Ich am of Irlonde,
And of the holy londe
Of Irlonde.
Goode sire, praye ich thee,
For of sainte charitee,
Com and dance with me
In Irlonde.

Anon. (14th century)

It inspired Yeats, of course.

‘I am of Ireland’

I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,’ cried she.
‘Come out of charity,
Come dance with me in Ireland.’

One man, one man alone
In that outlandish gear,
One solitary man
Of all that rambled there
Had turned his stately head.
That is a long way off,
And time runs on,’ he said,
‘And the night grows rough.’

‘I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,’ cried she.
‘Come out of charity
And dance with me in Ireland.’

‘The fiddlers are all thumbs,
Or the fiddle-string accursed,
The drums and the kettledrums
And the trumpets all are burst,
And the trombone,’ cried he,
‘The trumpet and trombone,’
And cocked a malicious eye,
‘But time runs on, runs on.’

I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,’ cried she.
“Come out of charity
And dance with me in Ireland.’

– W.B Yeats, The Winding Stair and Other Poems, 1933

Links:

Middle English lyrics Miscellaneous Texts
Inaugural Speech Given by Her Excellency Mary Robinson,President of Ireland,
in Dublin Castle on Monday, December 3, 1990

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, 1932. Carl Van Vechten photograph collection (Library of Congress), reproduction number LC-USZ62-42516 DLC (b&w film copy neg.).

I became interested in the painter Jackson Pollock through a poet, Frank O’Hara. They were both Americans, and oddly enough, both died in car crashes.

Like a former director of this gallery, Thomas MacGreevy, O’Hara was a poet who had a deep and professional interest in painting. Amongst other institutions O’Hara worked for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Many of his friends were painters, and some, including Larry Rivers, illustrated his books.

He is one of the most amusing poets I know, and I would like to quote a favourite and hopefully apposite poem called Why I am not a Painter

The New Spanish Painting and Sculpture and Jackson Pollock, published in 1959, are just two of his publications on art. Of course I had previously seen many photos of Pollock’s work, but it was the O’Hara Monograph which sparked my interest and which eventually led to the small poem called Prophet, which largely depends on an O’Hara quote from the monograph, which is: ‘In the state of spiritual clarity, there are no secrets.’

When I look into the abyss of The Deep I find it a paradoxically fearful and peaceful experience. But stripped of any symbolism, I think it is in itself a beautiful painting, and achieves what painting is best at doing, that is to say, it achieves beauty on its own terms, those of colour and composition, without necessarily having a subject or theme. In other words, he has achieved a state of spiritual clarity, which can either mean that there are no secrets, basically, or that in this state, all secrets are revealed. This dilemma is constantly present in contemplating The Deep, to my mind.

Image: Number One 1949

A few years back, and maybe it still continues, there was a vogue for comparing the findings of quantum physics with eastern philosophies and religions. Such books as The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters made quantum physics seem not only comprehensible, but spiritual too. The Wu Li book is particularly interesting, if only for its title. Chinese syllables can apparently be pronounced in several different ways, depending on the meaning. To cut a long story short, there are several meanings for Wu Li in this context, which includes Patterns of Energy – the Chinese way of saying ‘Physics’. Other meanings include ‘My Way‘, ‘Nonsense‘, ‘I clutch my Ideas‘ and ‘Enlightenment‘, where, in the latter case, wu means ‘My heart,’ or my mind.’

End of Chinese lesson.

It seems to me that any or all of these meanings could be applied to the masterpieces of Jackson Pollock. Moreover, they seem to me reminiscent of the restless sub-atomic world as I understand it, in which case the artist has envisaged the sub-atomic world before the scientist, and is in this sense a prophet.

Image: White Cockatoo

And whether I’m being totally fanciful or not, it also seems to me that in The White Cockatoo he closed his eyes and travelled inward until he came to a group of nerve cells in his brain in which was entangled the lost memory of a white cockatoo.

PROPHET

When he closed his eyes

he saw The White Cockatoo,

forgotten in the ganglia.

Pressing them further closed,

tension induced a magnified

print of connective tissue,

which he dripped onto canvas,

scattering electrons in fright.

He saw what physicists

would predict and measure.

‘In the state of spiritual

clarity there are no secrets,’

wrote Frank O’Hara of Pollock.

In The Deep, there are no secrets.

