Cassandra Voices

Category: Culture

  • A Variety of Voices

    ‘I have never met a man so in love with the written word – provided he himself has written it’
    Vincent Mercier on his editor at The Bell Sean O’Faoláin.

    In this second and final instalment, Frank Armstrong reviews Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland 2: A Variety of Voices edited by Mark O’Brien and Felix M. Larkin and published by the Four Court Press in Dublin this year.

    It follows his review of Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth Century Ireland: Writing Against the Grain (2014) edited by the same authors.

    This book delves deeper into the canon of dissenting Irish journalism and weighs up the consequences of the arrival of the internet for critical journalism in this country.

    Digital Flood

    John Horgan observes in Great Irish Reportage (Random House, Penguin, London, 2013) that ‘Writing about current events will have been transformed by the rise of digital media in ways we can only guess at.’ This may seem an obvious statement, but we can surely hazard a guess as to some consequences for journalism that goes against the grain, in particular.

    If the invention of the printing press in Europe in 1450 germinated a diverse range of ideologies and religions, signs are a distracted and smart-phone-addicted civilisation arising out of the technological rupture of the Internet is inclining towards homogeneity and conformity – not least in terms of the sub-Americana patois increasingly mouthed in the Podcast-verse.

    Thus, we have just witnessed widespread uniformity in the response of governments around the world to Covid-19, as dominant – group-thinking – academic scientists, doctors, NGOs and pharmaceutical companies harnessed traditional and social media to manufacture consent for unprecedented curbs on civil liberties to contend with a contagious respiratory pathogen.

    We may argue into the night over whether the response was right or wrong, proportionate or disproportionate, motivated by mamon or otherwise, but no one can now doubt the global reach of digital power, controlled especially from Silicon Valley. A latter-day Napoleon would not consider four hostile newspapers to be more formidable than a thousand bayonets. Rather he would surely recognise the capacity of social media to mould opinions and frame political choices: concluding the algorithm to be mightier than the best opinion writer.

    Moreover, the profound challenges legacy publications contend with pale in comparison to that faced by dissenting journalism that in Ireland has generally appeared in the marginal periodicals explored in these reviews.

    Thus, the editors of A Variety of Voices find it ‘hard to envisage that it will be possible – or profitable, in intellectual or any other terms – for historians of the future to compile two volumes on twenty-first century Irish periodicals like we have done on the twentieth-century ones.’

    Contemporary dissenting journalism that is not dependent on the financial largesse – and whims – of wealthy institutions and individuals faces extinction. This point is driven home by the recent demise of www.broadsheet.ie, a resolutely independent news and satirical website, representing no fixed political abode, apart from exhibiting a deep suspicion of state and corporate institutions that left it subject to charges of being informed by conspiracy theories, but which on a number of occasions displayed a willingness to publish purportedly defamatory material that mainstream publishers shied away from.

    Revealingly, the recently published Tolka – ‘a journal of formally promiscuous non-fiction’ – displays the logo of the Arts Council. A first edition lacks any obvious political intent, and hosts among other contributions a whimsical essay by Irish Times funny man Patrick Freyne on the origins of his attachment to list-making. It contains no advertising, so we may safely assume it will last as long as its annual grant applications proves successful.

    Other magazines funded by Arts Council in 2022 include: Banshee, €75,000; Comhar Teoranta, €46,800; Crannog Magazine, €18,000; Cyphers Magazine, €13,000; Dublin Review of Books, €25,000; The Dublin Review, €75,000; The Journal of Music, €75,000. Such magazines are not necessarily apolitical, but generally do not directly address political questions or engage in investigative journalism.

    The huge problem attendant to the public-private RTÉ model, emphasises the difficulty with the State directly funding political journalism and investigative reporting. With readers generally unwilling to pay for content, however, publishers are increasingly beholden to advertisers, including the state. This insulates powerful institutions and individuals from investigative journalism and critical commentary.

    Finding a Voice

    According to the editors A Variety of Voices the periodicals featured in their second volume ‘are mainly organs of important communities within Irish society – not always mainstream, but significant communities nonetheless that would not otherwise have a voice in Irish media.’ The authors acquaint us with important titles representing a feminist outlook that has remained distinctly marginalised until recent times, as well as publications emanating from a gay community whose sex lives were only decriminalised in 1993.

    There is also a strong analysis of myriad religious periodicals representing the full spectrum of views on the political, social and economic questions of their times. This includes the Catholic Bulletin (1911-1939) under firebrand editor Timothy Corcoran SJ as editor, who, according to Patrick Maume, considered the leader of the Blueshirts General Eoin O’Duffy insufficiently fascist.

    There are also accounts of other Jesuit publications from Declan O’Keefe that challenged the illiberalism associated with the Catholic Church in Ireland, under Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid especially; and an analysis of the shifting outlook of the Church of Ireland Gazette from Ian d’Alton.

    This volume also finds room for more contemporary publications such as the resilient Phoenix and In Dublin, although it is disappointing to find no entry for the literary and intellectual publication The Crane Bag (1979-1983) edited by Richard Kearney, and others including Ronan Sheahan; or for that matter, Envoy Magazine (1949-51) edited by the late John Ryan; although there is a passing reference to his correspondence with J.P. Donleavy, discussing the prohibitive cost of publishing.

    Ryan went on to become the author of a wonderful memoir celebrating Baggatonia, entitled Remembering How We Stood (1975). It provides intimate accounts of writers such as Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan and Flann O’Brien, and a memorable description of the first Bloomsday in 1954, organised by Ryan himself along with Flann O’Brien. He was, coincidentally, the father of his namesake former editor of www.broadsheet.ie.

    In eschewing self-consciously literary publications, the authors perhaps draw too firm a line between the political and the poetic. It might suggest to a contemporary editor that the two do not mix easily, but Irish history suggests that an emulsification of forms – especially evident during the Irish Revival at the turn of the last century – animate political action. Empiricism or strictly factual journalism has its limitation, if we acknowledge as Percy Bysshe Shelley put it: ‘the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’

     

    The Fourth Estate

    This volume draws attention to a remarkable series of articles (1944-5) in The Bell by Vincent Mercier and Conor Cruise-O’Brien (under the nom de plume ‘Donat O’Donnell’) assessing the Fourth Estate in Ireland, including dominant titles the Irish Independent, Irish Times and Irish Press. Mercier also attempted to define the timeless nature of Irish humour in his assessment of Dublin Opinion.

    In his account Felix M. Larkin describes it as a ‘dramatic intervention’ for a series of articles to critically assess fellow newspapers and periodicals, including itself.’ Recalling a contemporary reluctance on the part of Irish journalists to criticise directly one another, Larkin argues that

    to dig deeper into the affairs of other organs might delegitimize the status of the press generally, diminish its influence and give ammunition to those wishing to circumscribe its freedom. There was also a certain esprit de corps within the press, notwithstanding often fierce competition between individual newspapers and periodicals – a sense of ‘dog doesn’t eat dog.

    He further opines that ‘The idea linking all six articles is that the Fourth Estate was accordingly complicit in the stagnation that followed the revolution.’

    Mercier identified the Irish Times as the newspaper of the Protestant professional classes rather than of landowners ‘the true ‘people of Burke and of Grattan’, but observed how ‘slowly but surely it is becoming the organ of the entire professional class, Protestant and Catholic.’ He characterized the politics of the Irish Times as ‘on the left’ but qualified this by intimating it had ‘its own particular brand of conservative progressivism’. He nonetheless regarded its journalism as ‘ten times more alive than its rivals in the newspaper world.’

    O’Brien argued that the Irish Independent was first and foremost a business undertaking. He observed how: ‘Middle class Catholic families who were reading the Independent ten years ago are reading the Irish Times today’. He anticipated that it might react by using ‘its commanding financial position to get better features that other papers could afford.’ One such contributor would be Cruise-O’Brien himself!

    The now defunct Irish Press – of which then Taoiseach Eamon de Valera was still the principal shareholder – was also analysed by Mercier. According to its first editorial in 1931 the publication stood ‘for independence, for the greatest temporal blessing a nation may enjoy, the full liberty of all its people … Our ideal, culturally is an Irish Ireland.’

    By the mid-1940s, however, Mercier believed ‘it could justifiably be described as ‘the Government organ’ and that it was ‘almost as closely linked with the new Big Business of Ireland as the other two daily papers’. Nonetheless, he conceded that it is ‘mainly read on its merits as a newspaper rather than on any political count.’

    The same writer also analysed the Bell itself under Sean O’Faoláin as editor. Among O’Faoláin’s uncompromising articles was one entitled ‘The Stuffed Shirts’, where he fumed: ‘[T]he final stage of the Revolution was – and is to this day – a middle-class putsch. It was not a society that came out of the maelstrom. It was a class.’

    In a refreshingly iconoclastic piece Mercier wrote of Sean O’Faoláin: ‘I have never met a man so in love with the written word – provided he himself has written it’; but asserted that he ‘is not just a figurehead, he is the magazine.’

    In his essay ‘The Parnellism of Seán O’Faoláin’ O’Brien described O’Faoláin as ‘parochial’

    He [O’Faoláin] neither affirms nor denies anything of universal importance… His stories are illuminating about Ireland; an anthropological entertainment to the curious foreigner, an annoyance and a stimulus to the native. To Ireland, the stimulus is of great value; in a time of sleepy stimulation Mr O’Faoláin’s irascible and dissenting temperament has struggled, not without success, to preserve some honest intellectual life among his people.

    It is hard to imagine a contemporary Irish publication subjecting its own editor to such stern critical analysis.

    Irish Humour

    According to Larkin, Vincent Mercier’s The Irish Comic Tradition (Dublin, 1962) asserts that ‘comedy is the central tradition of Irish and Anglo-Irish literature and can be traced back to oral Gaelic roots in the ninth century.’ Mercier identified apparently timeless elements of this tradition as ‘a bent for wild humour [and] a delight in witty world play.’

    His article: ‘Dublin Opinion’s Six Jokes’ represented a foretaste of later scholarly work. These include the Civil Service Joke, which is also the Cork Joke: ‘if you took away the Corkmen, where would the civil service be? And if you took away the Civil Service, where would the Corkmen be?’

    There was also the Where Were You in 1916 Joke, the Irish Navy Joke’, emphasising its miniscule size, the ‘New Ireland Joke’, a ‘back-handed cut at the more absurd manifestations of the Gaelic Revival’; the Ourselves-As-Others-See-Us Joke, ‘usually located in Hollywood, and pigs in the kitchen generally figure in it somewhere.’

    And finally, The Farmer Joke, depicting the archetypal Irish farmer ‘filling up forms, submitting to inspection, resisting inspectors, selling his cattle, giving them away the price goes to hell etc.’

    Mercier regarded Dublin Opinion as ‘one of the most political funny papers in existence’. ‘The real secret’ he argued was its impartiality. He believed that ‘its sympathies were with the losing side [in the Civil War]’, but that it could not ‘attack those in power, who then had the majority of the people behind them. At least … if it wished to keep its circulation, or even, perhaps, some freedom of speech. On the other hand, it had no desire to persecute the unhappy Republicans.’

    However, he criticized the magazine for ‘failing to address such issues as unemployment and the Dublin slums’, at least since the end of Arthur Booth’s Cassandra-like prophecies of war and famine.’

    Fortnight

    Another important contemporary magazine covered in this edition is Fortnight, which emerged as an important voice of moderation during the Northern Ireland Troubles under the stewardship of an academic lawyer Tom Hadden in 1970. The article in A Variety of Voices was written by a former editor Andy Pollack, who reveals how he valued the opportunities it gave him to use controversial material he could not publish in ‘a more risk-averse national broadsheet newspaper’. This included accounts from the notorious Kincora boys home in east Belfast.

    At times the magazine experienced embedded resistance to its human rights advocacy, as when staunchly Unionist Lurgan printers made it clear that they did not want to continue to print it after an issue came out strongly against internment.

    Fortnight also contained one prescient critique of the Northern Ireland Peace Process from David Guelke who warned that that – unlike its South African equivalent – by concentrating on securing and sustaining ‘ceasefires by paramilitary actors at the margins’, it could actually make the situation more difficult by freezing in place ‘a Cyprus-type bloodless conflict’, where there would be ‘no incentives for cross-community collaboration’

    The publication received ‘substantial grants from the British charity the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.’ However, according to Pollack the advent of a social media – which spelt ‘the death knell for small, radical print publications everywhere’ – led to its demise. It did, however, resume publishing in September, 2020.

    Phoenix

    In his article on Phoenix Magazine Joe Breen cites a warning from Tony Harcup’s Journalism: Principle and Practice (London, 2009)] to the effect that investigative journalism, while achieving notable results might be seen as ‘perpetuating a myth that society is divided into a large number of fundamentally good people and a smaller number of fundamentally bad people’.

    Harcup asks where the investigative journalism is into structural forces in society answering: ‘Largely notable for its absence. Instead, particularly on television, we tend to have personalised stories of goodies, baddies and heroic reporters’.

