Empire State View

Ahmadinejad at Columbia

2007-09-24T13:42:00.000-05:00

"Why should an academic face insults?" he moans. "Is this what you call freedom?"

Professor Ahmadinejad, as he dubbed himself as soon as he started to speak twenty minutes ago, is speaking outside my window. Literally. I can see the big screen and the (suprisingly quiet and attentive) crowd from where I sit. And I have ten papers to mark in the next hour. So you won't be getting anything in the way of reportage here. But I thought I'd post to say that you can get it here; it's a live blog, updated every couple of minutes at the moment.

Still laughing...

2007-08-16T18:44:00.000-05:00

...at the comments on this Gawker item on the Jenna Bush pregnancy rumours...

DICKTHESNAKE: Well, has she been drinking in the last few months? Best way to check may be tracking the value of liquor stocks.

24-7: I bet the baby will be seven months premature. It will be a miracle, but that's because God loves Republicans.

HARBLS: Too bad that some sort of device doesn't exist that can prevent unwanted pregnancies -- some latex device that prevents semen from reaching the ovary, say, or perhaps a medicine that prevents ovulation -- that can protect privileged single young women with a good health plan from bringing up an unwanted child in a cold, cruel world. I've searched all the government-issued literature and simply cannot find a thing that could've prevented this

Rove is Resigning

2007-08-13T03:51:00.001-05:00

August 31.

Sort It Out, Aer Lingus

2007-08-10T09:36:00.000-05:00

A fiver says this and the plane from Monday evening are the same one. At least it's to be hoped they are, because if not, then there are two dodgy planes on the transatlantic route.

Are they sure they can even get up to Belfast to run their Heathrow service from there? Where are they going to find a plane capable of flying that distance?

James Wood Rocks

2007-08-08T18:02:00.000-05:00

He's the most intelligent critic working today. His collection of essays and reviews, The Broken Estate, completely changed my way of reading, and thinking about - and also writing - fiction. Unlike many critics, he doesn't see narrative realism as a dirty word, but as a complex, mysterious accomplishment - as a kind of magic, almost. He writes brilliantly on Austen, Gogol, Flaubert and Sebald in particular in that collection, and the introductory essay, "The Limits of Not Quite" is one of the most memorable and jolting pieces about literature I've ever read. And this week it has been announced that Wood is leaving the New Republic to become a staff writer at the New Yorker, which means (hopefully) he'll be writing much longer essays on literature, more frequently. This is good news.

Huh?

2007-08-08T10:56:00.001-05:00

Wow, I really am jetlagged. Apparently there was a frickin' tornado here in Brooklyn this morning. I heard the thunder, but pretty much slept through the whole thing. Thankfully I don't have to leave the house today, because all the trains are down, by the look of things.

No wonder the cat seems slightly subdued today.

"You Can't Be Too Thin. Or Too Powerful"

2007-08-08T08:12:00.000-05:00

So trumpets the e-mail announcing the new iMac, which comes out today and which is sort of ugly, as it happens. Presumably you switch it on by sticking your fingers down your throat...

I was going to say "Only in New York", but presumably this circular went to Apple customers all over America, meaning to dozens of states where having a protruding collarbone isn't the norm. Or do those states get an email concentrating on the enormity of the monitor, and of its creamy curves?

Also, Apple don't mention the downside of being too thin, which seems to be hitting my own relatively scrawny iBook with a vengeance these days: it means you're too weak to do anything efficiently for very long without collapsing in an exhausted heap. I'm guessing that Angelina Jolie, at the moment, is taking an impossibly long time to run anything over 2000 photos and freezing up every other application into the bargain. Rumour has it Brad Pitt has been looking longingly at a Dell.

To the Batmobile!

2007-08-06T13:30:00.000-05:00

I've become a little obsessed with my statcounter over the past couple of days. It may be something to do with having been holed up with my family for so long - I need to know there are other people out there, people who are not knee-deep in the same gene pool, people who are not going to follow me out of the kitchen and into the front room and down to the bedroom again because that's what families do to each other, we torment each other with constant refrains of "what are you doing?" or "where's [insert name of other family member]?" or "do you want a cup of tea?"...and so on.

Anyway, word to the three people who actually read this blog: I'm stalking you. Or at least I'm stalking your IP address. And I have an urgent message for one of you, IP address 3243498504385034 (ok, I just made that up) in Brooklyn, New York. The message being, please feed my cat. I'm stuck in damn Dublin airport, rain teeming down outside and the Aer Lingus plane I was meant to fly on standing disconsolate in a shed somewhere while mechanics fix (hopefully) its sinister-sounding "operational fault". What qualifies as an operational fault,anyway? Does it mean that one of the wings is hanging off, or just that one of the three hundred and twenty dials in the cockpit isn't whirring and flickering quite as it should? I don't know. All I know is that this plane can no longer take off, and that some other plane, run by a company I'm not sure I've ever heard of, is coming in here at two in the morning (only nine hours late, folks, don't get stroppy) to take us to New York instead. And, yes, that means that over a hundred people are tired and hungry and inconvenienced, but screw them, because so is my cat. So, please, Mr/Ms IP address 34543058038503485, break into my apartment and feed him.

PS I am now officially a sad woman who blogs about her cat.
PPS Don't all panic at once, some kind Brooklyn residents are actually going to feed the cat.
PPPS I'm off back to my pile of tacky magazines and my meal vouchers. It's kind of fun.

Why, Dan, is your nose growing?

2007-08-03T12:55:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I'm overdoing the posting today. But part of my blogging block over the last couple of months involved ignoring not just my statcounter, but the email account attached to this blog, which I've also opened up for the first time in ages today. It's mainly full of offers to "shoot 13ft across the room", which I must admit I've always wanted to do, but I'm kind of broke at the moment and can't afford the $10.99 plus postage, even taking into account the free gift of a herbal supplement which will drive my woman crazy like never before.

I did like the email from Justin of Justinspace, however, which alerted me - vis-a-vis of a post I'd written about Dash Snow and his set a few months back - to a post of his questioning the originality of one of Colen's pieces. It's a damn good read. Have a look.

Lonely Hearts Club

2007-08-03T09:18:00.001-05:00

I had a look at my stats for the first time in months today (suffice to say, after nearly five months' absence, I deserve to be so thoroughly abandoned) and the keyword analysis looked something like this:

2 Aug 20:38:16 www.google.ie ryan tubridy reason for divorce

2 Aug 17:51:08 www.google.co.uk conor mcpherson girlfriend alcohol

2 Aug 11:41:41 www.google.co.uk damien rice and grinning

2 Aug 07:32:54 www.google.ie peter crawley irish times

1 Aug 21:51:45 search.yahoo.com bonos new york city house

You're all a bunch of stalkers!! Anyway, everyone knows the real reason for Ryan Tubridy's divorce was that his missus ran off with Damien Rice, having been dazzled by his grin as he read a scathing Peter Crawley review of a Conor McPherson play, and that the two are now holed up in Bono's apartment overlooking Central Park.

But back to my eg0-bruising stats. Of all the keyword searches, my personal favourite is the googler who just can't forget his experience of North Leitrim statutory rape...

1 Aug 17:29:42 www.google.ca irish girl in ballinamore was
a great school teacher and lover

Answers on a postcard please: who is that Ballinamore maths teacher who shows her students the truth about square roots?

Happy April Fools' Day

2007-04-01T14:35:00.000-05:00

...from gmail.

It goes like this: gmail now offers a service whereby you can order paper copies (gasp!) of all your emails, and they'll deliver them to you for free. Check out the FAQs:

Are attachments included?

All part of the deal. Photo attachments are printed on high-quality, glossy photo paper, and secured to your Gmail Paper with a paper clip. MP3 and WAV files will not be printed. We recommend maintaining copies of your non-paper Gmail in these cases.

Is there a limit?

You can make us print one, one thousand, or one hundred thousand of your emails. It’s whatever seems reasonable to you.

But what about the environment?

Not a problem. Gmail Paper is made out of 96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum, and thus, actually helps the environment. For every Gmail Paper we produce, the environment gets incrementally healthier.

Post-consumer organic soybean sputum. Yum.

The Tuning Fork

2007-03-30T10:58:00.000-05:00

I asked Ronan Gallagher to send on the letter he wrote to RTE Radio after John McGahern died last year, and he did, and I'm delighted to be able to post it here on John's first anniversary. The talk last night went well enough, and afterwards people were buying McGahern books like there was no tomorrow, a good sign, many of them readers new to him. I couldn't believe the size of the crowd; I had thought that maybe there was not a lot of interest in McGahern here, given that so few people had heard of him when I mentioned him last year. But there was standing room only in the venue, both upstairs where the talk was and downstairs where they'd put some television screens. All evening I meant to read the passage in Amongst Women which McGahern described as his "tuning fork" - the passage which made him realise, once he'd written it, that he had a novel, and the passage against which he measured all the rest of that novel's sentences and passages to come. I never got around to it, so I'm going to post it here as a marker of today. It's significant in that it is a piece of his own prose with which McGahern was satisfied, or half-satisfied in any case; a very rare thing for him, as he was an acute perfectionist. And the idea of writing until that sure passage or sentence comes, and of having it there as the tuning fork, as the measure, for the writer, of everything before and after it, is probably the best writing advice I've ever come upon. That, and just getting the words right. Sounds easy, doesn't it?

Moran went out to the road and closed the iron gates under the yew after returning with the car from the station. He listened for the noise of the diesel train crossing the Plains behind the house but it had already passed. The light was beginning to fail but he did not want to go into the house. In a methodical way he set out to walk his land, field by blind field. He had not grown up on these fields but they felt to him as if he had. He had bought them with the money he had been given on leaving the army. The small pension wasn't enough to live on but with working the fields he had turned it into a living. He'd be his own man here, he had thought, and for the first time in his life he'd be away from people. Now he went from field to filed, no longer kept as well as they once were, the hedges ragged, stones fallen from the walls, but he hardly needed the fields any more. It did not take much to keep Rose and himself.

It was like grasping water to think how quickly the years had passed here. They were nearly gone. It was in the nature of things and yet it brought a sense of betrayal and anger, of never having understood anything much. Instead of using the fields, he sometimes felt as if the fields had used him. Soon they would be using someone else in his place. It was unlikely to be either of his sons. He tried to imagine someone running the place after he was gone and could not. He continued walking the fields like a man trying to see.

That line about grasping water hits me like a physical blow every time I read it.

Ronan's letter is below.

Dear Pat,

John McGahern is dead. The RTE man announced it with a slight hesitation, as if he didn't believe his own news. It stopped me in my tracks as I am sure it did many in this county and beyond in a much wider world. I have to confess that my introduction to McGahern's writings at the tender age of fifteen, had more to do with teenage hormones than literary knowledge. It all started when a very large padded envelope addressed to my father, 'Pat (the Vet) Gallagher' Mohill, arrived, carried with great reverence into our house by our postman as it was too large to fit in the letterbox. Printed on the envelope was the very prominent and glamorous mastiff of 'The New Yorker Magazine' which clearly impressed the Postman. 'Be God Pat, that's a very important looking package' he quipped as he passed the envelope to my father with the care and precision of a man handling a priceless Faberge egg. 'And a heavy one too' retorted my father as he placed the package on a shelf and thanking the postman, continued his work, crushing all my hopes and the Postman's, that its contents might be revealed. Disappointed, I soon forgot about the package until, a few days later I came across it, opened, and unattended on my fathers office desk. Having thought about it for all of a nano-second, I opened the envelope to discover inside, a hardback book by a man called John McGahern with the delicious title 'The Pornographer'. A hand written note attached on headed New Yorker note paper read something like 'I thought a brown envelope might attract too much attention.Ha Ha! Hope you enjoy. Say hello to all back home. John.'

Having a good idea that this might not be on my fathers approved list of literary classics for fifteen year olds, and drooling at the promise of the title, I immediately dived into page one. Well I was bitterly disappointed to find that as Trainspotting has no trains neither did 'The Pornographer' have much pornography. However I was absolutely thrilled to discover that it did have the wonderful writing that this mans pen could yield up. Here was a book about people and places that I recognised and could relate to. John McGahern drew a huge amount of his inspiration from his native Leitrim where he lived among the people. He was one of them, and could be seen out and about, often more concerned about having enough fodder for the cattle than winning the next literary award or reading the latest accolade. I cannot claim to have known Mr McGahern save to meet him the odd time at my fathers house or in Luke Early's bar cum Undertakers in Mohill where McGahern the 'Antennae' would sit in a corner listening to stories and banter from my father and his friends Tom Reynolds and Tom Murphy among others. McGahern would soak up the atmosphere, but always with the ability to be a part of it. He was of the people. He saw our history and our past through eyes that did not lie and refused to embellish, a history that many of a certain generation could relate to, but never speak of. Though his work contained beautiful romance, he never romanticised, and he recognised that as there is great beauty in everyday life there is also cruelty and harshness. His were the eyes of truth, a truth we refused to face for many years, that repression and dogma are no substitutes for freedom of expression and creative thinking.

Nearly twenty five years after the padded envelope arrived to our house, it's author John McGahern, was the first person to walk forward and shake my hand as I stepped out of Luke Early's hearse to bury my father. I'll never forget his words to me then, 'There will never be another Pat Gallagher. May God bless him' and they are the words which come to me now on hearing the sad news of his departure from us.

'There will never be another John McGahern. May God bless him.'

Yours in sadness,

Ronan Gallagher
Lough Rinn
Mohill
Co Leitrim

McGahern on Film, online

2007-03-29T07:07:00.000-05:00

It's all McGahern today, all day; surrounded by notes and trying to put some order on them, to do justice to the man, to get the words right, as he'd say. I've been trying to think about realism and parochialism, the difference between them, about the difference, too, between goodwill and genuine engagement. About the ways in which McGahern will be remembered, about the ways in which he is read, and how they square up to the way he wrote, his intense craft and rigor, the brilliance and clarity of his work which was in no way accidental or quaint.

I got an email this morning from Ronan Gallagher, the Mohill-based filmmaker and writer. I recognised Gallagher's name because he wrote the most beautiful and vivid letter to RTE Radio after McGahern's death last year. I can almost remember the words of it even a year on.

Gallagher has made a short film about the opening of the John McGahern library at the Lough Rynn Hotel in Leitrim last November(the photo of McGahern above, by John Keaney from Carrick-on-Shannon, hangs in the library). The film is called Amongst Friends and you can watch it by going to the Lough Rynn website here. Lough Rynn is a gorgeous place, very peaceful, and they've worked a really understated and lovely restoration and conversion of the old castle, which I used to visit when I was a child.
Have a look at the film. It does start out a bit like a promo for the hotel, and the presence of Bertie Ahern and his cronies becomes quickly cloying (he's barely able to pronounce McGahern's surname, and his comment about the "smashing houses" in the locality rings grimly for anyone who's seen how the blight of new houses is ruining that county, as commented on here). But it gives an interesting glimpse of how deeply-felt the connection to McGahern was in the county where he lived. Which is a more complicated relationship than all of the good will and genuine affection can suggest, I think; again, it feeds into the question of how McGahern will go down in local memory; for his artistry or in terms of his personality and the pride his name came, in later years, to inspire locally. The things are certainly not mutually exclusive. But if the former is brushed over or merely paid lipservice to, in favour of the latter, I think it runs the risk of being a less lasting memory. I'm not saying this of this short clip; it's something I've been thinking about more generally since McGahern's passing.

And the film is worth seeing for the moving moment when Madeline, John's widow, speaks about how, when first she saw the room, she could see John's "wry smile" and his pleasure at the idea and the remembrance.

I also meant to update yesterday with a full list of the films and dramas made about McGahern's work, or inspired by it, or scripts written by him. The IFI event is screening four, but there are others, and radio dramas and of course his stage play as well. A couple of years back, the mobile cinema in Drumshanbo had a festival of most of the works on film, more extensive than the IFI event even, gathering short films and student films from all around.

There's a list, a full one I think, after the jump.

By McGahern

Sinclair, radio adaptation of his own short story "Why We're Here", broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 16 November 1971; published in The Listener, 18 November 1971, 690-2.

The Barracks, radio adaptation of his own novel, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 24 January 1972.

The Power of Darkness, after Tolstoy, submitted to the Abbey and rejected in 1972, produced as a radio adaptation on BBC Radio 3 in the same year (15 October), produced at the Abbey in 1991, directed by Garry Hynes. Published by Faber.

The Sisters, television adaptation of the short story by Joyce. Broadcast as part of Full House on BBC 2, 17 February 1973.

Swallows, television adaptation of his own short story. Broadcast as part of the Second City Firsts series on BBC 2, 27 March 1975.

The Rockingham Shoot, original television drama. Broadcast as part of the Screenplay: Next series on BBC 2, 10 September 1987.

The Pornographer, film script adaptation of his own novel, remains unproduced and unpublished.

By Others

The Barracks, stage adaptation, adapted by Hugh Leonard, first performed 6 October 1969 at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin. Directed by Tomas MacAnna

Wheels, film adaptation of the short story. Adapted and directed by Cathal Black, 1976.

The Lost Hour, television adaptation of The Leavetaking, adapted by Carlo Gebler, directed by Tony Barry. RTE, 1983.

The Key, television adaptation of a work of McGahern (possibly "Bomb Box", but unverified), adapted by Carlo Gebler, directed by Tony Barry, RTE 1985.
Korea, film adaptation of teh short story, screenplay by Joe O'Byrne, directed by Cathal Black. 1995.
Amongst Women, audiobook, read by Stephen Rea, Faber 1997.

My Love, My Umbrella, an opera version of that story, "Sierra Leone" and "Gold Watch". Adapted into a libretto by James Conway, score by Kevin O'Connell, first performed 9 October 1997 at the Stamford Arts Centre, England.
Amongst Women [2], television adaptation, screenplay by Adrian Hodges, directed by Tom Cairns. First Broadcast on RTE 1, 17 May - 7 June 1998.
Swallows, film adaptation of the short story, adapted and directed by Michael O'Connell. 2000.

Details from Stanley van der Ziel's annotated bibliography in the Irish University Review special on McGahern, 2005.

John McGahern, A Year On

2007-03-27T19:35:00.001-05:00

Americans are not hugely familiar with the work of John McGahern, as I discovered when he died last year. Even in a school of fiction, only one person I spoke to had heard of him, and some people thought I was talking about Frank McCourt...

Anyway, March 30th is the first anniversary of McGahern's death, and there's an event to mark the occasion at Ireland House, the property donated to NYU by the Glucksmans and dedicated to Irish studies. With writers like Colum McCann and Nuala O'Faolain living in Manhattan, I'm surprised it's not a different, more writer-centric kind of panel, but hopefully there will be lots of contributions from the audience. The event will be followed by a screening of the terrific, moving documentary made about McGahern in 2004 (from which the still above comes).

Still, it's the McGahern event in the IFI in Dublin on Sunday which I'd really love to attend. It's a programme called "McGahern on Film" and will screen three screen adaptations of McGahern's work, as well as a TV drama written by McGahern in 1987. I've never seen any of these films; they're extremely hard to track down. Hopefully the IFI event will spur the release of a McGahern on Film DVD. The IFI event is hosted by Colm Toibin, who will be superb talking about McGahern's fiction, his aesthetic and his inimitable mischief.

Well done to both Ireland House and the IFI for getting the McGahern tributes together. I think there's one happening in his native Leitrim a little later in the year, which sounds great also. If you're in New York, come. If you're in Dublin, go, and report back...

update: Speaking of Frank McCourt, here's something I just found, in an interview with McGahern from 2000. He's responding to a question which was partly about Frank McCourt, partly about Brian Moore.

"Angela's Ashes interested me more [than Brian Moore].I found it a very strange book, a mixture of farce and clearly honed American evocative writing and literary pretension. The pretension was its weakest part. A work it reminded me of was Synge's Playboy of the Western World, also a farce. It was farce as a great kick at misery and passive suffering. If it's not a farce, then the concluding chapter is in serious bad taste and the whole book a sort of porridge."

The Fish Award

2007-03-16T13:59:00.000-05:00

Here's an example of the kind of rapid-fire literary posting I was talking about in the n+1/TEV post: for the first time in its history, the prestigious Fish Short Story Prize has been awarded to an Irish writer, Kathleen Murray from Dublin. The 2007 Anthology will take its title from her story, A Paper Heart is Beating, A Paper Boat sets Sail. She began writing when she took a course with the poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill in 2004; this was probably the one at the Irish Writers Centre, from which the anthology The Incredible Hides in Every House was produced. I like what Murray says about how she began writing - "I think good writing gave me the inclination to attempt to write" - and also about how she feels, having won the Fish award:

I feel that it is the story itself that has won though, not me, and I am pleased most of all for the story itself.

