Now I read in The Irish Times an article obviously based on a press release from Dunamaise about the reasons for the last-minute decision to withdraw the installation from the foyer of Dunamaise.
Mannix Flynn withdraws Laois show in protest.

In the interest of balance, and to make sure it gets out there, here’s a press statement I got from Mannix:

Press Statement Mannix Flynn, Farcry Productions

In response to a statement from the director of The Dunamaise Arts Centre regarding the cancellation of ‘Padded Cell and Other Stories” by Gerard Mannix Flynn which was due open to the public on Friday 10th July 2009.

According to the Director of Dunamaise Arts Centre, Louise Donlon, the Padded Cell show was pulled because Farcry demanded that certain pieces of art be displayed in the Foyer, an area of the building which has the highest footfall, and which Director Louise Donlon maintains was inappropriate since the arts centre had a duty in terms of child protection to insist that the work be moved elsewhere.

In response to Ms Donlon’s claims, Mannix Flynn and Farcry productions would like to state that at the time the exhibition was being discussed it was agreed that the building in its entirety was to be used for exhibition of the work.
The technical team in the Dunamaise Arts centre sent Farcry measurements of all the walls we intended to use and our own technical team made several visits to the centre to plan the layout of the work. Ms Donlon has been in possession of the pieces to go on display for almost 3 months and during this time could have raised with Farcry Productions any issues she had regarding the appropriateness of, or location of whatever material was to be exhibited. No issues were raised.
If they had been, a dialogue surely would have happened before the 8th of July, two days before the exhibition was to open. Even at the late stage at which Ms Donlon did raise concerns, Farcry tried to accommodate her, but in terms of the design of the work this simply wasn’t possible.

All this apart, a defining characteristic of Farcry Productions is that, given the shameful and shaming nature of some of the subjects dealt with by the company, public display is a key part of the artistic process. Given this, and given that the Arts Centre was in possession of the work for almost 3 months in advance of the exhibition, it is difficult for us to understand how Ms Donlon was unaware of the nature of the work she was agreeing to host. The decision by Dunamaise Arts Centre to cite child protection issues in their press statement seems to us to be extremely manipulative as in the course of our discussion with Ms Donlon, the issue of child protection never arose. As Ms Donlon says in her press release Mannix Flynn has indeed got a record of standing up for the rights of children but child protection is about protecting children from harm not from truth. Clear warnings about the content of the work would have facilitated parents in making the decision they felt was appropriate for their children – it is not up to Ms Donlon or the Dunamaise Arts Centre to make this decision on their behalf. No children will be harmed by an exhibition of words. If they can read it, and if they can understand it then it can be discussed with them, openly and honestly– and that’s true child protection.

Finally, why would Farcry Productions spend time, money and energy trying to mount an exhibition if they had any inkling that the gallery which was going to host it had issues with the content going on display? Ms Donlon maintains in her press statement that she has conflicting responsibilities towards supporting artists and protecting young children, this is a conflict of Ms Donlon’s own making. Had she attended more carefully to the work she was agreeing to host, this conflict would never have arisen. It is easier now to blame the artist for being uncompromising than to take responsibility for her own negligence.

Contact Mannix Flynn: 087 4139419

farcryproductionsltd@gmail.com
www.farcryproductions.ie

Mannix is also on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mannixflynn
As am I:http://twitter.com/Philip_Casey (see side panel with Twitter widget)

to highlight the ongoing destruction of the Tara Complex by the Irish Government. The Feis was

addressed by Pulitzer prize winner Paul Muldoon and Poet Laureate Seamus Heaney .

The event was organised in the open air of the Tara Churchyard and included the songs of

Susan Mc Keown and the harp of Laoise Kelly.

updated link
see report at Google Docs

This is the full Irish times story

This was something that Damien Mulley predicted in January and announced last week on his blog. His initial reaction is here. I’m quoting him rather than giving an opinion myself as I’m still getting used to the new design, and am still getting lost in places. The Ireland.com url seems to be shaping up as a what’s on, or magazine-type site.

There are some goodies at the bottom of the front page, and I particularly liked the audio slideshow, showing the Chinese demo in favour of the Olympics. However, the videos appear to be browser specific, ie IE only, or at least they don’t like Linux. When I tried them I got three x,

Compatible Internet Browser x
Windows Media Player/Quicktime x
Macromedia Flash 8+ x

I use Firefox 3, use VLC to play Quicktime movies, and have Flash 9, so that’s a bit disappointing.

The actual newspaper is at http://www.irishtimes.com/todayspaper/ and as I have a homemade page of links as my start page, I dropped that into it. I actually like the way links to all stories are given on the front page, making for an easy scan, although the font here is hard on the eyes. However as I intimated earlier, it’s in the subsections that I’m getting a bit lost at the moment. For instance I like the Technology subsection of the Business section, and couldn’t find that for a while. No doubt it will be second nature soon. [update]: yes, it’s easy in fact. Clicking on the Business tab does it].

