur De Tilbot, becomes part-parent, part-master of Parrot. By way of Australia, he ends up in France, only to be uprooted once more, this time to America as both transcriber and spy of Olivier. It is no surprise that the chapters narrated by Parrot, invested with the wit and street-wisdom of someone who has lived, are the more enjoyable.

“In the morning,” he jokes, “we had what is called a tramp’s breakfast, that is a piss and look around.” What is surprising, and a true testament to Carey’s skill as a stylist, is that despite the abundant stale similes of an uneducated mimic – “as funny as a murder site”, “as bitter as a lemon tree” – Parrot’s prose still smells as sweet as his lover’s jasmine. “The eyes of children of old fathers,” Parrot reflects, “have a sad grey quality which I have observed on more than one continent. Perhaps it is not that they inherit an old man’s wisdom, but that they are born knowing they must soon say farewell to him who gave them life.”

Meanwhile, Olivier’s short-sightedness becomes far-sightedness. “I mean this, democracy. It is truly a lovely flower, a tiny tender fruit, but it will not ripen well.” The problem here is that a supposedly far-sighted Olivier De Garmont looks more like a hind-sighted Peter Carey. No matter the undoubted prescience of Alexis De Toqueville, much of what the fictional Olivier concludes – “that the only books on their shelves will be instruction manuals” – reads more like clairvoyance. Fact is often too incredible for fiction.

This expansive, back-and-forth novel is about many things: the budding and flowering of American democracy, the death of the ancien régime and the dynamics of class relations; but as the novel thunders on, it is the question of democratic discernment – immediately regarding art, with politics, finance, culture, criminality all implied – that Peter Carey seems most concerned by. “In a democracy,” says Olivier, “there is not that class with the leisure to acquire discernment and taste in all the arts.” But who needs a leisured-class, Peter, when we have the Booker Prize panel?

Without Clout

2009-01-25T11:38:00.007Z

Or have Morgan and Howard fooled us by presenting this overhyped, shallow media event as some great battle for truth between two great forces of modern democracy: media and politics? Answer: yes, we’ve been conned. Frost/Nixon is a historical fraud, a mind-boggling travesty of the truth. Let me hasten to add, however, that it is without doubt the most gripping, entertaining, dramatically clever and fascinating fraud I’ve ever seen.

What?

Cosmo Landesman today points out that Frost/Nixon is historically inaccurate, underlining, for instance, that the late night phone call from Nixon to Frost on which the film balances did not actually take place. But, as you've read, he thinks it's a gripping piece of cinema in any case. I think he's wrong. It's an utterly predictable film.

The going gets tough for the Frost camp, as Nixon is found to be quite good at being interviewed, and it stays tough for a lot of the film. But things start looking up (as they threaten to do throughout the film) when Frost's researcher does two days of research, the tables are turned, and the tough going is overcome. All this as the film heads conveniently into the home straight, ready for the happy ending which comes when Frost elicits an (historically inaccurate) apology from Nixon for Watergate.

I don't think there's much drama in this film at all.

Even the exagerrated apology is tame. Despite the film's portrayal to the contrary, the viewer is left wondering, firstly, if Nixon didn't get away with it after all, and secondly, how Frost went on to such stardom on the back of such a poor interview.

An entertaining, but by no means gripping film.

The Frog

2008-12-18T10:38:00.002Z

What a wonderful bird the frog are-
When he stand he sit almost;
When he hop he fly almost.
He ain't got no sense hardly;
He ain't got no tail hardly either.
When he sit, he sit on what he ain't got - almost.

YOU COULDN'T GIVE THEM AWAY

2008-12-18T10:32:00.004Z

Walking into Trinity early this morning, I saw a woman employed by the Irish Independent to give out free copies of their newspaper. Of the five people whom I saw walk past her, all five refused her generous offer: a sight more refreshing than the icy matutinal air.

Revidalance

2008-12-18T10:14:00.005Z

As well as being twin towers of 20th century intellectual life, Gore Vidal and the late Susan Sontag share the honour of being the favoured grandparents of the New York Review of Books. I can't remember the amount of times each has been the subject to yet another essay published its hallowed pages, just as I can't be bothered to find out. But figures aside, the answer is often. And so, again, in the holiday issue of the review, we're treated to another essay on each. The difference between the two, however, is that the new essays on Sontag generally say something new on Sontag. Not so with Vidal, poor thing, who, with the publication of any selection, collection or reflection in the last five years, seems to have had more or less the same essay written about him and published in newspapers, magazines and reviews.

Back to Black

2008-12-18T09:54:00.003Z

When he got out of the lift on the thirty-ninth floor he could hear the telephone ringing in his office. He fumbled the key into the door and scrambled to the desk and seized the receiver - What is it, he wondered, that is so irresistibly imperative about a ringing telephone?

This comes from The Lemur, John Banville's third outing under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, which - at less than 200 generously-spaced pages - I had the pleasure of passing an afternoon alongside. The work is inconsequential, written to satisfy the coffers before the critics, but, for a book whose plot offers neither the pace, nor the suspense of Black's first two outings - to say nothing of The 39 Steps, written by John Buchan and alluded to above - it is nonetheless an enjoyable read. Much has been said about the difference between Banville and Black, yet, as The Lemur ably demonstrates, they share their strengths and weaknesses. Banville is often weak on plot, while Black, writing with a brow admittedly less furrowed than Banville's, is redeemed in this instance by an acuity of both observation and expression - two features which owe everything to the furrowed brow behind the mask.

Wouldn't make a bad Stephen's Day occupation.

TAKE DOWN THIS BOOK / AND SLOWLY READ

2008-11-21T16:03:00.007Z

"And I quote from memory," they parenthesise.

There's something very irritating about those writers who, when quoting poetry in print, mention that they are doing so without reference to the text. There's no need to quote fallibly from memory when, in the age of the internet, a printed edition is always at hand. And, if you can quote infallibly from memory, there's no need to overshadow the chosen quote. Poetry worth memorising is more remarkable than memorising the poetry.

This afternoon, in any case, I at last found my way into the Yeats exhibition in the National Library. There's a small room in which a few of Yeats' poems are projected onto a screen, while recorded voices - famous, infamous and not famous alike - read them aloud. I somehow suspect that Ulick O'Connor's recital of 'When You are Old' was derived from memory alone. For, while his lively, polytonal voice carries the music of Yeats' poetry better than, say, the recorded efforts of Sinéad O'Connor, in at least two instances, Ulick gets the words mixed-up. Instead of "nodding by the fire", we hear "sitting by the fire"; and instead of "the sorrows of your changing face", we hear "the changing sorrows of your face." A pernickity point, perhaps, but every word is important in poetry - in shorter poems especially; you'd expect that the exhibition's curator to agree.

A Dreaded Sunny Day

2008-11-08T03:33:00.017Z

Though less than one year ago I lived no more than ten walking-minutes from its gates, until last week I had never strolled through the decorated aisles of Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris; a non-act of laziness disguised as nonchalance. When, last week, I at last got around to visiting the cemetery, a weak winter sun scaled the morning azure like some great air balloon in the distance, its light bouncing off the cobblestones to make the cracks in between appear darker still.

And then I came upon this, an impressive tomb marked:

CROCE-SPINELLI ET SIVEL

MORTS A 8600 METRES DE HAUTEUR.

Intrigued, I did some research.

In April of 1875, at the dawn of the Third Republic, Joseph Croce-Spinelli and Théodore Sivel died of asphyxiation during the ascent of their air balloon Zenith to over 8,600 metres, an altitude unheard of at the time. The scientists were survived by their colleague and co-pilot Gaston Tissandier, who at 8,000 metres had passed out, before again waking at 6,000 metres to find his both colleagues dead, having bled from the mouth, and the balloon cascading dangerously towards the earth. He roused himself sufficiently, and landed the balloon safely. Though he had become deaf, Tissandier went on to flourish as a scientists, as an aviator, as a chemist and as an editor of his own scientific weekly, La Nature; an owl of Minerva spreading its wings at his colleagues' last dusk.

I left before seeing either Oscar Wilde or Jim Morrison, Père Lachaise's most famous denizens, but on parting, I did see pictures of each on postcards for sale next to the cemetery's back gate.

Keats and Yeats are on your side.

Fluctuat nec mergitur

2008-10-29T15:07:00.003Z

The first chapter of John Banville's new novel The Sinking City (in corso) is, for some reason, available to read on the Manchester Review's website. I'll be reading it tomorrow on a flight to Paris.

Winterwood

2008-10-12T16:58:00.006+01:00

The men of the mountain! I said, just for the laugh.

"Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades," said Vladmir Nabokov, the author of the great confessional Lolita, "Let us worship the spine and its tingle." It was with the close of Patrick McCabe's Winterwood, whose narrator Redmond Place differs only from Lolita's in his unwillingness or inability to know himself, that I last sat down, artistically delighted, a tingle felt not just between the shoulder blades, but upon my cheeks. Winterwood, my first exposure to McCabe, is a psychologically labyrinthine tableau — often reminiscent of David Lynch's Twin Peaks — consciously painted with the simple, progressively darker brush-strokes of a stylistically unsophisticated, structurally manipulative narrator.

Domestic Bliss

2008-10-07T14:14:00.003+01:00

Order, order.

Nothing to show for the autumnal month of this year's summer holiday; there's only so long self-discipline will hold. But the mind is perked this week by the resumption of college, alongside which will resume, I hope, the normal, shaky service renowned in this quarter of the internet.