The Inelegant Variation

2007-03-16T13:19:00.000-05:00

We're subscribers to the literary journal n+1 in this house, and daily readers of Mark Sarvas's literary blog The Elegant Variation, too (why am I using the first person plural all of a sudden? I blame Josh Ferris). Both are excellent. But the spat between the two camps which has exploded on TEV and also on the litblog The Millions (also a great blog, by the way) is just embarrassing. Confusing, also, and more than a little hysterical, and petty, a lot, but mainly just embarrassing. A couple of months back, I added the n+1 editorial in question to my course syllabus (I teach uni writing to freshman students), in a section which also included essays by William Cronon and Caroline Bassett. I added it, along with excerpts from Sven Birkerts' book The Gutenberg Elegies, and some recent media analysis of blogging, myspace, second life, etc, because I thought it was an interesting counterpart to those texts. Most of the students didn't like it, the n+1 editorial, for different reasons. They didn't think it convincing, or they thought it preachy, or they thought it too disjointed, or they thought it was "just showing off" (they tend to think a lot of writing is "just showing off", I should add). Or they didn't see the irony which I think was at work in much of the editorial. But they articulated their problems with it in a manner a damn sight more coherent and more reasonable than can be said for the leaders of the current litblog bitchslap.

For my part, I hugely enjoyed the editorial (which is currently excerpted on the n+1 homepage); I read it partly as satire, partly as polemic, and I found a lot of truth in what it had to say about blogging, about the e-mail bind, about mobile phones. It was, I think, too hastily dismissive of literary blogging - there do exist litbloggers who write considered criticism on their blogs, who do more than blow "wet kisses" or flick fillips of contempt, although they're in the minority. It's hard work to write a serious literary blog, and it's long work; when I started this blog, I hoped it would be a place for me to write about books I'd read and plays I'd seen. My friend Miglior does this kind of blogging about his particular area of interest very well, and very diligently. But I'm not that diligent, I guess. I read for work, and I read for school (apologies to non-American readers; I've caved in and started saying "school" instead of "college", like they do here), and I write for work, and I write for school, and I just plain write, and when it comes to blogging, I've found that it's the very immediacy of it - the very "reflex" criticized by the n+1 editors - the gossipy, news-sharing, info-sending aspect of it that most appeals to me. I'm a reflex blogger, and when I blog about books, it's rarely in a very considered way, or in a way, come to think of it, of which I'm particularly proud. I mentioned earlier this week, for example, that I was enjoying Liam Callanan's All Saints - well, that changed soon afterwards, and I began to be slightly horrified by it, and I kept going with it only to abandon it, unable to muster the enthusiasm to go on, roughly 20 pages from the end. Now that, there, what I've just written; that's not a review. It's a blog post. And there's no reason the two things shouldn't go together, and, on other blogs, they do, which is something the n+1 editorial ought to acknowledge, I think. But it's true, too, that there are many, many more examples of the kind of blog to which they do refer. And here's one of them.

That Person We All Know

2007-03-14T13:05:00.000-05:00

Today's Gawker Underminer (a column written in the voice of the friend whose brilliance always makes you feel like topping yourself) hones in on the literary overachiever. Specifically, the poetry overachiever, but it works for every genre. Read it and guffaw. Then go back to staring at your inbox and reminding yourself you're not 23 anymore and vowing to read David bloody Foster Wallace and generally asking soul-destroying questions of yourself.

Enjoy!

PS I couldn't find an image of a New Yorker rejection slip to go with this post, but look what I did find, via cartoonist Royston Robertson's blog: Who remembers the brilliantly vile comic Oink (see here for a history and here for some online issues)? My mother used to buy it for me every Friday, along with the Beano and Bunty. This was when I was seven or eight. One day, after I'd read every issue for about a year, she actually looked through an issue and never bought it for me again.
update: turns out they just stopped publishing it in 1988. That was why the issues stopped coming. Sorry, mum...

And Then We Came To The KGB

2007-03-12T23:42:00.000-05:00

After the Irish reading, we legged it up to the KGB for another reading, because I'd read a lot about Joshua Ferris's new novel, And Then We Came To The End (check out the fancy website here), and I wanted to hear him read from it. Ferris was an engaging guest blogger on The Elegant Variation last week, which I chatted to him about when he found himself inescapably stuck beside me in the tiny, overcrowded venue. He seems like a nice guy - talked about how time-consuming blogging was, and how he only ever did it at night, and how he couldn't imagine trying to do it all the time, while working on his fiction too - and he hung my coat up, so I'll definitely be buying his book. Oh, and it also sounded very good (if a little cinematic) - it's about office dwellers, and narrated in that horrible, cloying "we" voice, the first-person plural, beloved of HR departments everywhere - a nice touch, which knifes straight into the deadening, depersonalising heart of corporate culture. Anyway, they weren't selling the book in the KGB, so I'll have to hunt down a copy, and I'll report back when I have read it. I'm sure it will be a lot better than the novel I read last week, Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name; I don't know how Colm Toibin and Nicole Krauss could blurb it with straight faces. He wrote it in four months -clearly after having gorged on To The Lighthouse - and it shows. I like his non-fiction a lot, but this...no.

Getting back to the KGB reading - which will eventually be available to hear, along with interviews, here - Ferris was preceded by two other very enjoyable writers, Liam Callanan, whose new novel All Saints I'm reading at the moment (it was on sale on the night) and really enjoying, and Elise Blackwell, who read from her novel The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, which is about the floods which struck Louisiana in 1927. The book was all but finished when Katrina hit last year, and Blackwell felt it had to be completely rewritten, and relocated, in the light of what had happened. So her narrator now tells the story of one flood on the eve of another.

Some New Haunts

2007-03-12T23:11:00.000-05:00

New blogs I've stumbled across, or been meaning to post about, of late:

The Convex Mirror: a blog about art in New York, which may or may not be written by someone living in this very apartment (not me, and not the cat, above, pictured hogging the reading material behind the blog's title).

Sexagenarian And The City: my friend "Mimi's" blog about being a (nearly) sixtysomething on the dating scene in New York...hilarious and utterly true, every word of it...

The Poetry Snark: does what it says on the tin. Merciless interrogation of the many sacred cows of the American poetry scene.

Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant: a literary blog which makes me feel dizzier than do the Elegant Variation, the unread pile of New Yorkers in my sitting-room and the Strand Bookstore combined.

Ed Park's Blog: Aptly entitled The Dizzies, this is another literary blog, by a co-founder of the excellent Believer magazine. Ed Park's first novel is due out later this year.

Brit in Brooklyn: Great photography, commentary on how developers are gobbling up this and other boroughs, and depressing hurricane-related news (if it hits, Brooklynites are goners. Oh well)

Ugh, Look What He's Done With His Copy of The Irish Book Review*...

2007-03-12T21:23:00.000-05:00

"You'll never guess who's here," A. said the other evening, as we waited for a reading by some lesser known Irish fiction writers to begin in a Chinatown restaurant. The reading was part of the series Good Words at the Good World at the Good World Bar & Grill on Orchard Street; each month it has a different theme, and this month, to coincide with Paddy's Day possibly, the theme was Ireland - or "Out of Ireland", to be exact. Mary Burke, who teaches Irish literature at the University of Connecticut and was published in the Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2004-5, and Martin Roper, who wrote a novel called Gone and teaches nonfiction at NYU, both read from new novels in progress. The place was packed, standing room only, and for some reason there were replicas of the same couple - the distinguished-looking, grey-bearded man, and the long-haired, long-skirted, outdoorsy-looking middle-aged woman - in every corner. They all looked vaguely familiar - probably because they all looked so much like one another, so when A came back from his cigarette break with a glint in his eye and news of a celebrity sighting, I prepared my best fake-excited face, expecting to hear tell of some obscure modernist poet. Or worse.
"Please don't say Frank McCourt," I said.

But no! It was the semen-daubing sensation of the Downtown art scene, Dash Snow, described by a controversial New York Magazine profile in January as looking like "the son of Jim Morrison and Jesus Christ"; Dash Snow, who comes from the De Menil family, one of the richest art families in the world, but who ran away at 13 to be a thief, a graffiti artist and, pretty soon, a scuzzy, elusive scene legend. He makes art out of newspaper clippings and his own semen, out of skulls, out of phlegm. He had a piece - a series of polaroid pictures, one of a dog scavenging in trash - in the Whitney Biennial last year, and he also had a piece - a semen/newspaper collage - in the Saatchi Show. He and his set - Ryan McGinley and Dan Colen, McGinley arguably being the genuine talent among them - have been dubbed Warhol's Children, existing in their own mythology of weirdness, privilege and self-absorption. They're known for their Hamster's Nests, which they create by shredding up to fifty phone books, winding all the blankets and curtains in the room around themselves, turning on the taps and taking a lorryload of drugs "until they feel like hamsters".

And here was their leader, quietly sitting at the back of an Irish writers event. And not a hamster in sight.

Except, of course, Snow hadn't come for the Irish writers. He was at the Good World for his breakfast bloody mary, more than likely, it being the downtown breakfast hour of 5 p.m. And chances are (we couldn't see), he legged it out of there very soon after the first soft rumblings of an Irish accent came over the loudspeaker. He certainly didn't stick it out to the end. But I hope he was there for at least some of the first reading, so that his well-trumpeted paranoia might have been piqued by Mary Burke's descriptions of an early 20th century European bohemia (her novel is based on the story of Lucia Joyce) which, at times seemed both to mirror and to parody Snow's downtown scene, right down to the bodily-fluid-soaked artworks. There were a few strangled noises from the back in response to that bit, come to think of it...

* (on that business with the Irish Book Review)...well, who could blame him?

update: A. has helpfully pointed me towards this account of the making of a Snow/Colen Hamster Nest. Now I really wish Snow had stuck around. Cause that's the kind of Irish book party I'd like to see. Which Irish scribes are up to it, though? I see Des Hogan and Colm Toibin, holding forth over a mountain of coke and Cutty One Rock and surrounded by shredded 01 directories and Dublin pigeons named McDowell, while Tony Cronin and Tom Murphy roar encouragement from the sidelines.

Conde Nasty

2007-03-07T08:50:00.000-05:00

In half an hour, I have to be at 4 Times Square, otherwise known as the Conde Nast building, otherwise known as The Scariest Place in New York, to do an interview with the poetry editor of the New Yorker. She, Alice Quinn, is not part of the scary bit - she was one of my teachers last year, and is a very sweet and approachable person. The scary bit, obviously, is the prospect of the Conde Nast girls, the skinny, pouty, cheekboney, Prada-clad swarm of Vogue-associated women, who will be stomping their $700 snowboots into the lobby just about the time that I arrive in my cat-hair-covered coat, slightly holey tights (please stay above the knee, ladder, please stay, nice ladder), odd vintage-meets-Belgian-weirdo-designer outfit, and hair which has not been combed because I this morning, of all mornings, I cannot find the comb. And of course, since it's pelting down snow and something like minus ten outside, I will also be red-nosed, sniffly and trailing hats and scarves in a Wurzel Gummidge manner.

Yes, I know I'm going there to talk about poetry. And I have been there before, and I survived. But seriously, I think I'm allowed this wobbly. Anna Wintour shouted at one of my classmates in the elevator there last week.

At least I haven't eaten any breakfast. That might help me to fit in.

Oh yes: forgot to add, because it is so flippin' cold, I will also be wearing red furry earmuffs which my mother bought me for Christmas, probably from Lidl. Got a clear enough picture?

Neighbourhood Snark

2007-02-20T23:47:00.000-05:00

Speaking of blogging and the L train...

Over the weekend, while writerprocrastinating, I discovered nycbloggers.com, a New York City blogging map, which lists blogs by subway line and subway stop. Think of it as a sort of Gawker Stalker for bloggers. My subway stop, the Grand Street L stop, has 18 blogs listed. I haven't yet joined up because of their "New Yorkers Only" criteria, which made me stop and think about whether I could qualify as a New Yorker...and the next line on their form is "if you have to ask whether you qualify as a New Yorker, you're probably not." Huh. They also say ex-pats are welcome, but I don't think they mean Irish ex-pats, exactly...

Anyway. Forget all of that. My initial pleasure at finding a blogging map to poke around at was quickly curtailed and transformed into sheer terror. What kind of sheer terror, you ask? Well, the kind of sheer terror that only a writerprocrastinator - that is, only a trying-to-write-a-novelist - acquainted with the catty directness of Miss Snark, Literary Agent can understand. Miss Snark tells it like it is. She's an agent, who writes an anonymous blog in which she answsers questions from idiot (and not so idiot) writers about querying, agent-hunting, agent-pestering and publishing, and she doesn't mince her words. Witness her crapometers for synopses, query letters and first pages. Yeah, those sarky red notations she inserts into submissions as she tears them to shreds are funny. Catty. Hilarious. Until you find it's time to write a synopsis or a query letter yourself (NOT for Miss Snark...who would seriously put themselves through that ordeal?), and then you start to see her red notations in your dreams. She scares the bejaysus out of me.

So, you'll be wondering about the reason for my nycblogger.com-induced sheer terror. Turns out Miss Snark lives one subway stop away, at Montrose Avenue. That's less than ten blocks away. I probably see her on the subway every morning. Oh my god, what if she has seen me reading over print-outs of my bloody novel? Standing behind me during the morning rush and snarking silently over my shoulder? Aiming virtual red-pen squiggles at my every page?

Thanks a bunch, nycbloggers. Making me feel like a tourist in NY was bad enough. But this is just too much.

Caesar And Cassius With A Satellite Modem

2007-02-20T23:22:00.000-05:00

I don't usually talk to people on the subway. Not even if I know them. Not even if I got on the subway with them. But this morning, on the L to Manhattan, I overheard a conversation which combined (in the space of two minutes): Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar, a daily videoblog and podcast, and a round-the-world-on-a-trawler trip starting tomorrow. I did the unthinkable and stuck my nose in. And here's what I got: a link to Bill Bowles's website, which kicked off in earnest yesterday and will kick off in a different form tomorrow, when he starts his world voyage (not in the cardboard vessel pictured here, I should clarify). He calls himself an "Interactive World Traveller" and has a background in film and theatre. Equipped with a satellite modem, he's planning to blog every day from tomorrow from wherever it is he ends up. Today, he podcasted from Brooklyn - somewhere in Bushwick, I think - where he and his actress sister gave Shakespeare his turn on the waterfront.

I know that videoblogging (vlogging) and video podcasting are well up and running by now in the blogosphere, but at the risk of sounding like a fogey (well, I am over 25...ancient in blogging terms), I don't know much about this type of blogging, and I don't have any video blogs on my blogroll. So, while it might be old hat by now, I was still really interested by what Bowles had to say about his project and about the ramifications of vlogging for traditional forms of journalism:

It dawned on me a few months ago, that if you had all the right gear, (camera, laptop, sat. phone, solar panels) a person could be a new sort of independent journalist; uploading video stories from anywhere in the world, while maintaining one’s creative freedom. I figure that within a few years, most travelers and bloggers will have this sort of gear, and we’ll have thousands of un-affiliated reporters roaming the globe, sending out news as part of a diverse open-source media network. I don’t really consider myself a journalist, but I’m interested in trying out the concept to see what happens.

I think it was the incredibly casual way his sister dropped into the conversation that he was about to sail around the world with his video camera that really piqued my interest. Even when I'm taking the subway to Manhattan, it feels like a major operation. Maybe that's the difference between the vlogger and the blogger. Or maybe it's just that they don't have wireless signals on the subway. Yet.

Any vlogs or video podcast recommendations out there?

Tubridy The Theatre Pundit, Updated

2007-02-16T13:07:00.000-05:00

Following Tuesday's post about Ryan Tubridy's thunderingly ignorant approach to theatre criticism (in summary: don't bother seeing the play, assume that writing about a subject is the same as endorsing it, imply that a dramatic exploration of a disturbing relationship is irresponsible because it will just encourage people to engage in such relationships in real life, I heard from the director of the Dublin production of Blackbird, Michael Barker-Caven. He told me that David Harrower, the playwright, was seriously shaken up after Tubridy's vigilante-style swoop, and that he had never experienced anything like it in the round of press interviews he had done for the play's runs in other cities, and he's wary about the prospect of doing any more live radio interviews about the play in the future. Which caution is understandable, I guess, but hopefully unnecessary - Harrower would probably have to find himself in the hotseat on Vatican Radio's Concerned Mothers Against Theatre talkshow before he'd come up against a presenter as narrow-minded and blinkered as Tubridy.

Yup, And The Editor In Chief Is Cathleen Ní Houlihan...

2007-02-13T17:11:00.000-05:00

He runs one of the best literary blogs out there, and he's barely one to be fooled, but Mark Sarvas over at The Elegant Variation fell hook, line and sinker today for Newton Emerson's satirical take on Gerry Adams, Writer Extraordinaire, which was published in the Irish Times a (full) month ago (and covered by Blogorrah here).

In a post entitled "Why Didn't We Think Of That?", TEV faithfully quotes from Emerson's piece on Adams's refusal to publish the third volume of his memoirs without the guarantee of good reviews. The gag about how Adams is believed to have "serious reservations about the final chapter" is also taken as fact, as is the quote from "Ulysses Grant", Emerson's fictional Irish Times literary edtor:

Like most creative people, Gerry Adams is surprisingly sensitive...[h]e finds it difficult to finish anything unless he's absolutely sure that everyone will love it.

And TEV rounds it all off with a hilarious crack about a car bomb, before the commenters come in to rain on his parade.

Messenger, Bullet Wounds, Tubridy: Nothing New Here

2007-02-13T09:48:00.000-05:00

Having listened yesterday to Ryan Tubridy pouring ill-informed fury upon David Harrower, the strangely-appropriately-named author of Blackbird, which opened at Dublin's Project last night in a production by the Landmark company, it's great to see a vastly more considered (not to mention professional) engagement with this controversial play already online at Irish Theatre Magazine's website. As the reviewer, Peter Crawley notes that Tubridy's screeching outrage at the very idea of a play which deals with a sexual encounter between a preteen girl and a forty-year-old man "is hardly an aberration":

In fact, it seemed a true measure of the level of cultural debate surrounding paedophilia, even – or perhaps especially – in a country so psychologically scarred by child sexual abuse.

True; most of the Tubridy interview sounded like an outtake from the Brasseye special on paedophilia six years ago. The same levels of stupidity, narrow-mindedness and hysteria were in evidence as Tubridy seemed practically to confuse Harrower with the male protagonist of his play. To write about such a thing as paedophilia, he implied, you must be somehow interested in it, which is sick. And anyway, how could you write about such a thing; how much do audiences really need to learn about this subject? Was Harrower just looking around for something scandalous to write about, Tubridy asked, in a tone which made clear that he, for one, had already made up his mind; did he have children himself? No, said Harrower, and the smug, disapproving little grunt which followed from Tubridy said it all, really. Naturally, he hadn't bothered to go to a preview of the very play he was not-very-subtly dismissing out of hand.

Crawley is right; this response speaks volumes about the level of cultural debate around the subject. But it also speaks volumes about the level and quality of debate and discussion around practically any arts-related subject on daytime Radio 1 programmes. With the new policy of distributing daytime arts interviews between Tubridy and Kenny, the notion of genuine engagement with a book, or a piece of theatre, has been utterly abandoned. It's gotten to the point where anything that sounds like a comment about the work itself, rather than about the personal life, interests and hobbies or (in this case) Virulent Paedophilia Obsession of the work's creator, sticks out embarrassingly, so that even the most fleeting attempt to talk in artistic terms about art sounds pretentious. Witness Harrower, yesterday, using the idea of his characters carrying narratives of their pasts around in their heads; in the face of Tubridy's flaming How Could You Do This assault, Harrower's response sounded like it belonged to a different era, a different realm. Which it did. It belonged to the realm of intelligent radio, where to discuss the arts, presenters didn't feel the need to mock or deride their subjects - or make clear their gleeful ignorance of their subject, another RTE speciality - before, or in lieu of, getting into a discussion of it. Wouldn't it be awful, after all, if their listeners thought they were actually interested in this arts rubbish? Good god, people would turn off their radios in droves.

Funny, then, that exactly this has been happening anyway, isn't it?

Sentimental Muck Alert

2007-01-26T21:38:00.000-05:00

Siofra King and Daniel Fay, both born on Wednesday....good to have you with us. Yeah, yeah, so there's an ocean between you and all that, but I'm still going to plague your teenage years with lame jokes about matchmaking, ok? You can do the preliminary flirting on the bebo pages I've already set up for each of you.

