Let’s be alone together
Edited by Declan Meade (Stinging Fly)
Here’s the math: more than four hundred stories were submitted by around two-hundred eighty writers, and twenty were selected for this, Stinging Fly Press’s second anthology. Of those twenty, four are fine, and four are middling but need some hard workshopping.
In Thieves of the Dream, Emer Martin’s Iranian-Irish-American protagonist discovers her father’s secrets. James Lawless’s oddball Brown Brick, in which a man watches his neighbour steal his garden wall and his house brick-by-brick and add them to his own, may leave some unanswered questions (and leaves me wondering about the logistics of such bricklaying techniques), but is at least engaging, if a bit overly bleak. In Daragh Maguire and the Black Blood, D. Gleeson’s first published piece, a man barters body parts in exchange for respite from his grief – until the otherworldly creature turns on him.
Everything a writer introduces must serve a purpose, and must reappear for a payoff. A good short story is like a balanced equation, and it is fitting that one of the strongest is by physics teacher Tom Tierney. In Looking for America , a man finds a job painting a motel in advance of its demolition. The piece is warm without being corny, searching without appearing contrived, and suggests a writer who relishes the process of the craft,; I feel grateful to Stinging Fly for introducing me to his work.
And the rest? I shudder and think of a slush pile that could make a teenage journal look like a Pulitzer longlist. Perhaps Ireland has become difficult to write, overrun with vapid suburban estates on which nothing ever happens except strangers fucking each other and being unhappy at dinner parties. But do not blame your tools.
Many of the writers write about writers writing. Some of this looks too much like writing, and a few are beyond the ken of even the most compassionate workshop: narrators caught between omniscient and unreliable; obsessive indulgence in modern Ireland as if defining some new Hiberniana; the occasional confusion between nihilism and narcissism. Ennui is one thing, but some of the characters have no inner lives beyond their own self-regard, and no outer characteristics to render them at least superficially interesting -- the singer-songwriters of the literary world.
I looked forward to enjoying this collection, but instead found myself bracing myself at the start of each story, dampening the satisfaction from even the better pieces. Contributions from the talented William Wall, Viv McDade, Breda Wall Ryan and Jim O’Donoghue merely need more work, but many of the pieces are testament to a lack of support for creative ambition in Ireland in general, to a preference for accepting box-ticking mediocrity rather than providing constructive critique during the creative process. Because once in the public realm, work is subject to the whims of critics (ahem) who are not required to be so forgiving.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Column: Totally Dublin August 2008
I'm still mildly excited about space!
I'm standing over a scale model of the space toilet.
“Can I?”
“No!” the lady from NASA looks angry. I get down off the table and move on to a display about new NASA technologies.
A nice engineer lets me try the new space glove. It's 97 degrees Fahrenheit. I ask if he has anything that won't make my hand sweat, and we get on to the subject of a new moon buggy that has six wheels and can go in all directions, and there are people whose job it is to drive it until it breaks.
“My last car crapped two engines out its bottom in less than three months.” Once it was in the middle of a busy intersection while my housemate's farting rottweiler gobbled up the seatbelts in the back.
“That's nice,” he tells me. He puts the space glove away.
“Bet I can wreck the moon buggy,” I tell him. “Does it have a CD player or is it still tapes?”
After about half an hour, I've got an invitation to the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, but no keys to the moon buggy.
Every July in Washington, the Smithsonian chooses three cultures for its Folklife Festival, but they've pretty much shot their load, and if it weren't for the fall of the Iron Curtain, this would have happened a decade ago. This year, they have chosen Bhutan (the remaining country), Texas and NASA. Given my recent space-binge, which will end as soon as someone gives me a good book about otters or Nikola Tesla, we head straight for space culture. You're not allowed to bounce on the giant inflatable shuttle and you can't have any space food.
It's a little less shit than Washington as a whole, which is beige and crawling with senatorial interns and former captains of the debate team, swaggering around the place like a bunch of class presidents. Washington is a city populated by people whose personalities closely match their resumes. They won't eat fat calories or jaywalk, but they'll probably fuck you in a public toilet if you can get them a job in the Cato Institute. We spend three hours at the NASA tents.
My husband sips his limeade and walks a few steps further behind me every time I ask someone, “Are you really from space?”
We go to a talk by a food engineer who shows us dehydrated shrimp cocktail with a shelf-life of five years. She doesn't come out and say it, but we leave fairly sure that NASA's plan is eventually to abandon Earth and go live on Mars. I suggest we wait around so I can tell her I don't like shrimp cocktail, but there's a kid kicking my chair, so I give up. It's not going to be until about 2050, and there won't be any fish.
No one at the NASA festival of space culture tells us that the hydrogen bubbles in space food gives the astronauts bad farts, nor that the second thing Buzz Aldrin did on the moon was pee. One NASA person (Nasite? Nasian? Nasshole?) tells me that while there is no belt of astronaut shit orbiting the earth, there is a very narrow ring of pee around our planet. It is said to be beautiful.
We go to an oral history tent, where some anthropologists or sociologists are collecting stories about people's experiences of space. I write how Mark Arbeene was laughing when he told me the Challenger blew up, and he was the meanest kid in my class, and that I think we should probably give poor people some health care before we go back to the Moon.
A guy comes to the desk. “I worked at Goddard [Space Flight Center] in the 1950s. I would like to tell my story, but I don't have time right now – is there a way to do this online?”
The anthropologists or sociologists whisper at each other. Then, “Uh, no. Sorry.”
“There's....Will this be displayed anywhere online?”
“We haven't got that far yet.”
Uh oh.
I'm standing over a scale model of the space toilet.
“Can I?”
“No!” the lady from NASA looks angry. I get down off the table and move on to a display about new NASA technologies.
A nice engineer lets me try the new space glove. It's 97 degrees Fahrenheit. I ask if he has anything that won't make my hand sweat, and we get on to the subject of a new moon buggy that has six wheels and can go in all directions, and there are people whose job it is to drive it until it breaks.
“My last car crapped two engines out its bottom in less than three months.” Once it was in the middle of a busy intersection while my housemate's farting rottweiler gobbled up the seatbelts in the back.
“That's nice,” he tells me. He puts the space glove away.
“Bet I can wreck the moon buggy,” I tell him. “Does it have a CD player or is it still tapes?”
After about half an hour, I've got an invitation to the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, but no keys to the moon buggy.
Every July in Washington, the Smithsonian chooses three cultures for its Folklife Festival, but they've pretty much shot their load, and if it weren't for the fall of the Iron Curtain, this would have happened a decade ago. This year, they have chosen Bhutan (the remaining country), Texas and NASA. Given my recent space-binge, which will end as soon as someone gives me a good book about otters or Nikola Tesla, we head straight for space culture. You're not allowed to bounce on the giant inflatable shuttle and you can't have any space food.
It's a little less shit than Washington as a whole, which is beige and crawling with senatorial interns and former captains of the debate team, swaggering around the place like a bunch of class presidents. Washington is a city populated by people whose personalities closely match their resumes. They won't eat fat calories or jaywalk, but they'll probably fuck you in a public toilet if you can get them a job in the Cato Institute. We spend three hours at the NASA tents.
My husband sips his limeade and walks a few steps further behind me every time I ask someone, “Are you really from space?”
We go to a talk by a food engineer who shows us dehydrated shrimp cocktail with a shelf-life of five years. She doesn't come out and say it, but we leave fairly sure that NASA's plan is eventually to abandon Earth and go live on Mars. I suggest we wait around so I can tell her I don't like shrimp cocktail, but there's a kid kicking my chair, so I give up. It's not going to be until about 2050, and there won't be any fish.
No one at the NASA festival of space culture tells us that the hydrogen bubbles in space food gives the astronauts bad farts, nor that the second thing Buzz Aldrin did on the moon was pee. One NASA person (Nasite? Nasian? Nasshole?) tells me that while there is no belt of astronaut shit orbiting the earth, there is a very narrow ring of pee around our planet. It is said to be beautiful.
We go to an oral history tent, where some anthropologists or sociologists are collecting stories about people's experiences of space. I write how Mark Arbeene was laughing when he told me the Challenger blew up, and he was the meanest kid in my class, and that I think we should probably give poor people some health care before we go back to the Moon.
A guy comes to the desk. “I worked at Goddard [Space Flight Center] in the 1950s. I would like to tell my story, but I don't have time right now – is there a way to do this online?”
The anthropologists or sociologists whisper at each other. Then, “Uh, no. Sorry.”
“There's....Will this be displayed anywhere online?”
“We haven't got that far yet.”
Uh oh.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Column: March 2008
“You eat, I'll just sit here in the dark.” Or, So Long Grandma, and Thanks For All the Guilt!
Volume 4: Temporarily Reconsidering My Pessimism. (Happy Now?)
Here I've been going on about my mother, my grandmothers, and everyone but my father. He has that hopeful and unwavering liberalism, which is especially admirable in older people: no bitching about young people, except perhaps that we don't do enough protesting, which we don't, and are too uncivilly obedient, which we are. When Bush took office in 2000, my folks called to console me. When he took office in 2004, I did the consoling, my father especially crestfallen, having spent 71 years trying to make things better only to see it all unravel in less than half a decade.
In 1968, he worked on Bobby Kennedy's campaign in Washington, DC, in a largely African-American and solidly pro-Kennedy area that was pretty much ringing doorbells and shaking hands. One woman showed him a framed picture of Bobby. “I go to bed with him every night,” she said. He remembers an elderly woman who was concerned. JFK's assassination still felt raw. “I hope they don't kill Bobby, too,” she said. He assured her this was impossible, and in retrospect thinks her sadly prophetic. He remembers that night, going to headquarters to sit sadly and helplessly in folding chairs, and he tells me he remembers journalist Bill Moyers chiding him for being so emotional, adding something about how if it weren't for emotion, they might not be in this mess.
Forty years later, and there is fear and hope but too weighted in favour of the former. Doris Lessing, a boxer, and a rapper have all said publicly and with some terrifying certainty that Obama will be assassinated if he is elected. I can't remember who has said it, so I Google it and find I'm not the first. There are links to other links about increasing web searches for 'Obama assassinated'. I don't like this one bit. Some of them are suggesting America won't take to a black president, but it's more likely that they fear he's too emotional.