    Nonetheless, the achievements of The Phoenix under the control of John Mulcahy and with Paddy Prendevilll as editor (a bulldog quality, untainted by ideology is also attributed to deputy editor Paul Farrell) in this vital sphere are arguably unsurpassed in the history Irish journalism.

    Fittingly, an Irish Times obituary describes John Mulcahy as ‘one of the most significant journalists and publishers of the last half century in this country’. Phoenix’s major scoops have included: Charles Haughey receiving £1 million from Ben Dunne; the pension of £27.6 million paid to Michael Fingleton; Father Michael Cleary fathering a child with his housekeeper; and Anglo-Irish bank being technically bankrupt

    In October 1991, Dick Spring quoted a Phoenix article at length in the Dáil. It had been pulled from the magazine when Smurfit Web Press refused to print it.

    The magazine’s investigations are still accompanied by a Private Eye-infused humour, where Breen argues ‘laddish sexual innuendos were a staple’: as with the cartoon: ‘How’s the queen?’ Queen Elizabeth: ‘Edward’s fine, thank you’. The magazine has also displayed an unusual sympathy – in an Irish journalistic context at least – for the Republican cause in Northern Ireland.

    Despite its achievements, Breen warns that that ‘it is notable that with the rise of social media, where people play fast and loose with facts, rumours and innuendo, The Phoenix has lost some of its traction.’

    Second row: Far left: Hilda Tweedy

    The Irish Housewife

    The origins of the unradical-sounding The Irish Housewife magazine can be traced to a public ‘Memorandum on the Food and Fuel Emergency’ authored by Hilda Tweedy, Andreé Sheehy Skeffington; Marguerite Skelton and Nancy Simmons in 1941. According to Sonja Tiernan they ‘drew up an economic plan urging the government to ration all essential foodstuff, control prices and supress black-market sales.’

    In response it was denigrated by journalists as ‘a housewives’ petition’. The authors appear to have inverted these prejudices by using ‘housewife’ in the title of the Association they founded, which went on to publish the magazine.

    It is instructive that after Hilda Tweedy ‘applied for a teaching job in a Protestant girls’ school, she was told that as a married woman she was unsuitable; the headmistress said it would not be nice for girls if their teacher became pregnant.’

    Importantly, according to Tiernan the Irish Housewives Association ‘had made a rather astute business deal with an advertising agency: The agency printed and distributed the magazine and in return they kept all of the advertising income.’ As articles were contributed for free it was kept at an affordable price.

    Among its contributions, Katherine Watson recorded her experiences of visiting female prisoners in Mountjoy, while George Yeats (the daughter of W.B.) published an article entitled ‘Can Your Child Draw’ in which she warned: ‘don’t be too cautious! Beware of all that restricts a child’s boldness of hand and of imagination. More is at stake than his future as an artist.’

    The advertising market began to slow down in the 1960s and by 1966 it was no longer viable for the agency to print the magazine. Nonetheless, it had provided an important outlet, and Tweedy later mused: ‘Who would have thought in 1942 that women would move from the kitchen to Áras an Uachtaráin.’

    75th Anniversary of the Easter Rising, O’Connell Street, President Mary Robinson. Source: Dublin City Library Archive.

    Status

    Signs of the rise of future President Mary Robinson’s generation of successful and ambitious women can be identified in Status Magazine, a short-lived feminist news magazine from 1981.

    Its origins lie in in the gathering of about 1,000 women and several men at a conference in Liberty Hall, which led to the founding of the magazine with Marian Finucane as editor. She was already a well-known Irish media personality. 31,500 copies of the first issue of Status were printed and these sold out quickly; yet curiously ten months later Status closed down.

    The decision to launch a magazine squarely focused on women’s rights had come from the proprietor of Magill Magazine Vincent Browne’ who said: ‘News coverage and investigative journalism from a woman’s perspective is what we are aiming for.’

    Cutting-edge reportage included Nell McCafferty writing from inside one of the mother and baby homes where single, pregnant women effectively went into hiding until their babies were born.

    One regular feature that scared advertisers was a page headed ‘No Comment’, which reproduced snippets of sexist nonsense sent in by readers including advertisements and articles from national newspaper. This included one from the Irish Times, which observed that ‘sitting TDs, Mr Eddie Collins and Mr Austin Deasy, are regarded as “Garret men”, though not fanatically so: the young and pretty Mrs Bulbulia is taken for a dedicated “Garret woman”’.

    Without adequate advertising revenue it was, however, doomed. Vincent Browne felt from the start the magazine was ‘gratuitously offensive to advertisers … There was too much sniping which antagonises people to no purpose.’ He noted that ‘marketing managers are male dominated and – dare I say it – some of them maybe, a little frightened’. Status was, he felt, a ‘bit too aggressively women’s lib’.

    According to Tiernan: ‘The usual rules did not apply: Those controlling these decisions did not want to see their advertisements in Status no matter how many educated women were buying the magazine.’ Eventually, even those stalwarts of magazine advertising – cigarette companies – abandoned ship.

    A Future for Hard Copy Journalism?

    A final word goes to John S. Doyle the former editor of In Dublin, which was inspired by Pariscope, the New Yorker and London’s Time Out. It remained largely removed from the cut and thrust of national politics, apart from assessing the planning decisions of Dublin Corporation, and then providing an outlet for the campaign against the development of Wood Quay.

    Intriguingly, Doyle revealed that

    none of the people who started In Dublin, or who came to in the first few years, considered themselves to be journalists, or had thought of that as a career. They were people who, in their different ways, wanted to write, and one of the strengths of the magazine was that it attracted so many of them.

    It may be that through some such formula – involving those with a desire and even need to write – we may revive dissenting journalism.

    The challenge may be to find a broad-based platform that is not dependent on an increasingly commercialised and censorious social media for citizen journalists to publish. In this respect we mourn the demise of www.broadsheet.ie, which showed an usual willingness to court controversy, even if this occasionally placed them in the company of characters who apparently set out to cause offense.

    A future for dissenting hard copy journalism that is not funded by an emanation of the state or philanthropy is difficult to identify, but it may be – just as music connoisseurs are now purchasing vinyl which was once considered obsolete – that readers will revert to a tangible format as the promblems with the digital medium become increasingly apparent.

     

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  • Ballad of Lucy Kryton

    Ballad of Lucy Kryton

    “There will not be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime”, Margaret Thatcher

    The morning sun falls whitely on
    the lashes of Lucy Kryton.
    Her blondeness fully insured
    against theft, fire
    and termites. Her forehead
    the hard reality
    that care of both
    the elderly and the daft
    are best handled
    by entrepreneurs.

    Her navy dress
    an incentive scheme for foreign investors.
    Her compassion, a teenager taught failure
    to honour thy father and mother leads
    to a wet sleeping bag in a doorway
    the government won’t be
    rescuing you from. She knows
    hard cases make bad exceptions,
    of which she’ll be making none;
    that for many people in this country
    slavery and the right
    of Nigerian taxi drivers
    to marry each other
    are issues of conscience
    which transcend politics.

    Her fiscal policy is dampness moving
    down other people’s walls.
    The finest mind
    to come out of that part of Claremorris
    in a long time. Her Ireland of the future
    is an auld fella with a wig
    at Mass on a Monday
    somewhere in Mayo,

    as the evening sun bounces savagely
    off the achievements of Lucy Kryton,
    the day the laughter suddenly stops
    and she’s all that there is.

  • Featured Artist: Manar Al Shouha

    How would you define yourself as an artist?

    In fact I feel more like a researcher trying to find the truth about herself, her uniqueness and her art fingerprint. For me art is a kind of meditation where I reach the inner self.

    Each painting is not only a scene. It’s a journey through my deep self.

    I believe that the reason we are here as humans on earth is to try and reach our inner selves.

     Was there a particular moment in your life that you felt an artistic awakening?

    As a child I was slow to develop my speech and writing abilities. I always favoured drawing. Even at school, I used to sneak out of classes and go to the drawing room instead. Since I came to the realization of this art world, I can’t believe for a second that I can work in any other career.

    How did your teachers assist in the development of your artistic practice?

    My teacher is called Bassem. He taught me that my only teachers in life should be myself and books. He used to tell me that he is only there to encourage and guide me. By the time I started studying art at university, he had already left teaching because of the war conditions and had gone to another university. In order to reach him, I had to walk for miles, just to have him look at my work. His opinion was more important to me than the mark I received.

    Your mother is one of your recurring subjects. How did she influence your creativity and personality?

    She was a teacher of mathematics in the same school that I attended. She used to come and check on me during the day, any time she didn’t find me in the class. She would take me from the drawing-room. She used to get angry at my begging her to relent, but after a while she understood my nature and began providing me with materials and even booked me into art classes. She was always talking to me as a unique person and saying that when choosing anything I should follow my heart. She used to energize me mentally and physically. My mother used to help me prepare canvases before I started painting, organise my studio and tidy it up in a way that didn’t distress me. She always tried to interpret my work and was always happy with my achievements. More than I ever was.

    Ultimately, she is the reason I am here now.

     Which of your works do you feel best represents your oeuvre?

    There are two of them in particular. The first is one of a woman sitting down, painted with two colours only and a font. It’s painted in a highly impressionistic way. I completed this work in 2021.

    The second painting shows a social gathering for two women painted in a sketched style with warm neutral colours. I made this in 2016.

    In what way does politics enter your art?

    On account of my lack of freedom in expressing myself, and because the media doesn’t always show the more interesting angles in the news, I decided to reveal my nation’s suffering in my own distinctive way, through my art.

    Damascus is always appearing in your work and your thoughts, would you like to say something about this city?

    Damascus was the capital of the Umayyads, the dream of Abbasids, and is one of the oldest capital cities of the Islamic world.

    In spite of the war, I felt safe walking down its alleys and roads. This is not an ordinary city. It holds a lot of energy. Looking at the ancient monuments, I used to feel its greatness. I represent Damascus as a lady who has faced hardship through the years, but has managed to preserves an elegance. One day prosperity will return, as has occurred throughout the city’s history, for it possesses a wealth of energy.

    Has any artist from history had a particular influence on you?

    I like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pablo Picasso, Honoré Daumier and Egon Schiele.

    What particular technique is at core of your practice?

    Sketching. I like the strong impression of a sketch. I find myself attracted more to the expressive school, through the use of neutral translucent colours and heavy fonts.

    Have you integrated other disciplines or artistic forms into your painting?

    No, but in my first year of university I studied five general artistic fields. I liked sculpture and engraving, especially Honoré Daumier works. I think one day I will study this discipline more deeply.

    I particularly love your paintings portraying people commuting and traveling. What is so enticing for you about these subjects?

    Regarding the painting of the bus scenes, when I start painting, I always ask myself why I am doing it? When I used to take the bus, I watched people gazing out the windows, some were angry but couldn’t express themselves, and some were looking over their shoulders as if they were waiting for time to go back.

    I felt it was not a bus, but a boat taking us away from our country and away from our present and making us live in the past. Then I started painting it again. I wanted to apologise, but somehow I was painting to say that what happened wasn’t our faults.

    In future I want to make fingerprint through my art. I want my paintings to be alive so I can live through them. Not for a moment have I felt that I am Picasso or Goya. They are dead. But when I looked at their paintings, I always felt that I am talking to them.

    Follow Manar on Instagram

    Kindly translated by Jennifer Boktor and Nermine Abdel Malak

    Manar is preparing for a new exhibition in September in Rathfarnham Castle, and recently moved to the Lodge Studio with the organisation Common Ground.

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  • Adoring the Artifice of Paul Quin

    Paul Francis Quin has proven himself an approachable enigma. The myriad glamour shots gracing the cover of his upcoming album ‘Life on Earth’ and various assorted publicity materials tend to portray him as otherworldly, a strange mixture of glamorous and uncanny. Nonetheless, he is quite happy to talk, in his wryly calm and personable manner, about any subject, no matter how taboo. In fact, taboo subjects are his speciality. They are fuel to his creative engine, and vital to his artistic expression.

    “It’s been an interesting journey, especially at this point in history,” he tells me over the first of several hour-long Zoom calls we have. “But I can’t deny I’m excited to see these songs released into the world at last.”

    Quin is a Wicklow native, born in Bray in 1971, and his serene, cut-glass accent is still inflected with the earthy intonations of that venerable seaside haven. The electro-pop singer-songwriter and exeperimentalist composer is on a homecoming journey of sorts. At the time of writing [note: this date has passed], his long-awaited solo album ‘Life on Earth’ will see its launch at Dublin’s Peppercannister Church with a gloriously disparate personelle, after a heady 2.5 years (“a slight exaggeration,” Paul purrs coyly) in the making. This represents a definitive return to music following an extended hiatus, although, it must be stressed, not a complete departure from it.

