Fin Keegan

On the Bedside Table

• Reading The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. Like retracing in detail a long forgotten dream. What is it about? God knows.

RIP Robert McNamara

• RIP Robert McNamara: a life of moral learning, latterly concerned with our morbid ‘nuclearism’. Pity the lessons were so costly.

Dictatorship of the Bacteriat

• Dang ‘flu! You know you’re delirious when you see the face of Karl Marx in the clouds from your bedroom window…

Weather

• Studying an ink-soaked cloud over Westport, a cloud so pregnant with intent it looks like a pantomime villain

Image courtesy of 3ammagazine

One of the great things about having children is that it gives you the opportunity to return to childhood classics–and also read the books you’d like to read now if you were an 8-year-old. There’s many more we got through at bedtime than these of course, but these are stand-outs:

Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner. Revisiting a favourite from my childhood. [AmazonUK] [US]

Five Children and It by E. Nesbit. Wonderfully funny–and witty too. [AmazonUK] [US]

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night by Allan and Janet Ahlberg. Cervantes for the under-10 set. [AmazonUK] [US]

Just William by Richmal Crompton. Misadventures of spirited boy prone to scrapes: a masterclass in comic writing. [AmazonUK] [US]

Stig of the Dump by Clive King. Again, revisiting a favourite from my childhood with the alibi that I am reading to the kids. [AmazonUK] [US]

The Unlucky Day by Richard Scarry. Disaster comedy puts credit crunch in perspective: imagine cold pickles for dinner in flooded home! [AmazonUK] [US]

Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. A young boy finds friendship with mysterious children in the garden, a place transformed when night falls and midnight strikes… [AmazonUK] [US]

Material World

• Strange how coffee tastes differently when you think you are drinking tea.
• Every second day I seem to find myself explaining the miracle-in-waiting that is Print On Demand. Perhaps this short video demonstration might do it: Meet your future bookstore.

Spiritual World

• Fielding questions from my 5-year-old, e.g.: “Do angels have childhoods?” (This led to some lively discussion on Facebook).
• Disease is a dark consequence of sexual desire; organized religion dark consequence of spiritual desire. (After De Motherlant: this was the product of some lively discussion on Twitter).

Television

• Documentary on David Hockney (BBC). Restless heart, restless mind, restless eye.
• ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ (Anderson). Formal delights, gentle humour, choice tunes: an enjoyable foray into the world of my in-laws :)

Tennis

• watching men’s final, unnerved by ‘Wimbledon Effect’ of unchanged court livery that I am back in the 70s, watching as a boy.
• Difference between being a kid and a grown-up: a kids thinks “Yeah, I could take Federer…”

Ireland

• Amazing how little fuss Loyalist decommissioning innire is causing in Irish/UK media but, if you remember the bad old days, it’s “momentous”. The first day I set foot in Northern Ireland, the headline on a local paper quoted a loyalist promising “One Catholic, One Bullet”. Beyond even the images of the Chuckle Brothers, Paisley and McGuinness, the shift in thinking in Loyalism is a profound barometer of political progress.
• Could we airlift the Bernie Madoff judge and jury over to Ireland please? The American Justice System gave him 150 years. Wrongdoers with juice in these parts not only tend to go unpunished they often emerge with a golden handhake and a generous pension.
• Problem with Green Party in Ireland is that they are powered by ideology. What is Fianna Fail’s ideology? Power.

Joys of Self-Employment, Ch. LXXXIV

• Impromptu flashmob with the kids, dancing to ‘Funkytown’ by Lipps, Inc.

Flickr Image by by moominsean

Curses

• The Curse of the Left is the urge to make themselves feel good; the curse of the Right, the urge to make others feel bad

Celts

• Air in Mayo hazy with smoke while black plumes rise on every horizon: Bonfire Night!

Moonwalkers

• Sure that Keith Richards enjoyed a hearty breakfast this morning: he’s going to outlive us all, you know
• Look out! The Grim Reaper will soon run out of celebs and start picking on you and me.

Television

• Happiness (not so much is but) can be kids in bed and cricket on television.
• watching Springsteen play Glastonbury. Phenomenal set begging the question: has there ever been a better gig anywhere anytime? Maybe not.

The non-fiction books that I’ve read over the past 12 months. Unfortunately Taleb was a real disappointment: the book equivalent of a late-night infomercial that makes much out of little; Twyla Tharp’s was on the other end of the scale, as was the Heaney book.

12 Books That Changed the World by Melvyn Bragg. Not the usual suspects, the ones that had a demonstrable effect on daily life.

A Short History of English Literature by Gilbert Phelps. Dry but useful account, mercifully devoid of psuedocritical psauce.

Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly while rocking the pram in the hall. Direct, insightful, and strangely encouraging.

Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman. Great fun for bibliophiles; for those left cold by reading, not so much.

Literary Lives by Edmund Sorel, illustrator. The dope on Jung, Sartre, Brecht, and other monsters, drawn with relish and wit.

On the Sublime by Longinus. “Sublimity is the echo of a great soul”. Nearly 2000 years old and still on the money.

Stepping Stones [Heaney Interviews by Dennis O'Driscoll]. Ulster Poet proves efficacy of unSilence, unExile, & unCunning for Irish literary triumph.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Probability Prof take smart thesis and goes off the deep end. Tiresome ego-trip.