Pollack was deeply interested in the great Mexican muralists Orozco, Siqueiros, and Rivera, and in Rivera’s dictum that art should express the ‘new order of things … and that the logical place for this art, … belonging to the populace, was on the walls of public buildings.’ O’Hara suggests that this statement may have somehow pointed the way to the heroic scale of his later masterpieces.

Image: Self Portrait, 1947

Diego Rivera was married, twice, to the much younger Frida Kahlo.

This is The Two Fridas, one of many paintings which document their tempestuous relationship. Although she always claimed that she was born during the Mexican revolution of 1910, she was born in 1907, and christened Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon. Her first two names were given to Frida so that she could be baptized with a Christian name. The third, the one her family used, means ‘peace’ in German – her paternal grandparents were German. One of her maternal grandparents was Indian, a fact which was most important in her life and art.

At the age of six, she contracted polio in her right leg, but the event which transformed her life and gave the world such a rich legacy occurred on September 17, 1925, when Kahlo suffered horrendous injuries in a road accident.

Image: The Broken Column

I’ll spare you the bizarre details, which are given in Hayden Herrera’s biography, FRIDA. Suffice to mention that her spinal column was broken in three places; her collarbone was broken, and her third and fourth ribs. Her right leg had eleven fractures and her right foot was dislocated and crushed. Her left shoulder was out of joint, her pelvis broken in three places.’

Image: El Autobus

Now I knew nothing of all of this when I first became fascinated with Frida Kahlo. As is alluded to in Waking To The Plain, (which was originally called Homage to Kahlo) I first heard of her through an artist friend, who happens to share with me a significant experience of hospital. We were discussing pain, and she recommended that I should look up Kahlo’s paintings.

Image: Tree of Hope

Image: Without Hope

Of course I was very interested in her account of Kahlo, and I fully intended to investigate further, but the truth is I forgot all about it. Until a few months later that is, when I received a very excited letter from a close friend in Berlin. Enclosed were black and white copies of several Kahlo self-portraits and my friend knew me well when she predicted my interest in them.

Image: Self Portrait 1926

Shortly after this, I met a Mexican, and – you’ve guessed it – she loved Frida’s work and knew a great deal about her. She also spoke about the difference of colours in Mexico and Europe.

Image: The Love Embrace of the Universe

So now, three women, within a very short space of time, had come to me with the gift of Frida Kahlo. It was as if I hadn’t taken the hint on the first or second occasion, and now the gods were sending me a third messenger to make sure I got the message. I had already begun the first of many, many drafts of a poem which I hoped would lead me to the core of what was for me an enigma. (return to slide of ‘The Tree of Hope’) Even without their emotionally-charged colour, I was fascinated, particularly by The Tree of Hope. Now, I know there is a powerful feminine presence in this painting which transcends the self-portrait, and that is part of its attraction for me, even though, insofar as I am a man, it excludes me in a sense; but it also vividly states a personal and universal experience of which up to then I had only been vaguely aware.

Image: Tree of Hope. Now, I know there is a powerful feminine presence in this painting which transcends the self-portrait, and that is part of its attraction for me, even though, insofar as I am a man, it excludes me in a sense; but it also vividly states a personal and universal experience of which up to then I had only been vaguely aware.

As I thought about this talk, it seemed that there was a link between several of the paintings I wanted to explore, both those of Pollock and Kahlo. I’m thinking of the tension created by the presence of opposing ideas or states, and nowhere is this more graphically illustrated than in The Tree of Hope, where defeat and triumph are simultaneously present. It is, I suppose, a very Christian idea; in any event, I find it a haunting image.

A year earlier, in 1945, she had painted the heart-rending Without Hope. Perhaps more than any work of art I know, this goes to the core of the despair which is the inevitable visitor to those who suffer chronic illness and pain. However, on closer observation, there is a glimmer of hope. Her specially-constructed easel is on her sick bed, and it was on this, with the aid of a mirror, she painted many of her of her self-portraits, and this is a partial explanation of why she was herself her principal subject.