Twenty in NY Lawsuit Scandal

2007-01-19T18:31:00.000-05:00

Tch, turns out Twenty Major is just another of those fakes who blogs about Ireland while actually living in New York. Tax scam? Legal loophole? Failed screenwriting career? Hopefully none of the above, for not only is Twenty homeless and living outside a Manhattan antiques store, but he's currently being sued to the tune of $1 million in damages by the owner of the store, Karl Kemp, who says the sight of the bearded man and his filthy belongings is adversely affecting trade.

It seems Twenty has written almost the entirety of his blog from his grotty perch on Madison Avenue; he has been blogging for just over two years, which is also the length of time for which Kemp, according to his lawyer, has been plagued by Twenty's presence. Kemp says that the blogger, who is known on the street as "the Preacher" and often accompanied by up to ten followers, also homeless, can often be found "sleeping on the sidewalk,” “consuming alcoholic beverages from open bottles, performing various bodily functions such as urinating and spitting,” and “verbally harassing or intimidating the plaintiff’s patrons and prospective customers.”

But the real problem facing Kemp and other antique store owners, and the real reason for the staggering lawsuit, was revealed yesterday. It seems that Twenty has not only been "intimidating" would-be browsers of Kemp's goods, but he has also been running a sidewalk business in more modern, efficient, and interesting versions of such goods, which has, over the past year in particular, begun to siphon away Kemp's customer base. "We can't compete with the sidewalk traders," said another antiques dealer, who asked not to be named, yesterday. "They're plugged into everything that goes on in a way that we, surrounded by our mouldering antiques, never really can be. They get everything we do done more quickly and more economically. And while most of our most loyal customers do keep coming back to us, the sidewalk traders are stealing away the next generation. There is no next generation for the antiques dealers. Those homeless bastards - and it's not just Twenty, they're all over the place - have got us licked. I mean, look at them. They don't have any overheads, don't have any staff to pay, don't have any bosses to obey or pander to. Who wouldn't want to be homeless, the jammy bastards?"

The unnamed dealer did add, however, that not every sidewalk trader ran as successful a business as Twenty. Referring to the group of homeless people who often surround him outside the Madison Avenue Store, he said that the sidewalk industry had its share of inferior hangers-on and imitators. "That lot are just a merry band of wannabes," he said, prompting the ire of some of Twenty's followers, who at the time had been rooting through his "filthy belongings" and attempting to make them their own. "We say hilarious things about goats," bellowed one man, who seemed to be wearing a fake beard.

With the lawsuit, Karl Kemp hopes to compel the city to finally remove Twenty and his associates from the area outside his store. Homeless advocacy groups last night criticised his action, however, calling it "blinkered". "Regardless of where they pitch their camp, the homeless will still be out there, and their number is only getting larger," said a spokesperson for one group. "Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they're not there. They haven't gone away, you know."

Read more on Twenty's new found celebrity (much better than a crummy mention in the Irish Times): Gawker, New York Times

Sundance...

2007-01-18T10:41:00.000-05:00

...begins today. And the festival's website includes a number of the shorts which will be screened in Park City over the next couple of days. I think the shorts section of the site will be updated over the course of the festival (at least in terms of the given day's picks), so it's worth keeping an eye on. But you'll probably need a strapping bandwith - even my normally macho broadband connection is struggling to get going on this.

Poor Old Peter

2007-01-15T23:24:00.000-05:00

While happily gorging on the Golden Globes live blog at Cinematical (I do love me a live blog...nothing like a second-by-second commentary on Angelina Jolie's bored facial expressions, or the contrasting post-break-up sartorial statements of Reese and Cameron, to liven up a Monday night), I found myself really rooting for Mr O'Toole. And feeling so sorry for him when he didn't win for Venus. He was nominated in the Best Actor category, and the feeling seemed to be that he might take it, but no. And, not to get too gloomy about it, but this probably means he'll never win an Oscar, either, since the Globes are generally seen as a dry run for the Academy Awards. He'll just have to do with the honorary "lovely bugger" (his phrase for the statuette) he initially refused in 2003, on the grounds that he considered himself still in the running for a real one. Someone had a word in his ear, though, and told him not to be such a silly bugger, or words to that effect, and he accepted eventually.
New York magazine is feeling gloomy about Venus, too, but not because of anything to do with the quality of the film; rather, its review says, it comes as a shock to see O'Toole, "once the most beautiful of actors," playing "a near-death version of himself". See? Depressing.

But if anyone has to put paid to your last hopes of an Oscar, it might as well be Idi Amin. Forrest Whitaker took the Best Actor Globe for his portrayal of the dictator in The Last King of Scotland.

Sunday's Media Stuff: The Good. The Bad. The Sindo.

2007-01-15T03:02:00.001-05:00

The Good: Ambrose Clancy's riposte to the lazy sterotyping employed by Pico Iyer's New York Times review of Colm Tóibín's Mothers and Sons:

TYPICAL IRISH
To the Editor:
In his review of Colm Toibin's "Mothers and Sons" (Dec. 31), Pico Iyer separates Toibin from the "typical Irish writer, if you associate such with musical rhapsodies, loquaciousness or blarney."
Typical? Who has he been reading? Jonathan Swift? Frank O'Connor? Elizabeth Bowen? Benedict Kiely? William Trevor? John McGahern? Not to mention Samuel Beckett, so I won't.
There's a long list of writers, many included in the Toibin-edited "Penguin Book of Irish Fiction," who are spare in their music, blade-sharp and ruthlessly to the point.

Good man, Ambrose! Though you might have told them that the fadas in Tóibín's surname aren't mere rhapsodic quirks either...

The Bad: Albert Reynolds, in the middle of a riveting account of his working relationship with the late David Ervine on Marian Finucane's programme, uses the phrase "the nigger in the woodpile". The silent horror of everyone else in the studio comes over the airwaves like a blast of cold air. The tension was palpable for minutes afterwards; RTE's radio dramatists could learn a lot about atmosphere from the clip, which should still be online here. Reynolds will likely get a roasting over it, and deserves to, for speaking like a silly old fool.

The Sindo: Loads of coverage on Ireland's coke catastrophe, most of it by hacks only too happy to come across like they know just a little too much how this whole cocaine thing works - and all of it, hilariously, filed under the "Analysis" rather than the "Lifestyle" section of the paper, when, almost every case, the "analysis" in question barely extends beyond the tip of the writer's nose, clean or otherwise. As you'd expect, Bazza is in his element on this subject; so breathtakingly close to the action is his exposé of "(literally) high society" that it dispenses almost completely with the notion of providing sources for quotes. Sources? "[o]ne or two Irish rock stars, restaurateurs, Bohemians, rock managers, famous wives, solicitors [and] models" are hoovering it up and you want sources? Tch, petty. The man's a genius; he knew it wasn't enough just to describe the coke scene in Dublin. No, he worked long and hard on his style to make sure that it replicated in dizzying detail the precise sensations of a coke high; the rambling, unsupported assertions, the delusions, the shattered focus, the peaks of hysterical aggression, the verbal slips and slurs (" The magazine rang a front cover issue on coke last mag called 'High Society"). Repeating himself, mixing his metaphors, composing memos to Kate Moss, drawing on Naomi Campbell, Oasis and P.J. Gibbons as cultural referents, launching into, and then abandoning, a treatise on fashion and its drug history...Bazza brilliantly imbues his words with all the tics and traits of an addict. At the end of his piece, when we read this passage...

"Unbeknownst to themselves, cokeheads talk a lot of shite; but in very quick sentences and in a hyper manner as if dispensing some all-important wisdom that needs to be heard before time runs out."

...we feel, somehow, as though we've already been there, as though we've already witnessed the exact scenario he describes. His writing is that good. It practically gurns. Anyone can write about cokeheads. It takes Bazza to to become one - in a purely metaphorical sense, of course. Give the man a Pulitzer. And make sure the prizemoney's in nice, crisp banknotes.

That's if his colleague Liam Collins doesn't win, for his first-person account of the horrors of coke - all of which seem related, for some reason, to lovely girls and the weddings they either attend or intend to have. Liam's piece includes the story of a couple who last year died a Romeo and Juliet-style death in a Dublin hotel - after a wedding, naturally. It's incredible. No, really. Not a source or citation or a name or a date in sight. But look, the man says it happened. Isn't that enough for you? Bloody cocaine classes, always wanting more.

Once I Had a Bunch of Time (To Blog)

2007-01-12T15:56:00.000-05:00

Well, hello there, faithful readers. What you you doing, still hanging about here? Didn’t you know that after that last snide post there - that Lohan-bash which disregarded the whole meaning of Thanksgiving - I suffered a Lohanesque breakdown of my own (read: got blogblock) and had to go into rehab? Except it kind of looked like my parents’ home in the Irish midlands. And instead of having Pete Doherty to look at outside my window, snorting coke and groping Kate Moss in the clinic’s salubrious gardens, I had for my viewing pleasure the time-honoured elements of the fragrant midlands countryside: the Old Black Cow (the cranky one who insists on getting hurriedly knocked up at unsuitable times of the year, the old-fashioned way, without the help of the AA man); the New Housing Development (knocked up at a similarly hurried pace, also without the help of the AA man but with plenty of help from the WPP [What Planning Permission?] man), and the Two Roads Diverged in a Scraggy Wood, neither of which I could take due to my continuing, really-embarrassing-at-this-stage, inability to drive.
I also had at my disposal the slowest, patchiest, most sputtering internet connection outside of the Comoro Islands, with which I could try, I suppose, to excuse my blogging silence of the last two months, but I won’t lie to you. I was only home for three weeks: I could have been frenetically blogging all of the rest of the time. Out of the loop I fell, however, and here is my pathetic attempt to muscle my way back in. Wish me luck. It’ll probably be the 12th of April (happy birthday, Miglior!) before you hear from me again.

So, to kick off 2007 chez ESV, below are some lovely youtube swipes which pretty much sum up the world I’ve been inhabiting for the last few weeks:

1. My Native Place (or near enough):

I don’t know who made this (I swear to god it wasn’t me), but as far as I’m concerned it’s the greatest work of art to come out of said county since Castle Rackrent. The suspicious cattle, the time-stained bungalow, the novel approach to “landscaping” in said bungalow’s front garden; this skatebop guy has it all. I hope he’s at least getting some Local Authority funding.

2. My social life over Christmas:
I ventured all the way to Leitrim. Again, I am not the artiste behind this tape, but I live in hope of the day some Carrick-on-Shannon lad will shout “howya horseboxes” at my retreating skirt. (I hope they don’t speak to Mary McAleese like that as she’s going about Carrick doing her shopping, as she recently told Marian Finucane she likes to do.)

3. What I saw on my daily rambles down to the banks of the canal:

This is always happening, you can’t go for a walk anywhere in my neck of the woods without stumbling over proof of the county’s traditional song and music heritage, and what a hale and hearty state it’s still in. Honestly. All the energy there goes into fiddle-playing and sean-nós dancing, not into breathalyzer-avoidiance and anti-Latvian mutterings.

4. My new standard of excellence:

No, really. I thought Shay Healy’s documentary on Foster and Allen (which skipped over the whole matter of the boys playing in South Africa during the Apartheid-protesting boycott by practically ever other musician in the world) was kind of brilliant. In an accidental way, mind. But still. You can’t beat quotes (only slightly paraphrased) like these:

Foster: “I don’t think I’m famous at all. I don’t get treated too famous around here anyhow. Sure didn’t I come back from a world tour there one time, and I was only in the door before a neighbour rang to know would I go up to him and help him to pick a few stones out of a field. And I went.”
Allen: “No, we never see each other when we’re not on tour. No, never.”
Foster: “I built this huge complex for me horses. And I have pictures of horses everywhere in it. And this oul' Native American Indian wall hanging. It has a horse on it too, see?”
Allen: “I built this patio so that when I come home from tour, I can sit out here on my own. On my own. Do you understand me?”

I can’t wait for the director’s cut with behind-the-scenes coverage of the boys’ obvious mutual resentment.

Pret A Snorter

2006-11-23T08:27:00.001-05:00

Nobody is feeling more emotional about the
sad death of Robert Altman earlier this week than Lindsay Lohan. Lohan, who was directed by Altman in his last film, A Prairie Home Companion, issued her very own statement yesterday responding to the news of his passing. By "her very own statement, I mean that she spewed something into the public domain without first running it by her publicist. Or her spellcheck. Or that grammarcheck function which turns its nose up at all my sentences and tells me that they're mere fragments and should be revised. Don't you have that, Lindsay? The fragment-finder? You could use it, for starters, to locate the fragments of coke that still linger in your nostril-hairs after the three lines you must have blown before writing this searingly elegaic, AA-speak-infused prose in the back of a cab while Calum Best rifled through your wallet:

"I would like to send my condolences out to Catherine Altman, Robert Altmans wife, as well as all of his immediate family, close friends, co-workers, and all of his inner circle.

"I feel as if I've just had the wind knocked out of me and my heart aches.

"If not only my heart but the heart of Mr. Altman's wife and family and many fellow actors/artists that admire him for his work and love him for making people laugh whenever and however he could..

"Robert altman made dreams possible for many independent aspiring filmmakers, as well as creating roles for countless actors.

"I am lucky enough to of been able to work with Robert Altman amongst the other greats on a film that I can genuinely say created a turning point in my career.

"I learned so much from Altman and he was the closest thing to my father and grandfather that I really do believe I've had in several years.

"The point is, he made a difference.

"He left us with a legend that all of us have the ability to do.

"So every day when you wake up.

"Look in the mirror and thank god for every second you have and cherish all moments.

"The fighting, the anger, the drama is tedious.

"Please just take each moment day by day and consider yourself lucky to breathe and feel at all and smile. Be thankful.

"Life comes once, doesn't 'keep coming back' and we all take such advantage of what we have.

"When we shouldn't..... '

"Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourselves' (12st book) -everytime there's a triumph in the world a million souls hafta be trampled on.-altman Its true. But treasure each triumph as they come.

"If I can do anything for those who are in a very hard time right now, as I'm one of them with hearing this news, please take advantage of the fact that I'm just a phone call away.

God Bless, peace and love always.

Thank You,

"BE ADEQUITE"

Lindsay Lohan

"Be Adequite?" Be Adequite? It's my new favourite line. That, and the snark of one commenter on defamer: "BE LITERITE!"

Defamer

A Little Piece of Heaven

2006-11-22T06:54:00.000-05:00

Here follows heavy advertorial for the sheer, lucid, glorious BRILLIANCE of tuppenceworth.ie's takedown of the laziness, bigotry and vacuousness of the Sunday Independent. This has needed doing for a long, long time, and that it has been done so thoroughly and so clear-headedly just makes it all the sweeter. Drool.

Link via Bloggorah, who smell revolution.

update: Tuppenceworth's Paper Round is comprehensive, taking in the Examiner, Herald, the Tribune and a Friday edition of the Times, and deserves a fuller perusal. It's just the beginning of the road for this project, and already looks very promising. Nor is it confined to the realm of satire, as I previously thought; tuppenceworth is deadly serious about this, as his research and the application of his criteria (witness: where lies the difference between PR and advertorial? journalism and opinion?) show. Not that satire can't be deadly serious, but, focusing on one area, satire generally runs out of steam. This is different.

My Big Fat Scientology Wedding

2006-11-18T20:01:00.000-05:00

Something panfried, something blue... I've got it all sorted out.

No cats were harmed in the making of this post. A pan was, though, and will probably never again be usable.

Anyway, to celebrate today's happy event, here's a little clip for y'all from way back in those heady first days of Katie's contractual agreement: the David Letterman interview, conducted just after Tom's couch-jumping stunt on Oprah. Poor Katie was but a novice at the scientology/beard lark at this point (and hadn't started wearing awful satin blouses everywhere, either), and was clearly having trouble remembering the lines she'd been fed by Tom's handlers: notice how panicked she gets when Letterman asks her for anything like a concrete detail. Where did they meet? Shit! She can't remember the official answer to that one. Well, never mind, she'll just waffle her way through it, and hope it works....

It doesn't.

PS, my favourite detail out of all of today's coverage: La Dolce Vita, the film alluded to in so many headlines about the wedding and the paparazzi attention it has garnered, is apparently also the most hotly-anticipated title of the year. In gay porn.

Another Distraction

2006-11-11T14:40:00.000-05:00

Where have you been all my life, Critical Mick? And "when your anger is focused" (whatever the hell that means), could you possibly be "the most talented writer at work in Ireland today"? Bafflingly, you seem to think this title might already be claimed, what with chancers like Hugo Hamilton, DBC Pierre, Eugene McCabe and John Connolly daring to scribble on the old sod. (Oh, and some women too. But not many.)
What I'm trying to say is: read CM. He does things with reviews I never thought possble. Vernon God Little becomes an episode of South Park. Claire Kilroy's first novel inspires a sort of father/daughter/daughter's friend/UCD Arts Block love affair. The Master becomes a send-up of every panel discussion I've ever listened to, or been on, or had anxiety dreams about. And as for what he does with Utterly Monkey....just read it.

Times Select

2006-11-07T07:14:00.000-05:00

TImes Select, the online part of the New York Times which is generally hidden behind a subscription wall, is free all of this week. It's worth a look if you're in search of yet another form of distraction, and with the mid-terms today, this is a good week to be able to avail of it.
One piece I'd recommend is this article on a cache of over 800 newly discovered Dorothea Lange photographs, from the period in the 1940s when tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans were rounded up and sent to internment camps on the west coast of the U.S. as the war with Japan escalated. Lange's photographs were impounded by the government soon after they were taken and have been in the National Archives until now; W.W. Norton has just published 100 of them in a book called Impounded. The book's co-editor (with Linda Gordon) describes the kind of America this was, as families were ordered at gunpoint into horse stalls and shacks, where they were interned, in many cases for years afterwards, in the intense California heat. An editorial from the L.A. Times read: “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched — so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents — grows up to be Japanese, not an American.”

Lange had actually been employed by the government to document the process, presumably to show that detainees were not being mistreated. But at most of the locations she visited, she found her work being censored by government officials even as she tried to create it; at one camp, she was forbidden from taking photographs of wire fences, watchtowers, armed guards or anything like that. The photographs then disappeared almost as soon as the commission was completed.

To my shame, this is a period of history of which I only really became conscious last year, when I was researching the life of Isamu Noguchi, one of the most famous sculptors of the 20th century, who was Japanese-American. By the 1940s, he lived an artist's life in New York, had designed many high-profile pieces including the entrance to the Rockefeller Centre, and was a revered collaborator with the choreographer and dancer Martha Graham. In response to the growing anti-Japanese sentiment in the U.S., Noguchi established a group of writers and artists calling for democracy and travelled to California to oversee a documentary about the internment. He left California lest he himself be interned, but when he found, back in New York, that his efforts to influence government officials were failing, he decided to become a voluntary internee at the Poston camp, located on an Indian reservation in Arizona. He designed parks and recreational areas within the camp - including, tellingly, a cemetery - but soon realised that officials had no intention of implementing them. And when he applied for release, he was deemed a "suspicious person" due to his involvement with the artists for democracy group. He was forced to remain on for several months, and investigated by the FBI after his eventual release.

I was shocked to learn that this had happened to Japanese-Americans, in their hundreds of thousands, in the U.S. Looking at the country today, of course, I don't know why I was shocked. Noguchi was one of the lucky ones; he returned to his life in Greenwich Village, to exhibitions, acclaim and friendships with influential artists and the celebrities of the time. Other Japanese-American internees had less to look forward to. As the essay accompanying Lange's photographs makes clear, both the lives led by internees within the camps and the lives to which they returned after their release were often tragic.

My Editor

2006-11-04T14:38:00.000-05:00

He's a hard taskmaster.

Doherty gets Moss's ring stuck on his finger. No, I didn't make that up.

2006-11-02T11:46:00.000-05:00

The latest from the Kate Moss/Pete Doherty farce...

I still want to believe this guy is an elaborate KLF hoax. But even they couldn't dream up half the stories that come out about him.

In other news, how much more closely can Kate Moss come to resemble a wig-wearing Ian Beale before she is no longer considered a supermodel? Just wondering...

The Richard Ford Trilogy, NYT Style

2006-11-01T10:05:00.000-05:00

A Seattle reader of the New York Times has done what has needed to be done for a long time: he has socked it to the newspaper over its odd policy of often reviewing the same book twice, once on the weekday pages and once in the Sunday review. In this case, he's talking about what he saw as excessive coverage of Richard Ford's new novel, The Lay of the Land. The novel got two reviews, a reasonably poor one from Michiko Kakutani, and a more glowing specimen from the paper's film critic A.O. Scott. In between the two, the Arts section carried a front-page feature on Ford and the travels he undertook as part of his book research. At this stage, the reader wondered whether Ford had an "in" with the newspaper.

