You can also see Cyclopedia-Ireland, an early version Irish Culture Guide, dating from April 23, 2001.Some versions have this epigraph:

The best thing for being sad is to learn something
-Merlin the Magician

What that says about me, or me then, I’m not sure. As far as I recall I got that quote from an old book, but I can’t be certain.

By 2002, I’d found Cyclopedia-Ireland a bit too much to live up to and had settled for the more modest Irish Culture Guide (2002 version.. This is how Irish Writers Online and Irish Culture Guide look today, in case you haven’t seen them recently!

Needless to say, I’d lost a lot of the above over the years – computer crashes, new computers, or simply overwriting, so it’s great that the Internet Archive Wayback Machine has copies of a lot of it. It’s an imperfect record, with a lot of pages missing, but it’s way better than nothing and a tribute to the foresight of the founders.

And it’s nice to see that Kavanagh’s dictum on poetry holds true for web design – the journey ‘from simplicity to simplicity.’

Yeats’ writings are now in the public domain, it now being seventy years from the end of the year of his death year of 1939. Damien Mulley, whose blog on the subject alerted me, has some interesting suggestions about how they might be used in the digital age.

Speaking of the digital age, David Hewson’s technology articles in the Sunday Times were essential reading for me for about ten years. I really enjoyed his pugnacious style.
He’s now a thriller writer and his website, blog, etc is here, and reviews confirm him as a master stylist.

I re-found him, so to speak on Twitter, @david_hewson, retweeted by literary agent @caroleagent. He’s written a series of entries on book theft. eg Book theft myth no 3: Technology can fix it, (at least I think that’s where you find it. He uses an url shortening service). By book theft he means the digital copying of his work which is then uploaded to torrent sites.

It’s a very interesting question, especially for authors, but I don’t think it’s a simple cut and dried case.

Novelist Paulo Coelho takes the opposite view, for instance.

“Since the dawn of time, human beings have felt the need to share – from food to art. Sharing is part of the human condition.” Paulo Coelho, supporting The Pirate Bay.

Mr Coelho is world famous, and sharing one’s work via bittorrent can actually be very profitable for someone who is as famous as he is.

Publishing his books on The Pirate Bay worked out really well for Coelho. He actually sold tens of thousands of extra books because he shared them on BitTorrent. “I do think that when a reader has the possibility to read some chapters, he or she can always decide to buy the book later,” Coelho said, and he is not alone in that assessment.

Then there’s Cory Doctorow, who actively shares and has done so since his first novel.

His novels are published by Tor Books and HarperCollins UK and simultaneously released on the Internet under Creative Commons licenses that encourage their re-use and sharing, a move that increases his sales by enlisting his readers to help promote his work.

Of course, as well as being an author, he is “the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a contributor to Wired, Popular Science, Make, the New York Times, and many other newspapers, magazines and websites,” so he had a good base start for a very successful experiment.

For somewhat obscure writers like me it probably works in more mysterious ways. We’re glad if we’re read at all!

But the more important point is that books have been shared – or stolen, according to your point of view – since writing was invented. St Colmcille is famous because he stole a book without a moment’s thought, not having any concept of ownership. The world’s first copyright decision arose from that – after a lot of blood was spilt. The library in Alexandria sought ‘loans’ of books, copied them and gave back the copy. (see Peter Watson’s Ideas: A History)

If it’s a question of the author’s livelihood, what about books that are loaned, or bought second-hand? The author gets no money for that, at least not directly. All he or she can hope for in monetary terms is that if the reader who has read the book on loan, or has bought it second-hand, likes the work, that they will seek out the author’s other work and gladly pay for a new copy. Or at least buy the author a drink.

Of course no writer minds anyone loaning or selling on their books to second-hand bookstores, who often make large profits a few years later if the book is significant, so why, exactly, do we mind when someone passes on a digital copy to others without a profit motive?

It’s now known that the majority of those who download pirated music buy more music than those who don’t download. Does that work for books? No one knows, at least not to my knowledge. We’ll probably find out when more books come in digital form. Of course if pirates resell the book I’d be the first in line to hammer them.