We don't really like proper ardour in our leaders, we like cool detachment, unless of course it's advocating hate-filled mob justice, which angry mobs seem to enjoy. Only sissies get uppity about human rights, catastrophic economic disparity, and corporate lobbying, and if you can't make your point without getting tetchy, you're too moody for politics. Unfortunately, while detached, aloof and cool make it easy to wreck lives with pen strokes, it's not so easy to be fair and human and do crazy things like listen and respond to real people's real needs unless you get a little emotional. Obama is all about hope, and even the hopeful are uncomfortable with it.
I'm kind of enjoying these throes of Obamamania, but what worries me is the discomfort at abandoning the confusion of passionless sociopathy for 'realism' or 'good leadership', the way the rhetoric at once sweeps us away while kindling the collective self-sabotage that keeps us from enjoying the optimistic buzz. Optimism and realism are not mutually exclusive. Even Vonnegut, whom we saw off as A Man Without a Country didn't give up hope for humans – just for 21st-century America. I am pleading here: could we be realistic about the optimism, and stop predicting even more doom?
The night before the Potomac Primaries, I email my parents: “Hi! Don't forget to vote tomorrow. And remember, if you ever want grandchildren, vote for Obama! My uterus is closed for business until we are no longer on the brink of apocalypse! Love, Your Daughter, who is not afraid to blackmail you emotionally.” And this is where it gets so I feel really shit: the Kennedys are practically wiped out and they still had me because there was work to be done. They both tell me this, but I suspect they're firing the blackmail back at me and really they're that desperate for grandkids. Gotta up my game.
(from Totally Dublin, March 2008)
Volume 4: Temporarily Reconsidering My Pessimism. (Happy Now?)
Here I've been going on about my mother, my grandmothers, and everyone but my father. He has that hopeful and unwavering liberalism, which is especially admirable in older people: no bitching about young people, except perhaps that we don't do enough protesting, which we don't, and are too uncivilly obedient, which we are. When Bush took office in 2000, my folks called to console me. When he took office in 2004, I did the consoling, my father especially crestfallen, having spent 71 years trying to make things better only to see it all unravel in less than half a decade.
In 1968, he worked on Bobby Kennedy's campaign in Washington, DC, in a largely African-American and solidly pro-Kennedy area that was pretty much ringing doorbells and shaking hands. One woman showed him a framed picture of Bobby. “I go to bed with him every night,” she said. He remembers an elderly woman who was concerned. JFK's assassination still felt raw. “I hope they don't kill Bobby, too,” she said. He assured her this was impossible, and in retrospect thinks her sadly prophetic. He remembers that night, going to headquarters to sit sadly and helplessly in folding chairs, and he tells me he remembers journalist Bill Moyers chiding him for being so emotional, adding something about how if it weren't for emotion, they might not be in this mess.
Forty years later, and there is fear and hope but too weighted in favour of the former. Doris Lessing, a boxer, and a rapper have all said publicly and with some terrifying certainty that Obama will be assassinated if he is elected. I can't remember who has said it, so I Google it and find I'm not the first. There are links to other links about increasing web searches for 'Obama assassinated'. I don't like this one bit. Some of them are suggesting America won't take to a black president, but it's more likely that they fear he's too emotional.
We don't really like proper ardour in our leaders, we like cool detachment, unless of course it's advocating hate-filled mob justice, which angry mobs seem to enjoy. Only sissies get uppity about human rights, catastrophic economic disparity, and corporate lobbying, and if you can't make your point without getting tetchy, you're too moody for politics. Unfortunately, while detached, aloof and cool make it easy to wreck lives with pen strokes, it's not so easy to be fair and human and do crazy things like listen and respond to real people's real needs unless you get a little emotional. Obama is all about hope, and even the hopeful are uncomfortable with it.
I'm kind of enjoying these throes of Obamamania, but what worries me is the discomfort at abandoning the confusion of passionless sociopathy for 'realism' or 'good leadership', the way the rhetoric at once sweeps us away while kindling the collective self-sabotage that keeps us from enjoying the optimistic buzz. Optimism and realism are not mutually exclusive. Even Vonnegut, whom we saw off as A Man Without a Country didn't give up hope for humans – just for 21st-century America. I am pleading here: could we be realistic about the optimism, and stop predicting even more doom?
The night before the Potomac Primaries, I email my parents: “Hi! Don't forget to vote tomorrow. And remember, if you ever want grandchildren, vote for Obama! My uterus is closed for business until we are no longer on the brink of apocalypse! Love, Your Daughter, who is not afraid to blackmail you emotionally.” And this is where it gets so I feel really shit: the Kennedys are practically wiped out and they still had me because there was work to be done. They both tell me this, but I suspect they're firing the blackmail back at me and really they're that desperate for grandkids. Gotta up my game.
(from Totally Dublin, March 2008)
Enthusiasts: Records
Mark Winkelmann is playing me a horrible record, some religious group that would sound as if they were praising the hell out of The Lord if they didn't sound as if they were singing under divine or clerical duress into the sleeve of a choir robe.
“I've heard a lot worse,” Mark tells me.“I've got about ten religious records that have good bits or are generally good, but at lot of them aren't.”
He makes the record stop and I am glad and praise him. “I suspect this won't be a keeper.”
Mark's record collection covers a wall and a half of his sitting room. He estimates that there are around 5000, but it's impossible to know how many have passed through his possession since he got his first record as a kid (Madness, and yes, he still has it).
He a connoisseur but also an explorer, and so collecting is as reductive as it is acquisitive. Constant culling ensures his collection doesn't become a map of the record industry's output drawn at a scale of 1:1. “It's a constant process. Some stuff gets played for ten minutes after I buy it and then it's straight onto the out pile. You need to compare it to a gold standard. The enemy is not the bad record, it's the mediocre record.”
He brings a portable record player to record fairs, to check condition and make an initial assessment of quality. And the internet has allowed him to take more chances. “I might have stopped buying so many records if I didn't have a way to get rid of them and give me at least a portion of what I paid for them.”
One set of shelves holds a rock and pop collection organised alphabetically, but the stuff that has real allure is in a much larger unit loosely arranged by genre: jazz, reggae, modern composers, psych, psych and more psych, side projects, one-offs and reissues, the uncategorised. Plus about a palm's width of records that belong to his wife, Anne.
The sitting room is like a secret history of music, a sanctuary for otherwise orphaned musical artefacts. I'm not sure where the band called Rasputin's Stash belongs. Probably nowhere but here. Like the 1970s Turkish protest singer. The short-run Cher side project. Et cetera.
“There's a theory that there are two kind of record collectors, the ADD and the OCD”, the former lacking any particular goal, the latter an audiophile with tunnel vision. “I'm a bit of both. The kind of OCD focus, where I spend real money, is psychedelic folk and jazz.” He shows me a pile he's pulled out for an article he's writing. French crooner Johnny Halliday singing psychedelic tunes, Mel Torme performing Donovan covers -- purpose-assembled studio musicians doing 'psychsploitation', he tells me.
Some collectors define value by monetary worth, by obscurity, by an aspiration to conquer an entire genre or catalogue, as portals to nostalgia or social history. A few are Luddite snobs, although many vinyl enthusiasts do simply prefer their music without compression. Then there are the mint-condition obsessives. They've always seemed a little pathological to me, the hand-washers and light-switch-flickers of an otherwise perfectly logical hobby. Mostly, like Mark, they love music and love records, and with few limiting conditions.
The most he's spent is about 50 quid, on a '45 by a one-off group called 'People'. “It's the B-side that's sought out, it's called Glastonbury.” He doesn't shun reissues (to some collectors, this is like buying antiques at Past Times) or pass over things that look like they have a story, as long as they aren't completely trashed. He pulls a record out from behind the couch, to show me an example of one that's borderline trashed. Oh, yeah, there are some records behind the couch.
His taste in music has been at least partly shaped by learning to appreciate what was available before Ireland 2.0. “The selection was relatively poor compared to the UK. People were poorer, and the population was more homogeneous, so the chances of finding an old reggae record that hadn't been battered by being played a million times was pretty low. Whereas if you went to London to charity shops, you could probably buy them more easily.” So Mark would go to town on a Saturday and look through the cheapo section, buying what looked interesting and what he could afford.
He has a mental list of things he'd like to find, but hasn't gone to extremes, detective work like DJ Shadow is rumoured to do, starting with the town where a record was made. “He'd have the name of a musician and he'd get a phone book from that town and call everyone with the same name.” I'm thinking this sounds like fun. Mark's pause suggests he agrees. “Maybe if I lived somewhere where you're more likely to encounter it.”
(from Totally Dublin, April 2008)
“I've heard a lot worse,” Mark tells me.“I've got about ten religious records that have good bits or are generally good, but at lot of them aren't.”
He makes the record stop and I am glad and praise him. “I suspect this won't be a keeper.”
Mark's record collection covers a wall and a half of his sitting room. He estimates that there are around 5000, but it's impossible to know how many have passed through his possession since he got his first record as a kid (Madness, and yes, he still has it).
He a connoisseur but also an explorer, and so collecting is as reductive as it is acquisitive. Constant culling ensures his collection doesn't become a map of the record industry's output drawn at a scale of 1:1. “It's a constant process. Some stuff gets played for ten minutes after I buy it and then it's straight onto the out pile. You need to compare it to a gold standard. The enemy is not the bad record, it's the mediocre record.”
He brings a portable record player to record fairs, to check condition and make an initial assessment of quality. And the internet has allowed him to take more chances. “I might have stopped buying so many records if I didn't have a way to get rid of them and give me at least a portion of what I paid for them.”
One set of shelves holds a rock and pop collection organised alphabetically, but the stuff that has real allure is in a much larger unit loosely arranged by genre: jazz, reggae, modern composers, psych, psych and more psych, side projects, one-offs and reissues, the uncategorised. Plus about a palm's width of records that belong to his wife, Anne.
The sitting room is like a secret history of music, a sanctuary for otherwise orphaned musical artefacts. I'm not sure where the band called Rasputin's Stash belongs. Probably nowhere but here. Like the 1970s Turkish protest singer. The short-run Cher side project. Et cetera.
“There's a theory that there are two kind of record collectors, the ADD and the OCD”, the former lacking any particular goal, the latter an audiophile with tunnel vision. “I'm a bit of both. The kind of OCD focus, where I spend real money, is psychedelic folk and jazz.” He shows me a pile he's pulled out for an article he's writing. French crooner Johnny Halliday singing psychedelic tunes, Mel Torme performing Donovan covers -- purpose-assembled studio musicians doing 'psychsploitation', he tells me.