Publishing a feature as well as a review seems reasonable to me, especially in the case of a book as eagerly awaited as this one, which is the last in Ford's acclaimed Frank Bascombe trilogy. But the policy of double-reviewing has never made sense to me, particularly since the reviews are often in complete opposition to one another. Yes, there's a lot to be said for diversity of critical voices on a new title, but not in this form. Either publish one review and have another critic respond to that review, or publish one review full stop. Or, publish one review and allow the opportunity for another perspective on the book to come across in the course of a feature or interview. But publishing two reviews? Get off the fence. And use the weekday pages for other books. It's not like there aren't enough of them waiting to be reviewed.

Read the complaint, and the borderline-sniffy response from the NYT's public editor, here. (Registration may be required, but it's free.)

I'm off to my first class with Orhan Pamuk. Up for discussion is Mann's Tonio Kroger. Report later on...

Things Learned in a Poetry Class

2006-10-31T00:27:00.000-05:00

note: the second half of this post is supposed to be hidden behind a clickable "read-on" link, but blogger's "span/fullpost" etc html doesn't seem to be working anymore. Does anybody know the story? Any alternatives? Just looking at this solution makes me want to go back to pen and paper. Until then, sorry for the length of this post.

• In 1971, while rushing to dinner with his wife, the French poet Jean Follain (well discussed here), died after being struck by a car on a Paris corner. It was the exact corner on which his father had been knocked down and killed years previously.

•
In 1970, Svetlana Alliluyeva Stalina (seen, right, aged nine with her devoted daddy Joseph Stalin), received an invitation from the widow of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Stalina had recently defected to the U.S., causing uproar in the USSR for her denouncement of her father's regime and the publication of her memoir Twenty Letters To a Friend. Wright's widow invited her to come and visit her at Taliesin West, Wright's winter home and school in the desert of Arizona. A mystic, she was convinced that Stalina was a spiritual replacement for the daughter she had lost in a car crash, a woman also called Svetlana, who had been married to Wright's chief apprentice, William Peters. Stalina visited Arizona and had agreed within weeks to marry Peters. Stalina now lives in a retirement home in Wisconsin.

• Robert Lowell taught an undergraduate workshop in poetry at Harvard in the early 1970s. In lieu of the usual workshop approach of reading and/or listening to the poems of participating students, Lowell preferred to read aloud from a battered anthology of poems he admired. Every so often he would turn to the students, with ten minutes left to go before class ended, and ask them to read a poem. They were mostly eighteen years old, and understandably reluctant to follow in the wake of Marvell, Browning and Yeats. One of the students took a shine to an attractive girl in the class. One day, after class had ended, he asked her out. She walked away without speaking to him. A classmate filled him in on his faux-pas: he had just propositioned the Lowell girlfriend of that class. There was one in every class. Also, there was Elizabeth Hardwick, the wife he was in the process of leaving, and Lady Caroline Blackwood, the wife he was in the process of acquiring. Lowell was eccentric, but generous. He invited the whole class out to a meal in Cambridge. They all went. Meanwhile, Lowell went to the airport and took a flight to London, where he lived for pretty much the rest of his life.

• Something I remembered tonight about Lowell: when he died of a heart attack in 1977 in the back of a New York cab, he was returning from JFK airport, having flown there from Dublin. There, he had finally ended his marriage with Blackwood, who was an heir to the Guinness fortune and lived on the family estate at Castletown House, Co. Kildare. When Lowell died, he was on his way back to Hardwick, who lived in Manhattan. He died with a painting in his arms. It was a portrait, now famous, of Blackwood, by her previous husband Lucien Freud. I think I remember hearing somewhere that he had robbed it from Castletown's walls. But maybe I'm imagining that bit.

• Teaching in Harvard at the same time as Lowell was his great friend, the poet Elizabeth Bishop. His classes were taught in a penthouse with a stunning view of Cambridge; hers were taught in a damp basement. She was calmer than Lowell, which wouldn't have been difficult. She grew exasperated with her students, who were desperately self-conscious about their readers, their potential readers, their imagined readers, and about what all these people might say about what had been written or appropriated or revealed, when in fact their poems had, as of yet, no readers at all save for themselves and their teachers. She slammed a notebook down on the desk one day and said to her students, look. When you begin work on a poem, the thoughts that go into that and the material that goes into that process forms a bridge between you and hte page. And when your reader reads the finished poem, the poem forms a second bridge between the page and them. And your readers will never see the first bridge. Only the second one. So stop thinking about what your readers will think of your material. They will never be on that bridge.

• In French graveyards - at least in some French graveyards - there is a symbol for the grave of a suicide.

• In 1910, Houdini was the first man to fly an airplane successfully in Australia. As well as flying, he performed. During one performance in Melbourne, he jumped, bound in chains, from a high bridge into a river. Moments later, he resurfaced, free of his chains, and saw in the water beside him something that nearly caused him to drown.

• The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (right), who would have been 82 this week had he lived, was a descendant of George Herbert, somehow.

• On the last three points, learn more below. You'll have to read some poems. They are worth reading. I suppose I shouldn't really be printing them in full. But I am.

Outside Perpignan in Heavy Rain from In the Year of the Comet (1992) by Nicholas Christopher

The trees sway darkly
along the black wall with its vines.
For shelter, a cat squeezes between the steel bars over a window.
This is where the caretaker lives,
catty-corner to the cemetery,
with a door the color of stone.

We've just descended the mountains,
windshield wipers slapping mud
while we talked about the acrobat
who was in the papers in Barcelona
yesterday; how he attempted
to perch blindfolded on the highest
steeple of the Gaudí cathedral.

Through the gate, in the first
row of gravestones, a statue
depicts a young woman
raising her hand to her face:
the mortuary sign for a suicide.
Is she about to touch her forehead?
to tear out her hair?
to dig her nails into her cheek?
to stifle a cry
or make the sign of the cross?

In this life which is the only life
it is a gesture we see every day.
You say someone in a position
to know told you it's easy
to learn about these things
without ever learning anything at all.
Without ever running out of questions.
When that acrobat fell in bright sunlight,
did all the women in the street raise
their hands to shield their eyes?

From 5º (5º and Other Poems, 1995) by Nicholas Christopher

In 1910 Houdini was the first man to fly
an airplane successfully in Australia.
It was a biplane, purchased in France,
which he took to Melbourne on a ship.
During the two-week voyage,
he was continually seasick,
yet spent hours in the cargo hold,
poised at the controls of his plane.
He had HOUDINI painted on the fuselage
and wings in red and gold.

In Melbourne he gave two performances nightly.
He made a full-grown elephant disappear.
He caused a man's top hat to fill with coins.
He had himself submerged, straitjacketed
and handcuffed, in a tank of ice water.
Then he left his wife at their hotel and hurried
to a desert airstrip to sit in his plane.
He kept this up for weeks, studying charts,
waiting for the weather to clear.

On the evening of February 18th, a crowd
watched him leap manacled from Queen's Bridge
into the muddy waters of the Yarra River.
Moments later, a dead man floated to the surface.
The onlookers panicked, and when Houdini
reappeared, he was so startled to see
the corpse that he nearly drowned
and had to be hauled
into a rowboat by his attendants.

Finally, on March 16th, under cloudless skies,
he took off in his plane, circled, and landed.
He completed three flights that day,
covering seven miles at an altitude of ninety feet.
At each stop, bigger crowds cheered him on.
In April, he made four more flights
before crashing outside Sydney on the 22nd.
He walked away from the wreckage unscathed
and told his wife he had not slept in a month.

"I now seem to have lost the habit," he added.
To his journal he confided that history
would remember him, not as a magician,
but an aviation pioneer.
During the voyage home, he was seasick.
He never flew again.

Remembering My Father from Mr. Cogito (1974) by Zbigniew Herbert
Trans. J & B Carpenter

His face severe in clouds above the waters of childhood
so rarely did he hold my warm head in his hands
given to belief not forgiving faults
because he cleared out woods and straightened paths
he carried the lantern high when we entered the night.

I thought I would sit at his right hand
and we would separate light from darkness
and judge those of us who live
- it happened otherwise

a junk-dealer carried his throne on a hand-cart
and the deed of ownership the map of our kingdom

he was born for a second time slight very fragile
with transparent skin hardly perceptible cartilage
he diminished his body so I might receive it

in an unimportant place there is shadow under a stone

he himself grows in me we eat our defeats
we burst out laughing
when they say how little is needed
to be reconciled

How to Look Good in Photographs

2006-10-26T08:14:00.000-05:00

1. chin up
2. hand on hip
3. three hours of make-up and a day of intensive photoshop love (hey, it worked for Suri Cruise)

This is from a new Dove ad. Remember it the next time you embark on a fit of self-hatred while flicking through Vogue...

Master of Tact Returns to the Airwaves

2006-10-26T07:04:00.000-05:00

Goodbye, Con Murphy. It was fun while it lasted. You didn’t make racist,homophobic, sexist or just plain stupid remarks, we didn’t have to listen to your unprofessional blundering around issues of age or sex or technology nor anything else (note to Tubridy: when you want to know somebody’s age, just ask them. Stop this whole faux-polite “um, um, may I know what general age group you are in, if you don’t mind…um, haahaa, just, well you know what I mean,” etc) and you had clearly actually read the books (for once, something that was not a what-ho British book about boys’ hobbies! Joy!) and watched the films and whatnot up for discussion. (Though you could have talked a bit more about Dallas during that John Doyle interview; that would have made me really happy.) Now Turgidy is back; curse those advances in tonsilitis medicine. He’s interviewing Kevin Myers at the moment, and has already made him sound like a charming, subtle, intelligent speaker by comparison.("predilection for women", aargh, "I was an ardent young man", aaaaarrrrgh, "the female thing", stop it, oh my god Turgidy just spat out the word "threesome", now he’s talking about a woman “doing what she does on her own”, which is his euphemism for masturbation; I want to die). At least Jane Ruffino is coming on soon, and she is going to kick his tweed-jocked arse.

I mentioned Dallas, didn’t I? So that’s justification enough for this…

Genius

2006-10-13T12:50:00.000-05:00

I'm stealing this straight from Gawker, but it's too good not to steal. These images are from a campaign devised by Saatchi & Saatchi for the 30% off sale at the Italian English-language bookstore Mondadori earlier this year. Thinking about how this campaign might have advertised Irish novels, there aren't many contenders. Flann O'Brien seems to lead the way where numerical titles are concerned. I wonder how At Swim 1.4 Birds and The 2.3rd Policeman sold during the Mondadori sale. Better than The Barrytown Dilogy, I'd imagine. Or Paddy Clarke Ha Ha h...

Never mind.

What James Wood Does Like to Read

2006-10-03T00:16:00.000-05:00

I took a seminar with James Wood this semester. It's over now, even though the semester has barely started, which makes me feel gloomy, because he was a brilliant teacher; passionate and insightful as a reader of Bellow (the stories), Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground), Chekhov (stories) and Woolf (To the Lighthouse) and adept at talking about these works not just from the perspective of criticism, but of craft. He also had a very entertaining story about his own doppelganger, and about the Dostoevskian saga which ensued for him following the intervention into his life of that person, who shared his name and his occupation, and, for a while, showed up at every turn for Wood, writing letters, reviews, and even blurbs. It reminded me strongly of Paul Auster's novella City of Glass, but probably because that, in itself, is one big Dostoevskian trope.
Anyway, after the last class, Wood took some time to talk about "literature in general" and to take any questions the class had on this subject, and of course somebody asked the question that was on everybody's lips ("Which books have you liked in recent years?"), albeit phrased more delicately than others might have put it, given Wood's no-nonsense tack as a critic ("Is there anything you've ever liked?") And, while Wood was happier to give names (Spark, Sebald, Bellow, Coetzee, and the earlier Roth) than titles, there were a few that he singled out:
Amit Chaudhuri's collection A Strange and Sublime Address(1991)V.S. Naipaul's novel A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) Henry Green's novel Loving (1945)(see Wood’s TLS article on Green, from the TLS last January).

Naturally, I haven't read any of them; this is the first I've heard of Green, in fact. His novel sounds intriguing, set as it is among a bunch of servants in a castle in Ireland during WWII. I didn't get to ask Wood what he thought of Bowen, or of any other Irish writers; his slow, somewhat agonised but still fascinating revelation of his favourites was then intercepted by a bland question about marketing and the young writer (snore), so there were revealed no more than these. But at least it saved me from yet again displaying my provincial tendencies for all to see.

Welcome to the BQE, Bitch

2006-10-02T09:23:00.000-05:00

Sometimes we forget that we live in Brooklyn, and allow ourselves to be deluded into thinking that we've been transported into some less crowded version of the Village, except with fewer tourists, fewer strollers, better bars and lower rent. And then some actual CRIMINALS steal a van and set it on fire outside our window! At six o'clock in the evening! On Yom Kippur!! (Ok, ok, the last bit was just overkill.)

Man, we live an edgy life. I'm surprised some gangsta types aren't vying to shoot me in the head even as I write this. It must be the sound of the first ever JK Ensemble, streaming live from the wireless, that's saving me. By tomorrow, I expect to hear a playlist consisting of Bonnie Prince Billy and improvisations on Bach banging through the car windows of all the young men cruising (but not in the Village sense of the word) out there. And then, in a nice piece of symmetry, JK will open Wednesday's show by spinning the current boom-car fave, "You Already Know I Want to Fuck You (Fuck You, Fuck You)". And Ana Leddy will finally realise the enormity of her mistake.

Barry Egan, Journalist of the Year

2006-10-01T15:50:00.000-05:00

1. From today's Sindo, a primer in thoughtful, balanced, consistent prose:

IT'S official. Marian Keyes couldn't leave the house if they did away with hair dyes. "I would kill myself," she insists. (Mercifully, Marian was unsuccessful in a real suicide attempt in 1994.)

2. Conversation Chez Empire State View upon the reading-out-loud of the above paragraph earlier today:

ESV: "...in a real suicide attempt in 1994."
A: "Jesus Christ!"
(cue two minutes of hysterical laughter and one terrified kitten)
ESV: I'm going to put that on my blog.
A: Do.
(ESV types and mutters)
ESV: But I need a picture to go along with it, and all I get when I type in "Barry Egan" is Adam Sandler's character from Punch Drunk Love. I need a greasy, ginger "celebrity"...
A: Use Mick Hutchence.
ESV: Who?
A: Mick Hutchence.
ESV: Whose "real suicide attempt in 1994"* was successful?
A: Oh yeah.
ESV: Hucknall.
A: That's the one.
Max the Kitten: Where did you hide that roast chicken, youse bastards?

*yeah, yeah, 1997, whatever.

Clinton Uncut

2006-09-26T20:06:00.001-05:00

Apparently Fox News isn't too happy that there are full clips of the Fox News Sunday interview with Bill Clinton, in which Clinton, faced with questions about the Democrats' actions in the run-up to 9/11, gives Chris Wallace's smug mug something to chew on. Fox has pulled "unauthorised" (read: unedited-for-maximum-possible-Republican-advantage) clips from Youtube, and has authorised only online versions which cut straight from Wallace's polite, measured introduction to Fox's outraged headlines ("Clinton Freaks Out", etc). We can't be seeing that interview with our own eyes, because then we might make our own mind up on a few things. So Fox has to protect us. While Fox is busy doing that, you can see the video of the full interview on google videos. And, since youtubers are uploading copies of the interview faster than Fox can get to them, you can still watch it here.

Photos from Secret Project Robot, Williamsburg

2006-09-24T18:45:00.000-05:00

Secret Project Robot is a gallery space located in Monster Island, a converted warehouse building located on what seems to be the only few hundred square feet of ground not earmarked for high-rise development along the Hudson at Kent Avenue, Williamsburg. It houses several art organisations and hosts regular exhibitions and events; last weekend’s art and music festival was one of the best things we’ve been to in Brooklyn. Check out their (strangely antediluvian) website here, and get a sense one of the current shows, a sort of communal art store called cabin comforts, here. The photos below are of some of the other exhibits, including the superb super8 projection at the end of the night, which stretched across three buildings along the waterfront.The striped screen in the second-to-last photo was the result of an artist drawing straight lines of colour on empty super8 reels as they were projected onto the walls; it started as a single wobbly strip of orange and built, within minutes, to what looked like one of the old TV test screens, before turning to a single block of colour; the effect was gorgeous. These pictures don’t do it justice, but they give some idea of the event, I hope.

and lastly (and fittingly)...

Internet-savvy Sue

2006-09-24T17:27:00.000-05:00

So that’s who was doggedly rooting around these pages from the offices of the London Times for most of last week, going through the archive and leaving little queries about my true identity - almost touching in their never-tried-this-blogging-thing-before bluntness - in the comments section. I could see you, Sue: you'd be surprised at what thorough little bastards these statcounters can be. ISP trackers and all! Anyway, thanks for the half-mention. I'll treasure it. It is to me what vol-au-vents are to Bono.

I'm the "observer", by the way. At last, my proudest moment!

"Wasps are the Neo-Nazis of the Insect World"

2006-09-22T11:02:00.000-05:00

Our friends Ronan & James, aka Hoovers & Sledgehammers, are over from Dublin to play a couple of gigs; it's been fun watching the reaction of punters in Manhattan and Queens to their gentle performances of such hits as "I'll Stab You" and "Fat Fuck". Think a marraige of Glen Hansard and the dead Nazi soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. No, just kidding, don't. Think this video, for their song "Joyridin'". That's how he killed his sister Peg, after all. So a bit of respect...

Ardently Desire Away, Your Name's Not Down. Now Get Lost.

2006-09-22T11:01:00.000-05:00

Now, hold on. Irish artists, or rather artistes, are just losing the run of their tempers these days, by the sound of things. First Twink, then Bono, and now the wonderful Mannix Flynn? Mannix, you may have heard if you’re in Ireland, is presenting a mysterious piece at this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival, about which the organisers of the festival claim to know relatively little. As described in Saturday’s Irish Times, the piece sounds promising:

Letting Go of That Which You Most Ardently Desire [is] described as an art process whereby members of the public can call a number, enter into a contract based on trust and then be given instructions on how to have a unique experience at one of a number of site-specific locations.

Word reached me from a friend in Dublin this morning, however, that there may be quite a delicate art to getting those elusive instructions. My friend called the number given for Letting Go… and left her details; when her mobile rang later that evening, who was on the other end only Mannix, all ready to give the necessary instructions. Except my friend was in a crowded bar at the time, and the line was bad, and she couldn’t really hear Mannix that well, and had to keep getting him to repeat parts of his “process spiel” so that she could actually work out where to go to take part in the thing. Well, this wasn’t the done thing at all, at all. Obviously, she wasn’t taking the whole process very seriously at all if she was in a bar while waiting for her call to be returned. Obviously, she should have been sitting in a darkened room with all the doors and windows closed, without radio or television, staring expectantly at her mobile, unable to breathe until it rang. Apparently disgusted with her lack of interest (even though she was trying to hear what he was saying), Mannix basically (not to mention allegedly) lost the rag, told her to get lost, and hung up on her.

And this is the problem with the Aosdána funding. For Irish artists, it can’t possibly stretch to the weekly tab in Grogan’s and Anger Management classes with Tony Humphreys. Increase the Cnuas now!!!

The Unforgettable Ire: Bono's Fashion Week Tantrum

2006-09-17T21:59:00.000-05:00

Damn those fashionistas. They just have no respect, man. Like, you're up there on a makeshift stage in the Hudson Hotel, and yeah, so you look a bit fat and dumpy, and on second thoughts that haircut and that auburn dye-job might not have been the best of ideas, but you've got your orange wraparounds on, and your leather kaks, and let's face it, the missus, tipping 50 and all as she might be, is still gorgeous. And she's up here beside you, and she's after designing this fashion line, no less, and getting girls in African countries to make the clothes in fair-trade conditions. And it rocks. Right? Right?!Hello? Is anybody out there listening? Hello???Listen, we've got Damien Rice here, and everything...and Jeff "Richard Dean Anderson" Sachs...Please??!!