David Hewson obviously won’t see a bump in his royalty cheques because of bittorrents. On the other hand a lot more young people than before probably now know of his work, and if they like it, at least some of them will buy it sometime in the future. I haven’t read thrillers as a rule since my teens (and for the record I’m not young and don’t upload books to bittorrents), but I’ve just bought David Hewson’s Dante’s Numbers: The Seventh Costa Novel ). To prove a point? No, more as a thank you to David Hewson for all those great technology articles. But there is the point that I wouldn’t even have known he was now writing novels were it not for the bittorrenters.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve every sympathy with an author who finds his or her book on a Korean torrent site without their knowledge or consent. It’s an awful feeling. And yes, it’s illegal. And yes, it’s stealing. Just as newspapers lifting information or news from blogs without attribution is stealing, or indeed, large media corporations lifting biographical notes from my Irish Writers Online website without attribution, despite the explicit creative commons licence which asks only for attribution – that’s stealing. Which bolsters David Hewson’s point that it is a cultural phenomenon.

But let’s put this in perspective. Only a comparatively tiny number of people, mostly penniless teenagers, have even heard of the term torrent, let alone know how to use torrent sites. An even tinier number, even though they could afford to buy the book or song, or video, do it because they can, or out of principal. But teenagers grow up, have to earn a living, learn how hard it can be. Give them the chance to download music, books, films at a reasonable price and most of them will.

At the moment, very few people read a book through on a screen. They sample it, to see if they like it. pretty much like browsing through a book in a bookshop. Developments like Enhanced Editions, mentioned by Damien Mulley in his Yeats post, could change all of that, and is probably the way forward for publishing. There’s no doubt about it, a book torrent will have a completely different meaning in a few years, maybe even in the coming year: a torrent of readers will download books – legitimately, because finally, they will be able to do so. One of the reasons book chains are failing is that books which are not obvious best sellers – obvious to them, that is – are given a few weeks’ shelf-life, if that. Old-style bookshops used to have sellers who knew about books. It was a pleasure to browse, or to speak with the bookseller. Now, with noble exceptions such as Books Upstairs here in Dublin, staff typically know about bestsellers only. Mention a great literary writer and… As for poetry – forget it, unless you’re a megastar. So readers will gratefully download the books they want at their leisure, and be delighted to pay a reasonable price. Many of us live in small houses or apartments. I’m lucky enough to live in a small terraced house, but it’s bursting at the seams with books. Moby Dick plus a thousand others on an Android or Nokia/Maemo smart phone with a decent screen? You bet.

What about the infamous Google Book Agreement? Well, that’s a giant corporation and immediately people think of cultural colonisation, with good reason. As for its benefits and drawbacks and whether it’s piratical, it’s far too complex for mere mortals like most authors to figure out. Agents and publishers hopefully understand it better. For my part, I opted out.

I will say this, though. I’m doing a lot of research at the moment, and the limited preview feature on Google Books has been a godsend. Why? Because I can find out whether an expensive book has the information I need. Not only do I buy the book if it has that information (my poor postman is now aware of muscles he never knew he had) but I often use the limited preview to look up a reference in the hard copy on my desk. It’s quicker than trawling through an index, believe it or not.

Meanwhile, you could do worse than browse Philip Davison’s first novel, The Book Thief’s Heartbeat, 1981, which he has made available under a Creative Commons licence.

Pre-eminently human… funny in the way that The Catcher in the Rye was funny. BOOKS IRELAND

Mr Davison has a gentle touch with words that allow them to filter through the mind, leaving a residue of warmth and familiar recognition behind. SUNDAY PRESS

It has a hero who smacks of early Beckett EVENING HERALD

It is obvious that Philip Davison could make any place or circumstance or character that took his fancy equally compelling. He has a sparse and strangely matter-of-fact style of writing that gives full value to every word and act. THE IRISH TIMES

It’s now out of print, but if you’re a book collector, you can buy The Book-Thief’s Heartbeat from Kenny’s for £86.40, which is about €97.50.

So it’s a complex subject in an ever-more complex world. If I have any strong opinion on it it is that Cory Doctorow has the right idea – publish in hardcopy but also encourage digital re-use and sharing in order to promote the book. In other words positively and actively make a virtue out of an inevitability. All the DRM stuff is a pain in the neck for everyone concerned.