Some collectors define value by monetary worth, by obscurity, by an aspiration to conquer an entire genre or catalogue, as portals to nostalgia or social history. A few are Luddite snobs, although many vinyl enthusiasts do simply prefer their music without compression. Then there are the mint-condition obsessives. They've always seemed a little pathological to me, the hand-washers and light-switch-flickers of an otherwise perfectly logical hobby. Mostly, like Mark, they love music and love records, and with few limiting conditions.
The most he's spent is about 50 quid, on a '45 by a one-off group called 'People'. “It's the B-side that's sought out, it's called Glastonbury.” He doesn't shun reissues (to some collectors, this is like buying antiques at Past Times) or pass over things that look like they have a story, as long as they aren't completely trashed. He pulls a record out from behind the couch, to show me an example of one that's borderline trashed. Oh, yeah, there are some records behind the couch.
His taste in music has been at least partly shaped by learning to appreciate what was available before Ireland 2.0. “The selection was relatively poor compared to the UK. People were poorer, and the population was more homogeneous, so the chances of finding an old reggae record that hadn't been battered by being played a million times was pretty low. Whereas if you went to London to charity shops, you could probably buy them more easily.” So Mark would go to town on a Saturday and look through the cheapo section, buying what looked interesting and what he could afford.
He has a mental list of things he'd like to find, but hasn't gone to extremes, detective work like DJ Shadow is rumoured to do, starting with the town where a record was made. “He'd have the name of a musician and he'd get a phone book from that town and call everyone with the same name.” I'm thinking this sounds like fun. Mark's pause suggests he agrees. “Maybe if I lived somewhere where you're more likely to encounter it.”
(from Totally Dublin, April 2008)
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Column: Guilty Party, Dec 2007
“You eat, I'll just sit here in the dark.” Or, So Long Grandma, and Thanks For All the Guilt!
Volume 1.: A Ring of It.
“Oh, how the mighty have fallen.” My boyfriend is looking at my ring, which I am flashing, flicking in his face, spelling out, “Hey, look at my Fat Rock” in Heliograph code. Probably. I am a hypocrite. Definitely.
I always swore diamonds were tacky, flashy, for people who care too much about things that matter too little, and not for someone who can't tell her Balenciaga from her Jimmy Choo and will never care to do so. I believe – this is true -- they are a waste of money and I wouldn't even have permitted him to buy me one when we could buy something we both could enjoy instead. But there was one going.
That was bad enough. Until this thing was slipped onto my finger and the toxic cocktail of guilt at my glee became as powerful as the glee itself. You'd want to see this thing.
“Wanna see my ring?” for the thousandth time, until my boyfriend offers to return the favour.
Mine's bigger.
Someone probably died for this ring. (But have you seen it?) Probably people died for it. (That's one Fat Rock.) And no matter how often I tell myself that the ring is over a hundred years old (Christ, they don't make 'em like this any more, do they?), how nice it looks despite nails to the quick and top knuckles gnarled from years of nervous picking, I cannot bring this person/these people back from the dead. Diamonds are beautiful for the same reasons animals are made of meat, booze makes hangover, and dessert makes ass: not to test us with first-world problems that have real consequences, visible or not, but to test how we rank those consequences. But do past consequences count? And present? Ring was present. Mmmm.
My grandfather had two spinster aunts, lived in a big house together, gangsters' and gamblers' molls. When boyfriends' times were good, they dressed them in diamonds and furs, and when times were bad, fed them bathtub gin and cobbled together the ends of scavenged cigarettes. A poker game, a bad bluff, a broken poker face, or too much of that bathtub gin, and one of the boyfriends presents his trophy to the moll or the dame, or whatever they were called in the Other Noughties in Boston Irish. Really, though, some sap pried this thing from his maybe crying wife's finger to squander it on a bad hand of cards, and she didn't get to leave it to any kids – if he hadn't maybe gambled them away, too. Back there! In my historical mind's eye, slowly drowning in the 1919 Molasses Disaster (really, look it up), having been adopted by some Boston Italians to offset some Catholic emigrant guilt, maybe on their way to a factory job.
It (sparkly ring) ended up on my grandmother, my grandfather having given it to her as a token of his misunderstanding of spousal privilege. By marrying her, she could not testify against him, which he, a lawyer, should have known only applied to communication that takes place after marriage, which maybe isn't fair to expect him to know since he lived and died before there was a Law and Order. He went to jail anyway, six months, which in those days was known as The College, before you could do college in prison. He'd gone to college anyway, then maybe Harvard Law and he came from a family of politicos and wannabes and lived in a big house, but not as big as the Charles Street Jail which, as I already mentioned up there, he also lived in for a while. That was back when even high powered lawyers would sometimes do Actual Time for, you know, teeny tiny things like jury tampering. Not big. Big like my Fat Rock.
And my mother has been saving it for me.
“I had it sized a bit larger because your fingers will swell when you're pregnant.”
What pregnant? Who? Oooh, costly.
(From Totally Dublin December 2007)
Volume 1.: A Ring of It.
“Oh, how the mighty have fallen.” My boyfriend is looking at my ring, which I am flashing, flicking in his face, spelling out, “Hey, look at my Fat Rock” in Heliograph code. Probably. I am a hypocrite. Definitely.
I always swore diamonds were tacky, flashy, for people who care too much about things that matter too little, and not for someone who can't tell her Balenciaga from her Jimmy Choo and will never care to do so. I believe – this is true -- they are a waste of money and I wouldn't even have permitted him to buy me one when we could buy something we both could enjoy instead. But there was one going.
That was bad enough. Until this thing was slipped onto my finger and the toxic cocktail of guilt at my glee became as powerful as the glee itself. You'd want to see this thing.
“Wanna see my ring?” for the thousandth time, until my boyfriend offers to return the favour.
Mine's bigger.
Someone probably died for this ring. (But have you seen it?) Probably people died for it. (That's one Fat Rock.) And no matter how often I tell myself that the ring is over a hundred years old (Christ, they don't make 'em like this any more, do they?), how nice it looks despite nails to the quick and top knuckles gnarled from years of nervous picking, I cannot bring this person/these people back from the dead. Diamonds are beautiful for the same reasons animals are made of meat, booze makes hangover, and dessert makes ass: not to test us with first-world problems that have real consequences, visible or not, but to test how we rank those consequences. But do past consequences count? And present? Ring was present. Mmmm.
My grandfather had two spinster aunts, lived in a big house together, gangsters' and gamblers' molls. When boyfriends' times were good, they dressed them in diamonds and furs, and when times were bad, fed them bathtub gin and cobbled together the ends of scavenged cigarettes. A poker game, a bad bluff, a broken poker face, or too much of that bathtub gin, and one of the boyfriends presents his trophy to the moll or the dame, or whatever they were called in the Other Noughties in Boston Irish. Really, though, some sap pried this thing from his maybe crying wife's finger to squander it on a bad hand of cards, and she didn't get to leave it to any kids – if he hadn't maybe gambled them away, too. Back there! In my historical mind's eye, slowly drowning in the 1919 Molasses Disaster (really, look it up), having been adopted by some Boston Italians to offset some Catholic emigrant guilt, maybe on their way to a factory job.
It (sparkly ring) ended up on my grandmother, my grandfather having given it to her as a token of his misunderstanding of spousal privilege. By marrying her, she could not testify against him, which he, a lawyer, should have known only applied to communication that takes place after marriage, which maybe isn't fair to expect him to know since he lived and died before there was a Law and Order. He went to jail anyway, six months, which in those days was known as The College, before you could do college in prison. He'd gone to college anyway, then maybe Harvard Law and he came from a family of politicos and wannabes and lived in a big house, but not as big as the Charles Street Jail which, as I already mentioned up there, he also lived in for a while. That was back when even high powered lawyers would sometimes do Actual Time for, you know, teeny tiny things like jury tampering. Not big. Big like my Fat Rock.
And my mother has been saving it for me.
“I had it sized a bit larger because your fingers will swell when you're pregnant.”
What pregnant? Who? Oooh, costly.
(From Totally Dublin December 2007)
Bar Review: O'Donoghue's, Suffolk St
Bar Review: O'Donoghue's
Suffolk St
Dublin 2
What is Oxegen when it's at home? Oxegen lives on Suffolk Street in a place that used to be the Thing Mote, which was a real thing. It was a humongous mound of dirt and means 'meeting place that is also a mound of dirt' and survived until the 1680s when it was flattened, but this thing mote was slightly further up the road from the (later) pub of the same name, around the tourist office that used to be St Andrew's Church.
I'll bet that really fucked people up just like it does me now. “Where art thou?” “Ye Thing Mote! It hast been fixty minutef!” “Forsooth? I see you not.” “Speak up! Ye madrigals are fierce loud and the pint is nay fit to douse the wounds of a meazel for soothery!” “Alas! Ye are in the publicke house. I am at ye mote of ye literal sorte. Anon.”
Fast forward four hundred yearf. “I'm just in the door – I don't see you.”
“At the back in the pooling area,” which translates as 'smoking area' when predictive text is used correctly. Ring ring. “I can't....hang on, which one are you in?”
I wonder was it a good idea to open a second pub called O'Donoghue's not very far from the real O'Donoghue's and with a similar exterior. I wonder how many tourists, having heard glowing reports of the real O'Donoghue's, wander into this one by accident (I've had to steer people to the correct one, more than once, I should add) and wonder if perhaps that friend who told them about the 'traditional Irish music' maybe is a real asshole after all.
It is my understanding, though, that this O'Donoghue's is a real thing. Smug mammy's boys in polo shirts gnashing gum into pints of lager, bland, pageant-faced girls upholstered by Topshop, and oh, I'm sure someone's always going or coming from Australia, and do they still go on J-1s? But they're all completely maaaaaad, you know. Madouvit! Madsers! And Oxegen is BRILLIANT! Someday they will graduate with their 2.2s in BComm and to Cafe en Seine, lord hear us. Is there room for this many angels in heaven?
This is a pub for people who are, on their Bebo pages, “lovin collage life!!” This is a pub for people who go every day to a place they can't spell. Or, it may genuinely be a place for people who have been or aspire to be cobbled together with bits of paper and glue, although I saw none. It is a rural publican's idea, perhaps advised by a 13-year old, of what 'the young people' are into -- no more 'are ye dancin'?', nosiree.