    The designated venue is an interesting one, not least for its former ecclesiastical status. Paul tells me, a few months following the Zoom call and in person this time around, that: “To be quite honest, I was gagging to get on stage in somewhere like the Grand Social or the Sugar Club whatever, and do some live work there. Generally, I don’t sing live very much, I much prefer to work in a studio. But once I resalised I was actually still capable of it, I just pushed myself to get back to it. I’m at least determined to get back up on stage and at least do an album launch, and do a proper show with creative design and costumes and all that. It’s a dream away at the moment, but dreams are how I run.”

    I jokingly suggest he do an alfresco gig, charging people a fiver per head; he politely laughs such a notion off. 

    “I mean, I am also just asking myself where did all the time go, really,” he says, laughing. “I didn’t do much music-wise, really. I mean, I had a nine-to-five job and then I went back to college, and all this time has flowed by. I remember how prohibitively expensive hiring out a recording studio could be back in the 80s and 90s, and I remember thinking I could never re-enter one again. Then again, I remember my Dad, who had a really philosophical take on life, saying to me. ‘You are going to be a very late starter. But you are going to get there’. Not sure where he meant. But I got SOMEWHERE, I suppose!”

    Image (c) Billy Cahill.

    EgoBoo Studios

    Thankfully, such a dismal outcome has ultimately not materialised for him. We are both in the control room of the subterranean confines of EgoBoo Studios on Fitzwilliam Street, having just been buzzed in. Next to me sits Greg Malocks, EgoBoo’s owner and chief sound engineer (and now, musical director of the entire enterprise) working through a series of levels with an air of close absorption. The ensuing conversation is punctuated by occasional clicks coming from the recorder console as he works his digital magic. This is no problem of course, Paul is happy to defer to his expertise. “I need to come into a place like this,” he admits. “In order to work with a more structured environment. Even if I had a home set-up, I don’t think I’d have enough gauge of quality control and I’d never get anything finished as a result. I need to be in an environment like this.”

    Paul himself lounges opposite on the studio couch, a punkish vision in a longsleeve shirt, docs and sleek denim, with long, serpentine Medusa-esque, peroxide dreadlocks and makeup stylishly pale enough to make David Bowie (were he still with us) envious. He is far from blase about the studio set-up, however, preferring it to a more home set-up favoured by many during the last two years.

    “I need to come into a place like this,” he admits. “In order to work with a more structured environment. Even if I had a home set-up, I don’t think I’d have enough gauge of quality control and I’d never get anything finished as a result. I need to be in an environment like this.”

    “You need a second ear, sometimes” Greg chimes in, without taking his eyes off the flashing blues and greens on the monito before him. “When Paul’s singing, he needs to be concentrating, and with a second ear, suggestions about what else he can try come about more easily. It definitely helps.”

    Paul nods. “I think when there’s someone else present, it brings something else out of you as well. There is essentially an audience there, albeit one I can bounce ideas off. The love of stacling harmonies is something me and Greg share. I’ve often worked with producers and engineers in the past who would say ‘I think you’ve enough harmonies now,’ and the fact is, I can’t get enough of them! If possible, I’ll have a full choir of hamrony behind my vocals.”

    A Breath of Fresh Air

    Right now, he’s listening intently to the latest mix of a new untitled song, a pure 1970s disco-tinged track which, as it transpires, is actually for an entirely different project. Despite the studio’s confined, almost windowless space, Paul describes it as ‘a breath of fresh air’, allowing him to experiment with sounds quite divergent from his usual style, which has been nebulously described as very ‘eighties-esque’ in style, tightly syncopated and synth-heavy.

    “People are always saying to me, ‘your music is very ‘eighties’, and no matter what I do I can never seem to get away from that. Or maybe that’s just because of the way I sing, I don’t know. But this other friend [dreampop songwriter Keeley Moss, who will also be opening for Paul at the Peppercannister gig on the 11th] had a track that was a bit more of a disco groove to it, and I thought it’d be interesting just to try to adapt a style that also manages to retain a bit of an indie feel as well.”

    I mention The ‘Weeknd’, and his similar use of synth and uptempo beats in tracks such as ‘Blinded by the Light’ and ‘Save Your Tears’; songs that manage to simultaneously sound retro and futuristic. “It’s almost like a pastiche,” Paul says, “taking that sound and refitting them for a new generation. Even just listening to the instrumental [of ‘Save Your Tears’], you can tell it’s amazing track even when denuded of vocals. I’d have different lyric and vocal ideas for it, but it is a superb piece of pop music. And pop music is often the hardest to do because it has to hit the ear almost immediately. Whereas soul and R’n’B you can let grow on you more organically, but pop must have that instant grab for people. Almost like Eurovision, in a way.”

    I ask why in hell he’d stoop to comparing himself to Eurovision, to general amusement of all present company in the studio.

    “One can always hope,” he smiles.

    https://twitter.com/danwadewriter/status/1337890686029402119

    Behind Closed Doors

    Everything happens underground now. Or at least, behind closed doors, within spaces impounded by our boundaries, with face-to-face communication kept to a minimum, as tablet, mobile and laptop screens now stand in for sociability. We are visible to each other only through screens, our voices reduced to garbled, disembodied transmissions over a Zoom audio feed. Even those of us who may live a few miles away from each other, even short distances, seem, at times, impassable.

    Lockdown has been an atomising experience for virtually everybody: the blurring of the work-life balance, to the government-prescribed restrictions over not being able to leave one’s home, then one’s county, and finally with an inability to fly overseas, as well as the basic need to socialise in large groups (though this slowly but surely starting to change). The daily monotony, shot through with a vague tension of perhaps being next in line to be claimed by the pandemic, was once described in a half-joking fashoin as ‘the new normal’, a phrase many have abandoned as mounting imaptience. A sense of unreality has slipped into the very fabric of reality itself. The very autonomy we take for granted as adults has been brutally curtailed. Many of us wonder when and where we might see our friends and loved ones again. News of the impending climate collapse and a resultant creeping sense that the world is on the brink of an ill-defined but very imminent oblivion aren’t helping.

    A lot of this is doomsday thinking as well: the temptation to fall into it is on the increase.

    At the time of writing, the most recent restrictions have been tentatively lifted – though right now, it feels better to be discussing something, anything, other than the pandemic, lockdown restrictions and vaccines. News of the Delta and other assorted variants make for distressing reading, even with the rollout of a multiplicity of vaccines and much of the populace having received their jab (though, the presence of anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers keeping the pandemic of life support remains an ever-present worry).

    Many artists on the P.U.P. now face having thiers cutoff unless they branch out into separate industries. Impatience with extended closures mandated by the Irish government’s directive to keep all indoor music events effectively cancelled. This was estimated to last no more than a fortnight. Now, nearly eighteen months on, live music in smaller venues remains illegal, with no roadmap for the event industry in sight. For many artists and creatives, ‘first to close, last to reopen’ has become a defining mantra of the Covid era.

    The results of this are manifold. It seems we are at the risk of losing much of what made the nightlife so exhilarating. The unique intoxication that rises not just from a few pints and a spliff but from the very of sociability and togetherness itself, of being in the company of one’s peers and engaging in a shared sense of communal euphoria and solace. Dublin’s streets on a weekend evening are as likely to be deserted as they usually are in the midweek. The possibility that many of us are beginning to forget that unique euphoric rush of fellowship brought on by  is now a horribly real one.

    Of course, it is slight exaggerration, at least in the Anglophone sphere, to call this the apocalypse in easy mode, and there are far more urgent problems at hand than the halting of live performance and msic events. There is also an idea circulating that, post-Covid, there will be a flowering of creativity comparable to that of the Renaissance, which itself came gradually about in the wake of the bubonic plague. A generalised reaffirmation of life may come about from so much isolation, so much togetheness relinquished.

    Suspended Animation

    It could be argued that lockdown is comparable to being in suspended animation. For many people, not just creatives, this has been a strange period of working from home and thereby taking it upon themselves to make a project happen. Dispiriting as the last year and a half has been, many creatives have demonstrated their endurance and the commitment to their art. Moreover, the technological advances of 2021 have permitted many artists to create and work unimpeded by limitations as studio time and costs. Nonetheless, this isn’t ideal either.

    Yet, we are alive. We have survived a pandemic and all its accompanying madness. I consider myself healthily cynical about most things, but I doubt I am naive for being thankful to be alive, with my loved ones still here and my work still invigorating me.

    It’s an overcast afternoon in early July of 2021. Gunmetal clouds lurk sluggishly overhead, the air heavy with the threat of rainfall. Overcast days in the city centre are nothing new or unusual, but for the last year they’d taken on a grimly hazardous feel. Even in summer, flurries of chill air can come blasting out of nowhere, as if to remind the average pedestrian of the universe’s innate precarity even at street level. The vague sense that perhaps one should not be out in broad daylight for too long was constantly hovering at the base of my skull.

    Being out of the city centre for large swathes of time had also rendered it slightly unfamiliar. The buildings that hovered above me seemed alien. I felt like I was passing through a town I’d no previous knowledge of, having to stop every few minutes to check my Google maps and see if I still had the right place – even though a year ago I could traverse multiple streets and backlanes without having to even look up sometimes. The ongoing operatic thrum of traffic and buskers, bike couriers and people generally getting on with their lives had all but ceased, save for a few meagre pockets of people also going about their business.

    Working to a Deadline

    After eighteen months, the album is more or less finished, though with some quite-necessary mixing still underway. Working to a deadline can be as good a motivator as any, and the focus has thus far been sustained toward that goal. As any muso worth their salt will tell you, a spirit of collaboration is key to ensuring any album is the best it can hope to be, and ‘Life on Earth’ is no different, boasting a sizable personnel on a very disparate plethora of instruments.

    And Paul, for one, welcomes the opportunity to be able to work in-studio again. His determination to see the album completed is heartening – as is his (ithin reason) refusal to be deterred by the pandemic and its attendant restrictions. I ask him what, if at all, effect the pandemic had on the albm’s production.

    “I think lockdown actually helped!” he laughs. “It allowed me to focus on one thing (i.e. writing and making a record) without any other distractions like pubs, parties and the need for new clothes, new hair, new shoes. When all the background noise was taken away, it allowed me to hear the music in my head. At the same time you know they say the whole world was in suspended animation and that created it’s own little creative zeitgeist. You plugged in or you dropped out completely!”

    Despite the relative freedom offered by advances in recording technology, enabling   most people to theoretically record, mix and finaise entire albums from the safety of their living rooms, this is no guarantee of a high quality finished product or even of quality control: “I need to come into a place like this in order to work,” he says, “because, otherwise, I wouldn’t structure it well enough, because even if if I was recording at home with all of my equipment set up, I still wouldn’t possess enough gauge on quality control, and therefore would never get anything finished.”

    “Much of the songs are more synth-pop, with some orchestral elements mixed in as well,” Paul tells me. The latter elements, he asserts, is largely the influence of the aforementioned and ever-prolific Aidan Casserly, the maestro behind such recent albums as ‘Incubus’ and ‘Ballads of Sorrow’. Aidan’s hand in co-writing “Be Yourself Girl” has proven vital to ‘Life on ‘Earth’s longevity.

    “I never got to do a full album with Aidan,” Paul clarifies. “Prior to that, we’d done little demos here and there, though I’d alway wanted to do something a little more substantial. This album really started with that song ‘Be Yourself Girl’, which Aidan added both the keyboard and sax to. From there, he hept sending me bits and pieces until eventually it began to take shape.”

    At the time of writing, Paul is currently in the promo phase of putting the album forth, doing the usual round of interviews and trying to see it gain airplay across as many platforms as possible. A Herculean task, some would argue, but also doubly complicated in that he has been trying to do so in the midst of a global pandemic as well. He is certainly far from alone in this.

    In that time, he’s also managed to amass a formidable crew of collaborators and other musicians to join him onstage when the big night finally rolls around. If the measure of a man lies in how his peers speak of him, there is no shortage of  hossannas being directed Paul’s way by his tribe. The aforementioned Keeley Moss is especially forthcoming in her praise of him, telling me: “Paul is a flamboyant force of melodic magic, who delivers a torch song like few others. There’s a lavish grandeur to his Art-Pop that brims with all the tasteful grace of a sonic connoisseur.”

    Meanwhile, Pheonuh Callan-Layzell, bassist and co-songwriter of heavy metal outfit Beyond the Cresent Moon, and Paul’s longtime friend and designer, tells me: “There’s a lot of creative symbiosis with what we do. Paul’s very aware of what he wants and how he wants to present his work, and he tends to be really spot-on with what he’s aiming for. He’s quite magical as well. I mean, the Paul that I know and the Paul that I see, whether on stage or in a music video, say, are to very different people, which is applicable to a lot of artists, I’d say. The Paul I’d chat to and the Paul in ‘show-mode’ if you like, are almost complete inversions of one another.”