Alliouagana is the native name for the island of Montserrat which was originally inhabited by Tainos (Arawaks) moving north from South America along the eastern chain of Caribbean islands, and subsequently occupied by the Kaliganu people (Caribs) prior to the arrival of Europeans in 1493.
Caribbean American Research Foundation

I spent a long time reading and thinking about this island when I was writing my novel The Fisher Child, as its middle section is principally set in Montserrat, an island largely dominated by Irish slave plantation owners and their descendants in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries

Columbus, of course, named Montserrat, (ie Sawn, or Jagged Mountain), after the mountain of the same name in Catalonia, which, as it happens, I visited at least once when I lived in Barcelona in the seventies. The Monastery of Montserrat, located near the top of the 4,000-foot mountain, is famous for its statue of the Black Madonna, (La Moreneta). Have a look at Sacred Destinations for its history and pictures.

One of my working methods is to discover the Indian names for the Caribbean islands before they were colonized, and this was how I came across the Alliouagana Festival of the World.

Its featured artists are

Funso Aiyejina | Austin Clarke
Carolyn Cooper | Howard Fergus
Merle Hodge | Marie-Elena John
Hollis Liverpool (Chalkdust)
Earl Lovelace | Rachel Manley
Pauline Melville | Gordon Rohlehr
A-dZiko Simba | Yvonne Weekes
Edgar Nkosi White and others.

See their biographies and photos here
I don’t know why this makes me happy but it does. Perhaps it’s because Montserrat has been so ravaged by its volcano, and to see it now host a literary festival is yet one more testament to the human spirit.

I was delighted to make contact with the wonderful Chair of the litfest Steering Committee, Gracelyn Cassell. Contact her on the Alliouagana Festival of the World website.

I can’t go, but I hope someone who reads this can, or at least support the festival in some way. I’m having trouble uploading the pdf that Ms Cassell sent me but you can see the festival program here

* Source: Cornell Joyce Collection

This image was included in a printed subscription order form for Ulysses, published Paris, 1921, and is thus public domain in the United States by virtue of age of publication.

Originally uploaded to English Wikipedia by en:User:Chick Bowen. Public domain.

William Wall 2007

How should we describe the extraordinary consensus that existed in this country — a consensus that united us all around core concepts like ‘free markets’, ‘competition is the only way’, ‘private enterprise good, public enterprise bad’, ‘social partnership’, ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘greed is good’, ‘conspicuous consumption’? For a long time we lived inside a bubble. The walls of the bubble were invisible to us, they coloured everything we looked at but everything was that colour anyway so we thought it was colourless. It was, nonetheless, a bubble. What we hear these days, in the media, in conversations, in political speeches and union negotiations is the pop of the bubble bursting. We are faced with an absolute incongruence — between what we have been told and what we see.1 What this incongruence will tell us remains to be seen, but it makes us strange to ourselves, wakes us from our dream of shopping and eating and enables us to look back at our days in the bubble with at least the illusion of detachment. – William Wall

William Wall’s challenging call to develop a poetics of anger at Three Monkeys Online

Three Monkeys Online

Three Monkeys Online is a free current affairs and arts magazine, produced by writers in Ireland, Italy, Spain and the UK. The Magazine was founded in 2004 by a small group of writers with a clear idea that internet publishing could be about more than simply gossip, conspiracy theories, and dodgy you tube videos. It doesn’t have to focus on Paris Hilton. It can be about in-depth interviews, debates, intelligent opinion pieces, and reviews.

Christopher Nolan's novel The Banyan Tree

IT ALL begins with words. Words that teem and toss about, they stream and eddy. They’re torrential and pressing and insistent. They are lovely to hear inside, they talk to you; they are a delight to hear coming in, hovering, banking, waiting to land – that tree, sitka but call it evergreen, the flowers “sweet william” but who is he to be so sweet as to be like raspberry curdling and bleeding into cream?

Tribute to Christopher Nolan by his sister Yvonne in The Irish Times

Update: the article referenced above is now behind a paywall (August 2010).

This is from Christopher Nolan’s Wikipedia Entry

Christopher Nolan (6 September 1965 – 20 February 2009) was an Irish poet and author, son of Joseph and Bernadette Nolan. He grew up in Mullingar, Ireland, but later moved to Dublin to attend college. He was educated at the Central Remedial Clinic School, Mount Temple Comprehensive School and at Trinity College, Dublin. His first book was published when he was fifteen. He won the Whitbread Book Award, for his autobiography in 1988. He was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters in the UK, the medal of excellence from the United Nations Society of Writers, and a Person of the Year award in Ireland.