So this was the scene on Friday night in the Hudson, as Bono and Ali Hewson stepped up before the last gathering of New York Fashion Week to launch the new line of Edun, the collection they co-created with the designer Rogan. Edun is about organic materials and fair-labour practices in family-run factories in Africa and South America. It's all very worthy...seriously. But the New York fashion crowd, frankly, doesn't do worthy. It does these things: free mojitos, goodie bags and celebrity-spotting, all of which were on offer at the Edun show, along with some dubious video-screen splicing of Lindsay Lohan (pouting in an Edun t-shirt) and African teenagers (grinning as they sewed together hundreds of the same t-shirts in a factory that looked like it was constructed from cardboard). As size zero biatches eyed each other up with vicious distaste, each trying to gauge the authenticity of the Christian Louboutin heels worn by the other, whilst simultaneously trying to get as close as possible to Heather Graham and her horror movie smile, Bono strode onstage, leading Ali by the hand and followed meekly by Rogan (no? me neither). The first signs of trouble came when, out of the 150 or so crowd gathered in the upstairs club space of the Hudson, maybe 15 people clapped at the appearance of the trio - and maybe 18 people stopped talking. The din of various Balenciaga-centred conversations wasn't deafening, but it was enough to irk Bono, who pleaded jokingly for silence to assuage his vulnerable ego. That didn't work. so he just had to keep talking while others did the same. He introduced Jeffrey Sachs, Professor of Economics at Columbia, who talked about how Bono and Ali were actually, literally, seriously changing the world (before making a nuclear-proof parachute out of chewing gum, a shoelace and an Edun t-shirt.) Then Bono talked about how at last year's show, they'd had "the poet laureate ", Lou Reed (actually, Bono, Donald Hall is the poet laureate, but let's not squabble over niceties) and, in keeping with that tradition of having major musicians play a song or two in honour of the Edun collection, they were now presenting Damien Rice. Who proceeded to blink and tremble his way through a mediocre performance while nobody listened, before erupting into a "please-be-quiet-I-can't-play-while-people-aren't-listening" pleading fit, and finally working out that, unless he played the song from the Jude Law film, nobody would have a clue who he was, and this was the only way to get people to listen. Which they did, eventually. Pity that by this stage, having played two songs, Rice had used up his entire repertoire and had to limp offstage again.

But!! The drama was not yet over!! Not content with having staged a fashion launch without a single piece of clothing in sight (not even one of the shapeless "One" t-shirts), Bono then came back onstage to make some closing remarks, rattled on for a minute or so and then, tired of having the whispered conversations of a handful of party-goers rasp cruelly on his sensitive eardrums, roared to the emaciated throng: "YOU KNOW WHAT? FUCK YOU AND YOUR FUCKING FINGER FOOD!!! WE'RE TRYING TO DO SOMETHING HERE AND ETC ETC ETC" This is pretty much an exact quote, folks. Fuck you and your finger food. Two fingers to finger food, if you will (to add insult to injury, the finger food was kind of disgusting. It stank the room out, and smelt a bit like sick, which is a not unusual smell at fashion shows, but hardly the effect Edun was going for).

Bonos' words after the outburst I can't remember; they're an embarrassing blur of middle-aged Irish malehood getting into a bit of a tizzy while its mortified wife looks in the other direction. (Besides, I was too distracted by the sight of one fashionista in front of me suddenly repenting of her ways and darting around to claw at the arm of another bulimichic while hissing "that's you he's talking about! That means you!!") Having delivered his diatribe to previously-indifferent-and-now-sniggering ears, Bono then muttered the requisite Irish parting shot about going off to get very drunk, and a VIP area consisting of Weathered Graham, Helena Christensen, "Lindsay Lohan's Mother" (whose presence Bono felt obliged to mention onstage...another classy moment) and...oh, that was sort of it, really. The fashionistas raced for their goodie bags, the free mojitos dried up and everybody went back to not giving a crap about Africa. And that was Bono's Fashion Week. Funny thing is, the Edun clothes, stocked in Saks Fifth Avenue among other places, actually aren't bad; some of them, at least. Maybe if they'd opted for a runway show instead of a running commentary on balding muso insecurity, the whole thing wouldn't have been such a fiasco. Then again, if they'd done that, it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun....

update: Alright, alright. If all you bloggorites are going to come over here pointing and laughing at poor old Bono, I suppose the least I can do is direct you to the bloody ONE site. There you can buy something new to go along with your Twink t-shirt. You're still not going to look as hot as Seal in it, though. What? Oh, right, Matteo from In America, whatever. And stop muttering about how $40 could get you a Ryanair flight to Lesotho to pick up one of the t-shirts for yourself. It's for charity. Next up: an Edun t-shirt in aid of Damien Rice's self-esteem.

another obsessive update: Open All Night has the exact quote, which is hardly any heavier on the peaches-and-cream than my approximation: “Take your fucking finger food and fuck off!” quoth Bono. And if you really want to hammer this story to death (like, er, me), read the squeaky-clean version of events at RTE online, which recounts The Bon’s sick-inducing endorsement of Rice’s genius in all its hilarious, overblown detail. So Damo can “still and distil the crowds into quiet reflection,” can he? Not this crowd. He should have tried bribing them with a Birkin bag.

Introducing Max

2006-08-25T11:29:00.000-05:00

This is Max, who came to live with us this morning. He likes: meowing, running up and down the length of the apartment, hiding under the bed when his plaintive mewls are not consistently replied to, and sitting under a blanket on the couch while listening to Joanna Newsom. She gave an absolutely brilliant performance supporting Neko Case at McCarren Park Pool last night, but Max deserves a post all his own, so she'll have to wait. Suffice to say that we considered calling him "Mewsom" in her honour, but Max was already his name and it suits him. And, as you can see from the last photo here, Max also thinks it's about time I got around to doing the Library Thing.

Watching Williamsburg

2006-08-19T18:16:00.000-05:00

While I'm passing on my bad habits of watching hilarious stuff online instead of working, have a look at The Burg, a sitcom about Williamsburg (our cooler-than-thou neighbourhood) which hits the hipster nail on the head pretty accurately every time. Very funny. Just as funny is reading the comments on the site from all the disgruntled real-life hipsters who feel they haven't been fairly represented, because they would never drink Coors....

Americaaaaaaay-yay, United Against Baby-Melting Candle-Makers Everywhere

2006-08-19T17:23:00.000-05:00

Last night we wandered over to Bedford Avenue for the Found Footage festival presented by Rooftop Films. These guys spend their time rooting in thrift shops, dumpsters, HR offices and other spots for old footage that people would rather forget, and put them all together into a sort of montage. It sounded like it would be good, maybe along the lines of what the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players do with their found footage, and since we're both Super 8 film nerds, we were also hoping there'd be some of that kind of thing in there. There wasn't - the sixteen they screened were all strictly of the 1980s VCR variety, not to mention of the freakin' hilarious variety. This was all the kind of stuff that those involved would probably prefer to be destroyed...in fact, when it comes to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the "I'm coming day and night" bodybuilding movie, Pumping Iron (1979), forget the "probably". When his career turned from pumping to politics, Arnie tried to ban the screening of this footage, apparently, but he didn't succeed. Personally, I think he should have been more worried about Carnival in Rio, from 1983, a travel guide to Rio hosted by Arnie in which he loses the run of himself somewhat, gleefully pawing every bit of naked "mulatto" ass he can get his hands on, and giving his female co-host an English lesson which necessitates her to suck slowly on the carrot in his hand...you've got to see this.

There were other gems in there too, chief among them How to Seduce Women Through Hypnosis (1983), which seemed to be an entirely sincere guide to basically raping a woman by putting her in a phony trance; Strong Kids, Safe Kids (1984), a well-intentioned educational video teaching children about how to keep the bad guys away from their "private parts" and starring Henry Winkler in character as the Fonz (and featuring the genius that is the Proper Words Song); and a medley of patriotic videos by gleefully insane people, my favourite of which doesn't even have the excuse of dating from the '80s but was made last year by someone called Denis Madalone. You can experience its joys, tears and stars-and-striped-infused waters here. It'll make you cry. With happiness that you don't live here. Or with terror that you do.

Oh, and while you're at it, get yourself some unhinged preacher men: Wayne David Meyer and Jonathan Bell (the later swiped from a Daily Show clip).

Frank Bascombe, Older and Hardly Wiser...

2006-08-18T11:14:00.000-05:00

The new Richard Ford novel, in proof form, just arrived on my desk (wait, I don't have a desk. I mean, my kitchen table.) I haven't read it yet, obviously (at 485 pages, it will probably keep me going for a while) but I'm looking forward to seeing whether Ford has managed to convincingly get back into the voice of the narrator he first created 20 years ago, with The Sportswriter and returned to for Independence Day. Like each of those novels, it's set on a holiday, this time Thanksgiving, in the year 2000. So it's America before 2001, and before Bush (the Florida votes farce is still ongoing), and that in itself will make for an interesting read.

Something else I'm looking forward to reading today is the rehearsal script of Stuart Carolan's new play, The Empress of India, which opens in Galway and moves to the Dublin Theatre Festival. Carolan's first play, Defender of the Faith, was perhaps the strongest new work (in terms of "straight" plays) to open on an Irish stage in 2004, and perhaps even since then. When I was in the Abbey over the summer I noticed that the script was still for sale in the lobby there for something like €8. That's a recommendation, in case I'm being too subtle...The cast for the Galway/Dublin production looks terrific, including Sean McGinley in his first stage outing in five years, Aaron Monaghan, Catherine Walsh and Tadhg Murphy. It doesn't open until Sept 12, but I'd be interested to hear the views of anybody who gets to see it.

What else...slipped into my bad habit of listening online to RTE Radio 1 again while working (too depressing listening to NPR these days, most of the time...Israel or nothing) but today wasn't too bad; caught the excellent Rattlebag special on trad, and am now listening to the RnaG live stream ( I was going to write there, "I'm not a smug gaelgóir, I just listen for the music" but if I was a gaelgóir of any sort, rather than a head-hanging-shambles of an Irish speaker, it would be the smug sort, so forget about that). My neighbours probably hate me. But then, I hate them too, with their constantly appearing newborns and enormous dogs. That sounds very uncharitable. I like dogs and babies. But in a building which, even if it were a house, would arguably not be big enough to hold one of each, the apparent presence of several of them tends to grate on the nerves. Which reminds me. We're getting a kitten (now that it's in my blog, A, it has to happen. Ok?). Names suggested so far: Spling, Doodlemunch (long story) and Wee Thomas (short story...ok, downright theft). The eventual name, however, will depend on the unique personality and litterbox-related delinquency of the kitten itself.Dandelion, maybe?

Oh yeah. And the view is completely gone now. I don't want to talk about it...

www.everdiminishingview.blogspot.com?

2006-08-14T16:35:00.000-05:00

They're taking it away from us....a little more each day. How tall is that damn building going to be, anyway?

My Old Boy's A Dustman

2006-08-14T08:58:00.000-05:00

Boy George, who mistook his coke for a thief last year, today began the five days of community service to which he was sentenced for wasting police time, not to mention snorting time. He pushed a broom around lower Manhattan for a couple of hours this morning until the pressure of being followed by a few dozen photographers got to him and he screamed at them. He has now been assigned a gated sanitation lot for the remainder of his service. Here he's pictured accidentally tipping an ounce of his best stuff away.

Photos from McCarren Park Pool

2006-08-14T08:38:00.000-05:00

Sonic Youth were amazing; the Yeah Yeah Yeahs weren't worth the hype. Pretty boring, actually. But the venue was what made it for me, with its vast flaking floor and its rusted diving boards...

Home to Brooklyn, broadband... and blocked views

2006-08-11T13:50:00.000-05:00

Flying from Dublin to New York at 10.30 yesterday morning sounds like it should have been a nightmare, but, thanks to the very decent and professional staff at the airport, it wasn't really. Except for a moment when I had to restrain myself from spinning around in the crush at gate 32 to shout "JUST GIVE THEM THE GODDAMN CREAM!!!" at a woman behind me who was refusing to understand that the no liquid/no gel rule applied to her, too, no matter how little she felt like stooping down and opening up her bag (which, incidentally, looked way too big to pass as hand luggage, but anyway).

En route to the airport, the friends we'd stayed with called to tell us that there was a major security alert, and that if we needed to stay another night or two, there was no problem. It wasn't much fun turning to the severely-hungover and not-too-flight-happy-in-normal-circumstances A to relay this news (the security alert bit, not the staying another night with our very fun and now very pregnant friends). It was even less fun reading the texts that miglior started sending me at five minute intervals, each one carrying a greater air of foreboding than the last. When you're standing in the check in area for US flights, the last words you want to read are "Critical Terrorist Alert" or "liquid device expected/sought". Any minute the frantic calls from our mothers were bound to start coming, and they did. But check-in went smoothly, as did screening, as did immigration, and though the boarding gate was a bit of a cattle mart, it would have been chaotic on any day, given the number of very small kids travelling with their self-righteous parents (of COURSE you can push past me because you've been "separated" from your husband. What is this, a mercy flight? Look, he's just over there. He's not being bundled into a flight going in another direction to you. You don't have to step on everyone's heads to get to him).

I don't think the ban on liquids, medicines aside, will have that terrible an effect on the experience of long-haul travel; it depends on whether the airlines decide to use it as an opportunity to make more money by charging for water and other non-alcoholic drinks. On the flight I took yesterday, you could have as much water as you needed after the seatbelt lights were switched off. The other liquids I gave up - moisturiser, foundation, lip gloss - are hardly essential for hand luggage. True, the skin on my face felt like an armadillo's arse afterwards, but...well...plus ca change. But I was emotionally reunited with pretty much everything I'd given up at the baggage carousel in JFK, where a pretty surly crew worked to match the plastic bags of duty-free and other liquids with their red-faced, impatient Irish owners. Any flight from Dublin to New York, after all, will have its fair share of women on shopping trips, and it's dangerous for them to be separated from their bottles of bronzer for too long. Mild panic had definitely set in.

Favourite moment of the whole experience, though, was when the young male flight attendant did his last whirl round the cabin with a huge bin bag looking for "shampoos, gels, anything like that". "Still looking?" someone asked him cheerily. "Yeah, and I'll be selling this lot up the front in half an hour," he said, to loud, prolonged laughter from our end of the plane. It was a huge release of tension. He continued on his search. "Any shampoos, gels, ipods...."

Thankfully, the New York in which we found ourselves was not the New York of last week, when temperatures hit 117 farenheit; yesterday was a bearable 78 degrees. Thunderstorms last night ensured that today is manageable, too. We're going to see Sonic Youth and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in the amazing, surreal venue that is the disused pool at McCarren Park later today, and tomorrow we're going to a wedding of two friends who've recently moved back here (well, the groom has moved back, the bride has just moved here, full stop) up in Connecticut. So it's good to be back. But there is some bad news. I don't know whether I can call this blog by its current name for much longer. Why? Because yesterday, when we walked into the apartment, and when we looked out the kitchen window where our lovely view used to be, we saw this monstrosity.
This is how it used to look:
And it's only going to get taller. Even a Sashimi and Sushi Platter (that's 23 pieces of raw fish, folks! YUM) on Bedford Avenue couldn't make me feel better. Well, not much better.

Travelling

2006-06-26T15:00:00.000-05:00

Have been travelling...and trapezing...will update soon.

7pm EDT: This kid just got a year older in Ireland...

2006-06-22T18:07:00.000-05:00

...but she's still 26 in New York! Ah, these precious five hours of remaining youth. How shall she spend them? Finishing her novel? Considering her future? Mindlessly surfing online?
Yeah, probably the last one.

Doyle and Enright give The Irish Times what for

2006-06-22T15:36:00.000-05:00

It's a pity that Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times didn't elaborate on the barbed comments directed at that newspaper, and at Irish literary critics - that is, directly at her, among others - by Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright during their public interview as part of last week's Dublin Writers' Festival. Perhaps it was just mentioned in passing, but this is all her report had to say on the matter:

Both he and Enright shake their heads over what they see as the ongoing stupidity of The Irish Times, all that is wrong with society is invariably reflected in its cosy pages. They also agree that there are currently 40 good Irish writers and no good literary critics, "the film critics are even worse."

Firstly, 40 good living Irish writers is too generous an estimate. It really is. It sounds like a figure pulled out of the air, possibly as a joke. I can think of maybe 15 good Irish writers. Maybe, just maybe, 20. In fact, I'm going to try and write a list, and see how many I can come up with. I'll update later.

Secondly, on the cosiness of the Irish Times: Fair play to Battersby for mentioning the comments, I suppose, even if she doesn't do much more than tack it onto the end of her article. I have to wonder whether Doyle and Enright gave a fuller idea of what they meant by cosiness when they used that word (if they used that word - it's not in quotes). Were they talking about the newspaper as a whole, about the arts coverage, about the books pages, about the opinion pages, about the Saturday magazine, to which Enright herself is a reasonably regular contributor? (It looked like she might have been taking over Roisin Ingle's column for a while there.) It's difficult to respond to their criticism without knowing.

Thirdly, and related to this last point: the dearth of good Irish literary critics. I have mixed feelings on this. Ireland does not exactly boast a vibrant and strengthening critical climate where literature and the arts are concerned, but I don't for a minute agree that there are no good Irish literary critics. Again, it would be good to know what they mean by critics - if they're talking just about critics of fiction, or if they mean critics of every form of writing, from poetry to history and biography. It's unclear, too, whether they refer to academic critics, novelists who review novels, journalists who review anything they're handed, or a mixture of all three. Even if it is a mixture, I can think offhand of examples from all three fields who I count as fine critics. Again, I'll try to update with a fuller list, but here are some critics, or reviewers if you want, who publish in Irish newspapers and journals, and whose writing I respect: Nicholas Grene (academic). Colm Toibin (novelist). John Banville (novelist and former literary editor of the IT). Declan Kiberd (academic). Dennis O'Driscoll, Peter Sirr and Vona Groarke (poets). Susan McKay (political journalist and book reviewer). William Wall (novelist, who wrote brilliantly on Irish poetry in the magazine the Shop a few months ago). There must be others, and I know I'm sticking too closely to the reviewers of the Irish Times, but really where else do you look for a serious and dedicated book review section? There's also the Irish Book Review, which has some good reviewers, but it seemed, in its early issues at least, overly cliquey and unlikely to display any real diversity or unpredictability in its views on Irish books. Also, the reviews in those early issues were just plain poor; often badly written, and either petty or parochial.

On film critics: Donald Clarke is very good. Apart from him - and I doubt Enright and Doyle were even thinking of the internet as a valid source of reviews or criticism - I look mainly to blogs for reviews of film and for other criticism. But it's true, there's nobody in Irish film criticism of the calibre of, say, Anthony Lane. That said, what real outlets would there be for someone writing longer, more considered reviews like his? (I haven't read Film Ireland for a while. Maybe it has reviews like that? I don't know.)

I notice they didn't touch on theatre criticism, nor would I expect them to in this context. That's a whole other day's work.

I'd say that Doyle and Enright made for a formidable team once they got going together on this. They're both outspoken, eloquent, sharply intelligent and utterly intolerant of bullshit. If they were given an hour to talk about newspapers and literary criticism in Ireland, I'd be on the next plane home to hear them. I'd also hope for a slightly fuller account of the debate in the paper the next day (or six days later, whatever you can manage), but that's just me. And, like I say, the comments were possibly just part of a really rapid-fire discussion, and were not dwelt upon long enough to merit a fuller mention.

Some other features of the interview (Enright interviewed Doyle), from Battersby's article today:

• Doyle didn't suffer fools from the audience gladly. He doesn't suffer windbags gladly either. Or maybe he just didn't suffer audience members, full stop. A woman wanted him to know she didn't enjoy The Commitments; he seems not to have bothered even to reply. A man wanted to know about his views on "religion and churches". "I'm an atheist," Doyle responded bluntly. That was the end of that.

• Doyle admitted that the actor Ger Ryan's interpretation of his character, Paula Spencer, in the stage version of his novel The Woman Who Walked Into Doors had made for a "different, stronger" version of the character and that, as he wrote the sequel to the novel (which will be published in September), he was aware of the challenge this posed to his own characterisation of her. At least, I think that's what he's saying. Maybe he's talking about the stage version, which he helped to adapt. Again, it's a little unclear. But if this is the challenge he's talking about, it's a very interesting one, and I guess one that other authors have faced too, as they write sequels, or the next book in a series.

• He talked about the number of "wrecked, baldy old guys" who come up to him in the street and tell him that he used to teach them. Others, or maybe the same guys, are "recovering heroin addicts...the ghosts of young kids he used to teach," writes Battersby.

• Enright came across, writes Battersby, "as a harassed housewife on temporary day release from her children," and complains that she has no time to read. But she's shrewd and alert as an interviewer, and knew "how to turn an interview into an apparently casual conversation. She [was] also asking Doyle the right questions." Another reason why she should write for the Irish Times, then. Sign her up!

• Doyle would love to live in New York. You can stay with us, Roddy. Just for a couple of days, mind.