    ‘Sebastian and the Dream’ Fame

    As a full-length album, ‘Life of Earth’ originally started production under the auspices of singer, composer, producer, electronica wunderkind and multi-instrumentalist Aidan Casserly, of ‘Sebastian and the Dream’ fame. Of Paul, Aidan tells me: “I’ve always seen Paul as a very unique individual and free spirit/thinker. I’ve only met a few people similar in my life and they always bring out great creative energy in creative people such as I. His humour is pitch perfect and generous and cutting when necessary. I think we may have met in a previous lifetime, but that’s another conversation!”

    If the two have a shared thematic concern, it is with the underdog, the outsider, and anyone generally unmoored from mainstream society, in particular the many upheavals experienced by the queer community and the often-seismic changes that Irish society has undergone in the last three decades. ‘Be Yourself Girl’ addresses such themes directly, insofar as, lyrically, it depicts the struggles of a young trans-woman coming to terms with the vagaries of an increasingly mercurial world. July saw the release of ‘Be Yourself Girl’, the first single off the album, but there is little time to be euphoric. In a seperate track, ‘A Better place’ lyrical approach and the album’s cover, Paul assumes the aloofly compassionate role of a guardian angel, assuring the listener that

    IF I COULD CHANGE THE WORLD
    you know I’d make it a safer place, for you

    As the title suggests, the song is a hymn to love at its most altruistic, and that the hope for a better world is not only possible, but also quite plausible. Despite his often-acidic wit, Paul’s music in fact comes from a place of deep compassion and empathy for such corners of the human experince, corners, that, despite the progress of even the last ten years, still remain sidelined. That sense of being sidelined is something Paul himself knows very well.

    If electro-pop could be deemed culturally subterranean in the contemporary Irish music scene, this is not to say it is not rich in its variety of acts. If it is treated at best as niche genre of oddity or, at worst as a target for critical ridicule, Paul will soon prove otherwise on both counts.

    Covid or not, the work can often feel neverending for most musicians, an endless round of recording, mixing, promo on both social media and regular media outlets (if you’re lucky, that is), trying to land a performance slot at any venue you care to name, as well as plugging the album before, during and after its release. Lack of media coverage, whether in Hot Press or in more mainstream publications, remains another hurdle, though, to Paul’s credit, he has embarked on an interview campaign with as many forums as he can. For his part, Paul has not shied away from this necessary evil. If anything, he has taken to it with a certain dogged gusto:

    “I just wonder how many singles get released every week, but every time you’re doing, you’re trying desperately to be heard along with everything else that’s been unleashed on the airwaves. And it’s been extra hard to grow an audience and excite some interest in your work with no gigs and venues. So basically, all you’ve got is radio and, I suppose, to a lesser extent, the livestream gigs that people are doing at home, although I’m not quite prepared for that at the moment.

    “This time around, putting something out there just feels in equal measure exciting and daunting. You ask yourself, in moments of doubt, is anyone going to be even vaguely interested? And then you realise, you have to make them interested, hence all this social media stuff. And it is very easy to do it that way, but then, of course, so is everyone else, and it’s a tough job. I’m in this first and foremost for the love of it, and the passion I had once before, that has been gobe for years, has been rekindled. I have been extending my pool of co-writers and collaborators, and i now have three or four different songwriters helping out.”

    It must be stressed that none of this is any mean feat. The last few months have seen the restrictions of Covid finally lifted nationwide and a hesitant return to normalcy after two years of lockdown, quarantine measures, and the months of seemingly interminable isolation and uncertainty that accompanied them.

    Paul manages to remain philosophical about the entire ordeal. “Covid seems to have brought people into communicating in a slightly different way,” he muses. “I’ve noticed people have been more open to collaborating than they might have been before. Some benefit has come out it, I’d say.”

    It is these same changes in communication and understanding on a wider social level in the years preceding the pandemic that similarly have influenced Paul’s return to music.

    While advances in music technology and methods have made the recording process comparatively easier when working in isolation, the roadblocks set in place by our inability to work together face-to-face has lessened such opportunities. This is before we even mention inflation, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and resultant food shortages that have occurred. To be able to see such a bleak period in human history through and to emerge with a fully-fledged work of art on one’s hands is testament to both one’s resilience, the indomitable will to endure, and perhaps even live again once the dust has settled.

    No Stranger to Tests of Character

    Yet Paul is no stranger to such haphazardly-inflicted tests of character. His personal history, a crucial spur to the overall composition and recording of ‘Life on Earth’, is riddled with such tests. Paul is a proud member of Dublin’s gay community and has been so from a very young age; the album serves as something of a songbook for the gay experience as Paul knows it, contemplating the length and breadth of social change that has occured within Irish society over the last two decades.

    After singing at family gatherings and being encouraged to sing his local choir upon his discovery that he had effortlessly perfect pitch, Paul turned his musical attentions to guitar and piano before eventually joining up with John Butler, with whom he formed the electronic synthpop duo BiaZarre. Their first single ‘A Better Place/The Colour of Rain’, recorded in Windmill Lane, was released as a double A-side in 1989. “It did well on the Irish airwaves for most that year,” Paul recalls. “Or, at least, it was on the radio every day for at least a month. We played gigs in Sides DC, Blondes on Leeson Street. We were very influenced by synthpop, all that New Romantic styliings, which, little we realise at the time, was starting to go out of fashion.”

    As it turns out, the first of that single, ‘A Better Place’ is making something of a comeback along with its maker: it has received a full reimagining and recording on ‘Life on Earth’. There is a poignancy to this development, however; John Butler’s untimely death in 1998 is what the song pays ultimate tribute to.

    Much more than just a collection of songs, the album stands as a social document,

    Artifice has long been a part of Paul’s aesthetic and personal philosophy. While mostly an aesthetic choice, it was also in part a consciously-developed survival and defense mechanism The album, therefore, is coming thirty-plus years after he left music behind and when attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people began to undergo quite the seismic sea change, from decriminalisation to eventual acceptance in the form of the 2015 Marriage Equality Referendum, which saw same-sex marriage fully legalised within the Republic. In an op-ed for Northern Irish political weblog Slugger O’ Toole, written several days after that historical day, Paul writes:

    Those I had held in check for at least a couple of decades came freely and easily. Without any sobbing. They were simply tears of relief. And joy. It was now safe to cry. What had once seemed impossible was finally and unarguably here. Yet taking it all in was practically impossible… After a dirty tricks campaign against equality that must surely have reminded every LGBT person in the land of both the latent, and the blatant, homophobia that had followed several audible paces behind them through their lives, honesty and decency had won. The people of Ireland had seen through the thick smog of lies, distractions and fear mongering to the dawn of a new day.

    This is not to say equality for queer people has been fully achieved: at the time of writing, the homophobic double-murder of Aidan Moffitt and Michael Snee in Sligo in mid-April still confounds the nation. Such an act of brutality serves as an unfortunately harsh reminder that small, if insidious, pockets of ignorance continue to blight Ireland’s supposedly enlightened socio-cultural landscape. Renewed calls for a comprehensive Hate Crime legislation have been made by organisations such as LGBT Ireland in the wake of the murders.

    Violent Homophobia in ’80s Ireland

    For Paul, the spectre of overt, violent homophobia, so prevalent and normalised in Ireland throughout the ’80s when he first came of age, seems to once again rear its head, as if in a gesture of grotesque reminding: I haven’t gone away, you know.

    In the aforementioned article, Paul writes: ‘Back then, the fight for expression of identity was a huge battle that I personally had waged upon my world and theirs. The heterosexuals. The grand majority. Aged seventeen I was now illegal but I wore my queerness like a suit of armour. Making myself highly visible and inscrutable all in one smart move. And it worked for me. But only up to a point. One had to run the gauntlet of a very real series of dangers, threats and annoyances. People mumbled discreetly about the young man [Declan Flynn, who was gay-bashed to death in Fairviw Park in September of 1982] who had been beaten to death in a park just a few years before. Ireland was a place entrenched in a deep mire of homophobia and gay love truly was consigned to the shadows. Love was not fit for public consumption, if you were queer.’

    This same darkness, very real and very destructive, is one he wishes to stand against with ‘Life on Earth’. Paul remembers a time when the process of coming-out was (and for many, remains), a deeply painful experience; when the homophobic stigma endured by gay men of his generation was the norm. Ireland in the late ’80s was a far cry from the world of today where the first openly gay Taoiseach was elected into office and rainbow flags adorn virtually every shop front during Pride month.

    The shame of being fundamentally unloveable over a perceived sense of difference is quite a universal one, but one felt acutely by many LGBTQ+ people, past and present. Arguably, it is actively manufactured by a society still slowly unloosening itself from the socially conservative trappings of the Church.

    It must be noted at the time that homosexual activity remained illegal in Ireland. Reprehensible as its existence may seem to the contemporary mind, the infamous the Offences against the Person Act, 1861 (“the 1861 Act”) and the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885 (“the 1885 Act”) threatened a life sentence of penal servitude and a decade-long sentence of same respectively (itself an outdated concept and judicial practise even by late twentieth-century standards) for what each referred to as acts of ‘buggery’.

    By the mid-80s, according to Paul, these acts of legislation were not very effectively enforced. Speaking on the Extraordinary Souls podcast, hosted by Mark Haslam, he elaborates: “When I first started going to bars, they would have been raided by the guards and so forth. So men were not supposed to be having sex with men. The act was considered to be illegal on the statute books. That said, I don’t think the law was enacted very strongly. But… for a long time, myself and my friends were technically illegal by our very existence. At least, what we were doing and the gatherings we had were, technically speaking, illegal, because of our desire for one another. It’s simply another version of the many ways society moulds and shapes sexuality.”

    Conversely, he also was never a stranger to that subterranean world that arose in covertly defiant response to the aforementioned laws: a world where queer people could mix and mingle freely, without fear. Moving through Dublin in the mid-80s, a city and era both markedly different to now in terms of attitudes to queer people, he discovered it was also home to a vibrant-if-underground gay scene, with queer-friendly nightspots such as Flickers, Sides DC and the George [the former two now long since gone]. Paul described such a scene as: “A tiny little world of lingering stares of furtive glances. Apparently, I was home. I had no idea what to make of my new home, but there I was, regardless.”

    Velvet Rage

    In his fascinating 2005 book The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World, clinical psychologist Alan Downs, himself an openly gay man, writes: “One cannot be around gay men without noticing that we are a wonderful and wounded lot. Beneath our complex layers lies a deeper secret that covertly corrodes our lives. The seeds of this secret were not planted by us, but by a world that didn’t understand us, wanted to change us, and at times, was fiercely hostile to us.”

    Paul knows this hostility, which, as Downs points out, was and remains systemically enshrined across much of the western world.  As with many an artist before him, whether gay or straight, Paul’s own wounds feed into his work. Shame and pride go hand in hand for him, but it is not simply limited to his own experience. His track “Everything I Loved I Lost (That Day)” is a paean to his his long-dead father who, Paul movingly avers, did everything he could to ensure his children grew up knowing they were loved.

    “My dad was consigned to a 1940s industrial school in Glasnevin,” he tells me, “and only after he died did we discover the extent of his physical and psychological and other trials, simply because he was a poor child with no parents or guardians. Instead of turning his heart to stone, my father channeled all his terror and rage into ferociously loving and protecting his family. His heart turned to gold. Having lost both of his parents by the age of seven or eight his greatest fear was not being there for his children. And he always was. He stayed young both inside and outside and died swiftly without any fanfare and with tremendous dignity. I think he knew very well what it was to suffer adversity from all sides, but to keep going in the hope of a better day.”

    This same desire to keep hope ever-enkindled and passed on to any and all who need it is one of the chief driving forces behind the album; at the same time, the wounds it seeks to remedy are rarely ever so easily healed. I am reminded of a line in a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, No Worst, There Is None, that I think applies to this question:

    O the mind has mountains, mountains of fall:
    Frightful, sheer, no man fathomed:
    May hold them cheap who never hung there.

    Essentially, it’s very easy to be cavalier, dismissive or even outright contemptuous of someone’s perceived vulnerability (“may hold them cheap”), especially if one has never undergone or been made aware of the other person’s struggle. Whether grief or worry or depression or extreme anxiety (“mind has mountains”), an inevitable toll is taken upon one’s emotional state, in turn affecting how they interact with the world.

    Returning to Downs, he clarifies his point by saying: “Velvet rage is the deep and abiding anger that results from growing up in an environment when I learn that who I am as a gay person is unacceptable, perhaps even unlovable. This anger pushes me at times to overcompensate and try to earn love and acceptance by being more, better, beautiful, more sexy – in short, to become something I believe will make me more acceptable and loved.”

    With ‘Life on Earth’, however, Paul will see the wounds caused and exaserbated by such rage finally overcome. My only hope is that it is the beginning of something better.

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    Feature Image Image: Billy Cahill

  • Ecstasy of Truth Finally Spoken

    Kevin Higgins’s sixth poetry collection under the sardonic title Ecstatic starts with a dedication to the recently married Julian and Stella Assange, and this initial gesture is a perfect set-up for the poetic world we are about to enter.