James Liddy. Photo credit: Salmon Poetry

But now, after an illness that lasted just weeks and which I didn’t know about till last night, all of that fun and erudition is gone. We had our spats, as a student linked to below put it, but they always blew over. I hope he had forgiven our last disagreement, if, indeed, he remembered it.

He lived a full and rich life, to the end, that’s for sure. Along with Jim, Nora, Liam, to whom I offer my deepest sympathy, and a legion of friends and admirers and students, I will miss him sorely.

I’m not sure he would have enjoyed mention on the web, but as the news is out there already on a Milwaukee blog, as Brian Lynch alerted me, this may alert certain friends who might not otherwise hear the news.

Karl Saffran’s Tribute

James Liddy at Irish Writers Online

update
Tributes Paid to James Liddy: The Irish Times

Irish Times Death Notice * LIDDY, James Daniel – November 5, 2008, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, late of Coolgreaney, Gorey and 8, Mary Street, Wexford, Deeply regretted by his sister Nora, his friend Jim Chapson, cousins, relatives and friends. R.I.P. Funeral arrangements to be announced later.
o Date: Wednesday, 5 November 2008
o Published: 8 November 2008

Irish Times Obituary

Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel Obituary

Chapson said Liddy will be buried Saturday in Ireland. A memorial service in Milwaukee is being planned.

(thanks again to David Brannan for link)

Richard Tillinghast’s letter to the Irish Times

Death of the poet James Liddy

Madam, – The obituary of James Liddy in your issue of November 8th was a fitting tribute. He was, to paraphrase Yeats, a “hearty welcomer”, a man with a big heart and many friends both in Ireland and in the United States. He was a presence not only in both countries, but also in that spiritual country that joins the two, populated by poets and readers of poetry.

Not only was he one of the first writers to prove that being Irish and being forthrightly gay was not a contradiction in terms; in his work he also showed how the spirit of the “beat generation” could enter a sensibility that remained Irish to the marrow. In doing so he opened a space for the important poetry in Irish of Cathal Ó Searcaigh. There is no one like James Liddy among us today. – Yours, etc,

RICHARD TILLINGHAST,

Glenaskeogh,

Carrick-on-Suir,

Co Tipperary.

THE ALTER LIFE OF BOOKS

-after titles by James Liddy

Esau, my kingdom is a drink.

In a Blue Smoke,
Christ and Socrates smiled.
I was forever young.

Above planning permission:
Blue Mountain.

Proposal for a mega-publisher:
A Life of Stephen Dedalus.
And his White Rabbit. 1969.

O Babóg, come into Munster with me,
And print love bonds, not war bonds.

In the Blue House we are gentlemen
And generous with time.

Of all the bars in all the world,
Baudelaire had to come into mine.

In the rock pools of Corca Baiscinn,
My body is mistaken for a flower.
I am the sea anemone
who knows how to party.

To the philistines on every mean street
Let it be known:
I have all the Gorey Details.

As Comyn sings his Lay,
I walk into eternity
Among the hemlock and hibsicus,
The rosebuds and the hollyhock.

I am a Bachelor of Chamber Pot Music,
a Fellow of the Tent of Many Drinks.

At the grave of Father Sweetman
I hear the old world
swan out of
James Clarence Mangan
Singing its song.

Thinking A White Thought in a White Shade,
I am in my white suit,
My birthday suit of white butterflies.

Young men should always go walking.
Mens sano in corpore sano.

After a night’s drinking,
There’s nothing like
A good feed of Kerr’s Pinks.

Art is only for grownups
When it is noted
By the Garda Siochána.

Bowling in the Slovak Bowling Alley
I am truly happy my whole life.

In Avondale the trees
Are warmer than green:
Global village warming.

My Collected Poems
Are in full control of the Faculties.

Let my Epitaphery
Be written on Porter.

Vincey O’Rafferty
powers up his sqeezebox
For Gold Set Dancing
On Croghan Mountain
One more time.

I Only Know
That I Love Strength -
(the old glitter)
in My Friends -
(Mad philosophy
Hurts them into song)
and Greatness,
The territory of Spicer, Burroughs,
Kerouac, Michael Hartnett.

