Fin Keegan

Here’s an original story I told at an Open Mic in the Creel in Westport last night.

The Brown Envelope

This story came second in the 2010 Jonathan Swift Satire Contest. I hope you like it.

flickr image by Conor Pendergrast

In the week that the world’s biggest bookseller announced they are selling more Ebooks than hardbacks, it seems apposite to hearken to the message below, written with us in mind by Ulster poet Louis MacNeice.

This dates from just over half a century ago and the time to consider the poem’s meaning has surely come.

Happily our generation comes out of this interrogation rather well, as the English language, whatever the platform, is livelier and more playful than ever. But I leave it to you to decide–after all, the piece is addressed…

        To Posterity

        When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards
        And reading and even speaking have been replaced
        By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you
        Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste
        They held for us for whom they were framed in words,
        And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,
        Or will your birds be always wingless birds?

        -Louis MacNeice (1957)

From Selected Poems

Flickr Image by ‘Quick, like a mule’ (CC Licensed)

Video of the talk I gave the other night in Westport, at Ignite the West. Great fun, great people, and a really good forum to hatch new ideas. Thanks to the organizers, Steve and Dermot, for a great opportunity.

I just sent the following letter to my public representatives here in Ireland on the subject of the madness that is NAMA; if you’re in the same sinking ship I encourage you to do the same: you can find the addresses you need here. Those of you outside of Ireland should pause for a moment and consider the progress of a country determined to not only undo its achievements but also put paid to any future ambitions.

I am writing to you to express my deep concern as an Irish citizen about the establishment of NAMA and, in particular, the unorthodox methods being used to establish the value of properties concerned.

Perhaps all concerned are acting in good faith–but there is a great danger that the present and future treasure of our country, of our children and our grandchildren, will be squandered: all in a vain attempt to mitigate the losses of a reckless element.

The thinking of course is that those losses, when realized, represent a systemic risk. That may be so. But the creation of NAMA, like so many responses in this crisis, is ill-conceived and burdensome.

• For one thing, why are stakeholders in our banks not absorbing the losses first?
• For another, why are values being determined as though they will not fall further?
• And, to stop only at three points where a dozen could be made: how immune is NAMA to the “stroke-pulling” that seems endemic to our public life?

I would appreciate you redoubling your efforts to stop NAMA; if you are in support of it, I beg you to reconsider.

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.

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.

Catholic Church in Ireland

View more OpenOffice presentations from damienmulley.

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

Another interesting revelation from the UNICEF report on Child Well-Being in Rich Countries I wrote about previously is that books are not valued in many wealthy and successful countries.

Below is a chart from that survey showing the Percentage of Children age 15 reporting less than 10 books in the home. It’s hard to generalize (even for me!) based on these figures so I will just confine myself to noting that the paucity of books in over 10% of Irish homes should be a real cause for concern for parents, children, educators, and community leaders here.

Unfortunately, despite Ireland’s literary tradition and love of the English language–whether spoken, written, or sung–our libraries are generally lamentable.

It may surprise you to hear that their equivalents in Las Vegas, where we previously lived, were infinitely superior in every way than their oddly impoverished Irish counterparts. (See comparison figures below).

On top of this, booksellers here are not what they were (vide , for one, the stock-gutting of Waterstones on Dawson Street), we love television, and the public transport system is poor: together all conspire to reduce opportunities for people to read good books. Children, meanwhile, are not read to at night, and when they are taken to bookshops find either “franchise books” (which may or may not be good) and celebrity tie-in pulp, which is generally not.

Quite reasonably they conclude more fun will be had online or playing console games.

So, what are we going to do about it? Read to your kids every bedtime. Let them see you enjoying books. And maybe embarrass your local bookseller into thinking beyond Harry Potter, Madonna, and Enid Blyton

The figures from the two library systems: Las Vegas slightly outspends Ireland on library stock purchased [$5.47 to $5.10 per capita]. But the most telling characteristic, for me, is the non-stock spend: only 11% of the Irish budget is spent on stock. Las Vegas, by contrast, raises their stock-spend to 20%, almost double the Irish rate, while maintaining an ambitious expansion program to meet the needs of a continuing population influx. [Sources: Ireland; Las Vegas; and xe.net for currency rates]

A recent report by UNICEF on child well-being in rich countries seems to vindicate our decision to raise the kids in Ireland.

Across “six dimensions” averaging measures such as “Health and Safety” and “Subjective Well-Being”, the United Nations agency arrives at the conclusion that kids are best off being brought up in either Scandinavia/Switzerland, the Benelux, Spain/Italy, or Ireland.

The US and UK, though scoring high in Education (US) or Health/Safety (UK), manage to come dead last in the 21 OECD nations under analysis.

However, a closer look (click on table image below) reveals that free-market countries tend to fare poorly on these measures. Why? Because the internal wealth disparity is wider than society permits in, say, more socialist-leaning countries such as Sweden or France. And freedom of expression tends to be more valued in the UK and US, leading to lower scores for child “Behaviour and Risks”.

One corollary of this is that if you are wealthy (and thus healthy, safe, and well-educated) in the UK or US, your children’s well-being moves up to par with the countries at the top off the UNICEF table.

(Or it does if your “family and peer relationships” are not fractured: interestingly, the US/UK tradition of self-actualization means that, on that score, the two largest free-traders again trail their wealthy cohorts in Europe.)

Click on images above to enlarge data tables.

Source [PDF]: UNICEF, Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, Innocenti Report Card 7 (Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2007)

Recent riots in the Dublin suburb of Finglas and a teenage double suicide in my own county underline the responsibility we all have to help our young people grow up to become responsible, productive, and happy citizens. (Meanwhile, in my old home of Las Vegas, the radio station where I worked was hit by bullets following a post-school fracas across the street.)

The kids are not alright. An essay by Paul Graham examines adolescent unhappiness: his thesis, in a nutshell, is that because of the way we organize Western societies now teenagers are denied the experience of real and meaningful work in their teens. Money quote:

If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do.

But the problem is not that we choose to institutionally educate our children: the problem is how we teach them.

The trick is to teach our young their subjects as meaningful tools to live a better life. Literacy, numeracy, history, geography, and creativity can all be taught in a practical and useful way that has (and is perceived by the children themselves to have) direct benefits for themselves and their community.

Would the children of Finglas be so quick to destroy their environment if they had actually worked, through school, to determine it, say by planting trees or contributing to planning decisions? I do not think they would.

Paul Graham: Why Nerds are Unpopular: paulgraham.com, Feb, 2003

Image: ‘Halt’ by New York Observer on Flickr