    Prepare to be disillusioned, experience embarrassment for your government, mourn the death of journalism (and common sense at large), only to get to the core of the human condition and be inspired to choose love over gold, fear and power.

    Ecstatic is your reality check and a test to face the truth, however ugly, without a flinch. Just like a wedding ceremony in a London high-security prison, in Higgins’s poems our life becomes a celebration of humour, devotion and the beautiful mundane in confinement of global politics and oppressive social circumstances.

    The collection opens with the figurative lines: ‘The dread of being together / forcing us back to sleep’. And from there we are continuously forced to wake up and examine the world, look attentively at things that disconnect us, even if it is painful.

    This book is asking the reader to question not just their biased views, but the nature of thinking itself.

    Kevin Higgins is the Daniel Kahneman of poetry, human behavior and judgement are scrutinized through the lens of his uncompromising language. Sharp as a razorblade, not a line missing, his poems are full of what could be idiomatic phrases but are actually invented by the author: ‘no one hates Holocaust denial more / than the old woman who runs a bed and breakfast / five miles from Auschwitz.’

    These harsh truths could be overheard in an honest conversation between two old friends in a local pub, but instead they are now made available to a large audience of readers. We are dealing with the author brave and authentic enough to balance on the edge and take the risks to preserve the integrity of true art, so rare in our conformist times.

    Occasionally, it leaves you wondering if the expressions so easily coined all throughout the collection have always been part of colloquial speech, which might be the highest achievement for a poet. Being so close to the vernacular, that at times their voice is hardly distinguishable from that of the people.

    That being said, while perfectly attuned to the national discourse, Kevin’s poetry remains culturally multi-layered and intellectually challenging, often metaphysical. With the focus on Higgins’s signature ruthless satire, this collection will make you laugh, bitterly and loudly, and you will hate yourself for it.

    Immune to inertia, his wit will keep you on your toes. From absurdist poems verging on the surrealist aesthetic (‘Not time yet / to commit suicide again…’) to the beautifully shameless and staggeringly funny erotica (‘Her spine is a repossessed grand piano / you still play to yourself in your sleep’), this eclectic collection covers a surprisingly broad range of subjects. Its structure develops from the specific to the general, as an extensive metaphor for inductive reasoning.

    We are allowed to take a peek at images of personal history, masterfully conveyed childhood memories in Coventry, 1973; share private yet universal grief for lost friendships; embrace the inevitability of aging and sickness; and tenderly reflect on how our lovemaking changes as we grow older.

    Via the domesticity made precious and exhilarating, this collection teaches us to be vulnerable and aware of how fragile we are and how little time we have left.

    What gives it a special depth are incredibly lyrical poems with the mental imagery of lungs and breath, trees and leaves. Together they create an almost therapeutic effect, like a blues song that helps relieve emotional tension.

    This sublime landscape of a rich individual inner experience comes in stark contrast to the social and environmental issues explored further on, and the entire poetic impulse of the book erupts into an anti-war, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial sequence concluding with a merciless poem called ‘Past’ that can be read to relate to both a particular life and the chronicle of humanity.

    As a poet, on a personal and societal level Higgins is fighting the battle that can’t be won, and he knows it. Nonetheless, this is his job and Kevin proceeds with courage and self-irony to expose hypocrisy in ourselves and our communities.

    In ‘Serial Killer Dies’ we are once again reminded of the corrupt nature of any government and our suicidal tendency to let the psychopaths in power decide our destiny; there is no hesitation in it to call things what they are.

    Many poignant lines from other poems will stuck with the reader for long and will be widely quoted without doubt, such as ‘someone dies of politically necessary starvation’, or the tragically accurate commentary on the George Nkencho’s resonating case: ‘coming at Gardai with a chemical imbalance, / what some people are calling a machete / and a totally inappropriate post code…’.

    For me, as a Russian-born Irish resident, who writes in English, Ecstatic offered consolation and understanding, as well as leading me to acceptance of the familiar world crumbling down time and time again.

    I spent my childhood on Coventry Street in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), which is no longer twinned with the English city over the current Russian invasion of Ukraine.

    Now that those links of solidarity are gone due to the psychotic unjustified actions of one man (and criminal complicity of others), severing an eighty-year connection of two hero cities heavily bombed during the Second World War along with thousands of innocent Ukrainian lives, Kevin Higgins’ sixth collection emphasizes even more that there is so much in common between ordinary people of different nationalities and such an unthinkable abyss between us and the ruling class.

    The lies and agendas we are buying into, the false narratives and propaganda imposed on us are always a mass product, whereas ‘Truth is a paper-cut / no one but you knows is there.’

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  • Musician of the Month: Sebastian Reynolds

    I have been passionate about music from a very young age. I felt an urge to play the saxophone thanks to the theme from The Pink Panther. Unfortunately, a four-year-old can’t hold let alone play the sax, but it turned out that the recorder has the same basic fingering as the sax. So I diligently turned up to lunchtime recorder lessons throughout primary school until I was rewarded with a sax on my twelfth birthday.

    I played the usual gamut of classics in the school orchestra and wind band but it was really the formative tinkering in the music rooms after hours with equally curious friends with a nascent interest in Brit Pop of the day that really creatively fired up.

    I was part of the generation who started their teenage interest with Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Suede et al, but then came into contact with the weirded side of things when Radiohead brought out Kid A. What an important record that turned out to be in terms of bringing whole new genres of music to a new generation of music lovers.

    I’ve played in bands since my teenage years, inspired by Jonny Greenwood and his weird noise making.

    I always felt like I had to be in a band, I never had a clear role model for the kind of artist that I am now, or found a trajectory for how to become a solo act, which I’ve only come to in recent years.

    For my solo work I’ve drawn on material that goes all the way back to when I was teenager. The opening track Amoniker from my EP The Universe Remembers is named after the band I was in when I was seventeen. It is based on samples from a cassette demo me and my band mate Nick made back in 2000.

    The title track of my EP ‘Nihilism is Pointless’ features samples from a cassette recording of our first Amoniker gig in the suburbs of Oxford:

    I had the idea for ‘HAL’s Lament’ – a reference HAL from Space Odyssey – in this form of a musical track when I was nineteen years old.

    And I also came up with the original piano motif that eventually formed the basis for my piece Holy Island when I was a teenager.

    There are other references, ideas and samples from my early years that I will continue to draw on. The facility to preserve sound over decades is a truly magical phenomena, and it’s so cool to have twenty years-worth of musical exploration and ideas to be able to draw on for inspiration.

    Conversely my recent EP Athletics features material that I made from scratch in the last few months. In general, I have such a large catalogue of material to draw from that I can leave tracks to one side and revisit them at a later date, which is a great luxury.

    There’s nothing more stressful than making something at the last minute and having to commit to it being finished and ready for mastering and release. The track ‘Hammering’ from Athletics EP was completed as I was sending off for mastering, though I think it turned out ok in the end!

    Talking of long-standing influences, since early childhood I was brought up by my dad with a passion for sports and athletics, particularly running.

    The Athletics EP is the first of my releases that has been directly inspired by this passion. I happened to see the great Ugandan runner Joshua Cheptegei break the 5000m world record at the Monaco Diamond League in August 2020. Sadly I was watching it on TV; if only I’d been there in person!

    Joshua Kiprui Cheptegei at the 2014 World Junior Championships in Athletics

    The excitement and surprise in the commentators’ voices was as remarkable as the run itself. No one had any idea that Joshua was going to give it a go that night, let alone pull it off.

    I channelled this energy into my track ‘Cheptegei’, and I’m very grateful that the commentators Steve Cram and Tim Hutchings gave me their permission to use the samples from their commentary.

    Other influences and inspirations for me have been on the sadder end of the spectrum. My mother lost her battle with cancer in 2016, and I sit typing this article at her old desk and chair. Her incredible being and courageous passing has inspired a great deal of my work, including this piece: ‘My Mother Was The Wind’.

    The other track I released this with, ’Heartbeat’, is dedicated to my son Noah, who was born asleep in July 2020. Heartbeat features the sound of Noah’s heartbeat recorded in the womb during a check-up. It is shared with love and solidarity to all who have suffered this heartbreak, and with thanks to the medical staff and our friends and family who gave us their love and strength through the grieving process.

    My recent single ’Crows’ is a celebration of my love for retro rave electronica, acts such as Chemical Brothers and Broadcast. It really lit a fire in me for the more upbeat end of electronica in my teenage years.

    Hazy memories of seeing the Chemical Brothers at Glastonbury fused with an element of live instrumentation inspired by the likes of Battles, who I caught relatively early on at Truck Festival. Those were the days!

    I used to perform with a couple of great electronic acts from Oxford where I’m from, shout out to Keyboard Choir and The Evenings. I’m getting misty-eyed!

    Aside from this string of solo EPs and singles, I’ve also worked on commissions for original scores for dance company par excellence Neon Dance. We worked together on Mahajanaka Dance Drama, an Anglo-Thai collab with Thai dancers and musicians.

    The show toured the UK and I released two EPs of material from the show. The track Mahajanaka seemed to really strike a chord with people, and the music video is made with footage that came out of our research trip to Thailand.

    I also worked on the stage show Puzzle Creature with Neon Dance:

    And have performed and collaborated with the German musicians Alex Stolze (violin) and Anne Müller (cello) as Solo Collective. We released two records together via Alex’s Nonostar Records, and have more in the pipeline!

    In terms of my next solo releases I have a bunch of amazing remixes and reworked tracks from the Athletics EP, and am planning to release my debut album Canary in 2023. Keep an eye on my website: www.sebastianreynolds.co.uk

    Athletics EP out now on Faith & Industry

    Feature Image of Sebastian Reynolds by Ed Nix.

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  • Poetry: Haley Hodges

    Kyrie 

    Rotten fruit, rotten root. Hands up
    Don’t shoot. Kyrie eleison.
    By the waters of Columbine, of
    Blacksburg, of Newtown, by the
    Waters of Parkland and Uvalde,
    There I sat down beneath my desk
    (Don’t shoot) to weep.
    Christe eleison. My soul to take.
    Kyrie eleison. My soul to keep.

    Gloria 

    There is no
    No utterable Gloria
    In excelsis Deo—there is
    Only the unutterable.
    There is He, qui tollis
    Peccata mundi, but also
    He that brings them, and
    Brings them so
    Unutterably.

    Credo  

    “Of all things visible and invisible
    The rifle is king. I believe
    In one gun, in One Gun Almighty.
    How fast can you run?” Thus
    Spake Death, and these, even
    These are the conditions in which
    Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum.

    Sanctus 

    Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus
    Dominus Deus Sabaoth!
    And precious in His sight the
    Little children He bid come.
    Stop of the mouths of your
    War machines this hour—
    Strike them dumb. Let
    Heaven and earth be full
    Of their silence, lest every
    Hosanna perish in violence.

    Agnus Dei

    Agnus Dei, who takes away
    The sin of the world, what
    Can it profit the Most High
    If you take our sin but leave us
    To die? Miserere nobis. Lord
    Of the cellar, (hide!) Lord
    Of the attic, let it be mercy
    Falling semi-automatic.

    Dona

    Dona nobis pacem.
    Lead us beside quiet
    Waters, no more to bury
    Our sons and our daughters.
    Peace. Grant us ceasefire.
    Grant us peace.

    Feature Image: A memorial set up outside Robb Elementary school for the victims of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, US.

  • Writing Against the Grain

    This is the first of two articles occasioned by the recent publication of Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland 2: A Variety of Voices, edited by Mark O’Brien & Felix M. Larkin and published by the Four Court Press in Dublin. Here, Frank Armstrong reviews the first instalment in this illuminating study, Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth Century Ireland: Writing Against the Grain (2014) edited by the same authors.

    In their introduction to the first volume the editors stress the importance of what were often minority publications – generally with brief lifespans – to cultural and political developments in the Irish State and beyond; describing them as ‘the fulcrum on which the intellectual foundations of Irish society moved – slowly, but irrevocably.’ Their contents often anticipated ideas and movements that would go on to gain greater popular adherence, and their varied approaches remain an inspiration to contemporary journalists.

    Movable Type.

    “More formidable than a thousand bayonets”

    Most of those living through a Print Revolution in Europe after 1450 were unlikely to have been awake to seismic changes occurring in how information was being distributed and absorbed. Johannes Gutenberg’s invention, the first of its kind in Europe, as well as increased availability of paper, foregrounded the Renaissance and Reformation; increasing literacy levels and consolidating a few dominant vernacular languages through new literary forms, especially the novel and then, increasingly, newspapers, magazines and periodicals.

    From as early as the seventeenth century newspapers, magazines and periodicals were being published. A newspaper is printed matter acknowledging – unlike haughty books – its obsolescence ‘on the morrow of its publication’[i], as Benedict Anderson put it. Ireland’s first newspaper, devoted to foreign affairs and political intelligence, The News-Letter was published in Dublin in 1685.