One other problem concerns the images. They are so small that their subjects can be either distorted or unrecognizable. There doesn’t seem to be any enlargement of photos to compensate for this, either. Also the captions to the side are a bit weird, I find. But such problems are easiliy rectifiable in css and no doubt will be soon.

I hear subscribers are being offered access to the premium archive until their subscription runs out, but from what I’m told you can’t copy anything from it, as in save as or copy and paste. If you actually want a copy of something there is a whopping fee.

I’ll leave it to Mr Mulley and colleagues to comment knowledgeably on media matters, but I can’t see that lasting. How many will pay something in the region of €80 for what looks on screen like a fuzzy reproduction of their good selves in the newspaper from 1980 or whenever? Again I’m not a media expert but it seems to me that free access with ads would be far more lucrative for the paper.

Anyway, I wish it well, and I’m delighted to see the new approach. There’s a lot of really good people in there, and here’s to their success with the brave new direction.

Multilingualism is a special feature of the EU, but at the same time it presents an obstacle to understanding. Should Europe agree to use English as a lingua franca or must it promote each individual language?

Europe’s Babel
[via Digg]

I would have continued to be unaware of it but for Christine Clear and Rosemarie Rowley. Rosemarie sent me an email wondering if my website had moved. In Christine’s case, her friends and family who use IE complained that they couldn’t access her website. As her website is crucial to her work, I offered to help track down the reason, as it was fine in Firefox, and so I opened the dreaded Vista and gave it a go.

These things can be like a needle in a haystack, but finally I removed The Pale Blue Dot, that wonderful video excerpt from Carl Sagan’s TV series from, I think, the seventies, which was embedded in her site as a YouTube video. Suddenly IE was happy, Christine was happy and I was happy.

But then this morning I remembered that I too had that video embedded, along with several others in this and my alternative party website.

So I log out of my Ubuntu (Linux) comfort zone, and fire up the dreaded Vista and Internet Explorer (7) once again.

Yup. It viewed both sites and then threw up the page Aborted notice and the page went to, ironically, an IE notice full of javascript. Thanks a bunch, Microsoft. You spend billions developing software and yet you can’t cater for the world’s most popular video site. I normally try to avoid MS bashing, but once again your crappy software has taken up far too much of my time. So now I have to trawl the web to find a solution.
Thankfully I found it at Eastwood Zhao dot COM, for which many thanks.

The solution is simpler, of course, but it’s not the YouTube standard, so we have to do it the MS way once again.

May I implore those of you who use IE to switch to Firefox(or Safari – anything!).
For the more adventurous among you, consider Ubuntu. It solves all these problems at once, as Firefox is its standard browser. You can see my Ubuntu site under Sister Sites in the column to your right.

Thanks once again to
Christine Clear and Rosemarie Rowley, and to
Eastwood Zhao dot COM for the solution.

Also, hat-tip to Daragh and Graeme at Letshost for maintaining an interest in this problem.

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.

It’s only available in Dublin, on FM 103.2 Anna Livia, but you may be able to listen to a streaming version live on the web by following these instructions. The Parlour Review goes out at 1pm (1300) each Tuesday.

I was very impressed by Marion’s preparation. She knew more about my work than I did, and it was a real pleasure being interviewed by her.
Anna Livia FM

She is joined tomorrow, December 5, by Robert Downes, the well-known journalist and former RTÉ foreign correspondent in Iraq. When I had a TV, he always impressed me by his apparent actual knowledge of Iraq, and it appears his new book bears that out.

In Search of Iraq, published by New Island Books was launched by Vincent Browne on the 14th of November.

In his interview with Marian Kelly on Parlour Review he will discuss his near-death experience on his way out of Iraq after the coalition forces attacked in 2003, his opinion on the issue of the representation of Iraqi people in the media, and the changes he has witnessed in Iraq over the last few years. I’m particularly interested in hearing about Mohammed Darwish, Sunni Muslim academic and Joyce scholar, with whom Downes struck up a close friendship in which Downes was at least once asked to read from Ulysses in a Dublin accent!

It’s not often I plug a radio show (disclaimer: I may be on the series myself soon) but I think this one is worth a listen.

It’s only available in Dublin, I’m afraid, on FM 103.2 Anna Livia, but you may be able to listen to a streaming version live on the web by following these instructions at the bottom of the page. The Parlour Review goes out at 1pm each Tuesday.

In Search of Iraq

Anna Livia FM

If you have real audio or windows media, you can listen to Digging for Hidden Bodies in Michigan on NPR (the excellent National Public Radio in the US).
As Irish readers will know, Lynch is also an esteemed poet, who keeps a hospitable house he inherited from his cousin Nora in Co Clare.