As I mentioned earlier, Kahlo developed a system whereby an emotion or state corresponded to a particular colour. If I could quote her biographer Hayden Herrera:

“The self-portraits from 1940 also show clearly the degree to which Frida had by this time grasped the power of colour to communicate emotion. To eyes accustomed to the French tradition in the visual arts, Frida’s colour choices – olive, orange, purple, many earthy tones, and a hallucinatory yellow – are jarring. Although her bizarre palette reflects her love of the untutored colour combinations in Mexican popular art, Frida cunningly makes colour set off psychological drama. Pink is often used in ironic contrast to violence or death; in several self-portraits (slide The Little Deer) a yellow olive accentuates the feeling of claustrophobic oppression; (slide Henry Ford Hospital) the grey-blue of Frida’s skies and the lavender or burnt sienna of her earth give an edge to the expression of alienation and despair. Since not much black is used to model forms, her paintings often have a visionary brilliance.’

And here is an extract from her diary in the mid-nineteen forties:

Green: warm and good light.

Yellow: madness, sickness, fear. Part of the sun and joy.

Cobalt blue: electricity and purity. Love.

Black: nothing is black, really nothing.

Leaf Green: Leaves, sadness, science. The whole of Germany is this colour.

Greenish Yellow: more madness and mystery. All the phantoms wear suits of this colour… or at least underclothes.

Dark Green: colour of bad news and good business.

Navy blue: distance. Also tenderness can be of this blue.

Well, to quote from Waking to the Plain, there is bad news and good business in The Henry Ford Hospital. The bad news is that, because of the damage done to her pelvis in her accident, Frida is enduring yet another miscarriage, and the profound grief that, naturally, caused her. In the background one can see industrial Detroit, which was then dominated by Henry Ford’s factories which were producing babies of a kind – the Baby Ford car, illustrating yet again her black humour.

This, Self Portrait with Monkey, 1940, is Frida some eight years later, which she painted in a hotel room in New York for a wealthy collector, Conger Goodyear, and which graces the cover of the U.S. edition of her biography by Hayden Herrera, sent to me by an Irish friend who at the time lived in New York. Along with a gift of boxed cards of Kahlo’s paintings, this biography revealed to me why I was so obsessed with Kahlo, and finally allowed me to write about my obsession with a degree of honesty, and thereby lay it to rest.

I’m very fond of this particular painting, partly because of its attention to fine detail; also its suggestiveness, where the ribbon which binds her tightly combed hair is also the link to her pet monkey, and in turn, the monkey’s hand seems to grow out of her hair; and finally for its unrelenting honesty. It was one of several in which she is accompanied by pet animals and which were painted during the years of her divorce from Rivera – the monkey here was actually a gift from Rivera. Her eyes reveal her loneliness, but her batwing eyebrows and her light moustache are forceful presences, and dressed in her finery, she is sensual and proud.

This is The Dream, painted in the same year, 1940. According to Herrera, she was preoccupied with death during the period after her divorce, and that she actually did keep a skeleton on top of her bed’s canopy as – to her – an amusing reminder of her own mortality, as she explained to visitors. This is a Judas skeleton, part of the Day of the Dead folklore of Mexico.

But if Frida Kahlo was often preoccupied with death, and she had good reason to be for much of her life, she took a great sensual pleasure from her life and art. She was admired and loved by many of the great figures of her time, including Trotsky, Kandinsky, Juan Miro, Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O’Keeffe and even that arch-egotist Picasso, who if my memory serves me right, wrote to Rivera that she was a greater portraitist than either of them. She once told a friend that her view of life was: Make love, take a bath, make love again. She was still painting up to her death in 1954, and on her last painting she wrote VIVA LA VIDA – Long Live Life.

Image:
Self Portrait 1947

WAKING TO THE PLAIN

Here I painted myself, Frida Kahlo, from a mirror-image. I am thirty-seven years old, and it is the month of July, nineteen forty-seven. In Coyoacan, Mexico, the place where I was born. – Frida Kahlo

I tried to understand you through the self–portraits you began when the collision of a bus and tram changed your life as time slowed down.

They chronicle the trials of your body’s broken column; your love affair through two marriages with Rivera; the miscarriages; your passion compressed into a high tension and expression.

I must have known it was impossible, but blinded by what I thought was love – and it was, by some measure – I made draft after draft, losing my way through your subtle world of guise and fantasy, through what is at once concealed and revealed. The Tree of Hope was my prime enigma:

Dressed in her red Tehuana costume,

she is Kahlo the desert queen,

reigning over her butchered flesh and bone

that lies defeated on a surgical trolley -

where the moon is mistress beyond the orange sun.