    By the early nineteenth, Napoleon described a journalist as ‘a grumbler, a censurer, a giver of advice, a regent of sovereigns, a tutor of nations,’ concluding that ‘four hostile newspapers are more formidable than a thousand bayonets.’ Newspapers were crucial to directing or even forging collective identities such as the nation.

    Unsurprisingly, therefore, the powerful – whether state bureaucracies or dominant corporations – have long sought to control their offerings, and by extension journalism itself, through the carrot of patronage and advertising, and the stick of censorship and outright suppression.

    Traditional newspapers are also tangible products to be sold. Thus, proprietors stimulate demand especially through headlines demanding attention. The daily cry of the newspaper boy summoned a new scare or disaster – yellow journalism has long antecedents – downplaying or ignoring certain facts, while amplifying or even inventing others; often preying on fears and prejudices, just as click bait does today.

    Becoming a Thing

    Alongside meretriciousness and outright propaganda journalism provides an opportunity for visionary – or delusional depending on your outlook – editors and writers who believe in the capacity of collections of regularly published print materials – generally containing short form articles aimed at the general public – ‘to speak truth to power’, ‘move hearts and minds’ and expose hypocrisy and corruption.

    This form of idealistic journalism most frequently appears in magazines or periodicals that may succeed in eschewing obsolescence, even if it is ‘printed on lavatory paper with ink made of soot’, as Sean O’Faolain the former editor of the Bell memorably described the low-cost approach of his publishers.

    With a longer shelf life, the magazine or periodical falls somewhere between the immediacy of the contents of newspapers and the greater durability of ideas contained within books. As Joe Breen puts in his article on Hot Press: ‘One of the great strengths of periodicals is that by operating outside the routines and demands of 24/7 news-flow, they are afforded the space and grace to react thoughtfully to events.’

    To succeed, such publications usually require the guiding hand of a charismatic, single-minded and tireless personality as editor. The social historian Edward Hyams once observed how:

    When a journal is started, a number of minds combine under the dominion of one, the editor’s, to bring it into existence … What the editor and his colleagues have to do is contrive to make such disparate materials as news, views, fiction, criticism, poetry, even competitive word-games, jell into coherence … if this be done successfully then, after… a certain number of issues, the new paper takes on a quality, which is indefinable, and which is apparent, for example, in a work of art or well-designed machine … At that point the paper, to exaggerate a little, becomes a thing…

    Thus, in their introduction to the first volume of Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth Century Ireland the editors observe of their subject matters covered: ‘The most obvious common feature is the omnipresence within each of them of a dominant personality, or two – as editor and/or proprietor.’ The problem with such an approach is that if the guiding hand is lost these publications may struggle to endure.

    A Docile Lot

    Michael O’Toole observed that up to the 1960s in Ireland journalists had been ‘a docile lot, anxious to please the proprietor, the advertiser, the prelate, the statesman’. This era was, he argued, characterised by ‘an unhealthy willingness to accept the prepared statement, the prepared speech, and the handout without demanding the opportunity of asking any searching questions by way of follow-up.’ The fundamental defect of Irish journalism during this time was, he noted, ‘its failure to apply critical analysis to practically any aspect of Irish life.’

    Terence Brown was harsher still, noting that ‘almost all Irish journalism in the period had contented itself with the reportage of events and the propagandist reiteration of the familiar terms of Irish political and cultural debate until these categories became mere counters and slogans often remote from actualities’. While in 1935, the novelist Frank O’Connor declared that Irish daily newspapers were ‘intolerably dull’, were ‘not trying to educate the public’, and ‘trying to camouflage reality.’

    The editors of Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth Century Ireland, however, assemble those rare, eccentric, publications ‘providing an outlet for those writing against the grain of mainstream Irish society’, who ‘made freedom of expression a reality’ and created a ‘space for diversity of opinion’.

    Importantly, they argue that ‘the influence they had via that readership was entirely disproportionate to their circulation levels and profits, if any. They were the fulcrum on which the intellectual foundations of Irish society moved – slowly, but irrevocably.’

    Prior to the Irish Revolution ultimately led, as Kevin O’Higgins memorably put it by ‘the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution’ an ideological ferment was articulated through a variety of seminal publications. Certain contemporary political strands can be traced to the twilight of the British administration in Ireland. At that point journalism was characterised by anything but the grey philistinism of the post-independence era.

    Articles by Colum Kenny, Regina Uí Chollatáin, Patrick Maume, Sonja Tiernan, James Curry and Ian Kenneally in this volume consider Sinn Féin, the United Irishman and others under Arthur Griffith’s editorship, Irish language publications such An Claidheamh Soluis edited by Eoin MacNeill, D.P. Moran’s The Leader that lasted until the early 1970s, the suffragette Irish Citizen, primarily edited by Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, and James Connolly’s The Worker.

    Finally, there is The Irish Bulletin, a publication produced by the first Dáil, offering what might be described as well-intentioned propaganda – insofar as its (truthful) contents was aimed at a particular readership and served a clear strategic purpose.

    Arthur Griffith (right) with Michael Collins.

    Arthur Griffith

    James Joyce ‘said that the United Irishman was the only paper in Dublin worth reading, and in fact, he used to read it every week.’ Griffith, according to Joyce:

    was the first person in Ireland to revive the separatist idea on modern lines … A great deal of his programme perhaps is absurd but at least it tries to inaugurate some commercial life in Ireland … what I object to most of all in the paper [Sinn Féin] is it is educating the people of Ireland on the old pap of racial hatred whereas anyone can see that if the Irish question exists, it exists for the Irish proletariat chiefly

    Mischievously, Joyce had a character in Ulysses claim that Bloom ‘gave the idea for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper.

    Undoubtedly, Griffith was a formative influence on Irish nationalism, and it is indicative that his paper incubated the most enduring political movement – Sinn Féin (ourselves) – on this island. This combined, at times uneasily – hence the splits – a somewhat fuzzy ethnic nationalism with a go-it-alone petit-bourgeois mentality, alongside a visceral anti-colonialism that eschewed strict ideology.

    Griffith was a bundle of contradictions. A great writer – ‘an inspired journalist who combined style and temper in a way no one else could match’ according to F.S.L. Lyons – disinterested in literature that did not strengthen the nationalist outlook. Thus, he disdained Synge’s Playboy of the Western World that dared to question certain nationalist orthodoxies.

    Moreover, Griffith wrote sympathetically about the plight of colonised Africans, while excusing his hero John Mitchel’s reactionary views on slavery. His anti-Jewish statements leave him open to a charge of antisemitism, and even proto-fascism, yet he argued in favour of a Zionist state in Israel.

    Despite highlighting poverty, Griffith was antagonistic towards international socialism, suspecting British trade unions of weakening nationalist statements. If he had lived into the 1920s, however, it is questionable whether he would have supported the free trade policies of the first Cumann na nGhaedhal administration.

    James Connolly

    Challenging Authority

    The more radical political strains that emerged at this time were less evident in the post-independence period. Nonetheless, they provided a lasting body of opinions that served as an inspiration for future movements: the fulcrums “on which the intellectual foundations of Irish society moved – slowly, but irrevocably.”

    According to Sonja Tiernan the suffragist Irish Citizen was ‘edited by men [notably Francis Sheehy-Skeffington] so that women could devote their energies to political campaigns’. It combined feminism with a radical pacifism that put it at odds with, among others, Emmeline Pankhurst (though not her daughter Sylvia) who supported the British government’s recruitment drive.

    Francis’s wife Hannah pointed to the sacrifice of mothers who had to ‘deliver up the sons they bore in agony to a bloody death in a quarrel of which they know not the why or the wherefore, on the particular side their Government has chosen for the moment.’

    Francis organised anti-military meetings in Dublin, at which he argued that the leader of the main nationalist party in Westminster, John Redmond, simply ‘sold Irish people to the British army for nothing’ Recalling the old nationalist cry of England’s difficulty being Ireland’s opportunity, on 23 May 1915 he declared ‘Anything that smashes and weakens England’s domination of the seas is good for Ireland. Germany has never done us any harm. The only power that has ever done us any harm is England.’

    He would be arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act, and was ultimately murdered by a deranged British officer during the 1916 Rising.

    Another revolutionary editor of this period was one of the leaders of the 1916 Rising itself, James Connolly, who would later rage about how he had been the editor of ‘the only paper in the United Kingdom to suffer an invasion of a military party with fixed bayonets and to have the essential parts of its printing machine stolen in defence of freedom and civilisation.

    According to James Curry his ‘Irish Worker was a crusading paper of vitality that adopted a forcefully direct journalistic style to ensure readers understood its stance at all times’.

    The industrialist William Martin Murphy – apparently ‘the most foul and viscous blackguard that ever polluted any country’ – was regularly in its crosshairs.

    In response to alleged German atrocities, Connolly instead concerned himself with those perpetrated by ‘capitalist barbarians’ closer to home, arguing that the Dublin housing crisis was destined to be forgotten ‘amid the clash of arms, and the spectacular magnificence of international war’.

    In his article ‘The Huns in Ireland’, which led to the paper’s suppression, he argued:

    The steadily increasing cost of the necessaries of life since the war began brings home to the mind of even the most unreflective amongst us, the utterly heartless nature of the capitalist class … The enemy is within our gates. We need fear no Hun from across the waters of the North Sea.

    It is notable that James Connolly’s anti-war rhetoric is recalled by Irish activists today.

    A group of Black and Tans and Auxiliaries outside the London and North Western Hotel in Dublin following an attack by the IRA, April 1921

    The Irish Bulletin

    To achieve independence the government of the first Dáil dedicated significant efforts to garnering sympathy from an international, including moderate British, audience by highlighting the atrocities committed by British forces: the dreaded Black and Tans and Auxiliaries. This was achieved primarily through an underground publication: The Irish Bulletin, 1919-21, which apparently caused consternation in British government ranks. Thus, in Parliament, the chief secretary for Ireland, Hamar Greenwood, claimed that ‘critics were being duped by a mendacious Irish periodical’

    Unsurprisingly perhaps, Arthur Griffith was active in its early days, but Desmond FitzGerald became a guiding influence thereafter. Its power lay in its credibility. Ernest Blythe recalled how FitzGerald:

    resisted the pressure to which he was constantly subjected from most quarters in favour of painting outrages by British forces in a blacker hue than was justified by the facts …. The result of this attitude and the personal impression that he made was that independent foreign pressmen who admired and trusted him did ten times as much to make Ireland’s case known throughout the world as would have been done if the advocates of heavy expenditure had their way or if a less transparently honest man had been in charge of propaganda.

    It goes to show that facts can speak for themselves, and that exaggeration may only diminishes a publication’s credibility.

    Taste for Comedy

    Dublin Opinion (1922-68) styled its humour the ‘safety vale of a nation’. Its relative success attests to an enduring appetite for humorous takes on serious political events, such as we still see today most obviously in publications such as Waterford Whisperers. This apparently timeless Irish tendency to laugh at absurdities on the political stage is, however, often to the exclusion of more serious assessments. Thus, Felix M. Larkin argues that Dublin Opinion‘s humour ‘concentrated on the political to the detriment of the social and economic.’

    Nevertheless, there is some truth to the couplet carried in early issues: ‘Not seldom lurks the sage’s cap and gown / Beneath the motley costume of the clown’.

    Dublin Opinion played an important role in puncturing the reputation of Eamon de Valera, scorning his ‘professed belief that he had a unique insight into what the people of Ireland wanted.’

    Larkin argues that the publication ‘probably saved proportional representation in 1959, and it inspired T.K. Whitaker to write his seminal ‘Grey Book.’

    The renowned civil servant T.K. Whitaker said that he was impelled to undertake his famous white paper the First Programme for Economic Expansion in response to the cover cartoon in the September 1957 edition of Dublin Opinion in which the young female figure of Ireland instructs a fortune teller, peering into a crystal ball: ‘Get to work! They’re saying I have no future.’

    It also, arguably, exhibited a healthy suspicion of farmers, who are ‘seen filling out forms for grants… duping government inspectors, joining myriad associations to protect their interests, smuggling cattle across the border with Northern Ireland and constantly complaining.’

    The Bell

    Probably the most important publication of the post-War period in terms of its inspiration to future journalists was The Bell, under Sean O’Faolain as editor.

    Ironically funded in part by an investment by sweepstakes millionaire Joe McGrath, it was inspired by leftist UK publications that emphasised the importance of factual reporting. O’Faolain opined that ‘Generalisation (to make one) is like prophecy, the most egregious form of error, and abstractions are the luxury of people who enjoy befuddling themselves methodically’. Contemporary editors are still inclined to advise journalists “to show it, don’t tell it.”

    Covering generally overlooked themes such as the ongoing challenge of tuberculosis, many of its articles were created, according to O’Faolain, by ‘somebody [who] had to out with a notebook and listen, and encourage and make a record. The poor would for ever remain silent if people did not, in this way, wrench speech out of them’

    O’Faolain also bemoaned an enduring disconnect between academia and the general public: ‘with only one or two honourable exceptions our professors never open their mouths in public.’