The table is sticky and the music is so very loud, and it's connected to a dissatisfaction sensor in my brain-pan because every time I think, “This is louder than necessary,” it gets louder. But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Ho ho, DAVID GRAY!? I can't do it. I'm holding my hands on my ears and I'm trying to make it stop, but it's so loud it's humming up through the leg of the stool and into my posterior and I've really had enough. Babylon, indeed, David.
The original thing mote was also a pile of dirt, did I mention that?
(From Totally Dublin January 2008)
Suffolk St
Dublin 2
What is Oxegen when it's at home? Oxegen lives on Suffolk Street in a place that used to be the Thing Mote, which was a real thing. It was a humongous mound of dirt and means 'meeting place that is also a mound of dirt' and survived until the 1680s when it was flattened, but this thing mote was slightly further up the road from the (later) pub of the same name, around the tourist office that used to be St Andrew's Church.
I'll bet that really fucked people up just like it does me now. “Where art thou?” “Ye Thing Mote! It hast been fixty minutef!” “Forsooth? I see you not.” “Speak up! Ye madrigals are fierce loud and the pint is nay fit to douse the wounds of a meazel for soothery!” “Alas! Ye are in the publicke house. I am at ye mote of ye literal sorte. Anon.”
Fast forward four hundred yearf. “I'm just in the door – I don't see you.”
“At the back in the pooling area,” which translates as 'smoking area' when predictive text is used correctly. Ring ring. “I can't....hang on, which one are you in?”
I wonder was it a good idea to open a second pub called O'Donoghue's not very far from the real O'Donoghue's and with a similar exterior. I wonder how many tourists, having heard glowing reports of the real O'Donoghue's, wander into this one by accident (I've had to steer people to the correct one, more than once, I should add) and wonder if perhaps that friend who told them about the 'traditional Irish music' maybe is a real asshole after all.
It is my understanding, though, that this O'Donoghue's is a real thing. Smug mammy's boys in polo shirts gnashing gum into pints of lager, bland, pageant-faced girls upholstered by Topshop, and oh, I'm sure someone's always going or coming from Australia, and do they still go on J-1s? But they're all completely maaaaaad, you know. Madouvit! Madsers! And Oxegen is BRILLIANT! Someday they will graduate with their 2.2s in BComm and to Cafe en Seine, lord hear us. Is there room for this many angels in heaven?
This is a pub for people who are, on their Bebo pages, “lovin collage life!!” This is a pub for people who go every day to a place they can't spell. Or, it may genuinely be a place for people who have been or aspire to be cobbled together with bits of paper and glue, although I saw none. It is a rural publican's idea, perhaps advised by a 13-year old, of what 'the young people' are into -- no more 'are ye dancin'?', nosiree.
The table is sticky and the music is so very loud, and it's connected to a dissatisfaction sensor in my brain-pan because every time I think, “This is louder than necessary,” it gets louder. But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Ho ho, DAVID GRAY!? I can't do it. I'm holding my hands on my ears and I'm trying to make it stop, but it's so loud it's humming up through the leg of the stool and into my posterior and I've really had enough. Babylon, indeed, David.
The original thing mote was also a pile of dirt, did I mention that?
(From Totally Dublin January 2008)
Book Review: Ireland's Other Poetry
Ireland's Other Poetry. Anonymous to Zozimus, by John Wyse Jackson and Hector McDonnell (Lilliput Press)
Just so you know, I'm a bit of a poet myself. Once I spent an entire day composing haiku about one of my favourite political specimens. My proudest was the following: “The dual mandate/Big veins burst in fatter necks/Double Healy-Rae”. My favourite poets are Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, and anyone who's ever written a dirty limerick and meant it. In other words, this book may be Ireland's 'outsider' poetry, but it's the stuff most worth reading, especially considering Ireland's strong oral tradition.
By the end of the eighteenth century, there was a clear distinction between the academic and the vernacular, but more than just silly recitations, the poems in this anthology are as essential to Irish literature, history and culture as Joyce and Beckett. It's too bad that humour is not more accepted as part of 'serious' art, when it is frequently as clever, if not more so in its avoidance of the obfuscating stuff that earns a place in the canon. And the real zeitgeist is in the urban streets and rural boreens.
Jackson and McDonnell have long been avid collectors of lowbrow and obscure poetry, and have already discovered enough gems to fill a library of compendia. This is a careful selection of favourites compiled, not as a book to read cover-to-cover, but for dipping into and out of again, maybe taking an inspired break to write your own. Or to sigh and flush, if you choose to keep it in the most vernacular room in your house, which could hardly be more apt if you're not embarrassed about chuckling as you go.
There are anonymous verses, 'lesser' poets, gems from Flann O'Brien (“The extraordinary thing about cows is/That they never wear trowsis”), Spike Milligan, and John Betjeman, a light lament from Seamus Heaney about the demise of Irish coinage, and lyrics from Christy Moore and Shane McGowan. Of course, there is 'A Scattering of Limericks', some deliciously filthy. But the best (to me) are poems that wee on the base of the ivory tower, like the anonymous 'ditty' from the 1920s that goes, “I'm a poet, God help me, and I must cry!/Genius goes with a watery eye./With a watery eye,/and a big bow tie;/I'm a poet, God help me, and I must cry!” Or, Who Killed James Joyce?, Patrick Kavanagh's send-up the Joycean scholarship industry: “What weapon was used/To slay the mighty Ulysses?/The weapon that was used/Was a Harvard thesis.”
I've always loved the playful approach to words and language in Ireland, the unpretentious lyricism of everyday speech, the ever-expanding horizons of vulgarity. In Ireland's Other Poetry, there is the dubious inclusion of lyrics to a Richie Kavanagh tune and there is the tragic exclusion of Dublin's Vinnie Caprani, but my frustration that I cannot reproduce the entire book here is enough to be sure that a pint of plain (verse) is your only man.
Just so you know, I'm a bit of a poet myself. Once I spent an entire day composing haiku about one of my favourite political specimens. My proudest was the following: “The dual mandate/Big veins burst in fatter necks/Double Healy-Rae”. My favourite poets are Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, and anyone who's ever written a dirty limerick and meant it. In other words, this book may be Ireland's 'outsider' poetry, but it's the stuff most worth reading, especially considering Ireland's strong oral tradition.
By the end of the eighteenth century, there was a clear distinction between the academic and the vernacular, but more than just silly recitations, the poems in this anthology are as essential to Irish literature, history and culture as Joyce and Beckett. It's too bad that humour is not more accepted as part of 'serious' art, when it is frequently as clever, if not more so in its avoidance of the obfuscating stuff that earns a place in the canon. And the real zeitgeist is in the urban streets and rural boreens.
Jackson and McDonnell have long been avid collectors of lowbrow and obscure poetry, and have already discovered enough gems to fill a library of compendia. This is a careful selection of favourites compiled, not as a book to read cover-to-cover, but for dipping into and out of again, maybe taking an inspired break to write your own. Or to sigh and flush, if you choose to keep it in the most vernacular room in your house, which could hardly be more apt if you're not embarrassed about chuckling as you go.
There are anonymous verses, 'lesser' poets, gems from Flann O'Brien (“The extraordinary thing about cows is/That they never wear trowsis”), Spike Milligan, and John Betjeman, a light lament from Seamus Heaney about the demise of Irish coinage, and lyrics from Christy Moore and Shane McGowan. Of course, there is 'A Scattering of Limericks', some deliciously filthy. But the best (to me) are poems that wee on the base of the ivory tower, like the anonymous 'ditty' from the 1920s that goes, “I'm a poet, God help me, and I must cry!/Genius goes with a watery eye./With a watery eye,/and a big bow tie;/I'm a poet, God help me, and I must cry!” Or, Who Killed James Joyce?, Patrick Kavanagh's send-up the Joycean scholarship industry: “What weapon was used/To slay the mighty Ulysses?/The weapon that was used/Was a Harvard thesis.”
I've always loved the playful approach to words and language in Ireland, the unpretentious lyricism of everyday speech, the ever-expanding horizons of vulgarity. In Ireland's Other Poetry, there is the dubious inclusion of lyrics to a Richie Kavanagh tune and there is the tragic exclusion of Dublin's Vinnie Caprani, but my frustration that I cannot reproduce the entire book here is enough to be sure that a pint of plain (verse) is your only man.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Enthusiasts: Hot, Hotter, Cold
Hide and Seek for Grown-Ups
This city is enchanted. Not by Adderall-chomping tulle-stuffed Disney princesses pining singingly after strong-jawed manchildren, but something far less irritating: little boxes of plastic tat, bolts that aren't bolts at all, and miniature notebooks with friendly messages or cryptic codes that send you on missions. We live in a landscape of lilliputian adventure and few people even know it.
May 1, 2000, satellite technology previously accessible only to the military was made available to anyone who could get their hands on a GPS. Two days later in Portland Oregon, a guy called Dave Ulmer hid a bucket containing CDs, a can of beans, and a logbook, and posted the coordinates on the Internet, inviting people to find, look at, touch, but not take the stuff. Thus Geocaching was born.
Geocachers hide containers of objects then post coordinates on a website, sometimes with detailed descriptions, history or personal stories. Other geocachers find them, sign the logbook, and put them back, careful not to disturb the landscape (one of their guidelines is that they don't dig holes).
It's a disconcertingly sunny Saturday morning and I meet Kyle and Donnacha for a Geocache Ireland event on Howth Head. I expect nine or ten people, but there are more like thirty: from all over Ireland, a guy from Austria who came to Dublin for caching, and a family who came from the UK for the day. People geocache at home and abroad to discover new places, or new ways of seeing a place they know. Eoin, a founder of Geocache Ireland likens it to having a tour guide in every town in Ireland, and that seems to be the sentiment worldwide.
Discovering there are trinket troves lurking all around us is second only to the childhood revelation that there's stuff under the ground from the past. It's like the good bits of archaeology (walking, finding stuff) without the boring bits (measuring dirt).
The first cache in Europe was placed on Bray Head eight years ago. Kyle was the first to find it, and was instantly hooked. “No one had heard of GPS. I remember saying, 'Donnacha, look, there's this hidden cache on the Sugarloaf,' and he was like, 'Come off it.'”
“I had this vision of a treasure chest with diamonds and rubies coming out of it,” says Donnacha. He was hooked even without the precious gems.
“If I'm away on holidays I'll do it,” says Kyle. “You know generally that people are going to take you to a nice area.”