Who ate all the pi?

2008-09-01T16:02:00.004+01:00

The photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson confesses his great passion for geometry. "I do not believe in God", he said, "but I do believe in pi." He might have liked the composition of this, a photograph of someone called Yves, taken in 1967, which I found in a bundle of old polaroids left long ago in the pocket of a duffel-coat I bought second-hand in Paris this summer.

Arabian Nights

2008-09-01T14:25:00.005+01:00

One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.

Germaine Greer talks football. After decades of hardship and storm, the sun peaks over the horizon, ready to dawn on Manchester City. Super-rich Arab investors have bought the club from human-rights abuser Thaksin Shinawatra, our prodigal son Shaun Wright-Philips has returned from South London, and at the moment, as the transfer window remains barely ajar, it looks like we're about to nick Dimitar Berbatov from underneath the noses of rivals United. Give me back, give me back the wild freshness of Morning!

A Study of Writing Habits

2008-08-31T11:59:00.006+01:00

I like The Fall, and Mark E. Smith especially. He's a Man City fan, after all. But I wonder just how qualified Una Mullally is to submit, in the esteemed pages of one national newspaper, that Smith's autobiography is "one of the best music autobiographies in recent times," when she herself has read from it only "a good few extracts" according to her piece. Not hailed as, not regarded as, but is. Some extraction, that. If she'd read the whole thing (no mean feat at 256 pages), I suppose she'd be entitled, if still not disposed, to drop the approximation and call it the unbounded best of the lot?

I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul"

2008-08-27T22:03:00.006+01:00

In 1968, the year Man Utd won the European Cup and one year before Kes appeared, Ken Loach made a curious little documentary drama about Everton FC called The Golden Vision in which players are interviewed, officials attended and supporters orchestrated and observed. Everyone involved spoke with an unreserved erudition of another day and an assured humility of, in footballing terms, another age. Unfortunately there's no sign of it on the internet, but BBC 4 showed it last week, so perhaps it will once more pop up some time in the near future. A great social document, it's certainly one to look out for.

In what I presumed to be footage a few years older than the documentary itself, an FA official is asked to speak about the increasingly common inclination of fans to hurl abuse at players, referees and each other. He opined that such fervour was a regrettable aspect of the game, but that if (as he supposed) letting off steam in such a fashion stopped young men from starting, say, race riots, then it was a tolerable, even necessary aspect of the game, too - which I suppose is true enough.

It had been some years since I'd last gone to a football match, and longer still since I'd last sat through a League of Ireland match, but last night, with peculiar alacrity, I agreed - volunteered, really - to go to Dalymount with my mother to see Bohemians take on Drogheda. We arrived at the ground, passed through the turnstile, bought (terrible) fish and chips before kick-off, and I was surprised to find a great wave of nostalgia creep up my spine and come to rest between the shoulder blades. But when the match started I felt no propensity to shout anything at anyone as I suppose I had a decade ago.

It was at around this point in this post that I had planned to write a few words about the social aspect of football: about how much more tribal the game feels on a smaller, more indigenous scale; about how menacing a few voices, half-a-dozen flags and one or two drums can seem from the opposite side of a stadium; about how worrying it is that so many football fans seem unwilling to accept the fallibility of players and officials, and unable to draw a distinction between the referee and his decisions. But as half-time approached I thought better of that essay because, primo, I'd come across as a pretentious old bollocks, and, secundo, by the looks of it, race riots had been forestalled in Phibsboro for at least another night.

Bohs won two-nil, and the referee's a wanker.

I'll just say one word: 'Tony Wilson'.

2008-08-26T03:20:00.006+01:00

Without any real intention of doing so, I ended up watching, I think, every episode of Britain From Above, the recent BBC documentary series in which Andrew Marr imparts wisdom bestowed upon him by the skies, plus a team of researchers and experts. The show was actually a lot more interesting than it sounded and, despite the occasional descent into green-and-pleasant-land patriotism, Marr does come across as quite a genuine, genial, affable bloke. But whenever he came down to interpret any of his less mechanical flights (by paraglide, say), it took great effort to remove from mind this image of Tony Wilson - genius, poet, twat - as played by Steve Coogan in 24 Hour Party People.

LOST / FOR ALL EYES BUT THESE EYES

2008-08-26T01:29:00.006+01:00

This blog has never nearly been one to get thousands of hits a day, and in recent months the numbers graph has fallen from the modest heights up which it once so gallantly crept. But below passes a fairly consistent (if unalarming) tide of returning visitors, and I think that suits the somewhat garrulous voice I've found, or been found by, in the few years I've been doing this.

The counter rolled past 100,000 today. So, to anyone (loquacious or otherwise) who finds the time to drop by every so often, thanks very much indeed, whoever you are.

Your skin what?

2008-08-24T17:05:00.004+01:00

In Greece, I floundered when it came to sunburn and mosquitoes. I had no idea why I was coming out in bright red hive-like bumps every morning. It wasn't like I had been eating my skin nemesis, Weetabix.

Has anyone ever actually sat down and read the Sunday Tribune? I did, and was witness then to some of the most lame, irrelevant, affected, poorly composed opinion and feature journalism the country's broadsheets have to offer. A veritable right of passage, and all before midday.

She hasn't got one knee to stand on

2008-08-23T15:17:00.006+01:00

With youth, by contrast, everything is new and fresh and a growing experience. The years between 18 and 28 are hugely formative. The influences on the heart, soul and brain are immense. With time, those influences become even stronger. I spent the ages of 18 to 20 in France, and even now, those times pop up in my night-time dreams. When I return to Paris, today, it is not the Paris of now that I experience, but the Paris of my 19th summer, and the ambience seems as familiar as the Sandymount streets of my childhood. That's what you bring to a relationship when you marry young: the total freshness and deep imprint of the brain's early formation.

Pacing eagerly today through the Independent's magazine in search of what looked like a very interesting piece on Lorraine Kelly, I stumbled upon Mary Kenny's article about (deep breath) that most sacred of institutions: marriage. I don't know why I read it, but I did. It's a terrible piece and, I do solemnly swear, Mary Kenny is a terrible writer. Today she writes that, at 19, Peaches Geldof has chosen the perfect time to marry because, later in life, it is the memories from that gilded era which will burn brightest. Of course, such fond, puissant memories are likely to set unrealistically high hopes for the second marriages which, later in life, young disciples of Kenny will inevitably be forced to pursue.

Je ne suis pas un photographe

2008-08-12T17:49:00.014+01:00

But like everything else in great demand, people try to own it.

On the internet, it is possible to find with some ease decent reproductions of just about any old painting. So it was not without some confusion yesterday that I was witness to great crowds in the Louvre spending less time looking directly at paintings than they did through the eyes of a camera or, worse, a camcorder. I had a sneaky glance at a few of of those screens, and what I saw captured was of invariably low-quality, generally off-centre, sometimes even partially obscured by the back of someone's head. Oh lordy!, I exclaimed, at the thought of those who, some time in the future, will be forced to sit down and endure the holiday spoils of those aspiring auteurs and photographes - including, particularly, the aspirants themselves.

[Pause]

2008-08-11T02:29:00.008+01:00

Livvy Thompson, sitting beyond David, deplored these women who talked baby-talk. She felt that her own appeal to me was more serious. 'Mr Armstrong has got to play in the next set,' she said warningly. 'Hoity-toity!' thought Betty Vermont (she never used the expression aloud, as she was not certain how one pronounced it: it was one of her inner luxuries).

There aren't many words that I would ever use in conversation whose pronunciation I would stumble upon. That is to be taken as much a testament to my inarticulacy as it is to my articulacy. It is true, I think, however, that in some cranial cavern or other, the reader imagines the words on the page pronounced by the voice inside his head, without which (or is it whom?) the music in prose would seldom be performed. Here's just one quick bar of notes which I generally omit from the, er, symphonies for fear of tripping over them: antipathetic, autochthonous, coeval, elegiac, epithet, inchoate, placable, stoical.

What about you lot?

Theatre of Dreams

2008-08-09T22:36:00.006+01:00

What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?

Sebald, on dreams, in The Rings of Saturn.

It's funny I should have come upon that passage today, because, as a lively dialogue progressed in a well-painted dream I had last night, I became concious that one of my characters, my little brother, did not know how he was to answer a question he was due to be asked. And sure enough, when the point of inquisition came along, despite attempts made to jog his memory, my brother stood stunned, everything stopped and I woke up. Not that funny, actually.

What manner of theatre is it, at all?

Déjà Vu

2008-08-09T04:53:00.014+01:00

Not bad, is it? The Valpincon Bather, it's called, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. It really impressed me when I saw it the other day.

Somewhere in the enisling prose of Ghosts, by John Banville, the narrator describes a murder which, I noticed, recalled another committed in The Book of Evidence, an earlier Banville novel. What an artful trick of Banville's, I thought, for keen readers of his work to enjoy. As it happens, Ghosts is actually a sequel to The Book of Evidence, a truth this keen reader failed to observe until some months later. Still, the idea of later work alluding to parts of earlier work for no particular reason remains an attractive one to me.

Say, is that who I, etc.?

Most Difficult

2008-08-03T23:09:00.013+01:00

Like the narrator in Molly Fox's Birthday, often home is just a place to crash - suggestive, perhaps, of some greater absence.