    Mark O’Brien concludes that it ‘played a central role in prompting journalism to develop beyond the confines of party affiliation’, an endeavour ‘taken up with gusto by the Irish Times  in the early 1960s’, especially through Michael Viney.

    Sean O’Faolain

    Hibernia

    According to Brian Trench under John Mulcahy Hibernia, became a strong presence in Irish media as an independent, frequently dissenting voice. Indeed, ‘by 1973 it was already carrying articles alleging conflicts of interest and possible corruption in relation to the activities of local politicians in the Greater Dublin area.

    The magazine became a platform for dissenters such as Raymond Crotty, Desmond Fennell, Ernest Blythe and Proinsias Mac Aonghusa.

    Terry Kelleher a Hibernia journalist between 1970-75 recalls Mulchay’s ‘questioning approach to everything and everyone, but especially towards those in a position of authority. Every institution, whether it be a political party or financial grouping, artistic clique or academic ivory tower, all must be challenged, their continued existence questioned.’

    The magazine gave particular attention to stories of’ bad planning, illegal property development, councillors’ conflicts of interests and related issues,’ as well as the mistreatment of prisoners by the Royal Ulster Constabulary at a point when an anti-Republican Revisionism was increasingly prevalent in Irish intellectual circles.

    Hibernia went where most newspapers dared not go, at one point revealing that a sitting member of the Special Criminal Court was falling asleep on the job. According to Trench, ‘Irish Times journalists Peter Murtagh and Joe Joyce later dealt with this incident … though they omitted to mention that their own newspaper – like the other dailies – chose not to refer to what was happening in front of them.’

    Mulcahy’s unschooled approach of relying on tip offs brought criticism. Vincent Browne claimed the publication had ‘a style that may lack the investigative edge required by a serious paper.’

    However, when the publication closed after one libel action too many, Pat Smyllie wrote in the Irish Times that ‘whether you liked it some weeks or not, it was brave, searching, cheeky outrageous but … essential to many of us’. He noted that it sometimes had to pay the price in court for uncovering ‘double dealing’.

    According to Niall Kiely the magazine was a ‘must-read’ for journalists in the mainstream media: it was a source of information and perspective not found elsewhere.’

    Another legacy, argues Trench is the ‘almost universally cynical tone of the anonymous journalism in The Phoenix may be considered an unfortunate and partial legacy of Hibernia.’ However, given the endemic corruption of the period, and beyond, and an apparent acquiescence to this in the mainstream media, such cynicism might be forgiven.

    Hot Press Magazine

    Rock n’ Roll

    Jon Street notes that ‘music plays a part in our constitution as moral beings and in our constitution as political ones. In responding to and in evaluating music we do not just give expression to our tastes, but to our political values and ideas. Music is, to this extent, part of the way we think politically.’

    According to Diarmuid Ferriter the value of Hot Press lay in ‘its value lies in the extent to which it highlighted the burgeoning youth culture of the era as well as new musical departures and a determination to embrace international influences.’

    Its remarkably durable editor, Niall Stokes acknowledged that 1977 – according to Jon Savage the ‘moment of high punk’ – was ‘not the most healthy climate in which to launch a newspaper.’ He championed a liberal social agenda – which was very much in the minority at that point – along with his editorial partner (and wife) Máirín Sheehy and brother Dermot Stokes.

    Stokes said: ‘We felt in particular that the deference shown to the Roman Catholic Church in all areas of Irish life, including the media, was entirely inappropriate.’

    The U2 connection is central to the story of Hot Press, while John Waters, a young aspiring journalist then living in remote Roscommon, was an important recruit. According to Stokes: ‘Back then, John, I think it is fair to say, saw himself as a leftist’. For his own part Waters reckons: ‘I can say with absolute certainty that I would not be writing today were it not for [Stokes].’

    An important feature was the Hot Press interview, where according to Waters: ‘The idea was to ‘get under the skin’ of people who were known in a certain context.’

    An interview with Charles Haughey ‘caused a huge reaction in the mainstream media as the Fianna Fáil leader’s use of expletives and colourful descriptions of opponents broke with convention.’

    Vincent Browne.

    Magill

    In 1986 The Guardian newspaper recorded that ‘Magill has gained a political influence that has no parallel in British or indeed European magazine publishing,’ while the Sunday Times credited it with ‘dragging Irish journalism out of its largely comfortable, unquestioning dullness’.

    According to Kevin Rater it was ‘shaped by the particular interests of its proprietor and founding editor, Vincent Browne’, who wrote in 1969: ‘In terms of its wealth, Ireland cares less for the weaker and poorer sections of its community than any other country in Europe with the exception of Portugal. Yet the popular myth is that there is no poverty in Ireland.’ Party politics, the redistribution of wealth and Northern Ireland would be its primary focus.

    Browne shared editorial responsibilities with Mary Holland, who later claimed Browne: ‘could be very cruel to people and didn’t seem to expect them to take it personally.’

    According to another journalist, Paddy Agnew: ‘the cover was the most talked about, and the most agonising thing, every month. It was torture.’ Britan Trench recalled: ‘He would snort and sniff at content ideas. And then his view of the would emerge’.

    At the end of Browne’s tenure as editor Colm Tóibín was appointed to the role. He was influenced by the ‘new journalism’ in the work of American writers such as Tom Wolfe, Gay Telese and Hunter S Thompson’. Another editor, Fintan O’Toole brought ‘an extraordinary range and depth of interests.’

    Ultimately, according to Rafter ‘It was outflanked on one side by The Phoenix with its mix of business and political gossip and on the other by the national newspapers that had adapted their editorial offerings to include longer articles, many by names who had first emerged in Magill.’

    Image (c) Daniele Idini.

    Granular Analysis

    Magazines and periodicals share certain features with independent restaurants, insofar as neither tend to last very long, and are often dependent on a dominant personality, who regularly loses their shirts. Like independent restaurants they perform vital roles for a cultural avant-garde, incubating new tastes and literary styles, which the fast or convenience daily newspaper purveyors often appropriate.

    Moreover, it remains the case in Ireland that most investigative journalism occurs at a remove from mainstream daily publications.

    As adverted to, a second review of the latest volume in this series provides a more granular assessment of these publications, including magazines representing feminism and gay rights, and focuses on particularly illuminating stories, such as the nature of Irish humour and the state of the press. It will also afford a chance to reflect on the challenges of publishing in our contemporary digital environment.

    [i] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, New York, 2006), pp. 34-35

    Featured Image: Dublin, 1916, prior to the Rising.

  • And the Flesh was Made Word

    Through Fernando Pessoa the flesh was made word. Reminiscent of the renowned Chinese painter Wu Daozi, who, as legend has it, vanished into one of his own landscape paintings, Pessoa (1888-1935), the great Portuguese poet, appears to have disappeared bodily into his written works. Dispersing himself into the many lives of others through the medium of writing, Pessoa became nobody and many others simultaneously.

    Pessoa called these many others ‘heteronyms’ (other names). These distinct others who discovered a voice through Pessoa have left behind a treasure trove of philosophically charged poetic works. Their wide-ranging and diverse works created by the ‘secret orchestra’ of Pessoa’s soul have given rise to a choral symphony whose resonance intensifies over time.

    One is left in a state of silent wonder and awe at the sheer scale and brilliance of what Pessoa managed to achieve while semantically composing the soul. The challenge for his readers is to break this silence and put into words what it is that Pessoa accomplished, thereby naming precisely his significance for how we humans understand ourselves, the way we see things, and how we dwell upon the earth.

    Astute Philosophical Experimentation

    A new book, Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us edited by Bartholomew Ryan, Giovanbattista Tusa, and Antonio Cardiello (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Maryland, U.S, 2021) takes on this challenge with gusto.

    Its aim is to bring to light Pessoa’s in-depth knowledge of philosophy and his ability to engage in astute philosophical experimentation, and at the same time highlight his capacity to confront, appropriate, synthesise, and strip bare complex ideas into art. Additionally, by focusing on Pessoa’s writings through different philosophical lenses the chapters included in this volume seek to reveal novel ways of interpreting some of the seminal problems of philosophy.

    Bartholomew Ryan alerts us to the relevance and urgency of this task in his Introduction, where he claims that if ‘philosophy is to survive the various crises of human civilization ahead of us, to respond and open up new pathways of thought’ we will need the assistance of ‘experimenters in literature, in order to help us reconnect with ourselves, others and all living species on the planet.’

    Structurally, Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy consists of an Introduction, Exordium, Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro, fifteen essays dedicated to Pessoa and philosophy, a detailed appendix, and a critical bibliography. The wide range of elements that make up this volume come together to create a joyous banquet of a book.

    Ryan opens this feast for the soul with a fast tempo-ed, polyphonous introduction, entitled ‘An Encounter between the Poet and the Philosopher’. He notes how it is the task of the philosopher not to read a poet in order to appropriate an idea for her/his own purposes. Instead, the philosopher is prompted to engage with literature so as to learn how to dwell in an uncomfortable and uncontrollable region.

    For in this strange region where philosophy and poetry meet something innovative can occur. As Ryan writes: ‘It is in this encounter between the philosopher and poet a vulnerability is opened on both sides to inspire the creating of a new concept in the philosopher and a new form and linguistic gesture in the poet.’

    One of Pessoa’s astrological charts from 1916.

    A Sense of Journey

    By entering into such an encounter with Pessoa, the philosopher has a lot to explore and discover. As a poet animated by philosophy Pessoa prioritises a sense of journey over notions of progress, development and evolution, as he writes: ‘I don’t evolve, I JOURNEY’.

    Besides his emphasis on journeying, the heteronym Álvaro de Campos shares a similar vision for both the philosopher and artist when he notes in his futurist manifesto ‘Ultimatum’, how the philosopher should contain ‘the greatest number of other people’s personal philosophies; and that the artist should write ‘in the most genres with the most contradictions and discrepancies.’ These insights offer rich food for thought for the philosopher.

    The Exordium and Notes for the Memory of my Master Caeiro come after the Introduction. These two marvellous sections are comprised of words from Pessoa and four of his heteronyms, namely, Alexander Search, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. They serve to attune and acclimatise the reader to the mood and atmosphere of Pessoa’s writings.

    Some sentences shine luminously in the Exordium, for example, ‘There is for me – there was –  a wealth of meaning in a thing so ridiculous as a door-key, a nail on a wall, a cat’s whiskers. There is to me a fulness of spiritual suggestion in a fowl with its chickens strutting across the road.’

    Notably, the Exordium and Campos’s Notes also reveal the humour and irony of Pessoa’s writings. Campos writes in his Notes of the fictitious nature of the orthonym Fernando Pessoa: ‘Even more curious is the case of Fernando Pessoa, who doesn’t exist, strictly speaking.’

    And when humorously critiquing the work of the great 19th century writer Giacomo Leopardi, Pessoa claims Leopardi’s philosophical pessimism and overemphasis on suffering stems from a shyness with women. Pessoa remarks: ‘“I am shy with women: therefore there is no God” is highly unconvincing as metaphysics.’

    Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos seen by José de Almada Negreiros.

    Four Sections

    Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy is then divided into four sections: Spiritual Traditions, Metaphysics and Post-metaphysics, Philosophies of Selfhood, and Contemporary Problems and Perspectives. Each section has three to four chapters.  The volume has been arranged by philosophical themes which are both central to Pessoa’s work and to philosophy itself.  The first section, Spiritual Traditions, focuses on Neopaganism, Daoism, Indian, and Islamic philosophy.

    The first chapter by Antonio Cardiello, ‘Fernando Pessoa’s vision of Neopaganism as Life’s Supreme Art’ explores Pessoa’s project of reawakening polytheism and the Hellenic model of civilisation.  Cardiello observes how Pessoa, using his orthonym, calls for a ‘superior paganism’ for modern times in which ‘all protestantisms, all Oriental credos, all paganisms, dead and alive become Portuguesely fused.’

    In addition to a ‘superior paganism’ Pessoa makes reference to a ‘superior art’ that can ‘lift the soul above everything narrow, above all instincts, moral or immoral concerns.’, and liberate us from ‘life itself.’ Merging a superior paganism with a superior art, Cardiello claims it was Pessoa’s task to denounce two millennial of moral interpretation and substitute it for an aesthetic one that glorifies human life, thereby dispensing with unhealthy values for healthier ones that encourage humans to flourish.

    Paulo Borges’s ‘Fernando Pessoa, Daoism and the Gap: Thought of Insubstantiality, Vagueness and Indetermination’ is the second chapter in this section. It closely examines emptiness and the ‘gap’ in the writings of the orthonym Fernando Pessoa and the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, comparing these themes with Daoist principles.

    According to Daoist thought, emptiness allows the emergence of the ‘ten thousand beings’ or the infinity of possibilities and the possibility of an authentic life lacking self-centredness. Borges highlights how in Pessoa, the overabundance of becoming other and the experience of heteronymy emerges from that insubstantial emptiness of self and of everything.