The most exciting thing is not the gadgetry – though Kyle enjoys experimenting with the technology – or even the treasure. These caches make a narrative map where the geographical, the historical and the personal overlap, and invite you to add your own layer of meaning. It's experience, not a 'tourism product'. They observe and share, not intrude and consume.
Most of the people I meet seem to see it as a way of spicing up a walk. I wonder is it a coping mechanism for the sense of purpose we feel so pressured to fulfil during every waking moment, tempering the isolation of modern life.
In the city, caches are everywhere, including on the Ha'penny Bridge and on Molly Malone. Developers' eyesores commingle with the the personal touches of Geocachers. No matter how much the Docklands are squandered with joyless architecture, they can't pave over fun.
City caching can arouse curiosity or suspicion. Niall, in charge of ensuring caches adhere to guidelines says, “Some people search for urban caches wearing a hi-viz vest and a hard hat because they look like they're working.” That guy worrying the box hedge at the edge of the park may be neither the ESB man nor a pervert, he could be looking for tiny pound shop assemblages with his doohickey, and that jumbo breakfast roll could just be a prop.
There are personalised caches, like the Pop In For Coffee cache in the west of Ireland, where the couple who placed it (in their garden) invite fellow geocachers in for a hot drink. There's a Dermot Morgan memorial cache near the house from Father Ted, filled with trinkets, notes, and photos from the series. Some caches mark an unknown private ritual. “In the Phoenix Park,” says Eamon, a Dublin-based Donegalman, “there's a stage at the grave of a dog that was buried there about 30 years ago. Still there's a cross and anytime you go there're fresh flowers on the dog's grave. Somebody does that.”
Even today, I am escorted through a new experience of a familiar place. I also manage to bang my shin hard on a rock, get soaking wet, and nearly fall face-first into the sea.
Eoin's partner Helen and I run ahead, determined to be the first to find the final cache of the day, which we are, and we're giddy. There's something exciting about the box of toys, the cheery messages in the logbook. No matter how shitty a rainy Tuesday morning when you've just been splashed by a truck and you're late for a meeting, a few feet away there could be a reassuring note from some benevolent person, even if everyone around you is ornery.
I'm sure it's not the first time military technology has been turned into a way to make friends, but if there was ever a danger that I might go native with the anoraks, we're at code red.
This city is enchanted. Not by Adderall-chomping tulle-stuffed Disney princesses pining singingly after strong-jawed manchildren, but something far less irritating: little boxes of plastic tat, bolts that aren't bolts at all, and miniature notebooks with friendly messages or cryptic codes that send you on missions. We live in a landscape of lilliputian adventure and few people even know it.
May 1, 2000, satellite technology previously accessible only to the military was made available to anyone who could get their hands on a GPS. Two days later in Portland Oregon, a guy called Dave Ulmer hid a bucket containing CDs, a can of beans, and a logbook, and posted the coordinates on the Internet, inviting people to find, look at, touch, but not take the stuff. Thus Geocaching was born.
Geocachers hide containers of objects then post coordinates on a website, sometimes with detailed descriptions, history or personal stories. Other geocachers find them, sign the logbook, and put them back, careful not to disturb the landscape (one of their guidelines is that they don't dig holes).
It's a disconcertingly sunny Saturday morning and I meet Kyle and Donnacha for a Geocache Ireland event on Howth Head. I expect nine or ten people, but there are more like thirty: from all over Ireland, a guy from Austria who came to Dublin for caching, and a family who came from the UK for the day. People geocache at home and abroad to discover new places, or new ways of seeing a place they know. Eoin, a founder of Geocache Ireland likens it to having a tour guide in every town in Ireland, and that seems to be the sentiment worldwide.
Discovering there are trinket troves lurking all around us is second only to the childhood revelation that there's stuff under the ground from the past. It's like the good bits of archaeology (walking, finding stuff) without the boring bits (measuring dirt).
The first cache in Europe was placed on Bray Head eight years ago. Kyle was the first to find it, and was instantly hooked. “No one had heard of GPS. I remember saying, 'Donnacha, look, there's this hidden cache on the Sugarloaf,' and he was like, 'Come off it.'”
“I had this vision of a treasure chest with diamonds and rubies coming out of it,” says Donnacha. He was hooked even without the precious gems.
“If I'm away on holidays I'll do it,” says Kyle. “You know generally that people are going to take you to a nice area.”
The most exciting thing is not the gadgetry – though Kyle enjoys experimenting with the technology – or even the treasure. These caches make a narrative map where the geographical, the historical and the personal overlap, and invite you to add your own layer of meaning. It's experience, not a 'tourism product'. They observe and share, not intrude and consume.
Most of the people I meet seem to see it as a way of spicing up a walk. I wonder is it a coping mechanism for the sense of purpose we feel so pressured to fulfil during every waking moment, tempering the isolation of modern life.
In the city, caches are everywhere, including on the Ha'penny Bridge and on Molly Malone. Developers' eyesores commingle with the the personal touches of Geocachers. No matter how much the Docklands are squandered with joyless architecture, they can't pave over fun.
City caching can arouse curiosity or suspicion. Niall, in charge of ensuring caches adhere to guidelines says, “Some people search for urban caches wearing a hi-viz vest and a hard hat because they look like they're working.” That guy worrying the box hedge at the edge of the park may be neither the ESB man nor a pervert, he could be looking for tiny pound shop assemblages with his doohickey, and that jumbo breakfast roll could just be a prop.
There are personalised caches, like the Pop In For Coffee cache in the west of Ireland, where the couple who placed it (in their garden) invite fellow geocachers in for a hot drink. There's a Dermot Morgan memorial cache near the house from Father Ted, filled with trinkets, notes, and photos from the series. Some caches mark an unknown private ritual. “In the Phoenix Park,” says Eamon, a Dublin-based Donegalman, “there's a stage at the grave of a dog that was buried there about 30 years ago. Still there's a cross and anytime you go there're fresh flowers on the dog's grave. Somebody does that.”
Even today, I am escorted through a new experience of a familiar place. I also manage to bang my shin hard on a rock, get soaking wet, and nearly fall face-first into the sea.
Eoin's partner Helen and I run ahead, determined to be the first to find the final cache of the day, which we are, and we're giddy. There's something exciting about the box of toys, the cheery messages in the logbook. No matter how shitty a rainy Tuesday morning when you've just been splashed by a truck and you're late for a meeting, a few feet away there could be a reassuring note from some benevolent person, even if everyone around you is ornery.
I'm sure it's not the first time military technology has been turned into a way to make friends, but if there was ever a danger that I might go native with the anoraks, we're at code red.
Book Review: George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
George Saunders – The Braindead Megaphone -- (Riverhead Books)
There's a guy at a party with a megaphone, bellowing, and all the shouting and not-thinking has made him go 'a little braindead'. This is the media. Not our publication, but the television news broadcast that presents a story about 'Malls Tend To Get Busier At Christmas!' with the same gravity and earnestness as is given to the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, and all of the Iraqistan war reportage. Have you ever seen a six-minute (or more) piece about Thanksgiving in Iraq, where you see soldiers eating turkey and talking about how they miss home, and then you find out from another news source, that umpteen people were killed, I don't know, about six inches from the camera? That's what happens when you don't even need the megaphone any more, when everything is at the same volume. When everything matters, the important things cease to matter, but the title essay in Saunders's latest work is written, it seems, in the spirit of what he calls 'joyfully reckless confidence'.
He doesn't believe this is imposed on us from above, it happens every time we choose to watch I'm a Celebrity, I Like My Coffee With Lowfat Milk! instead of, I don't know, talking to people around us, noticing the world ourselves. But this is good news. It comes from us, which means it can be stopped by us. Rather than, “Yes, media, please tell us as much truth as you can while still making money,” we can insist that we can not only handle the truth, but that we deserve it in all its vile, planet-destroying, fat-clammy-faced-CEO-with-his-hand-in-the-slot-of-your-kid's-piggybank glory. Glory? Something like that.
His essays are witty, accessible, and meaty, like you're really learning something. Something about the meaning of writing in 'Mr Vonnegut in Sumatra' and his enviable appreciation of a well-revised sentence in 'Thank You, Esther Forbes', the dizzying contradictions of the moral quagmire that is Dubai in 'The New Mecca'. Many of these essays are reworked versions of published work in GQ or The New Yorker, or his new introduction to a recent edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The collation is a reminder of his versatility, and of his unmatchable skill as a satirist, the loveable ghost of the risen Mark Twain, a wit as humane as Vonnegut, as biting as Twain, as prescient as Bradbury, and wholly, unrelentingly likeable. We need George Saunders, but more importantly, he needs us, not needs us in a needy sort of way, but we really are required to stand up and remember that the world is full of humans, and more than half of us fall into a category he calls People Reluctant To Kill For An Abstraction, and all of them deserve at least a little respect. In this George we can trust.
There's a guy at a party with a megaphone, bellowing, and all the shouting and not-thinking has made him go 'a little braindead'. This is the media. Not our publication, but the television news broadcast that presents a story about 'Malls Tend To Get Busier At Christmas!' with the same gravity and earnestness as is given to the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, and all of the Iraqistan war reportage. Have you ever seen a six-minute (or more) piece about Thanksgiving in Iraq, where you see soldiers eating turkey and talking about how they miss home, and then you find out from another news source, that umpteen people were killed, I don't know, about six inches from the camera? That's what happens when you don't even need the megaphone any more, when everything is at the same volume. When everything matters, the important things cease to matter, but the title essay in Saunders's latest work is written, it seems, in the spirit of what he calls 'joyfully reckless confidence'.
He doesn't believe this is imposed on us from above, it happens every time we choose to watch I'm a Celebrity, I Like My Coffee With Lowfat Milk! instead of, I don't know, talking to people around us, noticing the world ourselves. But this is good news. It comes from us, which means it can be stopped by us. Rather than, “Yes, media, please tell us as much truth as you can while still making money,” we can insist that we can not only handle the truth, but that we deserve it in all its vile, planet-destroying, fat-clammy-faced-CEO-with-his-hand-in-the-slot-of-your-kid's-piggybank glory. Glory? Something like that.