The first half of that sentence makes no sense, and the second half is terrified that it might. It comes from an Irish Times feature on Deirdre Madden, who has just completed her "most difficult" novel, Molly Fox's Birthday. Madden teaches literatures in Trinity and, by all available accounts, doesn't do so with any great degree of convention. Her classes, we've heard, point a keen eye on the anecdotal, on feelings towards and personal responses to the novel. Be that as it may, her novels seem to be fairly well-regarded, if prizes are anything to go by (an iffy if, to be sure). But however fawning, Sorcha Hamilton's feature does Madden few favours beyond flattery by comparison. I can't remember the last time I came across a less piercing, less interesting piece of literary journalism.

Her Crude Line

2008-07-29T02:00:00.003+01:00

I sat down to dinner yesterday with my girlfriend and a bottle of rosé.

"How is it?" I ask her. "Ah," she replies, "sure a rosé's a rosé's a rosé."

Mon Point de Départ

2008-07-26T02:14:00.009+01:00

What’s behind these last few posts about art, readers might wonder. There’s a type of person who moseys around art galleries when abroad, but rarely calls into their own country’s galleries during the rest of the year. I’m afraid that, going by the last few months' form at home, I can boast a fair likeness to the type. But it is not, as one might expect, my idle gallivanting through foreign galleries that has brought on this newfound enthusiasm - at least not exclusively. If what follows sounds a touch naïve, you will forgive it, I hope, as a harmless indulgence of gilded youth - spit, rub, haw, shine.

As I left the Tate last week, knowing just how little of its treasure I had actually appreciated, for just ten pounds I picked up a copy of Gombrich’s classic The Story of Art, a book which, now in its 16th edition, I had been intending to buy for some months, perhaps even years. It’s early days yet, I know, but I don’t think its any bold exaggeration to say it was the best ten pounds (or e12.63) I’ve ever spent in this, my short lifetime.

Gombrich’s is by no means an exhaustive account of art's history; and I, approaching its conclusion, am by no means a confident reader of art. But this simple, yet never simplified account has offered order where there previously was none, and in doing so has sparked in me the first real flames of interest which I think and hope will burn at varying heights for years to come. A cataract singes, and I begin tentatively to make unaided steps, linking the old and oft-explicated with the contemporary and largely unconsidered.

Pictured, for instance, is a piece entitled Fallen Star 1/5, which I saw in the Hayward the week before last. The angle on show here is not the installation's most dramatic. On the other side, there hangs lodged in this apartment block a model of the house artist Do Ho Suh grew up in. But on the side which I’ve offered, notice the three-tiered structure, and notice as well the internal development from the top floor to the bottom. On top, the rooms are unembellished and chaotic; in the middle, there is a dusty kind of order; and on the bottom, there is a sort of domestic austerity. Compare this with the development of, say, the Collosseum in Rome or the Doge's Palace in Venice, whose three tiers of columns progress formally from the Doric to the Ionic to the Corinthian.

It is certainly no great insight on my part, of course. But to notice, unaided, the similarities between two works some far departed from one another, both formally and temporally, even if the similarities don’t prove exact, is encouraging and, in a ludicrously nerdy way, tremendously exciting. What a happy coincidence it is that as this new quarter of creativity begins to open in my mind, on my feet I find myself strolling through the quartiers of Paris.

The Bloody Crossroads

2008-07-25T20:45:00.007+01:00

In a dust-jacket blurb, Gore Vidal says he has been asked if he wishes to nominate a successor, "a dauphin or delfino", and names Hitchens. It's a wise choice, no doubt, but is it appropriate? Hitchens is far warmer, far more ruggedly alive, than the Doge of Ravello, who, as he enters what he once wittily called the "springtime of his senescence" - he was speaking of Ronald Reagan, the "acting President" - has taken to repeating himself with wearying regularity, in many forums, and often in exactly the same words, as if in his aristocratic jadedness he believed that no one nowadays reads more than one newspaper or journal or listens to more than one radio or television talk show.

It's usually interesting to learn what one writer I admire thinks of another's writing. Now, Christopher Hitchens wouldn't be someone whom I, a fickle mistress, could still profess to admire. But things were once otherwise, and so Hitchens remains, at the very least, a writer whose work (past and passing) I am fairly well versed in. A nice surprise, then, to happen upon this Irish Times review of Hitchens's Unacknowledged Legislation by John Banville. Nicer still, to be treated to a few words on Gore Vidal. It's not dated, but I imagine the review was published almost a decade ago, just after Unacknowledged Legislation was published and just before Hitchens lost all his old friends.

I think it's about time that Banville released an edition of selected non-fiction before this fickle mistress loses interest.

The Uncertainty of the Father

2008-07-25T18:20:00.009+01:00

Because, until recently, I've never really invested any time to getting a grip on art, what I will boldly and broadly call Expressionism has never been a particularly strong point of mine. Though its subtleties might go unnoticed, any novice can admire, say, a Renaissance painting for its faithful rendering of nature. Expressionism rarely throws such a large bone to the unschooled.

So it was with some sympathy then that I stood in front of this, The Uncertainty of the Poet, and heard beside me an enthusiastic father explain to his young daughter that bananas were used here to suggest something exotic and distant. Moments later, his daughter marched closer to the painting and read the few words the gallery had to offer on it: "In contrast," she read aloud and quizzically, "the passing train and perishable bananas suggest a sense of the contemporary and immediate." Yes! We have no bananas.

Art is hard, but somehow, parenting looks harder.

Dealt With

2008-07-25T00:24:00.010+01:00

Until last weekend, I'd never been to a music festival. Because I never know what to do at concerts - dance, sway, mime or, worse, sing? - they'd never really interested me. Which was all fine, because Irish festivals aren't cheap.

But for a variety of reasons - mainly peer pressure - I found myself last Friday sitting beside a cheap, just-about-erected tent, at something called Melt!, in a place called Ferropolis, which was once, I have led myself to believe, the bustling heart of East Germany's steel industry. But now that the industry is no more, the quarry is left to its proletariat, driven by drink to the very edge of sanity and tripped by its own bootlaces, only to be gripped some hours later by a rising sun and doomed to the hazy, harsh terrain of on-coming sobriety. This is Ferropolis, City of Steel.

At one stage in the trip, after I'd sat down on a bench very alone, I was approached by a group of rough-looking Germans. For about 5 seconds, as they blabbered away threateningly in German, I was sure I was about to be mugged. English, I said, I only speak English. They duly translated what had gone before. The moment I realised I was not being mugged, but instead being asked to join them for some group sex was, I think, the most hilarious, and yet most terrifying instant of my life.

I think that'll be my last festival, too, so.

And there's always music in the air

2008-07-24T19:43:00.007+01:00

I landed in Paris yesterday evening, but last week I went to the Tate Modern and saw, amongst others, this piece by Francis Bacon. Though I am at last making an effort, as far as art is concerned my frame of reference is unimpressive. But that foreboding red behind those pained reptilian figures: David Lynch has seen this, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, and it doesn't take an Agent Cooper to figure that one out.

Close Proximity

2008-07-13T18:40:00.004+01:00

I read so many books and magazines, life is too short to engage with what's going on online. Most of it is written so clumsily. It hasn't got the attention to prose style that the publications I write for would demand.

So says Philip French in today's Observer when asked for his thoughts on the supposed conflict between critics and bloggers. Philip French is a wonderful critic, a real figure of authorthy in the world of cinema. But it's unfortunate given his position above that, of all the magisterial criticism French has penned in his 50 years as a critic, The Observer lifts this line from his 1994 review of Pulp Fiction: 'Like Tarantino, the speakers are highly self-conscious; they live in close proximity to Hollywood and are fed by its myths.'

Close proximity? Oh, Philip, how clumsy!

Music for a Big Think

2008-07-08T14:11:00.006+01:00

Scarecrow and a yellow moon,
and pretty soon a carnival on the edge of town,
King Harvest has surely come.

All that talk of scarecrows, the night and fertility; it's like something out of Pound, whom I haven't really ever read, much less understood. But sure, anyway.

I don't listen to as much music as I think most people my age do. I've never owned an i-Pod, and most of the CDs belonging to my (once not inconsiderable) collection have, somehow, gone missing. I have loads of empty Dylan, Waits and Cave cases. But I'm down to just a few old Scott Walker albums, at this stage, and only because they were purchased within the last year. See, just as I'm not the collector I was once, nor I am the customer I once was. I download, of course, but sparingly. One record I will buy again before I leave the country, though, is Music From the Big Pink by The Band. I've listened to little else other than The Band in the last few weeks, perhaps months, even.

Fuckin' choons, like.

Speculation at the Mountain

2008-07-06T10:12:00.004+01:00

In 1996, BBC Radio aired a speculative account, written by John Banville, the encounter between Paul Celan, who was kept during the war in a Romanian internment camp, and Martin Heidegger, the philosopher and avowed Nazi. For 100 euro, you could get your mitts of Conversation in the Mountains, a limited edition of the play with illustrative paintings by Donald Teskey.

There are just 350 copies for sale, and much as I'm tempted, I haven't really got 100 euro to throw around at the minute. I can't find the BBC recording available anywhere online. Hopefully, The Gallery Press will put out a less expensive edition of the play, as it has done with Long Lankin, Nightspawn and Banville's three versions of Kleist plays.

The Elegant Variation has more, including a short interview with John Banville himself.