• The recent changes to Ireland's population, which have seen large numbers of immigrants come to the country over the last five to seven years, have created an unexpected bonus for Doyle, who's a pretty recognisable figure in Ireland, as writers go: "I can walk down the street without every tenth person asking me if I'm Roddy Doyle." He also mentions in passing that he's learning Polish. Is he? Was this said ironically (he also said he's the only person on his bus route now who speaks English) or in dead seriousness?

• As was already known (it was discussed at some length in Angela Bourke's biography, and in Doyle's book Rory and Ita), Doyle's second cousin was Maeve Brennan, the famous Irish New Yorker writer, who wrote the magazine's Talk of the Town column during the 1950s and 60s under the pseudonym of the ”Long-Winded Lady”. Doyle spoke a little about her on Friday; he was 14 when she came to stay in his family home for a few months. That would have been around 1972, when things had begun to fall apart for Brennan. She rarely ate, stayed in her room with the curtains closed, and wrote furiously. Doyle, on Friday, remembered her as "incredibly elegant and eccentric", bewildered by an Ireland she no longer knew. He didn't speak to her about writing, because he wasn't interested in it at the time.

• Enright talked about something interesting: the emergence of an underclass in Dublin, or in Ireland (not clear which), and how this is something different to the working-class. Again, more on this would have been fascinating, but perhaps space didn't allow it...or something... anybody who was there, please comment!

• Doyle on the linguistic gift of the working class (in Dublin, I think): "A well-aimed working-class insult can do in two sentences what it would take a barrister three days to do."

• After they made their '40 good writers' remark, the audience got involved, shouting out the names of other Irish writers to see what Doyle and Enright had to say about them. Battersby remarks that "the expected [were] praised". It'd be good to know who the praised and the unpraised were, but only one is named in the piece: Jennifer Johnston, whose work Doyle said he loved. It's the duty of the writer, he said, "to produce good work."

Yeah, and it's the duty of the literary journalist too.

That's Stephen James Joyce to you...

2006-06-22T15:19:00.000-05:00

What do we think of Stephen Joyce around these parts? Sorry, Stephen James Joyce, to give him the full name upon which he insists. Well, we think that it would be fascinating to see SJJ’s response if all the scholars and critics stopped showing an interest in Joyce’s writings, and in his life, all of a sudden; if the Joycean industry drew to an unceremonious halt. And people stopped reading, and stopped analysing, and stopped thinking about SJJ’s grandfather. Because that’s what you want, isn’t it, SJJ? That’s what you mean when you tell D.T. Max, in this week’s New Yorker, (ETA: now last week's...this has been on the backburner for a while, sorry) that academics are like “rats and lice” and “should be exterminated”, isn’t it? That academics are “people who want to brand this great work [Ulysses] with their mark”, and that you “don’t accept that”?

But you like your own mark on Ulysses, and on the rest of the Joyce estate, to be clearly visible. In fact, along with the Great Wall of China, it can probably be seen from space. That’s unusual for a big, grubby set of fingerprints, but you’ve proven that nothing’s impossible. You say that if you had “the energy”, you’d write a book about your grandfather, and about how he was treated by Ireland. You don’t mention whether or not you think yourself to have the talent to do that, though. To write a book. Funny that you never have. Don’t you feel capable? Do you wish you were as famous as your grandfather? Could that be what all of this fuss is about?

Below, some highlights from Max’s excellent New Yorker piece, which I think give an insight into the mind of the man.

In 1988, he took offence at the epilogue to Brenda Maddox’s Nora, a biography of Nora’s wife, which described the decades that Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter, Lucia, spent in a mental asylum. Although the book had already been printed in galleys, Maddox, fearing a legal battle, offered to delete the section: the agreement she signed with Stephen also enjoined her descendants from publishing the material. Shortly afterward, at a Bloomsday symposium in Venice, Stephen announced that he had destroyed all the letters that his aunt Lucia had written to him and his wife. He added that he had done the same with postcards and a telegram sent to Lucia by Samuel Beckett, with whom she had pursued a relationship in the late nineteen-twenties.

SJJ wrote at the time that he had not destroyed any papers or letters in his grandfather’s own hand – “yet”. But in the 1990s, he persuaded the National Library of Ireland to give him some Joyce family correspondence that was scheduled to be unsealed. Scholars worry that these documents, too, have been destroyed.

In 2004, the centenary of Bloomsday, Stephen threatened the Irish government with a lawsuit if it staged any Bloomsday readings; the readings were cancelled. He warned the National Library of Ireland that a planned display of his grandfather’s manuscripts violated his copyright. (The Irish Senate passed an emergency amendment to thwart him.) His antagonism led the Abbey Theatre to cancel a production of Joyce’s play “Exiles”, and he told Adam Harvey, a performance artist who had simply memorised a portion of “Finnegans Wake” in expectation of reciting it onstage, that he had likely “already infringed” on the estate’s copyright. Harvey later discovered that, under British law, Joyce did not have the right to stop his performance.

Ok, let’s pause here to think about that last one. By memorising a part of of Joyce’s work, an artist had violated copyright? D.T. Max’s article maintained a tone of appropriate distance from its subject, and somehow did not at any point erupt into exclamations of disbelief and disgust, but I don’t know for the life of me how he managed to resist the temptation. Probably David Remnick himself had to stand him a couple of strong brandies. You have to admire Max for writing this article without once using the words “insane”, “control-freak” or “roaring maniac”. Not about anybody in particular, that is. Just saying.
Let’s go on.

Stephen has also attempted to impede the publication of dozens of scholarly works on James Joyce. He rejects nearly every request to quote from unpublished letters. Last year, he told a prominent Joyce scholar that he was no longer granting permissions to quote from any of Joyce’s writings. (The scholar, fearing retribution, declined to be named in this article). Stephen’s primary motive has been to put a halt to work that, in his view, either violates his family’s privacy or exceeds the bounds of reputable scholarship.

Quoting from unpublished letters is one thing; though I’m firmly of the belief that the contents of unpublished letters can further the understanding of what drove and shaped an author’s work, and matter deeply for the development of serious scholarship around that work, it’s fair enough that an author’s estate gets to lay down conditions about the use of that content. They are personal documents, after all. Most estates are a lot more reasonable than SJJ, but I accept that, where the letters are concerned, his is the final word. However, the matter of quoting from Joyce’s published work is an entirely different one. The idea that he would prevent scholars, critics and artists from quoting from Dubliners or Ulysses on the grounds that such use somehow “violates his family’s privacy” begs further explanation. As does the notion that SJJ would somehow know, even before reading requests from scholars for the use of such quotes, that any use whatsoever would “exceed the bounds of reputable scholarship”. More from the whirring Eureka-vortex of SJJ’s brain, please! Here’s a suggestion for the next step: stop bookstores stocking the books, or, at the very least, stop them from displaying the books on their shelves in a way that the titles are clearly visible. Because that’s sort of a violation of copyright, too. And, come to think of it, so is the act of reading Joyce. Especially if you’re one of those people whose lips move as they read. Or, if you sometimes, for some reason, read aloud. For example, if you were reading to your precocious offspring from the pages of Joyce’s children’s book, The Cat and the Devil, based on a letter-story that your grandfather sent to you when you were a boy. Yes, don’t worry, SJJ, everybody knows that The Cat and the Devil, like all of Joyce’s writings, is really, secretly, essentially, at base, all about you! Don’t worry. You’re at the centre of everything to do with Joyce. As Max, in perhaps the article’s most pointed paragraph, points out:

The two-decade-long effort has also been an exercise in power – an attempt to establish his own centrality in regard to anything involving his grandfather…as he put it to me during two phone calls that he recently made to me from La Flotte, “What other literary estate stands up the way I do? It’s a whole way of looking at things and looking at life.”

And just a couple more samples of SJJ’s inimitable style:

When turning down a request for permission from an academic whose work was going to be published by Purdue, he said that he objected to the name for the university’s sports teams: the Boilermakers. (He considered it vulgar.) Michael Groden, a scholar at the University of Western Ontario, spent seven years creating a multimedia version of Ulysses, only to have Stephen block the project, in 2003, with a demand for a permissions fee of one and a half million dollars. (Before Stephen controlled the Joyce estate, such fees were nominal.) Groden’s sin was to have praised Danis Rose’s edition of Ulysses as “confident and controversial,” in a reader’s report for Rose’s publisher; he had also helped the National Library of Ireland to evaluate some Joyce drafts prior to acquiring them.“You should consider a new career as a garbage collector in New York City, because you’ll never quote a Joyce text again,” Stephen told Groden.

This week, Laurence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford, will file a suit against SJJ in United States District Court. He’s acting on behalf of the author Carol Loeb Shloss, whose book on Joyce’s daughter Lucia was published in 2003. The book was about Lucia’s mental illness, and before it was published, SJJ made clear to her publisher that he would sue if she quoted from copyrighted material. The book was published with cuts. While Shloss was fighting with SJJ, she met Lessig, a copyright specialist, who agreed to take on her case pro bono. He wants to show, to quote Max, that “distended copyright laws [are] not in the public interest.” His case this week will be the first to accuse a literary estate of “copyright misuse”.
Shloss’s book, it should be said, is by no means an example of why scholars should be allowed greater leeway when it comes to quoting from copyrighted Joyce material. There’s something decidedly sensationalist about her project; to probe into the mental illness of Joyce’s daughter is hardly an exercise in Joycean scholarship. So in a way her case is not ideal as a challenge to SJJ’s grip on the estate. But then, Lessig’s not challenging the grip itself so much as he is challenging the way SJJ wields that grip. During Shloss’s attempt to publish her book, she and her publisher received letters and phone calls of a threatening manner from SJJ. She alleges he was practically spying on her at one stage, and that he made concerted attempts to block her research - by removing documents from libraries, for example. It’s against that kind of behaviour on the part of an estate that Lessig is taking a lawsuit. Intellectual property specialists think he’s unlikely to succeed; the precedent such a success would set for estates would be too drastic. But it’ll certainly be an interesting one to watch.

Things You Really, Really Need To Know Today. Really.

2006-06-22T12:27:00.000-05:00

• You know what the gays have most pride in this week? Soon, if their cunning plan for marriage rights works out, they'll be able to marry snakes. [Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger, six comments from the end, likely only half in jest.] Lucky bastards. Below, Stephen Colbert tells it his way. [YouTube]

• Why, oh why, must America fall for the Victoria Beckham thing? Having emigrated largely to get away from endless magazine covers showing her bones-where-no-bones-should-be, now I have to see her all over the newsstands (ok, cyber-newsstands) here, too. At least until her withered internal organs finally collapse in about a year's time. [Hollywood Tuna]

• Neil Jordan's new film is called The Brave One and his method as a director includes much jiggly-paunch-pacing, head-rootin' and grumpiness to nosy onlookers. And having cars towed away at 7 a.m. [The Reeler 1 and 2]

• Zahara Jolie-Pitt is going to nut that new kid, first chance she gets.

• Gawker puts Makey-up-Million-Pieces writer James Frey on suicide watch. Suggestion: a quick way to end it all would be to cycle the wrong way up East 88th crash-bang onto Neil Jordan's set.

Oh, to be twelve again...

2006-06-21T13:45:00.000-05:00

You've got to love this picture from last night's Irish premiere of The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Look at the big red cheeks on that little girl taking the close-range photograph of Cillian Murphy! She's finally face to face with her poster-boy, and she's only scarlet, like...

By the way, you can see a trailer for the film here.

Alice Munro to retire?

2006-06-21T11:54:00.000-05:00

Via the Elegant Variation comes very sad news: Alice Munro is expected to announce tonight, at a fundraiser in Toronto, that she has written her last book.

Munro is scheduled to give a reading at a benefit and book launch for Writing Life, a PEN Canada anthology of essays from 50 Canadian and international authors that is scheduled to hit stores July 1. In her contribution to the volume, Munro cites a tremor in her writing nerves in the face of constant interruptions and advancing age. (She will be 75 next month.) She says she can quit writing "in the interests of a manageable life" and with the knowledge that it's rare for outstanding work to be produced in a author's later years, "so one or two books fewer won't really be anybody's loss."
Many will beg to differ.

She is a master of the short story, and her work, in its sober, exact beauty, recalls that of another writer whose pen fell silent too soon, John McGahern. Her next book will be her 13th, another book of short fiction, which is due for a November release. Here's what the MacDowell Colony had to say this year as it awarded her its highest honour, the MacDowell medal:

"Reviewers have often compared Munro to Chekhov, and this is no overstatement. When you close a book of hers, you know a lot more about what it means to be human."

If the rumours are true, her voice will be much missed.

RTÉ and the Arts Council: Going through the motions

2006-06-21T10:43:00.000-05:00

This just in from the Arts Council; the meeting between its director, Mary Cloake, and the Director General of RTÉ, Cathal Goan, took place yesterday. I accept that it's perhaps too much to expect concrete results from just one meeting, but I don't see anything in this press release about a follow-up meeting, and I see little sign, in this outline of the discussion, of concrete promises being given by RTÉ about its future coverage of the arts. Reading between the lines, it looks like little more than a call-and-answer session of the appropriate noises. The noises the Arts Council knows it has to make in this situation, and the noises that RTÉ knows it has to make not to invite more negative publicity. There was plenty of affirmation, and reiteration, and talk of high priorities, but there's nothing new, and nothing binding, in the statements Goan was cornered into trotting out in yesterday's meeting. Saying that the appointment of an arts correspondent is a high priority in no way obliges RTÉ to do anything about making such an appointment. This is pie-in-the-sky stuff. Given that it does not depend on the Arts Council for its funding, RTÉ was hardly even obliged to attend the meeting when it was called by the Arts Council, and it certainly was not obliged to provide Cloake with answers, and with anything other than vague assurances. And it shows.

The Arts Council raised the serious concerns of the arts community about changes in the RTÉ Radio 1 schedule and the potential downgrading of arts coverage on RTÉ. The Arts Council urged RTÉ to maintain arts broadcasting in the mainstream of coverage rather than solely at marginal times.
RTÉ reiterated its absolute and ongoing commitment to the arts across all its broadcasting services and affirmed that the arts will remain a key priority. RTÉ said the Radio 1 autumn schedule was being finalised. RTÉ is confident that its service to the arts in that schedule will address the concerns expressed by the Arts Council.
RTÉ also said the appointment of an arts correspondent was a high priority.
The meeting discussed the complementary responsibilities of both organisations in supporting the arts, a wide range of joint initiatives, actual and potential, and the central value of the arts in a changing Ireland.

Rattlebag

2006-06-20T15:27:00.000-05:00

The Rattlebag petition is well on its way towards the 1000 signatures mark - it looks like around 100 people a day are adding their voices to the protest. Do so now, if you haven't already! And pass the message on!

Nobody's saying Rattlebag is perfect as an arts programme, but RTE needs, and deserves, to be shown just how many people are frustrated and disappointed by its rescheduling decisions. A lot of those who have signed this petition are also using it to express their dismay over the axing of the Mystery Train (which, this evening, featured a brilliant and zany monologue by Kelly about when Bob Dylan comes to stay...).

Droit de Suite...but not tout de suite

2006-06-20T11:28:00.000-05:00

The Irish Government has announced the introduction of an Artists' Resale Right, otherwise known as droit de suite (right of continuation), which provides for loyalties to be paid to visual artists - and potentially also to their heirs - upon the resale of their work.

However, it's taking a staggered approach to the introduction of the legislation in question; instead of bringing the legislation in fully (and thereby enacting the EU directive which, by right, should have been enacted before January 1st of this year), the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment has put in place "temporary measures" which will allow artists to benefit from the Artists' Resale Right "in advance" of full legislation. The Department will continue, as planned, to introduce a new Act of the Oireachtas dealing with Intellectual Property, through which the EU directive will be properly implemented, but because that legislation will not be passed for at least another six months, and because it involves "complex matters" which can not be immediately addressed, these temporary measures are being introduced in the meantime. For the benefit of artists.

And if you believe that explanation, then the disingenuous hype of the last seven days, in which a crooked politician was championed as the greatest friend to the arts since Lorenzo de' Medici, has obviously achieved its desired effect. This is not a touching display of State sensitivity to the arts. It's not even a touching display of legality. Well, legal it is, but just about. What's on display here is the naked back of the Government being covered, once again, with shabby haste.

Here's why. The EU directive on the Resale Right is something about which the Government has known for more than five years at this stage. There was an official deadline for the implementation of that directive, and, surprise, surprise, that deadline (1st January 2006) was allowed to pass. That is, the Government failed to meet it. And the artist Robert Ballagh was entirely within his rights to challenge the Government on this, and he did. He is currently seeking damages from the State due to its failure to do what the EU directed it to do, and introduce full legislation on this issue. Ballagh is claiming damages for revenue lost after the deadline - revenue, that is, which he would have earned from the resale of his work had the directive been properly enacted. Or enacted at all.

And guess when Ballagh's case was due to be heard? Next week. And hence the rushed stopgap measure. Because if a court had found in Ballagh's favour - and it's hard to find any reason why it would not - then the outcome of that case would have implications for all artists whose artworks were resold for more than €3000 since January 1st. Whether Ballagh's case now collapses entirely, or whether he can still sue for revenue lost between January and June, is not yet clear- maybe someone better versed in legal matters can advise on this in the comments. But what is clear from looking at this interim legislation is that the Government has wilfully failed the artists whose rights it has been instructed to protect. These measures meet only the bare minimum of the requirements set out by the EU Directive. They come straight from the bargain basement of Government policy. And they don't inspire much confidence in the shape of the fuller legislation to come. Two of its most charming features:

• A work must be sold for €3000 before Resale Rights (up to 4% of the sale price) kick in. Lobby groups had suggested the much fairer figure of €1000. And just how fair that figure is becomes clear when you look at the thresholds operating in other countries where droit de suite is a given: in Finland, it's €252, in Germany €51, in France just €15. Anybody who is familiar with the Irish art market and with art auctions will know that the scene is small and not hugely competitive, and that you're not at all unlikely to pick up a painting by a significant contemporary artist at, say, the Irish Art Sale at James Adam, for less than €3000. A huge number of artists are going to be left without royalties if this threshold is maintained in the actual legislation. Which really makes a mockery of its introduction in the first place.

• In other fields, artists are protected by copyright. Copyright lasts throughout the artist's life and for 70 years after their death. The EU advised that the Resale Right should be implemented in a way which mirrors the terms of copyright - but left the matter of the actual duration up to individual member states. The Irish Minister has decided, in this implementation, to cut the 70 years clause and limit the right to the artist's lifetime, apparently ignoring the fact that droit de suite was first created as much to benefit artists' heirs as to benefit artists themselves. Perhaps the Government cannot be blamed for baulking at the idea of the full 70 year duration, but that it is not obliged to include a posthumous period in the legislation in no way justifies a complete exclusion. A 20 or even 15 year period, for example, would see to it, say, that any young families might be provided for in some way after the death of an artist parent. It's well known that the work of an artist often soars in value after his or her death, and not difficult to imagine a case where a dead artist's family could face financial difficulty, even as his or her work fetched increasingly high prices at auction.

It's not surprising to see the outspoken Ballagh as the head of this campaign, but I think in a way it's unfortunate, or at least seems a missed opportunity - he's not, after all, representative of the group of artists who are most in need of Resale Rights. He makes real money from his art, and doesn't live in poverty - or if he does, he's the first artist driving a beautiful convertible while also living in poverty that I've ever seen. I admire him for taking this case, but I can't help wishing that he was joined by an artist nearer to the other end of the income scale, someone for whom the droit de suite could be the difference between poverty and subsistence, rather than between less profit and more. Such a case would serve to hammer home even more vividly the need for this legislation, and the need for its future, more fully developed form, to take into account the recognised right of artists to make a living from what they do.

PS: I'm not sure whether, or how, the sale of work online is affected by the existence of droit de suite. Does anybody know? Since moving here, we've bought a few pieces on e-bay, mostly lithographs, and a couple of photographs. One of these was direct from the artist - Luca Paradisi, a photographer based in Cork, whose website is here - but the others were from dealers, and at least one from somebody who just had the print lying around the house for years. There's certainly no mechanism on ebay at the moment to deal with the distribution of Resale Rights, and I can't see the website rushing to incorporate such measures. But, say, if someone is lucky enough to pick up a Hughie O’Donoghue lithograph for €3000 from someone offloading it on ebay, will he now get 4% of that sale?

Again, most work on ebay goes for a lot less than €3000, even if it would fetch that price or close to it in a gallery. It's a bargain for buyers, but from the artist's point of view it's not such a good thing, whether or not resale rights are part of their country's law.

Update, June 23: The resale value will be set at the much more sensible threshold of €1000, reports today's Irish Times Article below the jump.