His essays are witty, accessible, and meaty, like you're really learning something. Something about the meaning of writing in 'Mr Vonnegut in Sumatra' and his enviable appreciation of a well-revised sentence in 'Thank You, Esther Forbes', the dizzying contradictions of the moral quagmire that is Dubai in 'The New Mecca'. Many of these essays are reworked versions of published work in GQ or The New Yorker, or his new introduction to a recent edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The collation is a reminder of his versatility, and of his unmatchable skill as a satirist, the loveable ghost of the risen Mark Twain, a wit as humane as Vonnegut, as biting as Twain, as prescient as Bradbury, and wholly, unrelentingly likeable. We need George Saunders, but more importantly, he needs us, not needs us in a needy sort of way, but we really are required to stand up and remember that the world is full of humans, and more than half of us fall into a category he calls People Reluctant To Kill For An Abstraction, and all of them deserve at least a little respect. In this George we can trust.
Book Review: Studs Terkel, Touch and Go
Studs Terkel – Touch and Go. A Memoir (The New Press)
Studs's life is made of stories, each sprouting a hundred offspring, each character in an anecdote hinting at dozens of others of whom there simply isn't time to tell. Who is Studs? He is a petulant optimist, a lifelong radical, and I have always admired him for his gentle touch. He admires the dignity of British journalist James Cameron for having restraint he wishes he had himself. Studs holds back when it is necessary, other times he writes angry letters, once calling the book editor of a major magazine 'a craven toady', which makes me feel like less of a failure.
He started listening to people in the lobby of the Chicago hotel run by his parents, learned about the world from honest working people and gangsters and their molls. Studs was on television when it was first born, and he's spent much of his life on radio, inviting people to tell their own stories, his voice in silhouette. And even in this, his memoir, it's mostly about other people. He doesn't need to be the star of his own show.
He speaks of names you know, and names you don't know, of whom he speaks with an affection that makes you wonder why you haven't heard of them before. People like Virginia Durr, who stood up to a 300-pound senator who'd hauled her before a Mississippi Senate committee on Un-American activities. She sat in the witness chair, quietly powdering her nose. When asked why she defied him, she said, “I guess I'm just a good old Southern snob.”
Studs did his part. When he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, he sat in his apartment reading, listening to records. When the FBI would arrive, he'd invite them in, offer shots of bourbon or vodka, “making it quite clear it was domestic”. Sometimes he read to them. His politeness eventually drove them away. When he was called in by an employer who questioned why he'd signed petitions for civil rights and against Fascism, and reminded that these were 'Communist' fronts, Studs said, “Suppose Communists come out against cancer? Do we automatically come out for cancer?” He was sacked. He did it before the Daily Show, before The Colbert Report, when it was still dangerous. It's not all about McCarthyism, but that his belief in humanity has always been subversive should worry us as much as it should make us hopeful.
Maybe I'm being flippant – I know I am – but there's a reason Hemingway, Hunter S., and other cynics couldn't go on, and Studs can. One of his recent books of interviews is called Hope Dies Last -- that's why. To call him a hero would be missing the point of Studs entirely, but I can't help myself. See? No restraint.
Studs's life is made of stories, each sprouting a hundred offspring, each character in an anecdote hinting at dozens of others of whom there simply isn't time to tell. Who is Studs? He is a petulant optimist, a lifelong radical, and I have always admired him for his gentle touch. He admires the dignity of British journalist James Cameron for having restraint he wishes he had himself. Studs holds back when it is necessary, other times he writes angry letters, once calling the book editor of a major magazine 'a craven toady', which makes me feel like less of a failure.
He started listening to people in the lobby of the Chicago hotel run by his parents, learned about the world from honest working people and gangsters and their molls. Studs was on television when it was first born, and he's spent much of his life on radio, inviting people to tell their own stories, his voice in silhouette. And even in this, his memoir, it's mostly about other people. He doesn't need to be the star of his own show.
He speaks of names you know, and names you don't know, of whom he speaks with an affection that makes you wonder why you haven't heard of them before. People like Virginia Durr, who stood up to a 300-pound senator who'd hauled her before a Mississippi Senate committee on Un-American activities. She sat in the witness chair, quietly powdering her nose. When asked why she defied him, she said, “I guess I'm just a good old Southern snob.”
Studs did his part. When he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, he sat in his apartment reading, listening to records. When the FBI would arrive, he'd invite them in, offer shots of bourbon or vodka, “making it quite clear it was domestic”. Sometimes he read to them. His politeness eventually drove them away. When he was called in by an employer who questioned why he'd signed petitions for civil rights and against Fascism, and reminded that these were 'Communist' fronts, Studs said, “Suppose Communists come out against cancer? Do we automatically come out for cancer?” He was sacked. He did it before the Daily Show, before The Colbert Report, when it was still dangerous. It's not all about McCarthyism, but that his belief in humanity has always been subversive should worry us as much as it should make us hopeful.
Maybe I'm being flippant – I know I am – but there's a reason Hemingway, Hunter S., and other cynics couldn't go on, and Studs can. One of his recent books of interviews is called Hope Dies Last -- that's why. To call him a hero would be missing the point of Studs entirely, but I can't help myself. See? No restraint.
Archives of the Planet
Albert Kahn Exhibition at the National Photographic Exhibition, Temple Bar, Dublin
A young woman – a girl, really – looks directly at the lens, legs crossed, hands clasped like a lady, and she does not hide the dirty fingernails of her swollen hands. She is squinting a little and her rotten teeth are showing, but she isn't smiling, and she isn't quite at ease in front of the camera.
There is neither the sadness of photographs intended to capture Ireland's dismal poverty (even though it was impossible to ignore), nor the typical Victorian or Edwardian attitude that these are people who are happy to be poor and too simple-minded not to be. Nor is she a nationalistic image of Mná na hÉireann, or some guardian of Ireland's moral virtue. She is wearing a form of dress that was out of date even then (although perhaps she is dressed up and hauled out for foreign tourists, a la An Beal Bocht?), but her full frontal gaze is too arresting to be didactic.
She is just a girl, robust but not beautiful, and could be any teenage girl in Ireland, only this was taken in 1913, before 'teenager' existed. And yet her familiar face, the deep red of her cloak, the detail of her shawl all make the antiquity of this image so jarring. These photographs preserve by record world traditions that were disappearing; today these old pictures of quotidian life are juxtaposed with a shockingly modern technology at a surprisingly early date. Guess what? The 'olden days' weren't black and white after all.
These are part of the Archives of the Planet, an ambitious project funded by French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn which ran from 1908 to 1931. He aimed to create an archive that represented a geographical totality – a world map made out of portraits – not for imperialistic ends, but because he believed that worldwide dialogue would produce a cultural intimacy that could save the world. His mission was also made possible by the Lumiere brothers who patented the autochrome process in 1903, allowing for colour photographs to be produced using glass plates and potato starch dyed in primary colours. This is why the reds of subjects' clothing stand out so starkly, why the delicate patterns of the girl's shawl are offset rather than obscured by the shadows of its folds.
“It was the first major colour collection taken in Ireland, and it is of such high quality,” says Fidelma Mullane, who recently curated the original exhibition of the Irish material from the Musée Albert-Kahn in Galway. “But his main overarching vision was that world peace could be achieved, even though he had endured three wars.”
Kahn sent teams to collect still and moving images from more than fifty countries with the aim of documenting traditions at risk of being usurped by modernity, in the hope of facilitating mutual understanding. “A lot of the operators on photo missions went to countries in a state of conflict or flux, such as Ireland,” Mullane says, “Things changed more rapidly in places where there was conflict and war.”
Mullane, a freelance geographer, discovered the archive in Paris in the 1980s, when she was conducting research on Jean Bruhnes, considered the 'father of human geography', and whom Kahn appointed to direct the Archive. It was only when Galway City Museum invited her to guest curate an exhibition that she had the opportunity to bring the photos to Ireland.
Ireland in 1913 was a nation inchoate: the formation of the Irish Citizen Army, the Irish Volunteers, on the cusp of Home Rule, the Dublin lockout, and intensely poor. To Ireland Kahn and Bruhnes sent two French women, Marguerite Mespoulet and Madeleine Mignon-Alba, a graduate in English literature and a scientist, respectively, both teachers and proto-feminists. They arrived in Galway on May 25, 1913, documenting people and places in Galway city, The Claddagh and Headford before travelling eastwards along the Shannon through Athlone, and then along the River Boyne to Drogheda. “The Irish collection was the only one achieved by women. They were not photographers, but they took great photos, and they were the only ones who annotated their photos,” says Mullane.
These images are surprising not only for their colour, but also because the textures. And the intimacy of these portraits afford an aesthetic, not assigned by a photographer attempting to convey the terrible beauty of a sublime and noble savagery, but one the subjects themselves possess. Their descriptions are underlined by a gentle humanity, neither purely scientific nor a literary flight of fancy.
They note that even in 'impoverished Connemara', “In every conversation, I am asked, 'Do you like Ireland? Isn't it beautiful?'” They are surprised at the lyricism with which their subjects speak, and there is something in the pairing of photo and diary that seems more real, even though such long exposure shots are staged by necessity. At a time when so many figurative images are imbued with colonial surveillance or a nationalistic recalcitrance, these are just pictures of people being themselves. Perhaps it is because in 1913, fewer people were aware of the conventions of behaviour in front of a camera, or that were these women weren't trained in directing such behaviour. They look like film stills for the best movie never made about rural Ireland.
Today monochrome lends gravitas to a photograph, and when we see an image from a hundred years ago, we expect it to look a certain way: stoically posed, grainy, shadows making even the happiest image almost saturnine. Only when we see these images in colour do we realise that, without the task of imagining what the colours really are, there is so much more wondering to be done. The aura of antiquity is fleeting, and our image-saturated lives, and the speed at which technology moves have deprived photos and gadgets of the ability to shock with the new.
By this time, Ireland had been mapped, drawn, photographed and described to exhaustion, and always with an agenda, but these seem to transcend any sense of moral or political instruction. Kahn's collection does have an agenda, and controversy surrounds some of the photographs taken in other countries. But in their plainness, in the gentle marriage of the art and science of the photograph, these Irish images capture humanity, set the stage for Walker Evans and James Agee's merging of text, image and experience in the rural American Depression decades later in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
In two sadly ironic twists, Kahn lost all of his money by 1931, and despite his obdurate pacifism, his insistence that, despite living through the Great War, the War to End All Wars, world peace was still possible, he died destitute in 1940 during the German occupation of France. The Musée Albert-Kahn with its gardens, near Paris, are all that is left of his Archives of the Planet and while he did not complete the project, we are left with a unique collection which restores, even if for only a moment, the power of the photograph, of technology to leave us bewildered.