As I Was Saying

2008-07-04T16:01:00.006+01:00

I've said little in recent weeks not because I've had little to say, but because my time has been otherwise occupied. I spent a not entirely disagreeable month after my (successful!) exams working as a cleaning-lady in Trinity in an attempt earn enough money to spend the rest of the summer in Europe with my girlfriend. Whether I've succeeded remains to be seen. But for now it looks as though the spirit of dolce far niente will reign tentatively over the summer's remaining months. And so today the silence ends.

On the 11th of this month we're leaving Dublin for London. On the 16th we're off to Berlin to stay with friends, with whom we're then going to Melt! festival. Finally (I think), on the 23rd of July we're flying to Paris, where we'll stay until sometime in late August. With some luck and (more importantly) motivation, I'll be able to throw up a few more travel posts than I did last year. After Paris, I'm going to try get down to the Flat Lake Festival, which Copernicus told me was great last year. In his own words, it better not be shit.

In the meantime - and in the same vein as Rick and Sinead - these above are the books I'm going to bring with me. There's nothing in the way of poetry apart from Thom Gunn, whose work I am finally beginning to understand due in some part to his book of essays, Shelf Life. he The relative dearth of poetry can be blamed, like most ills, on the university; there are a few collections of French poetry which I have to buy for next year. Better to buy them for next to nothing in France than to be taken to the cleaning-ladies in Ireland.

An Interlude

2008-06-18T17:54:00.004+01:00

My pause for thought, though coming to an end, is not yet fully spent. But I break my silence here to say that The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald, which I read yesterday, intoxicated by the sobriety of its prose, is a towering masterpiece of contemporary literature.

And everybody should read it.

Sun Ji-Sigh

2008-04-28T17:34:00.004+01:00

I'm a Manchester City fan. Have been since childhood. It's a strange club to support: though we'll topple our fair share of giants every season, we'll invariably throw those points away to teams we really should not. As the years pass, you learn to deal with this, our strange kind of mediocrity. Last Saturday, at home to 19th place Fulham, leading comfortably, two-nil up with just 20 minutes to left to play, we fell apart. Man City 2 - 3 Fulham. Still, nothing shocking. The first City match I went to was, I think, in 1993, when City gave away another two-goal lead - this time, to rivals United. Man City 2 - 3 Man United, that one ended. Saturday's game's pattern mirrored our season's; its result's reality typified our temperament. But City fans long ago learned to live with it.

Sun Ji-Hai gave away yet another penalty on Saturday, though. I really wish he'd stop doing that.

Pierre Bonnard, Nu dans le bain au petit chien (1941-46)

2008-04-27T22:02:00.005+01:00

"J’espère que ma peinture tiendra, sans craquelures. Je voudrais arriver devant les jeunes peintres de l’an 2000 avec des ailes de papillon."

This Fella, Ronaldo

2008-04-24T15:33:00.004+01:00

There isn't much RTE does well. But their post-match analysis, however unsightly, is consistently brilliant. Johnny Giles looks like a cigarette, Liam Bradey like a potato. Eamon Dunphy, a terrible writer, is football's most loquacious philosopher. And Bill O' Herlihy, well, he's some chancer. Three giants of punditry, and their mate. Consistently brilliant, I say, but if Ronaldo disappointed last night, our parliament of sages simply outdid itself.

Reading Themselves, Not Others

2008-04-23T11:22:00.003+01:00

David Maybury, on auto-analysis.

Whereof one cannot speak well, thereof one must echo

2008-04-23T10:51:00.006+01:00

I spent last night frantically research an essay (now overdue) on Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For the first time, I consciously noticed that, when reading a book taken from the library, I scan a few underlined passages of the chapter I'm reading to see if the scibblers of old were researching the same essay. And if I decide that they were, I pay more heed to the passages they deemed important.

The only way I can imagine this essay being particularly original, is if it first finds its feet on the wrong side of sense. Ah, le silence vertébral indispose la voile licite.

Sons of a Gunn

2008-04-22T15:41:00.002+01:00

All young men are unhappy. That’s why they identify so strongly with Hamlet. They’re unhappy in a formless kind of way, partly because they don’t have an identity, they don’t know where they’re going, they don’t know who they are. You’re a pretty unusual person—something slightly sinister—if at the age of twenty or twenty-two you really know exactly who you are and what you’re going to do. More likely you’re undefined, and being undefined is rather painful. I don’t know that I was more sorry for myself than anybody else was. I was trying to be brave about it too. Of course, I was striking postures.

Thom Gunn, quoted in the invaluable, though generally inaccessible Paris Review, 1995.

Minimalist Art

2008-04-21T13:12:00.003+01:00

Not that the mail he brings is always consoling. "No culture has a pact with eternity," he says. "The conditions which made possible the giants of the western poetic, aesthetic, philosophic tradition no longer really obtain." Steiner doesn't believe "there can be a Hamlet without a ghost, a Missa Solemnis without a missa", and if you say that the questions addressed by religion are "nonsense or baby talk or trivial, I don't believe that certain dimensions will be available to you. Particularly today, when the atheist case is being put, if I may say so, with such vulgarity of mind." Most writing "seems to me too often, in this country, at the moment, a minimalist art.

Saturday's Guardian carried an interview with George Steiner. It's all very interesting. I'll offer a few words of my own sometime this week; I promise an end to this silence, this minimalist art.

Frankly Unusual

2008-04-10T17:40:00.006+01:00

I left Ireland at 11am yesterday for Frankfurt with a group of friends. It rained there constantly, most clubs were closed, there were very few people around and the city looked very little like it does in this picture. Our flight, which we boarded fatigued and filthy, left an airport 120 kilometres from Frankfurt at 6am. But it wasn't half bad.

Magnums and Lego

2008-04-04T20:36:00.005+01:00

Henri-Cartier Bresson cubed.

An Appeal

2008-04-02T15:35:00.003+01:00

Allow me to paraphrase, for right now, I can do nothing but: 'A civilised man is one capable of living with two contradictory consciously in mind at once.' I'm nearing the end of an essay on Baudelaire. He's really very good. What I need is the actual quote which, I believe, belongs to one Carl Gustav Jung.

I'd ring Ray D'Arcy's Fix-It Friday, only the essay is due on Friday morning.

Old Scribbles

2008-03-31T18:49:00.004+01:00

The critic and essayist John Berger wrote that the problem with painting mountains is that the subject inevitably dwarfs technique: Nature reveals art to be a tiny thing.

I found this in my notepad. Not sure when I wrote it or where I first saw it. It must be a year or two old now - long before I ever read John Berger, in any case. But I like it.

Poem of the Day XX: je veult chanter

2008-03-31T12:56:00.001+01:00

The Antiquities of Rome, II, by Joachim du Bellay

The Babylonian will boast of his high walls
And hanging gardens; Greece Will describe the
Ancient construction of its Ephesian temple
And the people of the Nile will sing their pyramids.

That same, still vaunting Greece will proclaim
The Olympian image of its great Jupiter;
The Mausoleum will be the Carian glory;
And Crete will not forget its old labyrinth.

The ancient Rhodian will raise the glory
Of his famous Colossus to the temple of
Memory, and if any other work can boast

That it deserves to join this company, someone more
Eloquent will tell of it. As for me, in place of all these,
I wish to sing the Seven Hills of Rome, Seven Wonder of the World.

Come on, Eileen

2008-03-29T18:02:00.008Z

There are, to my mind, two things in the enterprise literary or cinematic journalism which, when fused, announce amateurism louder than any other failings can: reviewing an old book or film for no particular reason, and then remaining more or less within the parameters of synopsis. It is on this injurious marriage that the pages of university art magazines are generally founded. This year, for instance, Trinity News published, under the guise of a review, a quick run-through of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty 3 years after it had won the Booker Prize. Martin Amis received a similarly gushing review for his memoir, published no less than eight years ago. I wouldn't mind this instance, for it could so easily have been made relevant, but the reviewer offered no mention (indeed, seemed entirely unaware) of the disrepute into which Amis fils had only recently thrown himself. Instead, on the strength of his Experience (published in 2000), Amis was pronounced "the wittiest man alive." Not even in 2000, kid.

In today's Irish Times, incidentally, Eileen Battersby revisits Franz Kafka's The Trial. In case you were wondering, Kafka's parabolic masterpiece has not been recently re-translated. Nor is it marked by any significant anniversary. And it certainly isn't afforded the privilege of any new or original insights on the part of Ms. Battersby. Still, though, if you can't be bothered to read it, this is for you. The series, in which Ms. Battersby revisits classic titles to ensure they have not changed, continues next week in our paper of record.

Poem of the Day XIX: standing on the street

2008-03-28T12:14:00.002Z

Proletarian Portrait, by William Carlos Williams

A big young bareheaded woman
in an apron

Her hair slicked back standing
on the street

One stockinged foot toeing
the sidewalk

Her shoe in her hand. Looking
intently into it

She pulls out the paper insole
to find the nail

That has been hurting her

Édouard Vuillard, The Green Interior (1891)

2008-03-27T21:41:00.003Z

Poem of the Day XVIII: the insidious mastery of song

2008-03-27T17:54:00.002Z

Piano, by D.H. Lawrence

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

Poem of the Day XVII: a storm-tossed banner

2008-03-26T16:58:00.002Z

From The Gift of Harun al-Rashid, by W.B. Yeats

And now my utmost mystery is out.
A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner;
Under it wisdom stands, and I alone —
Of all Arabia’s lovers I alone —
Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lost
In the confusion of its night-dark folds,
Can hear the armed man speak.

A Study of Reading Habits

2008-03-25T12:08:00.004Z

When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my coat and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.

