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.
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