Resale threshold for artist to get cut set at €1,000
Gerry Smyth
23/06/2006

The value at which artists will be entitled to a share in the resale of their work is to be set at €1,000 in new legislation due before the Oireachtas in the autumn.

The new legislation, which is expected to become law by the end of the year, follows this week's "interim" regulations placing a minimum value of €3,000 on a work of art for it to qualify.

However, the €1,000 threshold limit is the figure for which organisations such as Visual Artists Ireland and the Irish Visual Artists' Rights Organisation have been lobbying, as it would ensure that the majority of artists, including printmakers, would benefit.

Under this week's regulations, artists are now entitled to 4 per cent of resale value of their work and this will be enshrined in the primary legislation which has been drafted in a consultation process between the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and the Department of Arts.

This week's regulations, and the forthcoming Bill, are in response to an EU directive on resale rights known as droit de suite. The State's failure to introduce the resale rights earlier in the year - it was due to be enacted from January 1st - was recently challenged in the High Court by artist Robert Ballagh, whose work frequently comes up for auction.

Under the directive, there is a ceiling of €12,500 on the amount an artist can receive on resale. One issue that needs teasing out when the full legislation comes up for Dáil debate is the duration of resale rights - how far down the family line it should extend beyond an artist's immediate dependants and family. The temporary regulations applies only to living artists.

Under the EU directive, a derogation on payment of the resale royalty to the heirs of deceased artists is available until 2010 but the Government will not seek to avail of this option.

The temporary regulations give artists the right to obtain details about those who sell on their work, but they are unclear about the means of collecting the new royalties, whether it is to be on a one-to-one basis between artist and vendor, or through some more formal arrangement. The legislation, however, is likely to place the onus on the auction houses and dealers.

The interim measures are effective from June 13th, a date on which, coincidentally, a major auction of contemporary Irish art was held by deVeres with work by a number of living artists - Louis LeBrocquy, Donald Teskey, John Shinners, William Crozier, John Doherty as well as Ballagh - receiving high prices.

Snippets

2006-06-20T10:47:00.000-05:00

Barbara Epstein, co-editor of the New York Review of Books, has died. [LA Times]

Robert Birnbaum interviews Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief and staff writer at the New Yorker. She talks about the increasing challenge of pitching more offbeat, non-celebrity-centred ideas to magazine editors...though I'm guessing she has it a lot easier than most writers. Then again, if she finds it tough, what hope for the rest of us? [Identity Theory]

Speaking of the New Yorker, there's a blog all about/obsessed with it, which has somehow recruited two anonymous staffers from the New Yorker to answer readers' questions (pre-vetted by the blog, of course) about the magazine. Unsurprisingly, Gawker and some of its readers already have a couple of suggestions:

-Are rejected submissions used as toilet paper?
- How do fact-checkers not kill themselves?
-Are all of your cartoonists bitter divorcees?
-Is it a prerequisite of publication that a short story be mind-numbingly boring and/or have characters who I don't really care about whose names I can't pronounce?
-Must all short fiction submissions end abruptly, sans denouement?

The Middle Eastern edition of Elle will hit newsstands in Lebanon, Jordan and Morocco this Friday. A second, more conservative version of the Lebanese publication will hit Saudi Arabia in October. Along with shoots heavy on accessories and beauty products rather than on clothes, the first issue will feature an article on The Vagina Monologues- which uses synonyms for 'vagina', rather than the word itself, throughout. Challenging. Will Orlean be pitching? [Wall Street Journal]

Brooklyn Blogs

2006-06-20T07:28:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned before, I love living in Brooklyn. I don't blog about it enough, though - probably because too many of my reference points are still in Ireland, work-wise at least. But there are some great Brooklyn-based blogs around, which give an idea of what it's like to be here at this (finally) lovely time of year. See, for example, this Brooklyn Life and the Brooklyn Record. Now I have to do some work...

You'll Never Clear Your Desk Alone

2006-06-18T20:03:00.000-05:00

It's not just in Ireland that matters to do with the arts are vulnerable to being sidelined by the media. One of the biggest media stories here this week concerned Erik Wemple, the newly-appointed editor of the Village Voice, who, on Thursday, "changed his mind" about taking the job and went back to Washington, where he was previously editor of the City Paper.

What could possibly have forced him to make this drastic decision, given that he'd just accomplished an enviable jump up the career ladder? Some vague noises about ”management differences” were made in the aftermath of the announcement. But turns out that our old friend, De Arts, may really have been the reason for Wemple's sudden exit, as Gawker explains:

From what we hear, Wemple held a two-hour meeting with the staff that went reasonably well until staffers asked if the paper would be asked to use other New Times writers. Wemple said that bringing in outside writers wasn’t in his plans, but the staff informed him the practice has already been imposed, as the Voice has been more or less forced to use film and music reruns from other New Times papers. That’s where things started to sour, because Wemple looked absolutely shocked that this had been going on. He also said he wanted to focus on more arts reporting and criticism, unaware that the arts sections had been significantly reduced.

Long story short, the New Times has hacked things up to the point where the Voice is no longer the paper Wemple thought he was signing up for. Management wanted Wemple, who’d been assured of autonomy — but then he got smacked with an alternate reality upon arriving in New York.

You can’t blame him for walking right back out the door.

Renegades

2006-06-18T19:34:00.000-05:00

This was on in our local park in Brooklyn this weekend, which made me want to spend all my savings on jewellery, handbags and notebooks. And on very cute baby clothes for babies I don't even know yet. It also reintroduced me to Bust, the magazine to which I subscribed a few years ago after reading an article about it in one of the Irish Sunday newspapers - written, unsurprisingly (given that it was actually about something interesting...) by Stellanova. My flatmates were a bit bewildered by this bastion of tough girliness which came through the letterbox every couple of months, and my then-newly-acquired boyfriend, A, confessed that, having seen it where it was stocked in Tower Records, he'd wondered if it was a lesbian porn magazine. Well!
Bust had a stall at the craft fair, as did Venus, as did zillions of amazing craftsters. I picked up business cards from the best ones and will post links to their websites as soon as I get out of this bar where I came to 'work'. Air-conditioned, y'know? And, um, Corona. Ahem. Look, it's Sunday night, ok?

• Notebooks made from old hardbacks – Nancy Drew included: Scraps of Paper

• Robots crafted from computer innards: Burrowburrow

• Cute ceramics: Perch design

• Bags & stuff. Drool-inducing: Kristen Aronsson

• Odd self-portraiture: Enid Crow

• Hand-forged belt buckles: Steel Toe Studios

• Jewellery made from silver-cast twigs and acorns: Twigs and Heather

• Wallets, bags, etc, in colourful leather: Miss Alison

• Gorgeous prints and lithographs: Cinqunquatre

• More bags and t-shirts: Slaughterhead Design

Still in Time for Father's Day...

2006-06-18T17:56:00.000-05:00

I don't know how much this costs, but you can actually buy it from this website. Now, if they could only add a magazine rack, for unread issues of the New Yorker, I'd be sold...

Or (thanks, Sinead), you could listen to a poem in there...

The Heat...

2006-06-18T17:37:00.000-05:00

...has come. 90 degrees out there. And I love it. When it's like this, I could walk around Brooklyn forever. And even if my Brooklyn is more Bedford Avenue than Bedford-Stuyvesant, I'm still using this pic from Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing.

Inishmore: Curiosity Killed the Cat

2006-06-17T11:13:00.000-05:00

I finally got along to see Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore at the Lyceum last night. I know I've mentioned it in posts before, and blogged about events around it, but I hadn't had a chance to actually see the play yet....oh, alright, I'd been putting it off because I'm incredibly squeamish, and five gallons of fake blood, plus a rake of severed limbs, blinded animals and disembowelled cats sounded like it might be more than I could take. But I knew curiosity would get the better of me eventually, and so yesterday evening, A and I rushed it (meaning we got student rush tickets, for $25, an hour before hte performance). He'd seen it already, two weeks ago when some friends had a spare, and he'd thought it extremely funny, and after last night I'm already thinking about when I can see it again before leaving for Dublin at the end of next week.
It is hilarious, whip-sharp and very, very clever, and definitely lives up to the hype.

I was really disappointed, though, to see that David Wilmot wasn't playing the role of Padraic, presumably due to that strained voicebox he was suffering from on the night of the Tonys, and that the understudy was in the part instead. But watching said understudy, Brian Avers, in the part was like watching a mirror image of Wilmot. The job of understudy here is taken very seriously - for long, long runs on Broadway, after all, understudies are vital - and not only do they attend rehearsals, but they get paid for it just as they would if they were actually in the cast proper, and they're featured prominently in the programmes. And the performance of Avers last night, and of David Wilson Barnes, the understudy for Jeff Binder's character, Brendan, I can understand why. These guys gave flawless turns. Avers practically was Wilmot - acccent, enunciation, stance, facial expressions, everything - and there was no sense of disjointedness, of the cast not gelling together properly, of second-best. From the outset, this cast was on fire.
Much has been said of the extraordinary nature of McDonagh's story - he left school at 16, sat around all day watching soap operas and listening to The Clash, then took inspiration from his brother, who was starting to do well in screenwriting, sat down and churned out seven plays in nine months. The rest...history...Broadway...an Oscar...and all of that. But there's also something extraordinary about Domhnall Gleeson, who plays the hapless (suspected) cat-impaler Davey, given that this is not just his first time on Broadway, but his first time in a play. Ever. 23 years old he avoided acting until now for fear of accusations of nepotism - his dad is Brendan Gleeson. He's had minor parts in a few short films, but this is his first time onstage, and it's impressive. OK, it's not as though he's playing a part of deep gravitas. For all its engagement with heavy themes, the play is basically a romp. But I still think Gleeson is one to watch. Especially if he happens to be throwing a cat basket out of a cottage window when you're watching him. I don't know why, but that made me cry with laughter. That, and a joke on a subject I'd have never, ever imagined as possible joke material - Bloody Sunday. Yeah, I know, it doesn't sound right. But it works. Savagely so.

End of the Witchhunt

2006-06-16T22:30:00.000-05:00

So the good name of the Hunt Museum has been cleared, and the charges of Nazi connections no longer hold water. Pity this comes too late for John Hunt, the director of the Museum, who died two years ago, aged 47, when the looting controversy was at its height. His final months would have been hard enough without this nightmare.

LIke Rain on Your Wedding Day, This May Not be Ironic...

2006-06-15T21:55:00.000-05:00

A thinks this letter to today's IT was written with tongue firmly planted in cheek. I'm not so sure. Any casting votes?

Madam, - The passing of Mr Haughey was one of those occasions when one just has to buy The Irish Times: a field day for your esteemed journalists to show their considerable talents. One recalls all the many occasions when that photogenic face graced your pages, all the acres of newsprint that have been expended on account of its owner.

Might I venture to suggest that some small acknowledgement of his value to the media is called for? Would it not be appropriate for your paper to take the lead in making some little donation to his estate, as a gesture of appreciation? - Yours, etc,

JOE ASTON, Sherkin Island, Co Cork.

Swagbag update

2006-06-15T19:30:00.000-05:00

Dear people who find their way to this blog by doing Blogger and Google searches for various items that were in the Tonys goodiebags (sample search: [product in question] + Tonys + gift + bag):

Please desist. If you're hoping that Cynthia Nixon or Mark Ruffalo keep blogs, and that they're using them to rave about the tacky rubbish you gushingly bestowed on them backstage at the awards last weekend, and giving you lots of free publicity that you can use in your next missive of dropped apostrophes and excessive exclamation marks...I mean, your next press release...well, you're sorely mistaken. So go away, and take your furry boots and gaudy jewellery with you. Instead, here are some pictures of "celebrities" (including Mary Poppins and Doogie Howser) looking like total sell-outs in your Celebrity Presenter Gift Lounge™.

Love, Me.

Update: On the other hand, to the person who found their way here through a google search for "giving to arts journalism": come back, come back! You can give as much as you want...

Speaking of Cash...

2006-06-15T12:26:00.000-05:00

Here he is, doing a flirty duet with Odetta on his television show in 1969. I'd love to see some more tapes of that show; it looks like it would have made for some juicy viewing. See that twinkle in his eye?

I Feel Better Now

2006-06-14T20:11:00.000-05:00

There's an interview here with Gyorgy Faludy, the Hungarian poet, who is 96 and looks spookily like a guy who used to live across the road from me in Stoneybatter (except that guy was probably 46...that's what having your own snug in Walshes will do to you). He believes, basically, that literature is doomed; that reading and dialogue are in decline and that what's approaching is a crisis in literature to rival the one which occurred in 350 AD, under Constantine the Great, when "people stopped reading." Well, that's a bit dramatic, I think. It's the material people read, and the way they read, which is undeniably changing, but I do believe that there will always be readers of good literature. Even if that literature is on a screen rather than in book form; Sinead wrote about this today, and like her, I don't think I could ever read a novel in electronic format. The experience of being with the book is part of the experience of reading it.

But this wasn't the passage in the Faludy interview which first caught my eye. No, as I survey the mass of looming and unmet deadlines stretching before me, it was his answer to a question about how he chooses which books to read that gave me hope. I'm more than a month behind on one of my longer pieces, an essay for an academic publication here. Every morning I wake up in dread of seeing the "Forget about it, you unreliable pup" e-mail from the editor in my inbox. But tomorrow, if I get that e-mail, I'm just going to refer her to the wisdom of Gyorgy Faludy:

After the success of Villon, in March 1938, I offered some of my poetry translations to the publishers Uj Idok. They offered me a contract to translate the 1000 most beautiful poems in world literature. When the publisher's head, Miss Andrassy, who looked rather like a woman from an Italian renaissance painting, asked me when I'd have it ready, I asked for four years. "I have a lot of reading to do: I'll submit the manuscript after the World War," I said. She replied: "After the World War? It's already been." She couldn't believe there'd be another. In the end, we agreed on a deadline of 1942. I finally completed the first version of the anthology in spring 1988. It's now being reissued, with another 500 poems. I don't regret chasing down great poems all my life. I learned something that few people know: that Japanese, Chinese, Persian and Arab poetry has just as much value as European poetry.

Six weeks over? Call that late? Why, it's positively premature!!
(If you're reading this, by the way, Ms. Editor, I am nearly finished. Nearly. Honestly. Faludy.)

Go Touché Yourself, Mr President

2006-06-14T15:53:00.000-05:00

Beautiful. Just beautiful. At a press conference this morning, President Bush mocked a reporter from the L.A. Times who stood up to ask a question wearing sunglasses. Transcript below:

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, Peter. Are you going to ask that question with shades on?

Q I can take them off.

THE PRESIDENT: I’m interested in the shade look, seriously.

Q All right, I’ll keep it, then.

THE PRESIDENT: For the viewers, there’s no sun. (Laughter.)

Q I guess it depends on your perspective. (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: Touché. (Laughter.)

And???? The reporter is legally blind. Unlike any seat of justice that Bush and his administration have recently had to answer to.

Update: The President has apologised. Well, he kind of had to, didn't he?

Update 2: Here's the question asked by Wallstein, and the answer (cough) given by the President:

WALLSTEIN: Following up on the other Peter’s question about Karl Rove, you said that you were relieved with what happened yesterday. But the American public, over the course of this investigation, has learned a lot about what was going on in your White House that they didn’t know before, during that time, the way some people were trying to go after Joe Wilson, in some ways. I’m wondering if, over the course of this investigation, that you have learned anything that you didn’t know before about what was going on in your administration. And do you have any work to do to rebuild credibility that might have been lost?

THE PRESIDENT: I think that — first of all, the decision by the prosecutor speaks for itself. He had a full investigation. Karl Rove went in front of the grand jury like — I don’t — a lot of times. More times than — they took a hard look at his role.

Secondly, as I told the other Peter, I’m going to tell you, that there’s an ongoing trial, it’s a serious business. And I’ve made the comments I’m going to make about this incident, and I’m going to put this part of the situation behind us and move forward.

I Hear The Train a Comin...

2006-06-14T15:21:00.000-05:00

Johnny Cash’s American Recordings V is on its way: July 4 is the release date.
John Kelly is playing "Like the 309", the last song Cash recorded before his death, on The Mystery Train right now. And others from the album (Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind" and the last song on the album, "I'm Free From the Chain Gang now").It already sounds magnificent. And this sort of radio, RTE, is why you should not have cut the best thing on your airwaves. Sorry to go on about this, but you've been stupid enough to deserve to hear it ad nauseam.

Update: You can listen to the programme in question here. The Cash stuff comes about halfway through, after all the Polish and German songs, which marked Tuesday's World Cup match.

Sorry....what?!

2006-06-14T10:30:00.000-05:00

This "press release" just landed in my inbox (and that of every journalist in Ireland, by the looks of the cc. list). It comes from Visual Arts Ireland and the Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild. And I'd like to know just how they have worked out that they speak for ALL Irish artists in the very debatable first line. Hey, let's all issue press releases on behalf of communities we haven't bothered to contact first. OK, let's assume they contacted every single visual artist, playwright and screenwriter in the country. That still leaves a lot of people in the category of "artist" who are being spoken for here, on a very contentious matter.

Yes, the tax exemption scheme is a good thing for artists. But that doesn't mean that artists have to get down on their knees and join the current revisionist hysteria.

PRESS RELEASE

Irish artists owe a debt of gratitude to Charles Haughey, regardless of their personal or political views and affiliations, a debt they want to acknowledge.

In a time of rapid and radical economic and cultural development, art plays an essential, often unrecognised role in identifying and examining the impact – individual and societal – of the many and often unexpected changes that are occurring. Charles Haughey made tangible his recognition of the role of artists in Ireland.

The income tax exemption scheme for artists, introduced when he was Minister for Finance in 1969, has been hugely beneficial to artists living here and has been recognised by the artistic community worldwide as visionary in its impact.

Dick and Jane go to the IMPAC awards

2006-06-14T10:11:00.001-05:00

Is it just me, or is there something bizarrely childlike about this NY Times headline about Tóibín's IMPAC win?

What next? Karl Rove is a Good Boy?

Next up for Cancellation: Music, Theatre, Literature, Painting, etc, etc...

2006-06-14T08:53:00.000-05:00

Turns out Colm Tóibín won't be the only Irish writer to be outHaugheyed on his big day: Bloomsday Cancelled to Make Way for Crocodile Tears.

And you can rail against the RTE arts cancellations here , where a petition has been set up. Although, technically, this is a petition for Rattlebag only, people are also using it as a platform to air their disappointment about the cancellation of John Kelly's Mystery Train programme. Nothing wrong with that.

Scrap Flatterday

2006-06-13T16:58:00.000-05:00

Two choice quotes from the speakers Vincent Browne had on the line for his Charlie special tonight:

"He could walk with kings and talk to...eh, to the lower classes." (some FF local politician eager to tell, again and again, how Haughey took him to his house for a drink once.)

"People didn't realise, he needed those Charvet shirts to meet with people just like him in Europe." (Noelle Campbell Sharpe. Who else?)

Add to that Browne's insistence on asking his panellists (male, of course) how many times they slept with Haughey. It was a bugging scandal, Vinnie. Bugging.

I agree with Jane on this one. Who is this guy they're all fawning and LYING about? And Bertie, what you said in the Dáil today about "de credits and de debits" was not just incoherent and full of mixed metaphors, it was untrue. God, when Irish politicians, the vast majority of whom would normally defect to a rival party rather than be linked to the arts, have to resort to repeatedly referring to someone as a patron of the arts first and foremost as a way of speaking positively about them, you know hypocrisy's in the house. Ah well. That sort of bull is as apt a summation of Haughey's legacy as any, I suppose.

update: I've fixed the link to Jane's blog; it's the entry for June 13th that I'm referring to. She's always good on worthless politicos, appalling Irish radio and the like.

IMPAC: The Right Winner

2006-06-13T07:16:00.000-05:00

Well done Colm!!

Irish author Colm Tóibín has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel The Master, a portrayal of American writer Henry James.
Mr Tóibín, whose previous novels include The South and The Blackwater Lightship, is the first Irish writer to win the world's richest literary prize-worth €100,000 - for a single work of fiction published in English.The Master was chosen by an international panel of judges, fending off competition from nine other writers.
The judging panel described The Master as "a powerful account of the hazards of putting the life of the mind before affairs of the heart." "This probing portrayal of Henry James is not merely an outstanding narrative. In crisp, modulated writing, it subtly balances a range of devices that leave the reader in no doubt about the accomplishment of this work.
"The Master is and will continue to be a work of novelistic art: its preoccupations are truth and the elusiveness of intimacy, and from such preoccupations emerge this patient, beautiful exposure of loss, and the price of the pursuit of perfection.