There was a time (before I left school) when, if it came to close of day and I had not yet read a newspaper, I felt incredibly guilty. One particularly uppity teacher once struck at some hidden chord when she positively denounced us, a classroom full of 16 year olds, for not knowing where, on that day, the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, was. What made me feel terrible was not that I didn't know where George Bush was, but that I didn't call the bitch on her mistake, because I wasn't absolutely sure that Richard Nixon was dead. From that day on, for about about three years, I read an entire newspaper everyday - sometimes including business pages.

I no longer read a newspaper everyday, nor do I feel guilty about it. I go to a Protestant University now. Sometimes, I go a whole week without scanning even the pages of something so frivolous as the Guardian's G2. But I did catch this piece in the Daily Telegraph about Philip Hensher, who claimed in the Observer a while back to have read 5 novels a week, every week, since he was 5 years old. I'm sure Hensher has read enough by now to put any of his Tapton teachers down. He may now desist.

Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.

Poem of the Day XVI: in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat

2008-03-25T11:25:00.002Z

The Windhover, by Gerard Manly Hopkins

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Poem of the Day XV: quand on ont dix-sept ans

2008-03-24T16:56:00.005Z

Novel, by Arthur Rimbaud

I

We aren't serious when we're seventeen
- One fine evening, to hell with beer and lemonade,
noisy cafes with their shining lamps !
We walk under the green linden trees of the park.

The lindens smell good in the good June evenings !
At times the air is so scented that we close our eyes.
The wind laden with sounds - the town isn't far -
has the smell of grapevines and beer...

II

There you can see a very small patch
of darkblue, framed by a little branch,
pinned up by a naughty star, that melts
in gentle quivers, small and very white.

Night in June ! Seventeen years old ! - We are overcome by it all.
The sap is champagne and goes to our head...
We talked a lot and feel a kiss on our lips.
Trembling there like a small insect...

III

Our wild heart moves through novels like Robinson Crusoe,
when, in the light of a pale street lamp,
a girl goes by attractive and charming
under the collar of her father's terrible collar...

And as she finds you incredibly naive,
while clicking her little boots,
she turns abruptly and in a lively way...
- Then cavatinas die on your lips...

IV

You are in love. Occupied until the month of August.
You are in love. - Your sonnets make her laugh.
All your friends go off, you are ridiculous.
- Then one evening, the girl you worship
deigned to write to you !

That evening,... you return to the bright cafes,
you ask for beer or lemonade...
We're not serious when we're seventeen.
And when we have green linden trees in the park...

Rise and Fall

2008-03-24T12:49:00.003Z

There's a great post and subsequent thread on the rise in journalism courses and their value over at Shane Hegarty's Present Tense. The rise of journalism courses comes with the fall of journalistic standards.

Post hoc ergo prompter hoc?

Poem of the Day XIV: on this good friday

2008-03-21T13:36:00.003Z

And death shall have no dominion, by Dylan Thomas

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Poem of the Day XIII: the song was wordless

2008-03-20T14:13:00.003Z

Everyone Sang, by Siegfried Sassoon

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of
sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will
never be done.

Poem of the Day XII: i have stood still and stopped

2008-03-19T23:16:00.000Z

Acquainted with the Night, by Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Strange, I speculate, that Frost chose to write sixteen lines, with a metre more or less set, and still refuse the traditional sonnet. In response, my girlfriend pronounces: "Make it new." I have been one acquainted with the light.

Poem of the Day XI: turned endlessly by a sleepy seamstress

2008-03-18T23:51:00.000Z

From The Sea, by John Banville

Anna died before dawn. To tell the truth, I was not there when it happened. I had walked out on to the steps of the nursing home to breathe deep the black and lustrous air of morning. And in that moment, so calm and drear, I recalled another moment, long ago, in the sea that summer at Ballyless. I had gone swimming alone, I do not know why, or where Chloe and Myles might have been; perhaps they had gone with their parents somewhere, it would have been one of the last trips they made together, perhaps the very last. The sky was hazed over and not a breeze stirred the surface of the sea, at the margin of which the small waves were breaking in a listless line, over and over, like a hem being turned endlessly by a sleepy seamstress. There were few people on the beach, and those few were at a distance from me, and something in the dense, unmoving air made the sound of their voices seem to come from a great distance still. I was standing up to my waist in water that was perfectly transparent, so that I could plainly see below me the ribbed sand of the seabed, and tiny shells and bits of a crab's broken claw, and my own feet, pallid and alien, like specimens displayed under glass. As I stood there, suddenly, no, not suddenly, but in a sort of driving heave, the whole sea surged, it was not a wave, but a smooth rolling swell that seemed to come up from the deeps, as if something vast down there had stirred itself, and I was lifted briefly and carried a little way toward the shore and then was set down on my feet as before, as if nothing had happened. And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

A nurse came out then to fetch me, and I turned and followed her inside, and it was as if I were walking into the sea.

Speaking recently at UCD about Samuel Beckett's late period, John Banville paraphrased (and did an impression of) the late John McGahern. He said that there are three types of writing: there's prose, there's verse and there's poetry. And most of the time the poetry's in the prose.

PC Gone Mad

2008-03-17T23:47:00.003Z

"Narcissism is a great motivator," to quote myself. There's an interview with me in this month's spectacular edition of PC Live. A picture, too.

Poem of the Day X: and if the thames weren't so filthy

2008-03-17T19:08:00.004Z

London, by William Blake

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

Poem of the Day IX: but o, photography! as no art is

2008-03-13T14:49:00.007Z

The Photograph, by Constantine Cavafy

In this obscene photograph sold in the street
secretly (have to watch out for the police),
in this whorish photograph,
how could there be such a dream-like face?
How did you get in here?

Who knows what a degrading, vulgar life you lead;
how horrible the surroundings must have been
when you posed to have this picture taken;
what a cheap soul you must have.
But in spite of all this, and even more, you remain for me
the dream-like face, the figure
shaped for and dedicated to the Hellenic kind of pleasure-
that's how you remain for me
and how my poetry speaks about you.

Almost 21

2008-03-12T17:48:00.003Z

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am venti—I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman, reinterpreted by Starbucks.

Poem of the Day VIII: the five kings count the dead

2008-03-12T15:36:00.002Z

The Hand That Signed the Paper, by Dylan Thomas

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.

Poem of the Day VII: one of your holiday games

2008-03-11T17:39:00.005Z

Macavity's a Mystery Cat, T.S. Eliot

Macavity's a Mystery Cat: he's called the Hidden Paw -
For he's the master criminal who can defy the Law.
He's the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad's despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime - Macavity's not there!

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.
His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare,
And when you reach the scene of crime - Macavity's not there!
You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air -
But I tell you once and once again, Macavity's not there!

Mcavity's a ginger cat, he's very tall and thin;
You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in.
His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed;
His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed.
He sways his head from side to side, with movements like a snake;
And when you think he's half asleep, he's always wide awake.

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
For he's a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity.
You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square -
But when a crime's discovered, then Macavity's not there!

He's outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)
And his footprints are not found in any file of Scotland Yard's.
And when the larder's looted, or the jewel-case is rifled,
Or when the milk is missing, or another Peke's been stifled,
Or the greenhouse glass is broken, and the trellis past repair -
Ay, there's the wonder of the thing! Macavity's not there!

And when the Foreign Office find a Treaty's gone astray,
Or the Admiralty lose some plans and drawings by the way,
There may be a scrap of paper in the hall or on the stair -
But it's useless to investigate - Macavity's not there!
And when the loss has been disclosed, the Secret Service say:
`It must have been Macavity!' - but he's a mile away.
You'll be sure to find him resting, or a-licking of his thumbs,
Or engaged in doing complicated long-division sums.

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.
He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:
At whatever time the deed took place - MACAVITY WASN'T THERE!
And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known
(I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone)
Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time
Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime!

The Guardian starts its Great Poets of the Twentieth Century series today. Craig Raine tries to demonstrate the humour of T.S. Eliot, and does a stellar job, too. But, while he draws astutely on the dark and the clever and the prankish humour of the Nobel Laureate, he overlooks the most obvious source of humour, fun, a source on which Eliot drew in abundance. Macavity The Mystery Cat is a star (the star, for me) of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Eliot's set of fanciful feline poems.

Temperence: the Horror!

2008-03-10T16:48:00.004Z

Story: "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" (pdf), (html)

Meeting: Monday, March 10, 8.00 p.m. (GMT)

I'll be calling over to Fustar's this evening for the first in the new series of Dreadful Thoughts discussions. The idea is that we all read Oh, Whistle before 8pm tonight, click over to Fustar's gaff and have a few drinks as we discuss the story. I'll be honest, I'd like this virtual discussion to imitate reality's. If nobody turns up annoyingly drunk, I'll be bit disappointed.

Poem of the Day VI: from such a local row

2008-03-10T15:30:00.001Z

Epic, by Patrick Kavanagh

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffeys shouting "Damn your soul"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel —
"Here is the march along these iron stones".
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

And There Was Blood

2008-03-09T15:03:00.003Z

Mark Kermode's film review podcast is just great. He recommends that, if you plan on seeing There Will Be Blood, you should buy five cinema seats. One to sit on and the four surrounding it to leave empty. Though admittedly I did not follow his advice, buying just the one ticket, I still felt a little put out sitting, as I was, next to a group of girls who had either been completely desensitised to physical and emotional violence or, leaving their bodies in front of There Will Be Blood, had spiritually left that screen to go watch a different, more humourous film.