Philip Casey, from Dialogue in Fading Light New & Selected Poems, New Island Books, 2005

Sydney Bernard Smith

Sydney Bernard Smith

Poetry Ireland was saddened to hear of the passing of poet and writer Sydney Bernard Smith. In the past Sydney had read for Poetry Ireland, has been a contributor to Poetry Ireland Review and his Poems 1957-2006 was favourably reviewed in PIR 92.

He published a large number of acclaimed poetry collections, plays and a novel. His work was broadcast by RTÉ, BBC and Channel 4 as well as being performed in Ireland, Europe and the USA.

We would like to express our deepest sympathies to his family and friends.

Poetry Ireland

Sydney Bernard Smith at Irish Writers Online See also links to Sydney’s various websites at this entry.

Free download of Sydney’s first collection, Girl With Violin, at Irish Literary Revival.

My deepest sympathies to his family. I know he was very brave and philosophical in the time since the terminal diagnosis.

I can normally take or leave lists, but when I came across this one from The Translators Association of the Society of Authors, it cheered me up. I knew all the authors! Well, I mean I’d heard of all of them and had read something by most of them.

It was compiled to mark the 50th anniversary of the association. Of course everyone will have their own favourites and wonder why they were ommitted. Mine would be Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Rilke, Selected Poems in the UK, and in the US, Ahead of All Parting

Anyway, here’s the Translator’s Association List. I’ve linked the individual titles to amazon.uk in case you’re tempted.

1. Raymond Queneau – Exercises in Style (Barbara Wright, 1958)

2. Primo Levi – If This is a Man (Stuart Woolf, 1959)

3. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa – The Leopard (Archibald Colquhoun, 1961)

4. Günter Grass – The Tin Drum (Ralph Manheim, 1962)

5. Jorge Luis Borges – Labyrinths (Donald Yates, James Irby, 1962)

6. Leonardo Sciascia – Day of the Owl (Archibald Colquhoun, 1963)

7. Alexander Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Ralph Parker, 1963)

8. Yukio Mishima – Death in Midsummer (Seidensticker, Keene, Morris, Sargent, 1965)

9. Heinrich Böll – The Clown (Leila Vennewitz, 1965)

10. Octavio Paz – Labyrinth of Solitude (Lysander Kemp, 1967)

11. Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita (Michael Glenny, 1969)

12. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 100 Years of Solitude (Gregory Rabassa, 1970)

13. Walter Benjamin – Illuminations (Harry Zohn, 1970)

14. Paul Celan – Poems (Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton, 1972)

15. Bertolt Brecht – Poems (John Willett, Ralph Manheim, Erich Fried, et al 1976)

16. Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish (Alan Sheridan, 1977)

17. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie – Montaillou (Barbara Bray, 1978)

18. Italo Calvino – If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (William Weaver, 1981)

19. Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida (Richard Howard, 1981)

20. Christa Wolf – A Model Childhood (Ursule Molinaro, Hedwig Rappolt, 1982)

21. Umberto Eco – The Name of the Rose (William Weaver, 1983)

22. Mario Vargas Llosa – Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (Helen R. Lane, 1983)

23. Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Michael Henry Heim, 1984)

24. Marguerite Duras – The Lover (Barbara Bray, 1985)

25. Josef Skvorecky – The Engineer of Human Souls (Paul Wilson, 1985)

26. Per Olov Enquist – The March of the Musicians (Joan Tate, 1985)

27. Patrick Süskind– Perfume (John E. Woods, 1986)

28. Isabel Allende – The House of the Spirits (Magda Bodin, 1986)

29. Georges Perec – Life A User’s Manual (David Bellos, 1987)

30. Thomas Bernhard – Cutting Timber (Ewald Osers, 1988)

31. Czeslaw Milosz – Poems (Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Hass, 1988)

32. José Saramago – Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (Giovanni Pontiero, 1992)

33. Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time (Terence Kilmartin, 1992)

