Six Tweets

June 28th, 2009 § Comments Off

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.

Ex Libris

June 25th, 2009 § Comments Off

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.

A-twitterin’ I Go

June 22nd, 2009 § 5 Comments

Dancing SkeletonSome 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.
Image by Zooomabooma on Flickr

From the Bedside Table

June 18th, 2009 § 2 Comments

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.

On the Tweetvine

June 14th, 2009 § Comments Off

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

Some Recent Tweets…

June 7th, 2009 § Comments Off

  • 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 #

Hiberno-Nevadan Peace Mission

June 2nd, 2009 § Comments Off

Red RockMy short play, Sing Hibernia, staged in 2008 by Painted Filly Theatre in Dublin, appears in the current issue (#23) of Nevadan literary journal, The Red Rock Review.

DEE: Sing Hibernia? The maidens will no doubt spreadeagle themselves on every known crossroad. Has your spoon wilted or what? Do you be forgetting that I am Dee, most high consumer of skincare products from the laboratoires of Lake Geneva? Dee, decked out every waking hour like the nest of a magpie in designer labels so exclusive they have yet to be knocked off? Sing Hibernia how are you?

NAOISE: And do you forget, Dee, that I am Neesh most honoured of Tribunal solicitors, who did his J-1 in Cape Cod and travelled once to Machu Pichu after college, and drives a turbocharged Audi TT morning, noon, and night? Begone with your spoons, wicked woman! It is babies you are wanting from me and the promulgation of the marriage banns in national newspapers on two consecutive Mondays! I have your measure!

Though usually available, if memory serves, in all Nevadan bookstores worthy of the name, the journal is currently changing distributors so, if you want a copy, send a $5.50 check (payable to “Board of Regents”) to English Department J2A, College of Southern Nevada, 3200 East Cheyenne Avenue, North Las Vegas, NV 89030.

Flickr image by lcrf

Child Persecution in C20 Ireland

May 29th, 2009 § 6 Comments

As Facebook friends and Twitter followers already know, I’ve been commenting a lot on the appalling revelations contained in the Ryan Report into Irish Institutional Child Abuse (I prefer the word Persecution for what happened). The original injury, bestial in the depths of its depravity, was made even worse by the intransigence, to this day, of the Religious Orders who controlled the institutions in which the children suffered.

Irish blogger Damien Mulley has helpfully pulled some of the evidence produced by victims into a slideshow: this, mind you, is only the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

Hibernian Exit

April 10th, 2009 § 2 Comments


My short play “Hibernian Exit” recently featured as part of 100 Minutes 2009 which ran for twelve performances at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Dublin.

Thanks are due to the director, Will Irvine, and especially the actors, Aidan Jordan, Claudia Schwartz, and the amazing Lorna Quinn.

The play concerns an extraterrestrial intervention in the affairs of a country battered by financial crisis and skyrocketing unemployment:

ADMIRAL: Let me guess…you want me to rescue this little band of Celts, is that it? And how do you suggest, young Meindroid, we get this shower of saints and scholars across six dimensions and up the back arse of a galactic wormhole?

MEINDROID: We could use the Moving Statues strategy, your welcomeness.

ADMIRAL: Stupid robot!

MEINDROID: Quite so, your Majesty.

Flickr Image by micky mb

Darkness on the Edge of Europe

January 12th, 2009 § Comments Off

Your wise teachers told you to look to your own potential: they remain right, whatever markets and ministers are doing–or failing to do.

Yes, things are dark here in Ireland, in keeping with our customary winter lightlessness.

Looking back on the Celtic Tiger (which, living in the US for 14 years, I entirely missed) one can see 2 phases in the boom: the first, from 1994 to 2001, was founded on an explosion of potential, a ‘legitimate’ boom if you like; the second, ‘bubble’ phase ran from 2001 to 2007 and was largely built on government-enabled profiteering in construction and related industries. Many Irish banks over-leveraged themselves during this decade and are in big trouble right now: but for government intervention a number of them might have gone under. Consolidation is certainly in the offing.

The fear, as recently expressed in the New Statesman and the New York Times is that the Irish have squandered the gains of the boom years.

The net reality is that quality of life for many people here has improved dramatically, expectations have soared, and the unskilled are being left behind either way.

What to do?

As in the US and UK, don’t rely on multi-nationals or governments. Look again to developing your own potential and the potential of the people around you. That is what fuels sustainable growth: let’s not forget that.

Flickr Image by MissNatalie

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