His protagonists are wanderers, usually bohemian, invariably troubled, following their distant star across oceans, into deserts, through the orbit of violence and evil or madness, then on into the depths of almost certain obscurity. They live, for the most part, in the contemporary world, consuming books and encountering friends and lovers, but their dedication to art seems anachronistic, more of a piece with the romantics, surrealists, or beat poets: these are not the kind of self-branding careerists to show up as writers in residence or guests on Start the Week. As with all great vocations, many are called but few are chosen: suicide, addiction and neurosis are often their lot but, along the way, they partake of a quest which, for Bolano, is the most interesting thing humans can do.

You can read the full text at the Dublin Review of Books.

Flickr image by rocketlass

Good News from Another Universe

Not exactly high-fidelity since I forgot to take the recorder out of my pocket–but I hope you like it.

Thanks to Dermot and Steve for a great night of music, fun, and smart people. The next event is being held on Saturday, November 20th. See their Facebook page for details.

1: You are a good person, worthy of fulfillment

2: When not your master, fear is your truest servant

3: You are strong: embrace challenge and risk rejection

4: Fantasy is good–but not in place of reality

5: Trust your instincts. Serve your truth. Be yourself.

flickr image by lanier67

FJK commented: “I like these 5 Antidotes. I deal with fears real and unreal in many recovering alcholic/drug addicts and it’s always a negative. Could you give me a couple of examples where it would become ones servant?”

And here was my response:

Thanks for the feedback. I suppose the point I am trying to get at is that fear is in fact something internal to our minds/nervous systems and thus, like pain, is actually meant to serve us (so that we can avoid unpleasant experiences).

However, because we are wired to avoid short-term threats, our fear system sometimes does not act in our best interest e.g. if I let my fear of water dominate me I will never learn to swim.

So the best way to treat my fear system is as a highly paranoid servant, who may well be right some of the time but not all the time.

The reason I say truest servant is because by treating its alarms as a useful indicator I can quickly identify areas of self-actualization that my paranoid servant is trying to warn me away from e.g. a young man in a long-term relationship might be terrified at the prospect of marriage. In fact, his fear is a strong indicator that there is a deeper destiny awaiting him–if he has the courage to overcome his fear he might well find fulfillment as a father.

Another example: a shy person is unreasonably afraid of strangers. And yet, if they can open the door to new people they might find a new role for themselves in, say, public service.

Some people go out of their way to systematically conquer each and every fear they possess but that does seem extreme to me!

The Brown Envelope

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

flickr image by Conor Pendergrast

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)

• 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

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]

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.

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.

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]

That’s one thing…the other thing is that the book is a cracking good read and very witty.

Buy the book at Amazon US or Amazon UK

A share of the proceeds go towards running costs for The Second Circle, which I edit and Aravind writes for.

Gracq was a contrarian French author who shunned the fame and honours garnered by his work. His best known book is the war novel Un Balcon en Foret [A Balcony in the Forest]. According to the obituary, Gracq had his doubts about the style-cult which marks modern literature in France and…

believed in the importance not so much of style but of form. As his example, he gave the sayings of the countryside. Many of them are about the weather. These sayings are accepted. No one seeks to verify whether they are accurate. It is the form that makes them authentic.

Johnson: Julien Gracq: French novelist who refused the Goncourt The Guardian, Dec 24th, 2007

Image: ‘Death Applications’ by Raphco on Flickr

Fin likes to read coffee-table picture books about the railroad in the 19th century…

Fin likes to sit in the space between the wall and the bed…

Fin likes to stare longer than decorum permits…

Fin likes to be and knows he is alone because he is “different”…

Fin likes to rasp through the skin of cucumbers…

Fin likes to get all the way down by my feet…

Fin likes to be poked with a stick…

Fin likes to get the job done when he is on hot pursuit of the criminals…

If only André Breton had lived to use the Internet.

Image: ‘Found 16mm’ by N°1 on flickr

• a megalithic tomb
• a hilltop cairn
• a medieval parish church
• the site of a watermill
• a smattering of ringforts or coastal promontory forts, and
• a number of miscellaneous hut and house sites”

He is hardly exaggerating: the average Irish square mile, like the average Irish soul, seems to teem with the workings of a long human history.