34. Roberto Calasso – The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (Tim Parks, 1993)

35. Naguib Mahfouz – Cairo Trilogy (Olive E. Kenny, Lorne M. Kenny, Angela Botros Samaan, 1991-3)

36. Laura Esquivel – Like Water for Chocolate (Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen, 1993)

37. Bao Ninh – The Sorrow of War (Frank Palmos, Phan Thanh Hao, 1994)

38. Victor Klemperer – I Shall Bear Witness (Martin Chalmers, 1998)

39. Beowulf (Seamus Heaney, 1999)

40. Josef Brodsky – Collected Poems (Anthony Hecht et al, 2000)

41. Xingjian Gao – Soul Mountain (Mabel Lee, 2001)

42. Tahar Ben Jelloun – This Blinding Absence of Light (Linda Coverdale, 2002)

43. W.G. Sebald – Austerlitz (Anthea Bell, 2002)

44. Orhan Pamuk – Snow (Maureen Freely, 2004)

45. Amos Oz – A Tale of Love and Darkness (Nicholas de Lange, 2004)

46. Per Petterson – Out Stealing Horses (Ann Born, 2005)

47. Irène Némirovsky – Suite Française (Sandra Smith, 2006)

48. Vassily Grossman – Life and Fate (Robert Chandler, 2006)

49. Alaa Al Aswany – The Yacoubian Building (Humphrey Davies, 2007)

50. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace (Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky, 2007)

Compiled by Shaun Whiteside (Chair, TA) and the Committee of the TA (Don Bartlett, Alexandra Büchler, Martin Chalmers, Nicholas de Lange, Sarah Death, Marueen Freely, Daniel Hahn and Christine Shuttleworth).

The Translators Association of the Society of Authors

A Philip chóir, táim ag scríobh chugat mar gheall ar Chumann scríbhneoirí Óga/Úra na Gaeilge. Bunaíodh an cumann seo chun tacú leis na scríbhneoirí óga/úra atá ag saothrú i ngort na Gaeilge d’fhonn is go bhféadfadis misneach a thabhairt dá chéile. Fé láthair táthar ag iarraidh an blag idirlín atá againn a fhorbairt agus ar an intinn seo atáim ag scríobh chugat. Feicim go bhfuil nacscanna luaite agaibh ar an suíomh s’agatsa agus ba mhór againn dá bhféadfá nasc don gcumann s’againne a chur in airde ar an suíomh s’agaibhse.

I am writing to you with regard to Chumann scríbhneoirí Óga/Úra na Gaeilge na Gaeilge. This organization was established with the intention of giving young and new literary voices writing in Irish a platform whereby they could reach a (potentially) wider audience. It was also felt that these new literary voices would benefit from the mutual support which such an organization could offer young Irish-language writers and regular Irish-language workshops. We are presently trying to develop our blog and this is really the reason I am writing to you. I see that on your site that you have listed links to other sites and we would really appreciate it if you could place a link for our blog here. Chumann scríbhneoirí Óga/Úra na Gaeilge

Beannacht,
Muiris Ó Meara
Ríona Nic Congáil
Majella McDonnell

So I’m very happy to give them a plug. Besides, even if it’s just started, it seems a very nice and lively site and I’ve put it in my RSS links, so I can have a peek on a regular basis.

Well done to all concerned. It’s a great development, because if writing is a lonely task, writing in a minority language like Irish is lonelier still. And some recent research on my part showed that with few exceptions, notably the great Cló Iar-Chonnachta, it’s very hard to get information on Irish language writers. This despite the fact that some Irish language sites have a lot of money at their disposal. The web is a great opportunity for the Irish language, and here’s hoping the young writers now beginning their literary journey will take the opportunity with both hands.

Chumann scríbhneoirí Óga/Úra na Gaeilge

Paul Durcan, Harry Clifton, Kit Fryatt, Luis de Paor, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Philip Coleman (the main organizer), Michael Augustin, Sujata Bhatt, MacDara Woods, Vincent Woods, Ciaran O’Driscoll and Michael O’Dea among other writers and academics will read from, discuss and lecture about Hutchinson’s life and work.

By the by, the Provost of Trinity College hosted a reception to honour past alumna Anne Enright last night in his fine residence at No 1 Grafton Street. It was touching to see her former tutor the distinguished Professor Nicholas Grene so chuffed at her Man Booker success and he gave a simple but affecting speech on her career both as student and author. It’s so nice to see writers honoured, even if it might never have happened but for the fame of the Man Booker, rather than the sustained quality of her work. I’ve heard different opinions of her winning novel The Gathering, all of it trenchant, and for my part I think it’s wonderful – alive in every line.

Finally, my old friend Jim Greeley is a year dead today. It doesn’t at all seem like a year, hardly even a few months, but he’s gone and his family and friends, not least his partner Richard Lewis, miss him badly. I know I do. Peace to your ashes, Jim. You were a great pal.