In any case, I was blown away. I love all these dusty films.

Poem of the Day V: let be be the finale of seem

2008-03-07T11:20:00.004Z

The Emperor of Ice-Cream, by Wallace Stevens

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

I had intended to begin this series with 'The Emperor of Ice-Cream', but somehow a theme - things related to Nick Cave and his new album - developed into which, I thought, this poem did not fit. I've read it over a few times since and, now, though I was going to post it today anyway, I really think it does fit our (broad) theme or pattern. Cave doesn't think Lazarus wanted to be raised - "I mean he, he never asked to be raised from the tomb" - and suggests, in fact, that Lazarus got a raw deal out of Christ's greatest miracle. Though Stevens writes not of Lazarus, 'The Emperor of Ice-Cream' expounds of philosophy which would, if practiced, keep Lazarus wrapped in grave-cloths. "Le be be the finale of seem." In other words, let what actually is become the end of what seems to be.

Jesus Christ, for God's sake, just let Lazarus be.

Poem of the Day IV: dig yourself

2008-03-07T01:46:00.002Z

Digging, by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Again, I'm a little rushed. The link here is, again, pretty obvious, but this time, a lot more tenuous and a lot less imaginative.

Poem of the Day III: charged with life

2008-03-05T15:49:00.006Z

Head of Hair, by Charles Baudelaire

O fleecy hair, falling in curls to the shoulders!
O black locks! O perfume laden with nonchalance!
Ecstasy! To people the dark alcove tonight
With memories sleeping in that thick head of hair.
I would like to shake it in the air like a scarf!

Sweltering Africa and languorous Asia,
A whole far-away world, absent, almost defunct,
Dwells in your depths, aromatic forest!
While other spirits glide on the wings of music,
Mine, O my love! floats upon your perfume.

I shall go there, where trees and men, full of vigor,
Are plunged in a deep swoon by the heat of the land;
Heady tresses be the billows that carry me away!
Ebony sea, you hold a dazzling dream
Of rigging, of rowers, of pennons and of masts:

A clamorous harbor where my spirit can drink
In great draughts the perfume, the sound and the color;
Where the vessels gliding through the gold and the moire
Open wide their vast arms to embrace the glory
Of a clear sky shimmering with everlasting heat.

I shall bury my head enamored with rapture
In this black sea where the other is imprisoned;
And my subtle spirit caressed by the rolling
Will find you once again, O fruitful indolence,
Endless lulling of sweet-scented leisure!

Blue-black hair, pavilion hung with shadows,
You give back to me the blue of the vast round sky;
In the downy edges of your curling tresses
I ardently get drunk with the mingled odors
Of oil of coconut, of musk and tar.

A long time! Forever! my hand in your thick mane
Will scatter sapphires, rubies and pearls,
So that you will never be deaf to my desire!
Aren't you the oasis of which I dream, the gourd
From which I drink deeply, the wine of memory?

Time constrains me today - blame Bertrand Russel. But Baudelaire is pretty cool. Anyway, this one is fairly self-explanatory.

If he only knew

2008-03-04T10:07:00.005Z

[via 3quarksdaily] Did anyone else notice that the artist (pictured 1.34) bears a striking resemblance to what, if he only knew, would presumably be another of Bush's favourites, Martin Amis.

Poem of the Day II: he that believeth in me

2008-03-04T01:25:00.009Z

Lazarus Not Raised, by Thom Gunn

He was not changed. His friends around the grave
Stared down upon his greasy placid face
Bobbing on shadows; nothing it seemed could save
His body now from the sand below their wave
The scheduled miracle not taking place.

He lay inert beneath those outstretched hands
hich beckoned him to life. Though coffin case
Was ready to hold life and winding hands
At his first stir ould loose the frozen glands,
The scheduled miracle did not take place.

O Lazarus, distended body laid
Glittering without weight on death's surface.
Rise now before you sink, we dare not wade
Into that sad marsh where (the mourners cried)
The scheduled miracle cannot take place.

When first aroused and given thoughts and breath
He chose to amble at an easy pace
In childhood fields imaginary and safe -
Much like the trivial territory of death
(The miracle had not yet taken place).

He chose to spend his thoughts like this at first
And disregard the nag of offered grace,
Then chose to spend the rest of them in rest.
The final effort came, forward we pressed
To see the scheduled miracle take place:

Abrubtly the corpse blinked and shook his head
Then sank again, sliding without a trace
From sight, to take slime on the deepest bed
Of vacancy. He had chosen to stay dead,
The scheduled miracle did not take place.

Nothing else changed. I saw somebody peer,
Stooping, into the oblong box of space.
His friends had done their best: without such fear,
Without that terrified awakening glare,
The scheduled miracle would have taken place.

As the week marches on, there may emerge here a theme, of sorts. Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds' new album, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, is born of Cave's childhood fascination and terror at the miracle of Lazarus. "We are all, of course, in awe of the greatest of Christ's miracles - raising a man from the dead - but I couldn't help but wonder how Lazarus felt about it. As a child it gave me the creeps, to be honest." In one sense, 'Lazarus Not Raised' concurs with Cave. Lazarus isn't particularly interested in coming back to life. In another sense, though, it's an altogether more impowering thought than Cave's. In Gunn's poem, Lazarus doesn't want to be raised, so he simply is not raised. In Cave's new effort, he's raised, indeed. Raised to New York City, where his second shot at life isn't going so well.

Well New York City man, San Francisco, LA, I don't know
But Larry grew increasingly neurotic and obscene
I mean he, he never asked to be raised from the tomb
I mean no one ever actually asked him to forsake his dreams
He ended up like so many of them do, back on the streets of New York City
In a soup queue, a dopefiend, a slave, then prison, then the madhouse, then the grave
Ah poor Larry
But what do we really know of the dead - and who actually cares?
Well, I don't know what it is but there's definiately something going on upstairs.

ce noir océan où l'autre est enfermé

2008-03-03T20:35:00.005Z

To kiss her milk-white throat, a dark curtain of black hair
Smothered me, my lover with her beautiful black hair
The smell of it is heavy. It is charged with life
On my fingers the smell of her deep black hair

Full of all my whispered words, her black hair
And wet with tears and good-byes, her hair of deepest black
All my tears cried against her milk-white throat
Hidden behind the curtain of her beautiful black hair

So, we knew Nick Cave liked black hair, but it wasn't until just over a week ago, when the Guardian interviewed Cave to publicise the release of the new Bad Seeds album, that we found out just how much. When asked if, at the age of 50, his hair was still as naturally black as, say, a quarter-century ago, Cave shot back, "I've been dyeing my hair since I was 16." Shock! When asked what colour it would be without dye, he replied aghast, "I hate to think."

Pronounced Dejection

2008-03-03T14:32:00.007Z

I read and enjoyed Philip Roth's first published work, Goodbye Columbus and five short stories, just a few days ago. There's a Jewish Chaplain in Defender of the Faith, one of the short stories, who speaks "syllable by syllable, almost - as though to communicate, above all, with the lip readers in his audience." He reappears hilariously as a Rabbi, his oratorical habit amplified, in Roth's veritable triumph Portnoy's Complaint. Roth was 26, only six years older than I am now, when he won the America's National Book Prize for this, Goodbye Columbus, and the 5 short stories with which it was published.

That's an in-cred-ib-ly dis-heart-en-ing re-flec-ti-on.

Poem of the Day I: afresh, afresh, afresh

2008-03-03T02:45:00.007Z

The Trees, by Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

As part of a personal effort to read a more poetry, I'm going to post one poem here every day. I'll do my best not to draw too heavily on the usual suspects with whom secondary school has familiarised us. And nope, I won't let them just be. Nope, I won't just let them be. Nope, I just won't let them be. Nope, nope, nope. I'm going to try to make some contribution to each post. This poem, 'The Trees' by Philip Larkin, I've chosen for obvious reasons. Namely, that this series is a new departure, of sorts. As well as that, though none of the deciduous trees in sight look particularly leafy or even fresh, it will surely soon be seasonally apt. Larkin's 'almost' conveys an appropriate reluctance on nature's part, in any case.

Larkin's treatment of that reluctance is interesting. Though he describes nature's pronouncements as reluctant or tentative - "almost", "seem to say" he reports them as if they were anything but - "last year is dead", "begin afresh, afresh, afresh". This is Philip Larkin, a notoriously dour poet, willing some optimism into the world without quite putting his name to it.

Cheat Street

2008-03-02T14:07:00.004Z

To some degree or another, blogging poses a threat to traditional, mainstream journalism. Anything written or said, though, about the challenge journalism now faces usually concludes that, although the opinion pages of newspapers are in some danger, blogging will never replace reportage - the traditional business of journalism - because blogging, like newspaper comment, relies so heavily on the stuff of that traditional business, the reported fact. Of course, this argument assumes a certain competence, care and energy on the part of the reporter. A misplaced assumption, according to this review. Whereas journalists are supposed to be disinterested, increasingly, they are simply uninterested.

So only 12 per cent of what is in the papers consists of a story that a reporter has found out and pursued on her own initiative; and only 12 per cent of key facts are checked. The rest is all rewritten wire copy and PR. This remaining 88 per cent is, in Davies’s stinging coinage, ‘churnalism’. No wonder the papers feel a bit thin.

...