Reference: The Mayo News, Oct 9th, 2007

Similarly with life. Though our recent move to the West of Ireland undeniably involves escape, it will only succeed if fresh challenges are raised, fresh insights attained–and fresh failures endured.

Such is Life…and Art.

Onward!

The Sopranos‘ dialogue, acting, conceptual wit, and direction have all been praised to the skies elsewhere. Like HBO stablemate Big Love, it is at once both believable and unbelievable that such lives could be lived in our modern world.

But, the deepest appeal of this mobster clan may be their elemental likeness to us: wealthy, or comparatively so, both we and they alike live with a radically split consciousness: worrying over our children, vain about our waistlines, more or less slaves to our appetites, we remain wilfully ignorant of the pain of those (the victims; the poor; the powerless) upon whom our lifestyle is based.

If Chinese peasants-turned-factory-workers, to take but one example, were to successfully organize for fair working conditions tomorrow, our cheap clothing and footwear would be gone in a week.

For Tony Soprano there is “out there” and “in here”, with markedly different rules and moral imperatives at work in each context: aren’t we all a little like him?

The shift–or downshift–is all the more painful coming as it does on the twenty-fifth anniversary of their last memorable exercise of unilateral power: the retaking of the Falkland Islands.

Now Britain is characterized as the impotent partner in the transatlantic alliance: a perception verified as actual by President Ahmadinejad who has expertly demonstrated how pitiful is the UK’s friendship with continental Europe and even, to some extent, with the US (arguably the US laid low in order to keep the situation calm–but the plight of limey sailors also failed to capture the American public imagination).

Geopolitics aside, the behaviour of Faye Turney and her 14 colleagues has exposed some ugly division, none more so perhaps than in a Jan Moir piece for the Telegraph whose anger at Turney in particular for “singing like a canary” to the Press and “writing screeds of damaging propaganda” for Iran after being “lightly coerced” shades into a classist subtext.

How, one senses the traditional Tory class wondering, did this ignominy come about? Moir provides the answer: desire for ‘cash and celebrity’ among the cannon-fodder multitudes, the “low-ranking workhorse…personnel” as she calls them.

British elites have always been somewhat embarrassed by their working classes, upon whom the whole show has always depended–as Kipling knew but the world, before mass media at least, did not.

The saddest aspect of this generally happy day (apart from the fact that moderates have been so sidelined) is that it took almost forty years to get the two sides to share power in a jurisdiction that is so tiny.

In an ideal world Paisley and Adams would be provincial councillors or part-time local politicians. Instead they are known throughout the world, from Tehran to Tulsa, very often for their sectarianism and, betimes, more or less veiled approval of political violence.

Now we may be headed for a situation, once unthinkable, where Ian Paisley is in charge up North and Gerry Adams is President down South. Who’s to say now that such a thing could not happen?

With globalisation of culture and commerce rising around us as inexorably as the oceans, our Nation States are showing signs of disintegration: Anglo-Canada’s identity seems to be dwindling down to “NotAmerica.ca”, Ireland’s to “NotTheUK.ie”, and Francophone-Europe to “PasLaFrance.zut”.

Dubliners, when not gossipping into their cellphones or weeping over the tribulations of English celebrities and soccer teams (AKA corporations) , are forever telling us how confident and well-adjusted into Europeanness they are: so well-adjusted that if you describe them as British, which they largely are, they almost suffer a stroke.

But, if there is no positive identity behind the rhetoric, what is the point of carrying on, except out of an atavistic vanity? Dublin now has reverted to the quasi-English city it was when Queen Victoria visited, only with designer icons in place of Union Jacks; all one ever hears from Anglophone Canadians is how frightful it is to be mistaken for Americans.

The fact is that Mother Tongue more than Location or even History, mass trauma aside, defines groups most exactly and the foundational slogans of the New Exceptionalists (Ireland and Canada, e.g.) will quickly wear thin when actual sacrifice is called for (e.g. meeting the true costs of Defense, Counter-Terrorism, or Oil)

Margaret Atwood was speaking on ABC Radio Australia.