Just under a year ago, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Marion Kelly for her Parlour Review on what was then known as FM 103.2 Anna Livia, but is now known as Dublin City FM, on the 103.2 FM band. (It’s Dublin only, I think).

Well, last night, to my surprise and pleasure, Marion came to interview me again, this time also recording a reading from The Water Star.
She spoke about matching my reading with Timothy O’Grady, reading, I think, from I Could Read The Sky.

There are a few wheels within wheels here. Just last week, I finally got around to buying the dvd of I Could Read the Sky, starring novelist and poet Dermot Healy, and while I’ve only managed to see about 20 minutes of it so far, both Healy and the film are amazing.

Also, I think I was introduced to Timothy by Matthew Sweeney in the Barbican in London many moons ago. As it happens, Matthew’s recently published poetry collection Black Moon has been shortlisted for this year’s T S ELIOT PRIZE FOR POETRY, and he has just taken up the position of Writer in Residence in Cork, which I think is in association with the Munster Literature Centre.

And here’s the final wheel: The Munster Literature Centre has just published Best of Irish Poetry 2008, edited by Bríd Ní Mhórain and Thomas McCarthy, which to my surprise and pleasure, includes a poem by yours truly, The Warm Stone. As it’s freely available on the web as part of my last collection under a Creative Commons licence, I’m sure the editors won’t mind if I post it here by way of an ad for Best of Irish Poetry 2008.

THE WARM STONE

Beneath the starlit sky
after the heat of the day,
we are talking quietly
of beliefs
which matter to us.

You’re seated on the porch,
wrapped in a shawl
against the chill.
I’m slouched
in a wicker chair.

For a precious interval
we have found the ease
of hard-won simplicity.

As when, in a heat haze,
a butterfly, like a hand
conducting a silent adagio,
comes to land on a stone,
then is still as the stone.
-Philip Casey



This work is licenced under a
Creative Commons Licence.
Included in Dialogue in Fading Light, available for free download from Irish Literary Revival.

But wheels within wheels aside, back to Marion’s Parlour Review.

103.2 Dublin City FM is now on Bebo
WWW.BEBO.COM/DUBLINCITYFM
and Parlour Review goes out at 1300 (1pm) on Tuesdays. Always worth a listen and I’m practically sure that if you tune in to
103.2 Dublin City FM you can hear it on the web.

Banville did it, Roddy Doyle did it, John McGahern, Sebastian Barry and Colm Tóibín came close, but Anne Enright joins the tiny elite of Irish writers, and is the first Irish woman, to win the Man Booker Prize.

Wonderful.

The Gathering Wins the Man Booker
[photo credit: Joe O'Shaughnessy]

Complete List of Booker Winners

Anne Enright at Irish Writers Online

Interview with Anne Enright by Sinéad Gleeson on The Sigla Blog

Update: I stand corrected. Anne is the second Irish woman to win the Booker. Iris Murdoch was the first. See The Gathering wins Man Booker link above.

Update: RTÉ sound and video clips of Anne Enright, including The View interview

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2007
“that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”
Doris Lessing

The citation for the IPCC and Al Gore reads

The Nobel Peace Prize 2007
“for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr.

These links will be work returning to after December 10, when the Prizes are awarded and the Laureates’ speeches will be online.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2007

Nobel Peace Prize 2007

There are so many Irish books coming on stream that it’s not practical for me to mention them all, but I mention Patrick because he’s my colleague and co-founder over at Irish Literary Revival, which is one year old today, May 1. Do have a look at the bright new WordPress-based site.

It’s a big year for Patrick. Better known as a poet and screenwriter, The Wow Signal is his first collection of Short Stories, and a first novel is forthcoming. I haven’t read the stories yet, but I look forward to them, and of course you can download his first poetry collection, Jazztown at Irish Literary Revival.

And the reason for mentioning Joseph O’Connor? Well, apart from the fact that he’s a gentleman and scholar, I was at the launch in the Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire last night, with Prof Declan Kiberd doing the erudite and accurate honours before a packed house.

I’ve just read the first chapter of Redemption Falls so far, but if it isn’t writing of the first rank I’ll eat my crutches. It is quite simply dazzling, startling and enthralling work.

All best to both writers, this beautiful May Day 2007