The boffins in Cardiff found that 30 per cent of home news stories are direct rewrites of PA and other news agency copy; another 19 per cent are ‘largely reproduced’ from this copy; another 21 per cent ‘contained elements’ of it. That’s 70 per cent of news stories wholly or in part from wire copy. The general rule in journalism, increasingly honoured more in the breach than the observance, is that a story has to have two sources to be confirmed, but according to BBC guidelines, ‘the Press Association can be treated as a confirmed, single source.’ That practice is widespread.

You should really read the whole thing.

The Boy Who Doesn't Blog Anymore

2008-03-02T13:19:00.005Z

The boy who doesn't blog anymore. That's how Rick O'Shea described me, as I rose from my seat to collect the food stamps I'd won in last night's raffle. I'm just happy to have somebody take note of the relative silence around this once bustling corridor of the internet. As exam season approaches and procrastination begins in earnest, I promise to make an effort to create more noise in the next few weeks and months. Because, damn it, I want more than food stamps next year.

Very nice to see everybody I saw, by the way.

Seriously Like

2008-02-29T13:54:00.006Z

The Trinity student union elections are finished with for another year. I was at the count last night. Some people take these things very, very seriously. Tempers, tempers, tempers, tears. And O! The injustice of it all! Commiserations to quasi-joke-candidate and Best President Trinity Never Had, my dear friend Robert Donohoe. I expect tomorrow evening to be as bitchy, narcissistic and volatile as last night. Anything less, people, and I'll be quite seriously disappointed.

Ill Received, Ill Relayed

2008-02-19T23:59:00.003Z

John Banville will be speaking on "Beckett's Last Words," in UCD at 7 o'clock tomorrow evening. I know nothing more than that.

Pale Fire

2008-02-19T23:02:00.004Z

To save or to burn it. To save or to burn it?

I was going to write something in favour of publishing Nabokov's final, incomplete novel. But it struck me that, having not read his existing oeuvre in its entirety, I'm probably not in any position to ask for more. Not until I've finished my greens.

LOOK WHAT I HAVE - THE ARTS & CULTURE LONG LIST

2008-01-30T18:17:00.000Z

Look everyone! The Arts & Culture long list for the 2008 Irish Blog Awards. No sign of this blog. Oh, how we've fallen. But, in any case, good lucks and congratulations to all the lucky, lucky, lucky nominees.

No Everywoman

2008-01-27T14:09:00.000Z

Flaubert’s bleak and unpitying view of his unfulfilled heroine, and, to be fair, all his other characters, is not automatically reflected by Christie, who takes a lively tone that relishes the detailed scenes — a country wedding, a smart ball — and sees the absurdity in trying to be happy while married to a dull doctor in Normandy.

Says somebody initialed KR in today's Sunday Times. Of course, there is no necessary or universal absurdity in trying to be happy while married to a dull doctor in Normandy. Many people - dull housewives, for instance - could be very happy indeed while living with a dull doctor in Normandy. Rather, Madame Bovary highlights the particular absurdity in the romanticist, Emma Bovary, trying to be happy while married to a dull doctor in Normandy.

A small, humourless, but important distinction, that.

Very Blue Velvet

2008-01-25T16:09:00.000Z

Perhaps David Lynch's most popular cinematic effort, Blue Velvet was so emphatic in its depiction of women as subservient to men that Lynch was actually accused of misogyny. There's a scene in the film anyway in which Jeffrey Beaumont finds himself spying on Dorothy Vallens as she gets changed. Lynch offers us a view of Vallens, played by Isabella Rossolini, from behind, in all her glory, and though I can't locate the view in question, readers are invited to revisit to film at 10pm this evening on Channel 6, so that they, too, might make the the comparison, which is really rather striking, with the recently published photograph of Simone De Beauvoir, in all her glory. I'm sure Simone would have found it all very appropriate.

Domino's Affect

2008-01-24T22:08:00.000Z

"I have traveled more than any one else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent." - Mark Twain

The concept and reality of accent has for a long time fascinated me. When I was five years old, I moved to Cork where my voice soon procured the beautiful vowel sounds, the rise and fall, native to the People's Republic. I moved back to Dublin at the age of seven and, happily, surrendered the accent. Happier still, should my parents decide kindly to surrender their home-videos marked '1993-1995'. T.S. Eliot seems to affect a hilarious English accent. But, in Domino's current ad campaign, I'm not sure what their pizza boy seems to affect. It aims, I think, for somewhere between Dublin and Warsaw, but lands somewhere out of this world. It's as confusing as the ad's supposedly incredible offer: should you so wish, Domino's are willing to put different toppings on separate pizzas. Oh, wow!

Tagged! Flagged! Bragged!

2008-01-24T15:57:00.000Z

We've been tagged by 73Man, who doesn't spend a lot of time on this blog. We're to link to five pasts posts. We should say that, though of late we've come to sympathise with the left, we could hardly be called a group blog, much less a group blog of left-wingers. We're no longer plural or political enough for those labels. Disillusioned Lefty used to be a relatively pertinent title, but no more. So, five links to capture the sense of what this blog has become, for 73Man in especial:

The Essayist: this was the first post of substance to arrive after the Leaving Ceritificate. It conveys the naivity from which this blog stems and links what this blog was (political) to what it has become (cultural).
Poetics Please: My first poem, an homage to Government, and in French to boot.
An Odyssey: Though it's frivolous, I have a fondness for this post, which is emblematic of the short, somewhat pretentious, posts this blog has of late indulged in.
Cultural Amnesia: A critical review of Clive James's latest book of essays, which appeared originally in the books pages of Trinity News.
Footy!: A post by the late Michael Larkin in defence of football.

Smoke and Glass

2008-01-20T14:28:00.000Z

They walked east along 44th Street, and Glass at last got to smoke a cigarette. The fine rain drifted down absent-mindedly, like ectoplasm. The trouble with smoking was that the desire to smoke was so much greater than the satisfaction afforded by actually smoking. Sometimes when he had a cigarette going he would forget and reach for the pack and start to light another one. Maybe that was the thing to do, smoke six at a time, three in the gaps between the fingers of each hand, achieve a Gatling-gun effect.

Chapter Two of Benjamin Black's serialised new novel, The Lemur, appears in today's New York Times.

The Munich Air Disaster - 50 Years On

2008-01-19T16:49:00.000Z

BBC Four, that last remaining staple of televisual worthiness, aired recently A Game of Two Eras, a documentary comparing English football of 50 years ago with that of today, based on the FA Cup finals of 1957 and 2007. What was more remarkable about the clips of the 1957 final, contested by Manchester Utd and Aston Villa, was not the cordial aggression with which the game was played, but that within less than one year, over half of the Manchester Utd starting line-up would be dead.

On February 6th, 1958, carrying the victorious Manchester Utd side home from their European Cup quarter-final against Red Star Belgrade, British European Airways Flight 609 crashed back into the snow-blanketed Munich runway from which it had three times attempted to take-off. 23 people were killed. Amongst them, some of the finest players British football had ever seen. Bobby Charlton survived to achieve the greatness of which he was capable. But Duncan Edwards, Liam Whelan, Roger Byrne, Mark Jones, Tommy Taylor, Eddie Coleman and Geoff Bent: they didn’t. High time, I think, that I declared my interest: Liam Whelan, who in 98 games for Man Utd scored 52 goals, was my grand-uncle. As the fiftieth anniversary of his and 22 others’ death looms, I thought it worth revisiting Eamon Dunphy’s A Strange Kind of Glory, which I read years ago and which, though planned (and performed) as an account of manager Matt Busby’s entire career, reigned above any attempt thitherto made to chronicle the pre-Munich years and its untimely departure into, I suppose, post-Munich years.

Eamon Dunphy, best known at home as a TV pundit and abroad as the ghost-writer of Roy Keane’s autobiography, has not here penned a particularly bad book. It’s well-researched, clearly quite genuine and rich in anecdote. But Dunphy’s prose is dreadful. It reads, more often than not, as if a paean to poverty, to the living conditions of the 1950s working-class and to ineducation. His grammar reflects as much. “He was feared was Jimmy.” “By the time Jimmy found out he’d spent a lot of passion.” “Johnny Carey was neither militant nor one of the lads. But that was not what was required of him.” At times, A Strange Kind of Glory reads like a version of social polemic The Road to Wigan Pier without the notorious respect its author, George Orwell, had for the English language and its grammar: “Except for Sundays this was all the family saw of Jimmy. He worked long hours. He been doing this for seven years.” Though he clearly has a sense for the social and cultural texture of 1950s football, Eamon Dunphy cannot write without appeal to the sentimental, to the informal and to the ungrammatical. A Strange Kind of Glory needs a different ghost-writer.

For they were the Busby Babes and their legend deserves better. In 1955, Matt Busby fielded a gifted team, conscripted and cultivated by his assistant Jimmy Murphy, marked not by their value, but by their youth. “Not old enough to have a drink,” says Dunphy. Their success was considerable. They won the league in 1956 and 1957 and, though the 1950s put an end to the illusion of British Football’s supremacy, in 1958 they were favourites to win the European Cup. They had successfully rejuvenated British Football which, 5 years previous, had been shown “sterile”, having suffered its greatest embarrassment when the national team was beaten 6-3 by Hungary. But their rejuvenation of the game is confined to anecdote, for the team’s name doesn’t appear on any European silverware until ten years down the list, marked 1968, when a rebuilt Manchester Utd won the European Cup under the captaincy of Bobby Charlton, the only remaining Busby Babe.

