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

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.

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