The moon, Frida, and that old orange the sun, that your childhood teacher held in one hand – a candle in the other – to explain the solar system. Darkness and Light.

And the fissured desert that stretches to the distant, eternal mountains is the desert that encroaches when hope is ruined to often. Isn’t that so?

The images return to haunt, and I repeat the attempt to write them out:

Bound in plastercast, she paints in

the hair on her lip from a mirror-image,

rapt in search of the meaning of what

she is doing again, and again, and again.

After dinner one night, an artist told me about you. The house we were staying in was old and later I sensed a ghost in my room. I think it was a part of myself, long forgotten. A few months later a letter arrived from a friend:

A bulging letter, postmarked Berlin.

I read the excited hand, unfold

the black and white copies: Kahlo.

So began the obsession. Spring passed into summer, and one evening I ambled down Kilmainham Lane, admiring the elderflowers, the peace of this rus-in-urbe broken only by guard-dogs and the rhythmic clack of my crutches. Then an odd thing happened:

A red car stops, a puff of dust

rising before the tyres,

and a Mexican asks for directions.

Later, in a bar, I ask about Kahlo,

who, she insists, painted with colours

which don’t exist in Europe.

The burnt siennas of your Mexican earth, Frida; your yellows at once pouring out sickness and fear, sun and joy; your dark blues occupying both distance and tenderness. Dark green, you said, was the colour of bad news and good business. There is bad news and good business in your Henry Ford Hospital, 1932:

In the Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit,

Frida has lain in her own blood

since 1932,

her miscarried foetus spirited above her

like an African fetish – her pelvis, her tear,

the hopes of her famished love, so much debris.

Its foreground is green, and the spiritual drama of your miscarriage is played out against a backdrop of Henry Ford’s factories delivering Baby Fords. It took me a while to see humour where previously I could recognize only suffering. Now I’m glad to know it was typical,like your parrot who drank beer and tequila and croaked:I’ll never get over this hangover!

This is a quote from the story of your work and life by Hayden Herrera, who wrote it with the ring of respect and truth. A friend sent it from New York, while another gave me reproductions I had never seen. It was then I realised that all my drafts were false. I was writing about myself.

Something as formerly innocent as a cloud or landscape or as utilised as a polluting bus, can recall you as if you were seated in them, a mirror before you, your brush in hand.

So many correspondences where nothing is strictly itself might unbalance a mind. How many women limp through a crowd? Might they have light moustaches or eyebrows joined like batwings?

They, the correspondences, are sane because you are unique, like a giant river from whom tributaries flow away through the thoughts and emotions of those who need you.

She floats, asleep

in canopied rest, rooted

high over the earth -

her vigilant companion

a Day of the Dead skeleton

decked in dynamite and flowers.

She has journeyed a long way,

and no one can follow

into the shell

of all she has yearned for.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou0EOcpdJm4

The Real Frida Kahlo Con musica de Cafe Tacuba (Esa Noche)
Fragmento extraido de un documental dedicado a esta gran artista, (The History Channel Español)
Ojessy Youtube channel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXtRN-UNKKA

frida kahlo including The two Fridas (1939); Wearing a velvet dress(1926); The little deer (1946); What the water gave me (1938); Without hope (1945); The Broken Column (1944). Chanystears Youtube channel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrVE-WQBcYQ

Jackson Pollock 51, 1951 (excerpt)
Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg (directors) Morton Feldman (composer)
Facs100b Youtube channel

Bella Akhmadulina

The Russian poet Bella Akh­madulina has died. I saw her read once, in the old Project Theatre in Dublin, and was so moved by the way she read her poems in Russian, which reminded me of chanting in a cathedral, that I wrote the following piece, published in my collection The Year of the Knife.
Thank you, Bella. May you rest in peace.

photo credit: www.kremlin.ru some rights reserved.

THE RED CATHEDRAL
   –on see­ing Bella Akh­madulina per­form her work

‘The Cathed­ral is aligned East to West,
a circle on two rect­angles
over a blind spring where pil­grims sup.
Its red­stone wings spread North and South.
It greets the rising sun,
and accepts dark­ness as it comes.
Requir­ing noth­ing, it is noth­ing to itself.
To enter into it
is to be given a hard grain as talis­man.
Solitude touches its high, bare walls.
Grass has split the flag­stones;
dust swarms in light from the stained glass.
The Cathed­ral is home to ter­rains and cit­ies
and those who live in them
as they breathe fumes, travel on shunted trains;
and just now, a woman dressed in black and gold
is the swooned instru­ment
through whom the Cathed­ral fills with their song.
High in the dome, a swal­low loops and skims
to the soar and whis­per
of grief, to the little shuffle of the woman’s fun.