The Irish Times newspaper from the day of my birth: snowstorms, death of revolutionary WT Cosgrave, and Vatican Council on TV

The Creative Habit. by Twyla Tharp. Practicalities for the artistically inclined. Engrossing, insightful, useful. Excuse me now while I defenstrate the television.

Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James. From an Australian boyhood through London bedsits to glittering success and hyper-productive maturity. The fourth volume, (North Face of Soho) is the most enjoyable of the set: as wisdom of age settles over the reminiscences.

Some good conversations with people on Twitter this week, especially on the subject of Iran, when everything went green in solidarity with the protestors. I am putting my Iran tweets in a separate post; here’s the rest:

Definitions

• Ireland: a functional society trapped in a dysfunctional state
• Globalization: Angelus bell rings in distance while WNYC News plays in kitchen and messages from Iran stack up in office.
• Happiness: kids in bed and cricket on television. (sentimental alternate: playing cricket with kids)

Ireland

• Violent pogroms against Romanian Immigrants in Belfast are linked to Sectarianism: in a divided society, where children are educated apart and never encounter people of other creeds and ways of life, any ‘other’ can seem a threat.
• New pipeline in Mayo may be good or bad–but Shell’s record in Nigeria shows that we need to be sceptical of their intentions
• Could Archbishop Martin of Dublin be the Gorbachev of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland?

A Nicer Film Title

• Fort Apache The Hamptons

A Pop Song Anti-Climax

• Dust Around the Clock (We’re going to dust, dust, dust…)

Outputs

• Redrafting a play on the Dylan Principle: “You do what you must do and you do it well”

Inputs

• Hope Humph would be pleased: I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue is back on BBC Radio 4 with guest chairs, starting with Stephen “No Better Man” Fry.
• Watching “Dancing Skeletons” (Disney, 1934) with the kids. Walt does German Expressionism: David Lynch couldn’t top it.
• Watching “Star War IV” (Lucas, 1977) with the kids. The film now seems a product of post-postwar angst. Consider the central conflict of a death-giving and bureaucratic Military-Industrial Empire versus the ragtag band of a Blonde Superman-child. In the end “Pop USA” wins the day.
• Watching Vincent Browne’s political talk show on TV3 is like watching the party scene in “The Plough and the Stars” (and, as it happens, the country is in a state of chassis).
• Chatshows on RTE since Gay Byrne retired often fail because they are “genre-driven”. The opening segments of, say, The Late Late Show or Saturday Night with Miriam will be ‘light’ come what may–while later segments will be ‘heavy’, again come what may: there is no room for spontaneous evolution of a discusion e.g a political commentator may be determined to be flippant or a pop singer may turn out to be unexpectedly articulate: good hosts adapt and let the conversation grow accordingly, but RTE’s current crop seem unable to ‘trust to the moment’.

Decline of Western Civilization, Ch. CXLVII

• At the bookshop. Assistant: “How do you spell Proust?”
• Probably the rot set in when fishmongers started calling themselves “seafood delicatessens”

At the Dinnertable

• Missus and I agreed over dinner that Herb Caen would have loved Twitter.

Proofs

• A parrot wrangler in Vegas once assured me crows were by far the smartest birds. Here is the proof.

Thanks to Twitter, I’ve found a good system for tracking my recent reading. Here are capsule reviews of fiction that has made an impression on me in the last 12 months:

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Avant-garde means yield to poetic ends. A Southern King James in places. Riveting; funny too.

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill. Perfectly realized meditation on New York, cricket, and the immigrant experience. Pace Zelie Smith, too perfect perhaps?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. Wish-fulfilment thriller by Swedish journalist: misogynist execs decoded, destroyed

The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek. ‘Certified idiot’ tramps about w/Austrian army during WWI, proves to be sanest there.

The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler. Tintin for adults.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. A Still Life in which everything is happening.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Very Funny. Malicious Devil amuses himself in Stalin’s Moscow. Poets irrepressible.

“What I Found Out About Her” by Peter LaSalle [Antioch Review 66.1]. A short story. Nuanced meditation on sad mystery of young suicide.

Some of me Tweety-tweets from the past week, grouped for better consumption…

Definitions

• Cricket: A deathly duel between Batsman and Bowler–disguised as 5 days of well-dressed gentlemen ambling about a large field

Observations

• There is a world in which you are one of The Beatles–if the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics is correct.
• T20 cricket on, featuring 2 geographically disparate sides, once thought to be the same place: India and the West Indies
• In the 1890s, 7 of the 8 Imperial British provinces in India had Governors born in Ireland [Source]
• Eggs are not the way to defeat the racist BNP: arguments are and, if it comes to it, laws.
• I love France, but this image is too perfect a metaphor of her ’standing’ in today’s world to pass up.

Facts

• Arab intolerance hits a new low: there are now only 4000 Jews in the entire Arab World says The Guardian

Wishes

• Wish Market57 in Westport would follow my lead and rename themselves Studio51: I have only limited memory for names at this point.
• Zoe Heller on TV: wish she would go back to writing columns: she was so funny.

Questions

• How do goldfish poop so much when they eat so little?

Tips

• When a bit of biscuit falls in your tea, use remaining part to fish it out. (Only works metaphorically; in reality you double the mush).
• Method to bypass political gatekeepers of ungettable Public Reps/Servants: tell them you’re calling from the Dentist’s

• The older you get the more you realize how good Detective Columbo is. #
• Want to rip people off? A masterclass from Ernst & Young, bank ‘auditors’ , in barefaced cheek: http://bit.ly/17dMSZ #