The simple life, according to Kavanagh

This article first appeared in the Irish Times

The cosmopolitan life is nothing if not unoriginal. From city to city across the world, the modern elite of much-travelled professionals brand themselves identically: by their experiences (on holiday or in the ubiquitous “year out”); by what they own (Apple products or houses in “up-and-coming” districts); even by the kind of books they choose to let themselves be seen reading, and the kind of cafes in which they choose to read them. This is a life lived outwards. While not exactly shallow, it is extensive. The recession, of course, is an antidote to all that for many – and a harsh, unwelcome one. Yet this life is so tied up with our idea of being broad-minded and fulfilled that we scarcely countenance the alternative. Denied his travel and his products the cosmopolitan thinks life has stopped when perhaps what is needed is to develop a talent for simplicity and for staying put, either out of necessity or because of a realisation that we have all “tasted and tested too much”. That quote is no accident – for Patrick Kavanagh could be the poet laureate of the post-Celtic Tiger age. It must be said that the forced poverty of Kavanagh’s life in meagre, squalid dwellings is something nobody should have to put up with. Nor should those robbed of security be asked to look on the bright side of bohemianism – Kavanagh would never have done so, and in fact dreamed all his life of a monthly pay cheque. But what he does have much to tell us about is the right kind of simplicity, and how to embrace it.

Abbie Spallen’s Strandline

This article first appeared in the Irish Examiner

As a launch pad for writing careers, no Irish theatre company can match Fishamble. Granted, they have been devoted to staging new plays for 21 years now, but nevertheless, the ability of director Jim Culleton and co to spot talent is borne out by an alumni of debutantes that includes Mark O’Rowe, Joseph O’Connor, Marina Carr and Michael West. In the last few years Gary Duggan with Monged and Sean McLoughlin with Noah and the Tower Flower have won prizes and praise both nationally and internationally. Now, it is the turn of Abbie Spallen to continue to build a name for herself.

Lonely Cork

This article first appeared in the Irish Times in response to the Lonely Planet’s naming Cork in its top 10 hot spots

In Cork the news that Lonely Planet had named the city as one of its top 10 hot spots for 2010 was greeted not with an “oh, how nice”, but with a “shur why wouldn’t it?”. While there is much to admire in such pride, there is in it a current of smug complacency, which is perhaps one reason why Cork is not, as the guidebook says, “at the top of its game right now”. For that you would, like the city’s beloved hurlers, have to go back to the late 1990s and up to about 2005. Lonely Planet is too late: in those years Cork was far more “sophisticated, vibrant and diverse”. It has since taken its eye off the ball.

Bring back Soundings

St Vincent de Paul is campaigning for cheaper schoolbooks; why not start by bringing back Soundings? That was a generational heirloom for most of us. What better summed up the waste and abandonment of thrift that was this country so recently than having a poetry book that was obsolete each and every year instead of Gus Martin’s selection of classics. And it’s called, of course, Poetry Now. What’s wrong with poetry then? Why does the Leaving Cert poetry book have to have such an ingratiating title, like a dad trying to dance at a party?

Yet another essay on Heaney

This article first appeared in the Irish Examiner on Seamus Heaney’s 70th birthday

As Seamus Heaney turns 70, it is fitting to reflect upon the unique position his fame and massive readership has given him. Truly, it is a privilege for a poet to be genuinely popular in his own time.  He has a wide, international readership. But his prominence in Ireland serves a different function.  He follows us through our lives as a public figure – from the poet of schoolbooks and childhood memory whose early poems are so familiar we almost lose the ability to hear their music, to feel their sensory imagery and weighty words (“…some hopped/The slap and plop were unseen threats”; “A rat-grey fungus glutting on our cache”; “…Cheeks and clothes were splattered/with flabby milk”), to a valuable kind of verse journalist who has offered richer alternatives to the headlines of our national life.
But we also stumble after him: Seamus Heaney’s journey through public life in Ireland has been exemplary; in a sense, we as a nation have grown outward along with him. He has enriched the public conversation when, to quote an over-exposed though truthful line, “hope and history rhyme”; but also, he has been a public conscience grappling with terrain beyond mere outrage during the Troubles, probing deeper than the public displays of both worthy condemnation, dogma and crude partisan politics. Such reactions had their own adequacy, but neither were the whole truth. Heaney, self-castigating, honest, yet scrupulous in his aesthetic distance, became an exemplary conscience for the nationalist “side” of the Troubles.