  – Philip Casey



The Red Cathedral by Philip Casey is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

One Hundred and Thirty Nine Years of Solitude

(CBS Gorey, l854-l993 /past pupil,1967-1971)

I can see now, at the distance
of half a lifetime,
that what I disliked about it
was the absence of women,
their sensual spur to wit
which keeps the intellect entranced.

That’s why Latin was dead:
amo, amas, amat had no object.
Mathematics, too:
it had no pax de deux,
no algebra of the hormones.
Irish was a sex-free zone,
a vital, private part of expression
cut away from a blood-rich tongue.

A Brother told me
that if I read half the books
on science that I did on history
he’d be pleased.
But history had its Lucrezia Borgias,
and English its Louise.

Not for me the Greek ideal
that a man’s intellectual equal
could only be a man,
though I wasn’t aware of this, or of anything.
But some fine teachers had a liking
for intellectual hunger, and passed it on.

Now I can see that like everyone,
I was a product of my time,
as the men who taught me
were products of theirs.
They had a certain certainty
which allayed their fears,
or so it seemed, whereas my conviction
was that nothing was certain –

apart from the beauty of a certain woman.

Perhaps thus a culture evolves,
and amidst such tensions
in small classrooms
a new generation tries to solve
the conundrum of its role,
convinced it will make a better world.

Philip Casey

139 Years of Solitude by Philip Casey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://blog.philipcasey.com/contact-me/.

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

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.

Poetry Ireland, in association with The Gallery Press, presents a reading followed by a reception to mark the 80th birthday of John Montague and to celebrate the publication of Chosen Lights, Poets on poems by John Montague.
Tuesday 24 February @ 6.30pm
Albert Theatre / The Board Room, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, 123 St Stephen’s Green West, D2
*This a free, unticketed, event*
For more information contact Poetry Ireland T 01 4789974
John Montague image credit: Poetry Ireland

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.

And then one of my cousines, Marie-Claire, rang me to let me know of an interesting event at the Alliance Française, also here in Dublin. Can’t go to that, either… but this is for you Francophiles who are also SFTB readers…

Les Poètes de Philippe Noireaut

Les Poètes was created for Radio Canada and celebrates diverse eras and styles, from very well-known poets (Rimbaud, Baudelaire) to others long forgotten. This recital has one key element: the pleasure of discovering and re-reading texts which show us just how universal the human experience is.

Wednesday 18 February at 8pm, Admission: Members €5 Non-members €10
Alliance Française, with the support of the Canadian Embassy

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 Prayers will take place at Murphy’s Funeral Home, The Avenue, Gorey tomorrow (Saturday) at 11.15 o’clock followed by removal to St David’s Church, Johnstown for funeral Mass at 12 Noon. Burial afterwards to Ballyfad Cemetery.

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

A few of us repaired to the Hugh Lane Gallery Cafeteria/Restuarant afterwards, and as we were leaving, Francis O’Duffy spotted the Gallery piano, and proceeded to amaze us with his arrangements of Irish airs, until, just as he finished, and having drawn an audience, he was reprimanded by one of the porters. I hadn’t heard him play in 20 years, so I was gobsmacked.

I think he is trying to arrange a concert, so if he succeeds, I will of course mention it here, and recommend that you give yourself a treat.

All in all, a wonderful afternoon – and the day was fine too!

Anyway, the 24th of October seemed a long way away when John asked me, but now suddenly it’s next Friday. If you happen to be in Central Dublin on Friday do come along. I’ll even try out some new poems! And we’ll leave you enough time to get back to work, if work is what you have to do.
The readings are usually up a couple of flights of stairs, but because of my recent illness the IWC has kindly offered to hold it downstairs.

Out To Lunch reading by Philip Casey.
Venue: The Irish Writers’ Centre, 19 Parnell Square, Dublin 1
Time: 1.15pm
T: 01 8721301
E: info@writerscentre.ie