(from Temple Bar Magazine January 2008)
A young woman – a girl, really – looks directly at the lens, legs crossed, hands clasped like a lady, and she does not hide the dirty fingernails of her swollen hands. She is squinting a little and her rotten teeth are showing, but she isn't smiling, and she isn't quite at ease in front of the camera.
There is neither the sadness of photographs intended to capture Ireland's dismal poverty (even though it was impossible to ignore), nor the typical Victorian or Edwardian attitude that these are people who are happy to be poor and too simple-minded not to be. Nor is she a nationalistic image of Mná na hÉireann, or some guardian of Ireland's moral virtue. She is wearing a form of dress that was out of date even then (although perhaps she is dressed up and hauled out for foreign tourists, a la An Beal Bocht?), but her full frontal gaze is too arresting to be didactic.
She is just a girl, robust but not beautiful, and could be any teenage girl in Ireland, only this was taken in 1913, before 'teenager' existed. And yet her familiar face, the deep red of her cloak, the detail of her shawl all make the antiquity of this image so jarring. These photographs preserve by record world traditions that were disappearing; today these old pictures of quotidian life are juxtaposed with a shockingly modern technology at a surprisingly early date. Guess what? The 'olden days' weren't black and white after all.
These are part of the Archives of the Planet, an ambitious project funded by French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn which ran from 1908 to 1931. He aimed to create an archive that represented a geographical totality – a world map made out of portraits – not for imperialistic ends, but because he believed that worldwide dialogue would produce a cultural intimacy that could save the world. His mission was also made possible by the Lumiere brothers who patented the autochrome process in 1903, allowing for colour photographs to be produced using glass plates and potato starch dyed in primary colours. This is why the reds of subjects' clothing stand out so starkly, why the delicate patterns of the girl's shawl are offset rather than obscured by the shadows of its folds.
“It was the first major colour collection taken in Ireland, and it is of such high quality,” says Fidelma Mullane, who recently curated the original exhibition of the Irish material from the Musée Albert-Kahn in Galway. “But his main overarching vision was that world peace could be achieved, even though he had endured three wars.”
Kahn sent teams to collect still and moving images from more than fifty countries with the aim of documenting traditions at risk of being usurped by modernity, in the hope of facilitating mutual understanding. “A lot of the operators on photo missions went to countries in a state of conflict or flux, such as Ireland,” Mullane says, “Things changed more rapidly in places where there was conflict and war.”
Mullane, a freelance geographer, discovered the archive in Paris in the 1980s, when she was conducting research on Jean Bruhnes, considered the 'father of human geography', and whom Kahn appointed to direct the Archive. It was only when Galway City Museum invited her to guest curate an exhibition that she had the opportunity to bring the photos to Ireland.
Ireland in 1913 was a nation inchoate: the formation of the Irish Citizen Army, the Irish Volunteers, on the cusp of Home Rule, the Dublin lockout, and intensely poor. To Ireland Kahn and Bruhnes sent two French women, Marguerite Mespoulet and Madeleine Mignon-Alba, a graduate in English literature and a scientist, respectively, both teachers and proto-feminists. They arrived in Galway on May 25, 1913, documenting people and places in Galway city, The Claddagh and Headford before travelling eastwards along the Shannon through Athlone, and then along the River Boyne to Drogheda. “The Irish collection was the only one achieved by women. They were not photographers, but they took great photos, and they were the only ones who annotated their photos,” says Mullane.
These images are surprising not only for their colour, but also because the textures. And the intimacy of these portraits afford an aesthetic, not assigned by a photographer attempting to convey the terrible beauty of a sublime and noble savagery, but one the subjects themselves possess. Their descriptions are underlined by a gentle humanity, neither purely scientific nor a literary flight of fancy.
They note that even in 'impoverished Connemara', “In every conversation, I am asked, 'Do you like Ireland? Isn't it beautiful?'” They are surprised at the lyricism with which their subjects speak, and there is something in the pairing of photo and diary that seems more real, even though such long exposure shots are staged by necessity. At a time when so many figurative images are imbued with colonial surveillance or a nationalistic recalcitrance, these are just pictures of people being themselves. Perhaps it is because in 1913, fewer people were aware of the conventions of behaviour in front of a camera, or that were these women weren't trained in directing such behaviour. They look like film stills for the best movie never made about rural Ireland.
Today monochrome lends gravitas to a photograph, and when we see an image from a hundred years ago, we expect it to look a certain way: stoically posed, grainy, shadows making even the happiest image almost saturnine. Only when we see these images in colour do we realise that, without the task of imagining what the colours really are, there is so much more wondering to be done. The aura of antiquity is fleeting, and our image-saturated lives, and the speed at which technology moves have deprived photos and gadgets of the ability to shock with the new.
By this time, Ireland had been mapped, drawn, photographed and described to exhaustion, and always with an agenda, but these seem to transcend any sense of moral or political instruction. Kahn's collection does have an agenda, and controversy surrounds some of the photographs taken in other countries. But in their plainness, in the gentle marriage of the art and science of the photograph, these Irish images capture humanity, set the stage for Walker Evans and James Agee's merging of text, image and experience in the rural American Depression decades later in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
In two sadly ironic twists, Kahn lost all of his money by 1931, and despite his obdurate pacifism, his insistence that, despite living through the Great War, the War to End All Wars, world peace was still possible, he died destitute in 1940 during the German occupation of France. The Musée Albert-Kahn with its gardens, near Paris, are all that is left of his Archives of the Planet and while he did not complete the project, we are left with a unique collection which restores, even if for only a moment, the power of the photograph, of technology to leave us bewildered.
(from Temple Bar Magazine January 2008)
Dirty Hoarder
There's a man in an old suit. It smells a little musty and he's sitting in a chair, rusty spring peeking through cat-scratched upholstery. The cat died a few years ago, nothing fancy, it was just impossibly ancient. The man is asleep, a newspaper on his leg – not today's – the financial pages having slipped onto the floor, and a cigarette balances in the ceramic ashtray, all that's left a stubborn ashen cylinder and hissing embers that should cause concern. He's fallen asleep, as always, his grubby beard nestled on a yellowish shirt, shoes planted firmly on painted floorboards.
Or maybe not. I made that up, which is the great thing about salvaged objects. These things clearly have stories, but they can't tell you them, so you get to invent.
It's in his studio, an icebox on Dublin's north side, and it was like this when he bought it: un-cleanable, and genuinely icky – like, recoil-in-horror icky. There's a sort of elf-gnome-fairy creature perched on a porcelain mushroom, as melancholy as the gunge in the dish and I don't like it one bit, which is precisely why I covet it. It's totally and unashamedly gross, and it reminds me of something almost as creepy that I once bought for a quid just to freak myself out.
“There's something sad about that ashtray,” he says. He doesn't know much about it, except that it might be German, but we imagine its story, cigarettes left burning, a scorchmark on its buttholder. “I think of somebody alone in a room.” Definitely.
Stephen collects. Junk, whatever. From second-hand shops, car boot sales, and he never passes a skip. He thinks it's because he comes from a generation when they didn't have much.
“When I go into these shops, sometimes I see people from my generation. I think there's a certain longing for one's past – looking for childhood memories.” He's drawn to stuff, maybe because there's barely a gap between a contemporary artist and an archaeologist, giving meaning to the material world. Only that archaeologists think they're telling a truth, while artists play with its limits
When I arrive, he says his studio is a bit like Francis Bacon's, which is fine, because I like messy people. You'd never know it from his art, which is more clinical, definitely cleaner – maybe an outlet for some inner visual austerity.
He's definitely not clinical about stuff: there's no theme beyond his own interest in oddities all kinds. Two – two! -- lamps in the shape of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Laurel and Hardy salt and pepper shakers, a junky 1950s mug with two nudie girls, a strangely gory styrofoam pomegranate he found on the street outside, a plastic sign from a pub on the North Circular Road.
“There's a sense of disappointment in buying from a shop. This, you buy it, you bring it to one guy who can't fix it, and he tells you about another guy who can fix it, then you meet another guy and he fixes it and then it's up on your wall and it has a whole story there. Plus, there's the story that was there before as well.”
“I bought this clock recently, an old school clock. I found this Indian man called Mr Singh who works in an arcade off Meath St – there are all these people that branch out, that fix things.” Well-worn objects can be practical, but I'm getting the sense that it's not just nostalgia, it's empathy, an unwillingness to let things pass into obsolescence just because they're a bit grotty. There's an instant sentimental attachment.
I'll never understand how people throw stuff out – I've even found myself getting a bit attached to bus tickets. I like to think that for every label whore and gadget junkie, there's someone like Stephen who will adopt my old stuff.
He's got some crap crap, too, although I disagree with the declaration of crapness about the thing that is a bespectacled monkey made out of coconuts. “That's crap! Even I know that's crap!” He turns it over and reads the label. “'Handmade in the Philippines, 1970' and look how much I paid for it – 3.50 – I was ripped off!”
“The weirdest thing I ever found was a picture of a woman in her underwear in the pocket of a jacket. It was obviously taken by her husband, but I can only imagine what happened when she said 'What did you do with that jacket?'” I like the innocence he's assigned it, a husband admiring his wife in her skivvies.
He takes a tiny piece of paper out of a book. It's wrapped in paper, a sketch of a cat. “This thing is really freaky. This I got for a euro. I thought it was a reproduction but it's real. I brought it up to the National Gallery and they say it's 18th century. And you can see the mark of someone's thumb.” I'm too busy congratulating myself for guessing the period correctly to take a good look at the thumbprint.
Stephen has a good eye, mostly. Mostly. He once missed two Egg Chairs by Danish designer Arne Jacobsen. “They were covered in this garish print which I took to mean they were destroyed, but they were actually limited edition Pucci print. I didn't realise it – they were gone the next day.”
He's wrong about the coconut monkey. That thing is class.
(from Totally Dublin January 2008)
Or maybe not. I made that up, which is the great thing about salvaged objects. These things clearly have stories, but they can't tell you them, so you get to invent.
It's in his studio, an icebox on Dublin's north side, and it was like this when he bought it: un-cleanable, and genuinely icky – like, recoil-in-horror icky. There's a sort of elf-gnome-fairy creature perched on a porcelain mushroom, as melancholy as the gunge in the dish and I don't like it one bit, which is precisely why I covet it. It's totally and unashamedly gross, and it reminds me of something almost as creepy that I once bought for a quid just to freak myself out.