John F. Kennedy was granted office, but never given the time to govern with the virtue myth ascribes to him. His brother, Robert Kennedy, was killed before he was even elected. An assassin robbed Benizar Bhutto the occasion to turn Pakistan into a viable democracy. Irène Némirovsky was never to finish her five part Suite Francaise; she was killed by the Nazis before she came even to write the third book. We know these figures less for what they did than for what they did not do. And truly, we indulge in this injustice. It is this, the injustice of supposed greatness left unfinished, which - befittingly or not - makes the players of the Munich Air Disaster legendary and Manchester Utd - past, passing or to come - something more than a football club.

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

2008-01-18T12:41:00.000Z

His was a Promethean opening, an eccentric middlegame and an indisposed endgame. Bobby Fischer resigned in Iceland. His clock read 64 years.

The Lemur

2008-01-17T22:07:00.000Z

The researcher was a very tall, very thin young man with a head too small for his frame and an Adam’s apple the size of a golf ball. He wore rimless spectacles, the lenses of which were almost invisible, the shine of the glass giving an extra luster to his large, round, slightly bulging black eyes. A spur of blond hair sprouted from his chin, and his brow, high and domed, was pitted with acne scars. His hands were slender and pearly pale, with long, tapering fingers — a girl’s hands, or at least the hands a girl should have.

Not to keep going on about him, but the New York Times is serialising The Lemur, the lastest effort of Benjamin Black, John Banville's alter ego. The first chapter was published last Sunday. No sign of Quirke, the protagonist in his last two books, but it's early yet.

Being John Banville

2008-01-14T23:17:00.000Z

Being John Banville airs on RTÉ 1 tomorrow at 10.15pm. Banville's our favourite living novelist. It should be good. Here's our take on his pseudonymous Benjamin Black books.

Flash in the Pangloss

2008-01-07T22:58:00.000Z

"Twenty folio volumes will never make a revolution. It is the little portable volumes of thirty sous that are to be feared. Had the gospel cost twelve hundred sesterces the Christian religion would never have been established." - Voltaire

My New Year's Resolution was to read more long books. I began optimistic, as ever. One week in, and I've finished two books! John Banville's Newton Letter, which weighs in at a whopping 80 pages, while Voltaire's Candide runs still further to an impressive 101 pages. Oh dear. Not much room left for Optimism at this stage, then.

In Defence of Secondary Reading

2008-01-05T22:43:00.000Z

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot.

The line between having read and not having read a particular book, holds Pierre Bayard, is less defined than most would have it. You've read the reviews; you know what it's about. But the argument certainly rings true when I consider my relationship with Eliot's The Waste Land. Over Christmas I sat down to read it properly, with one my thumb on Eliot's notes, one thumb on a companion's notes and my other, final thumb lodged between the pages of some secondary, critical writing. I had read the poems before, but never slowly, never with much consideration and never, unsurprisingly, with much comprehension. "That is not it, at all," would echo in mind after brief consideration. But I have a feel for it now, I think. Nothing definitive, of course. But I'm content, for now, with what I've taken from it.

I told a friend about this endeavor. He replied not with the light praise I expected, but with light censure in its stead. He argued that poetry should by read independent of such notes and criticism. That they should only be referenced when you haven't the faintest idea what the poem is about. Otherwise, poetry should be an entirely personal affair, where first impressions and careful, slow reading are most rewarding.

Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
'Jug Jug' to dirty ears.

I have some sympathy for my friend's point-of-view. He's usually right about these things. Criticism seems often an almost bureaucratically soulless affair. We'd prefer if poetry wasn't reduced to this greyness. Perhaps in another age, notes were obsolete. Perhaps readers of poetry could slowly read the passage above - to take just one - and understand that "the sylvan scene" alludes to the a hill with hairy sides on top of which sits Paraidse in Milton's Paradise Lost. Perhaps they knew Philomel and her story of rape, blackmail and revenenge from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Perhaps - ridiculously, perhaps! - they knew, as well, that "Jug Jug" was slang for sexual intercourse in Elizabethan poetry. But I didn't. And I'm certain that, without a companion to The Waste Land, very few readers of my age would. I've read Dante's Inferno (try reading that without notes!), but allusions to it bypassed my attention. We miss these things not because we have not read the books, but because we have not a necessary intimacy with them.

For better or worse, we're no longer made to learn poetry by heart. Unless we do so voluntarily, we sacrifice a cultural frame of reference which allows literary allusion to exist and prosper. Granted, we can read the work of the Modernists - and, more broadly, any work of poetry - for what it is on the page. But Eliot dropped those allusions for a reason. Allusion is more than the writer showing off (though it is also that). It brings a grand backstory to a few condensed syllables. It pays homage to the alluded writer. It might even bring resolution to problems arisen in the poem's narrative.

A back and forth on this in the comments would be nice. Haven't had one of those in a while. Let's have it from everyone, including my dear friend: I hold that without an extensive frame of reference to drawn on (as I am and many are), notes and secondary writings become not only helpful, but depressingly necessary.

Damascus Moments

2008-01-04T00:16:00.000Z

I have a few days free to read whatever I want before I have to return, briefly, to the prescribed reading list. So this morning, I took myself up to the 5th floor of Trinity's Ussher library and read about the foundations of Christianity. Previously a rather strict follower of Jewish law, St. Paul decided that followers of Christ need not anymore be circumcised. There's a theological justification, of sorts, behind the decision, but one can't help but look cynically on the move, which did a lot to spread a religion in its infancy. Sometimes I look at history and, with the priviledge of hindsight, ask how or why people didn't see through certain decisions. But there was, at least, a not entirely unreasonable justification behind Paul's conversion.

But the Mormons! Christopher Hitchens spent a chapter of God Is Not Great inveighing against those members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. But the compression of the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg is very much more impressive.

And the dogmas of Mitt Romney’s sect are breathtaking. They include these: that in 1827 a young man named Joseph Smith dug up a set of golden plates covered with indecipherable writing; that, with the help of a pair of magic spectacles, he “translated” the plates from an otherwise unknown language (Reformed Egyptian) into an Olde English that reads like an unfunny parody of the King James Bible; that the Garden of Eden is in Missouri; that American Indians descend from Hebrew immigrants; that Jesus reappeared in pre-Columbian America and converted so many people that the result was a series of archeologically unconfirmable wars in which millions died; that while polygamy had divine approval for most of the nineteenth century, God changed his mind in 1890, just in time for Utah to be allowed into the Union; and that God waited until 1978 to reveal that it was O.K. for blacks to be fully paid-up members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Oh, and we'd like Obama in '08, but we're not hugely enthusiastic about it.

Barbarati

2008-01-03T23:34:00.000Z

The strikers themselves were looking a little hairy on the picket lines in midtown. Colin Jost, a writer for “Saturday Night Live,” estimated that ninety per cent of his friends were now barbati. (One of the ten per cent, a young “S.N.L.” staffer, confessed to being “physically incapable of growing a strike beard, or any beard.”) There was no official call to action, Jost said, but, rather, a gradual, snowballing effect, born of equal parts solidarity and apathy. When asked to characterize his facial growth, he said, “Let’s see. It’s sort of a Russell Crowe, ‘3:10 to Yuma’ beard.”

“I don’t want to overanalyze my own beard, but, I mean, Trotsky had a beard,” Rob Dubbin, a writer for “The Colbert Report” and an admirer, from his Harvard days, of the “thesis beard,” said. (A mutant cousin of the thesis beard, Jost pointed out, is the “neck beard,” grown sometimes during final exams.) “When you see someone else with a beard on the line, it resonates with the idea of lean times.”

There's a photograph of young Gore Vidal picketing, I think, during a writers' strike of old. I recall it appearing in the Guardian about 2 or 3 years ago. Alas, though, I can find neither the photograph, nor any suggestion that Vidal took part in any such strike. I'm still fairly sure it's out there somewhere, though. And I'm surer still that Vidal appears clean shaven. But - just a thought - wouldn't it be interesting to see Vidal barbu.

Wouldn't it, indeed.

A Question of Court

2008-01-03T10:14:00.000Z

To support his case, Kripke offered a thought experiment: Suppose, he asked us to imagine, that Gödel’s theorem was actually the work of a fellow named Schmidt; it’s just that Gödel somehow got hold of the manuscript and thereafter was wrongly credited with its authorship. When those of us who know about “Gödel” only as the theorem’s author invoke that name, whom are we referring to? According to Russell’s view of reference, we’re actually referring to Schmidt: “Gödel” is merely shorthand for the fellow who devised the famous theorem, and Schmidt is the creature who answers to that description. “But it seems to me that we are not,” Kripke declared. “We simply are not.”

I woke up early the other day, muttering to myself and Other: Shakespeare is playing, Shakespeare is playing. In what position, and for what team, I remain unaware. But then, he's always been an elusive figure. We're not entirely sure what he looked like; we don't know much about his life; some doubt that he even wrote the plays for which he is famous. Some time ago, Yahoo published a story on the authorship. "Some of the greatest Shakespearean actors," ran the sub-header, "are doubting whether the Bard wrote his plays." Assuming, rather recklessly, that Shakespeare did not write the plays in question, we might still justifiably attach his name to the plays. To Russell, "Shakespeare" is merely shorthand for the fellow who wrote the plays. But "the Bard" being a nickname for the author of those plays, it is surely indisputable that "the Bard" - no matter his identity - did indeed write his plays.

Once a bard, always a bard. Shakespeare is playing, Shakespeare is playing.