But it's a very good thing you didn't call your novel The Boss. Talk about having your thunder stolen...

Update: Tóibín has just been on the News at One to give his views on Haughey: unlike most of the assembled journalists, editors, etc, he didn't mince his words, mentioning Charlie's pomposity. But he also pointed out that he has a lot to thank Haughey for today. Because were it not for Haughey and the tax exemptions he introduced for artists in 1969, Tóibín would have to pay enormous tax on the €100,000 prize he has just netted. And €100,000 is still well under the €250,000 cap that was introduced on the exemptions scheme in last year's budget.

Tony Awards Live 4

2006-06-11T22:12:00.000-05:00

Just heard someone behind me on the phone to their mother, telling her that they just saw Cynthia Nixon. “What? No, Mom, not President Nixon, Cynthia Nixon!”

Nixon was pleasant and bland, talking about shoes (hers are comfortable so that she can last the longest at the afterparty), singing lessons and the need to nurture new writing, which seems to be the buzz phrase of the evening.

Alan Bennett came! He is so sweet. Bowtie crooked. Still here, talking in a very bumbling and bashful fashion about the success of the play and what he’s doing next. Last time he was on Broadway with a play was in 1962, with Beyond the Fringe, (“before any of you were born, I’d imagine,” he says to the room of journalists, making the considerable quotient of fiftysomethings in here very well disposed to him indeed, I’d imagine. "I haven't followed the history of the Tonys since," the '60s, he observes. "I had no idea it had become such a big deal." A reporter puts his hand up to congratulate him on the fact that The History Boys has just tied the record for most Tonys won (6) by a single play. Bennett clearly doesn't believe him - Angels in America, he thinks, holds the title. Turns out the journalist was right.

Bennett's not working on another play, because he gets so many letters about his memoir, Untold Stories, that he spends all day replying to them (“it’s not a joke, really”) and he’s unlikely to be bringing his play The Lady in the Van, to New York unless Maggie Smith comes – and she won’t come, she says, unless he plays himself in it. And he gets stagefright now, he says. “I don’t think I’d even be able to play myself.”

Tony Awards Live 3

2006-06-11T21:36:00.000-05:00

The History Boys just won Best Play. Alan Bennett, along with the producer, accepted the award...and the ENTIRE cast and crew trooped up on the stage along with them. Very short speech from Bennett, talking about how they were nervous bringing the play to Broadway and worried it wouldn't be understood by New York audiences. Actually, the night we were there, it was the sections of the audience from parts of America other than NY (the tourists from the Midwest, etc) who were hissing to each other in bafflement at the accents. Anyway. The RTE boys have just gone home, because there's no reason to stay around here any longer now - that's it for the Irish nominees. But I'm hoping they'll bring Cynthia Nixon up here, and Richard Griffiths, and maybe even Alan Bennett (unikely), so like a good little starstruck hack, I'm staying put. Plus, there are strawberries, With chocolate on them.

Poor Martin. And he looked so good in that tux...

Gad. Cynthia Nixon just came in. She's THIN. Whining about the strong lights, but otherwise pleasant. Or is that bland?

Tony Awards Live 2

2006-06-11T20:51:00.000-05:00

First Anti-Bush joke of the evening. Actually, it's probably going to be the only one. Something about a Republican puppet. And when you've seen it (earlier on, they let me into rehearsals by mistake) being practiced over and over until it's done right, it sort of loses its magic. But still. Loud applause, etc.

Christian Hoff won best Featured Actor in a Musical and cried, and thanked the Lord, and talked to the unborn baby in his wife's womb. God. Somebody else make a puppet joke and get that man off the stage.

Oooh! Julia Roberts is announcing the Best Actor award next. G'wan David Wilmot!!!!

Update: Wilmot would have gotten the award for incredulity-at-being-here if there was one (his expression when the camera closed in on him was priceless), but Richard Griffiths won (so there, Ralph Fiennes). He gave such a long speech that they did the play-the-music-so-he'll-leave thing eventually; relished his 6000-strong audience and quoted the Walt Whitman line from the play, and I think he even sort of shrugged off the bony usher woman who seemed to be trying to steer him away from the podium. Good man! Cynthia Nixon, on the other hand, who won Best Actress, was BORING...and, as the guy from the San Fran Lesbian Gay Times beside me at the red carpet said when he saw her, where the hell was her girlfriend? And why no mention or thank you? Come to think of it, for a theatre awards ceremony, there was a depressing dearth of gay couples out there tonight. So everyone in NY theatre is straight and married? Yeah, right.

Fair play to Julia Roberts for prefacing her scripted introduction to the Best Actor award by saying to the actors in the audience "you people are insanely talented" in a very pointed fashion. A reference, I would think, to her discovery that being on stage is damn, damn hard, and not at all like film work.

What's left of the Irish hopes now? Best Play and Best Lighting Design, I think. So that's that...

Wait! Bob Crowley just won for Scenic Design - not for Tarzan, but for The History Boys. He's Irish....and begrudging with it: "Thanks very much. But between me and you, I should have won for the other one," he said.

A bit of a live blog: The Tonys, I

2006-06-11T19:31:00.000-05:00

Now this is what I call an Empire State View. Sixty-four stories above Manhattan, in the Tonys media room, the Empire State herself on one side, the Hudson and Central Park on the other. It’s a pretty good set-up here, with lots of food and drink and a spot with internet access for every journalist, but I’d still prefer, obviously, to be across the road in Radio City Music Hall, where they’re rattling through the ceremony at a brisk pace. Faith Healer was the first winner of the evening, with Ian McDiarmid (below) getting the award for Best Featured Actor. He gave a brief speech about how the play was one of the most musically perfect pieces for stage in the English language…wonder what all the musical people present made of that…and then came back here and talked about Brian Friel for a bit. He seemed genuinely thrilled. This is his Broadway debut, at 61. The History Boys won for Best Director and Best Featured Actress, Nicholas Hytner and Frances de la Tour respectively. He went on a rant about how English theatres got so much money from the government and American theatres should too, and she talked for the zillionth time (it wasn’t her fault, people kept asking the question) on what it was like to be the only woman in a cast of men. What did she draw on? “Sixty years.” How do the young guys in the cast regard her? “They call me J-La”.

Faith Healer lost out in Best Revival of a Play, which went to Awake & Sing. John Doyle, another British director, won for Direction of a Musical, with Sweeney Todd, and The Drowsy Chaperone seems to be winning all the other musical awards (sorry, I just can’t absorb information about musicals. It’s nothing to be proud of, I just don’t take it in.)

Heee, I think the Americans are getting a bit pissed off with all the British directors coming in here and talking about money and ticket prices and the other cold hard economic facts of theatre. John Doyle has just taken a question from a British journalist about ticket prices, and he’s answering pretty passionately (prices are rising in Britain too, becoming almost as ridiculous as Broadway), and you can just feel the boredom in the room. They should count themselves lucky they won’t have to listen to Michael Colgan talking about how he runs the Gate on a fraction of what the Abbey gets…

After the jump, some red carpet observations and pics...

This was my first time covering a red carpet do; I was late for the opening of Faith Healer on Broadway a couple of weeks ago, just getting there in time for the beginning of the play, and missing all the celebrities-and-flashbulbs activity beforehand...I did get to run up the red rug myself though - it was more panting and perspiring than preening and posturing. But that wasn't nearly as big a deal as the Tonys, for which two whole streets of midtown Manhattan were closed for 12 hours, with cops everywhere and something like 600 journalists. It was quite the rite of passage. Dozens of uniformly thin, uniformly blonde, uniformly stern-faced PR women barking us all into queues, into submission, and eventually, into place. "Place" being a tiny, tiny spot behind the barricades. Journalists stood pressed against each other, the ranks at least two deep, cameras banging into each other's heads and notebooks getting into each other's shots. Remarkably, tempers remained calm - but then, I had been placed on the...um, special interest (read: not really important to the PR people) end of the line, it seemed. Beside me were reporters from couple of LGBT publications from California, an insane woman from a Midwest newspaper, and a very young looking girl from NYU radio who, for some unknown reason, was dressed in full evening regalia and had a camerawoman with her. For radio, sweetheart. Weren't you overspending the budget somewhat? Anyway. I didn't care. These people were more fun, I'll bet, than the sharks from Entertainment Weekly and Access Hollywood, who got the premium spots at the other end of the carpet.

Lots of jostling for position and craning of necks to see if anybody important had arrived yet; for a good half hour, nothing. Thousands of fans gathered on the other side of the road, behind another set of barricades; their view was terrible, because the journalists stood between them and the red carpet. Still, they stood and cheered every tinted-glass limo and SUV that pulled up. And the limos were starting to come, and the screams of the crowd suggested that someone had arrived. Not that we could see anything. Except a seven year old girl who was chillingly skilled at the art of preening, walking nonchalantly around at our end of the carpet - turned out she was Kate Burton's daughter, waiting for her mother to make her long journey from the other end. And at our end, another odd thing was happening. And at first, it looked very bad indeed. Lots of people in evening dress - the sort of people you'd imagine should be walking the red carpet with all the other eveningfrocked people - were gathering by the door to RCMH, sort of huddling together, and being snubbed by the legions of publicists and photographers stood between them and the journalists. Looked like these people weren't allowed to walk the red rug. Looked like they were kind of forced to play second fiddle to the "real" stars. Looked like they were being sort of humiliated. Looked bad. And oh, did I forget to mention that all of these people were black?

Well, I needn't have worried. Rampant racism was not, after all, stalking the Tonys. (Although *cough* there weren't that many non-white people on the actual red carpet, as opposed to its Edge Of Shame, either. Just saying...) Turns out that the people in question were, rather, paying guests, otherwise known in the business as the lowest of the low. They'd bought their tickets, and they'd paid for their own dresses and tuxedos, and they were standing outside the venue for as long as they could in order to get a gawk at the stars with whom they'd be sharing breathing space for the evening. "You don't want to look at those people," the journalist beside me cautioned, when she saw me looking curiously in their direction. "Those people are nobody."

Might As Well Stay Home...

2006-06-10T17:27:00.000-05:00

If these predictions are anything to go by, the three Irish plays haven't a hope at the Tonys later on today. Looks like The History Boys and its star, Uncle Monty, will win everything, plays-wise at least, and as for the musicals, Drowsy Chaperone or Jersey Boys or something, who cares?

Last night we went to see Adam Rapp's play Red Light Winter at the West Village theatre, the Barrow. It's a good spot, and the plays I've seen there have been of a consistently high quality. But, like most of the theatre I've encountered here, they've always had to them a hint of compromise, of second-best. Standards here are just lower, sloppier, without, it seems, anybody really realising or caring. Hyperbole is the critic's best friend here. They go crazy for anything sentimental, moody, angry, no matter how shallow or manipulative the employment or portrayal of those emotions may be. Red Light Winter is an o.k. play, and I'm glad I saw it, but it didn't deserve the glowing reviews it got in the establishment press here. It's about two best friends who sleep with the same prostitute in Amsterdam; one of them, a tortured playwright, falls in love with her, while she falls in love with the other, a macho idiot. The dialogue is snappy (too snappy at times) and there are genuinely powerful moments. And it gave me a chance to hear Tom Waits' Tom Traubert's Blues again, and reminded me to download all of Small Change this morning, and listen to it, so that's good. And yeah, good performances. But claustrophobic, and underdeveloped, and abandoned just when things were getting interesting. So all in all, another NY theatre experience. It's only when it comes to theatre that I ever really miss Dublin.

The Week in Covers

2006-06-10T17:15:00.000-05:00

It was a week for walking past newstands and doing a double-take. Firstly, because of an undeniably-cute-but-scarily-hyped newborn:
And secondly, because of an unbelievably-tawdry-but-scarily-typical headline/caption combination:

Once more with feeling: Yup, folks, this is America.

Nice Work If You Can Get It

2006-06-10T16:28:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow, I'll have my first taste of celebrity reporting when I'm assigned my four square inches of a spot along the red carpet at Radio City Music Hall, to watch the stars arrive for this year's Tony Awards. I'm slightly dreading it, as I'm useless at the "Ralph! Julia! Will from Will & Grace! Er..David Wilmot! Over here!" style of journalism, preferring to sit with my subjects for hours on end and have long, rambling conversations that don't sound anything like an interview when I play back the tapes, provoking much last-minute panic, but actually lend themselves nicely enough to the writing-up process in the end.

So anyway. I'm not really relishing the prospect. Then again, Martin McDonagh will be there. In a tuxedo. Hmmm.

But before they let me near the red carpet tomorrow, I have to witness what sounds like a pretty crass phenomenon - the Celebrity Presenter Gift Lounge. The Swagbag room, in other words, where the famous names who'll be presenting awards on the night will be invited to "customize" (ugh) their own "gift bags" from the array of freebies donated by companies eager to get a bit of celebrity cachet. Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing Ralph Fiennes trying to maintain his signature elegant-and-aloof look while stuffing a goodie bag with Gucci sunglasses and UGG shoes. Not forgetting his spray tan and tooth whitening gift certs.

Down under, the full range of "gifts". $35,000's worth. (Or is that per gift bag? Hang on, I think it is. Ok, I have to lie down now.)

THE OFFICIAL PRESENTER GIFT LOUNGE COLLECTION:

Stars will roll away with Kipling’s Coast Tote & Las Vegas Trolley filled with over $35,000 of goodies! Highlights include:

Solstice Sunglass Boutique offers stars a choice of the season’s hottest designer sunglasses
from Gucci, Dior, Juicy Couture, Marc Jacobs, Girogio Armani and more;

Jabra JX10 state-of-the-art Bluetooth® headset
where style is the operative word - the perfect fusion of function and form;

Salt Works latest denim collection for men and women;

Chantelle Lingerie Essensia T-shirt Bra & Tanga embellished with Swarovski Crystals;

Essenza Automatic Espresso Machine & two month supply of coffee...from Nespresso
for the ultimate coffee experience;

UGG Australia’s Women’s Classic MINI – new for Fall 2006 – and Men’s Classic Ascot Driving Shoe;

Invicta Watches newest Anatomic Collection
featuring individually molded links of translucent ultra light thermo polymer -- in colors like Mango, Ocean Glass and Sun Ray;

Tahitian Noni International Luxury Bath & Body Gift Set..your ticket to pure pampering;

Stunning Details Handcrafted Semi-Precious Gemstone Jewelry;

Kumi Kookoon Silk Filled Travel Pillow and Silk Pillow Case with Silk Travel Slippers...
experience pure indulgence;

Keep a sharp eye out for the paparazzi, with perfect vision courtesy of
LASIK Surgery from Laser Eye Center of Silicon Valley;

Flash those pearly whites...courtesy of a beautiful
new permantly white smile from Lumineers;

Get in shape for next year’s award show season
with a 1-year Passport Membership to Crunch Fitness Nationwide;

Get revved up for the big night, with a private 2-day, 4-wheel drive training adventure
with legendary Bill Burke of Bill Burke’s 4-Wheeling America;

“Love on Broadway” by Eric Waugh - an 18” x 24” Broadway-themed Limited Edition Print on Canvas,
individually hand-painted by one of the most innovative and collected artists of fine art today;

PLUS more of the hottest merchandise trends including:

Spiegel Catalog Norma Kamali Timeless Convertible Tie-Waist Skirt, M.A.C Cosmetics Colour Box & Skin Care Box,

New York City Opera One-Year Associate Patron Membership, Saitek Industries A-250 Wireless Speaker System, Chronicle Books “A Must See”,

Am Rieys Industries American Chang Men’s Blazer, Dior Bois d’argent – an exclusive men’s cologne, Mario Russo 7 Wonders of the Hair World,

Left Field American Made Hand Appliquéd Tees, Coty Prestige Marc Jacobs Pretty Blush Holiday Gift Set, The Tao of Movement Private Pilates Session,

Kashwere Blanket & FurrMe.com Spa Products for your pampered pet, Archipelago Botanicals Signature Series Home Spray,

KangaROOS Sneakers, C-IN2 Industries Men’s Loungewear, FlipFlopTrunkShow.com Dressing Room Flip Flops,

Infinity Sun Spray Tan Gift Certificate, TIGI Hardcore Professional Flatiron, Peanut Butter & Co., Nature’s Gate Advanced Skincare Gift Set,

and gifts from Dr. Fresh, SweatLeaf Stevia, Herban Essentials, Silenze Beauty, Watersall, Pocket Books, Mary Green, Altoids & more!

Riders to The Sea....

2006-06-08T09:20:00.000-05:00

An anecdote from this year's Listowel Writers' Week arrived by email yesterday to cheer up (albeit guiltily) a rainy day:

"This year they ran the Listowel Races at the same time as the Writers Festival. Literally. X swears that while John Banville read, it was slightly distracting that a horse in one of the races threw his jockey, crashed into a barricade and died! Apparently John didn’t (doesn’t?) know it was going on behind him.

The Untouchable, indeed...

Dull. Dull. Dull.

2006-06-07T11:04:00.000-05:00

Look, New York, it's not like I moved here for the good weather, but you can stop messing around now, alright? If I have to read one more e-mail or blog entry from Ireland talking about the beautiful weather there, while out my window the Empire State Building is shrouded in mist and rain, and dreary grey skies push down with their pathetic attempt at warmth, I'm going right back to Dublin. Even 90% humidity would be better than this. No, wait. Wait. I didn't mean it....

RTE: Supporting Old Wives' Tales

2006-06-06T12:07:00.001-05:00

I can't believe what I've just heard on the RTE live stream, the 6 p.m. news. Tragically, five people drowned in accidents in Ireland over the bank holiday weekend. The bank holiday weekend. But what did the newsreader (Eileen Dunne) say? That this was the worst Whit weekend for drownings in Ireland in recent years.

When I was little, my mother would never let us go swimming on Whit weekend, the weekend of Whit or Pentecost Sunday, because the superstition was that water should be avoided on this weekend. I never asked about the reason behind the superstition, but today, hearing that the national broadcaster thinks it enough of an authority to cite it in a report on the evening news, I looked it up online. Here's what the Irish Culture and Customs page says:

Water was completely avoided, for it was thought that the danger of drowning was very great. People didn't bathe or go swimming; the fishing and sailing boats were left idle; and it was considered very foolish to even walk along the edge of the sea, river or lake. The reason for this was based on an old superstition that all of those who had perished in that water rose up on Whit Sunday to try and persuade or force the living to join them.

Well, that's very interesting. And a bit spooky, if you're into that kind of thing. But it is NOT fact, and it is NOT something which should be referred to on the news. Whit weekend isn't even a term that most people use anymore. As far as most people are concerned, the past weekend in Ireland was the June Bank Holiday weekend. Why not just describe it as such? Why the reference to Whitsuntide, in an item on drowning? If five people had died in fires or in road accidents (and of course, too many people did this weekend, but that's not the point) would the newsreader have made the same reference? Hardly.

I don't know, maybe this is part of RTE's new policy of accessibility. Just think of all those old ones who were thinking of switching permanently over to Newstalk until they heard Eileen's nod towards the Ancient Ways, and now they're sticking with RTE for the rest of their days. Or all those disgruntled arts and music lovers who were disgusted by the loss of Myles and John...but wait! Superstition! That's "arts", right? That's creative, and alternative, and sort of, um, bohemian, right? Get all the hippies back on board? Good thinking, Ana Leddy. I can just imagine what the nine o'clock news bulletin will kick off with: "A bird has been seen in the house of a man in the Co. Longford area. A death in the house is expected within the next twelve hours, the Garda Press Office said. Funeral arrangements to be announced later. In other news, Gardai are not seeking anyone else in connection with the shooting of a young woman in the Tallaght area. Gardai stated that the young woman was last seen walking under a ladder, and the death is accordingly being treated as a suicide. The man apprehended at the crime scene pointing a shotgun at the woman's face has been released without charge."

By the way, RTE, if you're really going to follow this Whitsuntide business through to its logical (...) end, you should have a look at the other superstitions associated with the date. Apparently, any animal or human born on this date will die a violent death or cause the death of another, Deirdre-of-the-Sorrows style. But Irish Customs and Cultlore (whatever) goes on:

However, there was a simple way to avoid this fate and that was to have the infant creature kill something. Most often, a live insect was put into a baby's hand and the little fingers squeezed on it until the insect was dead. Having caused a death, the child was freed from the spell. A baby animal was made to perform the same ritual so that it too, would be saved from the ill-fortune of being born on this day. Counter charms such as this one were very common in old Ireland and were often used to protect against an evil influence.

Come on, RTE! Where's your coverage of all the newborn babies squeezing wasps and bluebottles to death? Forget all this Margaret Hassan coverage; that poor woman is already dead, after all. It's all about changing the future now. You're just not on the ball.