“There's something sad about that ashtray,” he says. He doesn't know much about it, except that it might be German, but we imagine its story, cigarettes left burning, a scorchmark on its buttholder. “I think of somebody alone in a room.” Definitely.
Stephen collects. Junk, whatever. From second-hand shops, car boot sales, and he never passes a skip. He thinks it's because he comes from a generation when they didn't have much.
“When I go into these shops, sometimes I see people from my generation. I think there's a certain longing for one's past – looking for childhood memories.” He's drawn to stuff, maybe because there's barely a gap between a contemporary artist and an archaeologist, giving meaning to the material world. Only that archaeologists think they're telling a truth, while artists play with its limits
When I arrive, he says his studio is a bit like Francis Bacon's, which is fine, because I like messy people. You'd never know it from his art, which is more clinical, definitely cleaner – maybe an outlet for some inner visual austerity.
He's definitely not clinical about stuff: there's no theme beyond his own interest in oddities all kinds. Two – two! -- lamps in the shape of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Laurel and Hardy salt and pepper shakers, a junky 1950s mug with two nudie girls, a strangely gory styrofoam pomegranate he found on the street outside, a plastic sign from a pub on the North Circular Road.
“There's a sense of disappointment in buying from a shop. This, you buy it, you bring it to one guy who can't fix it, and he tells you about another guy who can fix it, then you meet another guy and he fixes it and then it's up on your wall and it has a whole story there. Plus, there's the story that was there before as well.”
“I bought this clock recently, an old school clock. I found this Indian man called Mr Singh who works in an arcade off Meath St – there are all these people that branch out, that fix things.” Well-worn objects can be practical, but I'm getting the sense that it's not just nostalgia, it's empathy, an unwillingness to let things pass into obsolescence just because they're a bit grotty. There's an instant sentimental attachment.
I'll never understand how people throw stuff out – I've even found myself getting a bit attached to bus tickets. I like to think that for every label whore and gadget junkie, there's someone like Stephen who will adopt my old stuff.
He's got some crap crap, too, although I disagree with the declaration of crapness about the thing that is a bespectacled monkey made out of coconuts. “That's crap! Even I know that's crap!” He turns it over and reads the label. “'Handmade in the Philippines, 1970' and look how much I paid for it – 3.50 – I was ripped off!”
“The weirdest thing I ever found was a picture of a woman in her underwear in the pocket of a jacket. It was obviously taken by her husband, but I can only imagine what happened when she said 'What did you do with that jacket?'” I like the innocence he's assigned it, a husband admiring his wife in her skivvies.
He takes a tiny piece of paper out of a book. It's wrapped in paper, a sketch of a cat. “This thing is really freaky. This I got for a euro. I thought it was a reproduction but it's real. I brought it up to the National Gallery and they say it's 18th century. And you can see the mark of someone's thumb.” I'm too busy congratulating myself for guessing the period correctly to take a good look at the thumbprint.
Stephen has a good eye, mostly. Mostly. He once missed two Egg Chairs by Danish designer Arne Jacobsen. “They were covered in this garish print which I took to mean they were destroyed, but they were actually limited edition Pucci print. I didn't realise it – they were gone the next day.”
He's wrong about the coconut monkey. That thing is class.
(from Totally Dublin January 2008)
Painted Love: 40,000 Years of Battle on Liffey Street
“The galaxy is in complete madness,” says veteran Warhammer player, Rob, attempting to explain the difference between a plain vanilla human and a Space Marine. “There's literally demons appearing from an alternate dimension, causing havoc, helping some of the good guys who became bad guys. These'd be Chaos Space Marines. They tend to live for about a thousand years.”
Rob's been here on his day off from work, painting tanks and putting together Imperial Guard.“There's billions of these, and they're cannon fodder. You run 'em into battle, they're mown down. One Space Marine is the same as like a thousand Imperial Guard.”
These are part of Warhammer 40,000, one of two battle games which, every Tuesday (except in December), people meet to play on a tabletop here in the Games Workshop on Liffey Street. They're talking in-universe and translating as they go, only the the universe is so complex that trying to explain anything to me is like Marco Polo trying to explain the wonders of the Orient to an Alsatian.
Games Workshop is genius: first one's free, then you know where to come and all that. Brand loyalty maybe, but also a community centre for people who fit into a fantasy world better than this one, where dizzying landscapes for some of the wildest imaginings are also regulated enough that most disputes can be settled with the roll of a die.
Rob plays as an army called Tau. “They have this thing called the Greater Good. Everything's done for the good of everyone. And it's not just for the Tau, they want everyone to benefit.”
Ben, a small fourteen, has been coming in since he was twelve, most days now after school. The shop recently raffled off a massive army, most of which he painstakingly painted, and the other gamers wanted him to have it. “He could never afford that,” Rob says. “A lot of us were hoping he would win it.” They collected a bunch of money to buy it for him, but he won it anyway.
Gabhann, a visual artist by vocation, points out the detail used in painting some of the models. “You have very high quality, very technical stuff. Glazing, layering washing: techniques they would've used on German realist statues of the 15th century.” Some models take weeks to paint. Hunched monks illuminating vellum, take note.
Some players are lured by the window displays, or the opportunity to dwell in a micro-universe where the odds are not stacked against geeks. Says Rob, “I was interested in the story behind it – why are they fighting? Most people play a computer game, 'I don't care why they're fighting. Kill! Shoot! Blam!'” Here, there are 40,000 years of history, no limit to what can be imagined. Many storylines are still being written, mainly by gamers themselves. As huge a business as this is, most gamers just want small satisfactions: a model well-painted, a game well-played, a friendship well-established.
This kind of hobby tends to appeal to males, maybe an intense form of refuge to exercise an impulse that isn't satisfied by modern daily life. “I don't know whether it's a socialised response, but maybe it suits their focus,” says Gabhann.
Maybe we should worry that in a macho culture of sport and sexual dominance, this aspect of masculinity, however positive, is tantamount to 'geekdom', and only finds real relevance in tiny space dudes play-fighting on a table. Teenage girls frequently wander in when they see a shop full of boys. Few stay long.
Aoife is married to Rob and is one of a small number of female gamers. “I went from being a little kid, not caring about the differences between girls and guys to, yeah, I'm into comics, I'll hang with the guys. I was pretty much a solitary person anyway .” She shrugs.
Among her collections are the Sisters of Battle, some of the only female characters in any of the Warhammer games, an armour-clad regiment of no-nookie nuns. Whatever the intricacy of their internal logic, these tabletop worlds, well, where do baby Orcs come from?
“This is the most common thing you get,” she whispers like a wildlife narrator as two teenagers come in, the guy in a basic fleece, the girl from some planet of Abercrombie shills, and as he shows her a box, she's looking over her shoulder, like geekiness is some sort of contagion, “A boy bringing his girlfriend in to try to introduce her to it. They tend to fail.” The girl drags the guy out by the sleeve of his fleece. If you can't take the Goblin sweat, get out of the galaxy.
(from Totally Dublin December 2007)
Rob's been here on his day off from work, painting tanks and putting together Imperial Guard.“There's billions of these, and they're cannon fodder. You run 'em into battle, they're mown down. One Space Marine is the same as like a thousand Imperial Guard.”
These are part of Warhammer 40,000, one of two battle games which, every Tuesday (except in December), people meet to play on a tabletop here in the Games Workshop on Liffey Street. They're talking in-universe and translating as they go, only the the universe is so complex that trying to explain anything to me is like Marco Polo trying to explain the wonders of the Orient to an Alsatian.
Games Workshop is genius: first one's free, then you know where to come and all that. Brand loyalty maybe, but also a community centre for people who fit into a fantasy world better than this one, where dizzying landscapes for some of the wildest imaginings are also regulated enough that most disputes can be settled with the roll of a die.
Rob plays as an army called Tau. “They have this thing called the Greater Good. Everything's done for the good of everyone. And it's not just for the Tau, they want everyone to benefit.”
Ben, a small fourteen, has been coming in since he was twelve, most days now after school. The shop recently raffled off a massive army, most of which he painstakingly painted, and the other gamers wanted him to have it. “He could never afford that,” Rob says. “A lot of us were hoping he would win it.” They collected a bunch of money to buy it for him, but he won it anyway.
Gabhann, a visual artist by vocation, points out the detail used in painting some of the models. “You have very high quality, very technical stuff. Glazing, layering washing: techniques they would've used on German realist statues of the 15th century.” Some models take weeks to paint. Hunched monks illuminating vellum, take note.
Some players are lured by the window displays, or the opportunity to dwell in a micro-universe where the odds are not stacked against geeks. Says Rob, “I was interested in the story behind it – why are they fighting? Most people play a computer game, 'I don't care why they're fighting. Kill! Shoot! Blam!'” Here, there are 40,000 years of history, no limit to what can be imagined. Many storylines are still being written, mainly by gamers themselves. As huge a business as this is, most gamers just want small satisfactions: a model well-painted, a game well-played, a friendship well-established.
This kind of hobby tends to appeal to males, maybe an intense form of refuge to exercise an impulse that isn't satisfied by modern daily life. “I don't know whether it's a socialised response, but maybe it suits their focus,” says Gabhann.
Maybe we should worry that in a macho culture of sport and sexual dominance, this aspect of masculinity, however positive, is tantamount to 'geekdom', and only finds real relevance in tiny space dudes play-fighting on a table. Teenage girls frequently wander in when they see a shop full of boys. Few stay long.
Aoife is married to Rob and is one of a small number of female gamers. “I went from being a little kid, not caring about the differences between girls and guys to, yeah, I'm into comics, I'll hang with the guys. I was pretty much a solitary person anyway .” She shrugs.
Among her collections are the Sisters of Battle, some of the only female characters in any of the Warhammer games, an armour-clad regiment of no-nookie nuns. Whatever the intricacy of their internal logic, these tabletop worlds, well, where do baby Orcs come from?
“This is the most common thing you get,” she whispers like a wildlife narrator as two teenagers come in, the guy in a basic fleece, the girl from some planet of Abercrombie shills, and as he shows her a box, she's looking over her shoulder, like geekiness is some sort of contagion, “A boy bringing his girlfriend in to try to introduce her to it. They tend to fail.” The girl drags the guy out by the sleeve of his fleece. If you can't take the Goblin sweat, get out of the galaxy.
(from Totally Dublin December 2007)
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