Happy birthday Faber

This essay appeared in the Irish Times marking the 80th birthday of publisher Faber & Faber and celebrating a history that has incorporated a long, distinguished relationship with the world of Irish letters

TS ELIOT HAD a unique position in 20th-century literature. He was able to shape literary modernism as arguably its leading poet, and as poetry editor of Faber & Faber. Operating for four decades in the genteel surrounds of 24 Russell Square, where editorial meetings would take the form of long lunches, Eliot cemented the iconic status of the two-f logo. Eliot’s reach, indeed, goes back even further – to Faber and Gwyer, which became Faber and Faber in 1929 when Geoffrey Faber bought out Lady Gwyer. No second Faber was ever involved, and, it is said, Walter de la Mare suggested the repetition “because you can’t have too much of a good thing”.

Draughts of literature

A slightly shorter version of this appeared in the Irish Times around Arthur’s Day. It’s a look at the long and proud tradition of booze  (stout, specifically) in Irish letters

IN 1956, Guinness began sponsorship of a national poetry awards, with cash prizes of £300, £200 and £100; as well as that, the best 60 or so poems were collected in an annual anthology. But the role of Guinness in Irish letters has long been more complicated than simply that of patronage; by the 1950s, stout itself had become such an accredited theme that the Guinness awards could have included a category dedicated to a uniquely Irish subgenre – the poetry of the pint of plain. The Oxford English Dictionary credits Charles Dickens with literature’s first mention of Guinness, in 1824. This notwithstanding, the writers of Guinness’s native city are the ones who have most honoured it. So much so that, unlike Dickens, the Irish writers do not even have to introduce the national drink by name. As Brendan Behan wrote in his Irish sketch-book: “Guinness is universally drank in Ireland”. Thus, the Irish poets can be familiar. “Pint” means a pint of Guinness; “stout” and “porter” (a difference little appreciated nowadays) similarly take the same brand in the mind of the reader. This holds true despite Maria Edgeworth’s early mentions of porter from Cork and Samuel Beckett’s later nods to mugs of “Beamish’s porter”.

Hip hop is dead…there, I said it

Originally published in the Irish Times

Hip hop has given the wider culture many things in the past 30 years, including a whole vocabulary of slang.  This includes (or once included at any rate) the word “fresh” as a multi-purpose expression of admiration. “Fresh” was most often used in this context in the early 1980s: good rappers were fresh; good beats were too. And why wouldn’t it have been thus? For hip hop was just that – bold, new, exciting.  It was, in essence, what every great American music was at its beginning.
However, as I stood in the crowd at what I now know to have been my last ever hip hop gig, I felt certain that “fresh” was the last word one would use to describe what was happening.

those Galway existentialists

This account of Jean-Paul Sartre and John Huston’s abortive attempt to work on a screenplay about the life of Freud was originally published in the Irish Times

Did you hear the one about the philosopher and the filmmaker? It sounds like a bad joke, but, sometime in 1958, John Huston, then living in Co Galway, hit upon the idea of making a film about Sigmund Freud, and, having already directed No Exit on Broadway, he approached Jean Paul Sartre to writer a script.
Sartre had, of course, no little talent for dramatic writing and he took the task with gusto, no doubt impressed by the $25,000 fee. Huston’s idea was to depart from the traditional biopic approach and instead make  Freud a kind of intellectual detective story, following the hero down the back alleys of the unconscious to his theory of psychosexual development – a descent into the subconscious somewhat like Dante’s into Hell.

An encounter with Paul Durcan

This article first appeared in the Irish Examiner

Joseph Heller never settled down to write until he had the a first sentence. You could hang a whole novel on the right one. Often in interviews, first questions are of the same significance.  Draw a one-word answer (especially if it’s no) and it can be a trying experience. With Paul Durcan, however, the first question is his. ‘Did you see the sermon by the priest at Darren Sutherland’s funeral,” he asks, before pulling out the paper where he has underlined in red pen phrases to his liking. “It’s the parish priest of Navan: ‘Our silence betrays a deep uneasiness as we all ponder the question – why?. The question we hesitate to ask out loud because we know it is a terrifying question and we fear that there is no answer.’ I haven’t heard something as thoughtful, from a priest or otherwise. It’s almost like Samuel Beckett”.