    While the abyss of being prior to defining oneself by naming oneself, surfaces as the ‘gap’ that ‘is between’ the self and itself. Towards the conclusion he identifies a wonderfully apt quote from Tchouang Tseu to describe Pessoa. Tseu writes that ‘the perfect man is without any I, the inspired man is without work; the holy man leaves no name.’

    Marketplace in Goa, as depicted in Jan Huygen van Linschotens Itinerarium.

    Imaginary India

    The third chapter, ‘Pessoa’s Imaginary India’, by Jonardon Ganeri, looks at Pessoa’s understanding of the ‘Indian ideal’ which he interprets as signifying the transcendence of the illusion that is living a human life.

    Pessoa regards the Indian ideal as ‘inhuman’ and speaks of ‘the principle, which we already know to be absurd, that the universe is an illusion.’

    Ironically, Hindu thinkers writing at the same time as Pessoa, such as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan share Pessoa’s critical sentiments towards this ideal. Borrowing a phrase from Nietzsche, Ganeri acknowledges an ‘ironic affinty’ between Pessoa’s position that he occasionally assumes as his own contraposition to the ‘Indian ideal’, and the ideas of his contemporaries in India that he never knew.

    In the final chapter of this section, ‘Pessoa and Islamic Philosophy’, Fabrizio Boscaglia, brings to light Pessoa’s engagement with Islamic philosophy and its impact on his writing. Boscaglia draws attention to Pessoa’s interest in the philosophical thought of Omar Khayyām, through Edward Fitzgerald’s translations, and the possible connections of Sufism in Pessoa’s poetry.

    Boscaglia also demonstrates how Pessoa’s makes several references to the Islamic civilization as the keeper, interpreter and transmitter of Greek culture between the Middle Ages and the Renaissnance.

    In the second section of this book, Metaphysics and Post-metaphysics, the topics of time, nihilism and the nothing, transcendentalism, immanence and becoming-landscape take centre stage. João Constâncio opens the section with ‘Nihilism and Being Nothing in “The Tobacco Shop”’.

    The chapter seeks to respond to two significant questions: 1. What is the meaning for Pessoa, particularly in the masterpiece ‘The Tobacco Shop’ (by Álvaro de Campos) of ‘being nothing’ and 2. How can the study of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s philosophical writings contribute to the understanding of such a paradoxical way of being, which consists of ‘being nothing’?

    Constâncio delves into Campos’s despair for ‘being-nothing’ and reveals it to be tantamount to despairing for having to be a mask, for not being able to avoid adopting an identity that is a mere linguistic construction, regardless of whether it implies some ultimate metaphysical purpose implicit to life within society.

    Furthermore, Constâncio shows how Campos’s ‘conscious consciousness’ makes him envy those who, living by way of an ‘unconscious conscious’, manage to believe in an identity that is intersubjectively attributed to them.

    ‘Pessoa and Time’ by Pedro Duarte is the second chapter in this section. For Duarte, it is possible to grasp the individuality of each of the three heteronyms Caeiro, Reis and Campo, by studying their different approaches and responses to time.

    But Duarte also includes Pessoa, the orthonym, in his analysis. For Pessoa the past needs to be rediscovered, and not set aside, because it summons the present to build the future. Caeiro takes time out of things, through detachment and unlearning and to see without thinking. Caeiro writes ‘I don’t want to think of things as being in the present; I want to think of them as things’.

    Reis believed that ‘we pass like the river’ through life. For Reis, existence was all about adhering to this passage. Aging should be accepted. On the other hand, Campos desires to feel everything in every way, and find the beauty of the present moment, a beauty unknown to the ancients, hence electric lamps and factories are to be celebrated. Campos says ‘I who love modern civilization and kiss machines with all my soul.’

    Walt Whitman aged 35.

    American Transcendentalism

    Benedetta Zavatta’s chapter entitled ‘Pessoa and American Transcendentalism’, investigates the link between Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Pessoa. Emerson’s influence on Pessoa had not received scholarly attention prior to Zavatta’s essay.

    Zavatta convincingly hypothesises that Pessoa was drawn to Emerson and Whitman by the notion, repeatedly articulated by these two authors, that every individual latently contains within herself/himself the seeds of an infinite number of different personalities.

    This in turn enables an individual to foster an empathetic connection with other humans, to the point where they ‘become them’. Enlarging this empathetic connection allows one experience how the whole world is seen and felt as these others see it and feel it.

    In the chapter ‘Bernardo Soares’s Becoming-Landscape’, José Gil explores the use of landscape in The Book of Disquiet. Gil’s philosophical approach to The Book of Disquiet opens up this impossible book for the reader, by revealing that each of its fragments is ‘a veritable landscape-state of emotion’, providing it with ‘both skeleton and flow’.

    Gil’s deft analysis of Bernardo Soares’s becoming-landscape culminates with an enquiry into what occurs when the plane of the landscape clashes with the plane of emotions. Gil suggests ‘all distances disappear, and the “I” itself, which functioned like a screen between sensations and the landscapes, explodes, disappears and ceases to exist’.

    What remains is the pure landscape of event-sensations. A ‘sensation-universe’. Literary description ceases, and ‘sensations attach themselves to the flow of the landscape because they result from them: it is no longer the sky yonder, or the I, here, like this sky: it is the sensation-sky or the sensation-light.’

    Philosophies of Selfhood

    The third section, Philosophies of Selfhood, examines the dissolution and plurality of the self and subject in Pessoa’s writings. It commences with Bartholomew Ryan’s chapter ‘Voicing Vacillation, Logos and Masks of the Self: Mirroring Kierkegaard and Pessoa’.

    Ryan argues that, in the journey of forging the human self or subject into writing, the achievements of the poet Pessoa and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard remain unsurpassed. Through Pessoa and Kierkegaard, Ryan investigates the making and unmaking the elusive self through vacillation, logos and masks.

    At the core of this study lies doubt, which Ryan claims both writers see as the sickness and heartbeat of modernity. Pessoa and Kierkegaard voice doubt and despair, as the poetic-philosopher and philosophical poet.

    According to Ryan, Pessoa delights in aesthetic melancholy and being allied to no one or no thing except literature. Describing Pessoa as an Argonaut of Modernity or the Argonaut of true sensations, Ryan envisages him journeying ‘to the abstract chasm that lies at the depths of things’ and questioning the philosophical problems of selfhood by voicing its vacillation, logos and masks. Buffeted by this tormenting journey, Pessoa vacillates between knowledge and faith, and experiencing the elusive moment.

    In ‘The Difference between Othering Oneself and Becoming What One is’, Maria Filomena Molder states that the dictum of ‘becoming what you are’ is nowhere to be found in Pessoa, and the concept of ‘othering oneself’ belongs in other waters.

    Drawing support from Nietzsche’s insight in Twilight of the Idols that the ‘I’ has become a fairytale, a fiction, a play on words’, Molder proposes that Pessoa has no need for a theory of the subject.  Molder then shows how Pessoa coined the term ‘othering oneself’ in order to account for the multiplicity of writers who are born out of his way of writing.

    According to Molder, othering oneself, ‘proceeds not from the plurality of the subject but from a precocious, childlike inclination to imagining oneself as multiple characters, a succession of dramatic scenes secreted by creative play.’

    This incisive and succinct chapter draws to a close with the claim that Pessoa and his heteronyms are not liberators. What is he, then? Molder asks, and answers through the mouthpieces of Ricardo Reis and Pessoa.

    The answer from Reis is: ‘I am merely the place/Where things are thought or felt’. And Pessoa responds: ‘I look at them. None is me, but I am their ensemble’. Not done yet, Molder asks: What does Pessoa want? And this time Pessoa replies: ‘I want to be the creator of myths, which is the highest mystery achievable by a member of the human race.’ And so Molder reveals the undecipherable mystery of the many in one, of the one in the many.

    Foucault

    Gianfranco Ferraro’s chapter ‘A Hermeneutics of Disquiet: Approaching Pessoa through Foucault’ concludes is final one in this third section. Ferraro tends to Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet through the ‘toolbox’ provided by Michel Foucault’s in The Hermeneutics of the Subject.

    Why Foucault? For Ferraro, Foucault’s terminology, specifically in relation to ‘technologies of the self’, greatly assist us in interpreting Pessoa. These technologies highlight, in Ferraro’s own words, ‘practices which permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being,’ so as to ‘transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’.

    Consequently, approaching The Book of Disquiet through Foucault’s hermeneutics of the self allows us to see how Pessoa recovered many of the ancient practices and technologies of writing and how modernity adopted them again.

    Borrowing from Foucault’s hermeneutic toolbox Ferraro reaches the conclusion that we can observe in The Book of Disquiet a work that summons one to oneself and to experimentation of oneself in revealing the many beings that lie dormant in our forms of life.

    Contemporary Problems and Perspectives

    The fourth and final section Contemporary Problems and Perspectives concentrates on value theory and secular capitalist modernity; the logic of seeing, ecological thought, and the fundamental relationship between poetry and some contemporary philosophers.

    ‘Pessoa’s “The Anarchist Banker” and the Logic of Value’, by J.D. Mininger offers a thorough reading of Pessoa’s short story ‘The Anarchist Banker’, which in part is supplemented by Nietzsche’s essay ‘On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense’.

    Anarchism strives to vanquish all social conventions and fictions, and is thus in a sense morally and politically motivated. Yet it could also be understood as signifying the freedom from such conventions and fictions.

    In this story the anarchist achieves his own freedom by becoming a banker. According to Mininger, the essential politics of this story does not lie in the author’s construal of anarchism, but in the silent relation between philosophy and literature, between algebra and story, between proposition and performance, between constraint and freedom.

    For Mininger, Pessoa’s story is an anarchistic act to the extent that it expresses freedom through constraint – a paradox made possible by the literary surplus value that is both the story’s cause and effect.

    The second chapter in this section ‘For Your Eyes Only: The Logic of Seeing in Alberto Caeiro’s Poetry’, by Bruno Béu, opens with the words of the artist Kazmir Malevich, ‘I have transformed myself in the zero of form’ found on a leaflet distributed at the exhibition Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 (zero-ten).

    One of Malevich’s most famous works is his 1918 painting entitled White on White, showing a white square against a white background. As a work of art it calls into question the very possibility of form and representation.

    Bèu in this chapter draws connections between Malevich’s paintings, and Caeiro’s poetry, in which language is being forced to reach its zero ability to signify things, while our experience of things is ‘freed’ from any re-presentation that we make of them.

    Bèu demonstrates how Caeiro’s tautological discursive and logical performance is a radical negation of all possible predicates. This linguistic process leaves each thing absolute, indescribable and indefinable. As Bèu poignantly remarks ‘It is as if, through this process, each thing revealed itself and spoke from the top of Mount Sinai pronouncing the tautological and biblical words: ‘I am that I am’.’ As such no-thing is said for things to be seen, and ‘Poetry turns white on white’.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini.

    Ecological Dimensions

    In the chapter ‘Where Does Fernando Pessoa Dwell? The Economy and Ecology of the Heteronyms’, Michael Marder illuminates some of the ecological dimensions to Pessoa’s work. This is attained through an analysis of what Pessoa called ‘disquiet’, to outline what Marder names a new ‘economy and ecology of the heteronyms’.

    ‘Disquiet’, in the sense of being unsettled, describes the possibility that dwelling and the dweller no longer exist, or, perhaps, never have.

    For Marder, Pessoa is the place where dwelling might be reimagined, or, the placeholder for the lives of others. Turning his focus to Caeiro, Marder asserts that he wants to dwell in a world unspoiled by the ideal and idealising system of co-ordinates.

    For Marder, Caeiro’s poetic project is to liberate the ‘innocent’ green and flourishing earth from the imaginary lines that have divided its surface through social and political conventions.

    ‘So where does Pessoa dwell?’ Marder asks at the close of this chapter. Marder’s response:  ‘Between economy and ecology, between nowhere and everywhere’. Pessoa’s heteronyms outline an ‘economology’, where dwelling and unsettlement are not formally opposed to one another, a place where it is possible to dwell in the very unsettlement that acknowledges the impossibility of dwelling.

    Giovanbattista Tusa’s ‘The “Pessoa Event”: Notes on Philosophy and Poetry’ concludes this section. Tusa’s text articulates the fundamental relationship between poetry and philosophy through Fernando Pessoa and the works of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy.

    Badiou in particular takes on a hugely significant role in this chapter, for it is he who notes that the poem far from being a form of knowledge, is the instance of thought subtracted from everything that sustains the faculty of knowledge.

    Tusa also cites Badiou’s Handbook of Inaesthetics in which he claims to be contemporaries of Pessoa is ‘a philosophical task’, and through the reading of his work, philosophy could experience its own incapacity or perhaps its own impossibility.

    After these four sections, Jerónimo Pizarro provides an appendix to the book called ‘Pessoa and Philosophy: Texts from the Archives’. This is a collection of selected Pessoa texts alongside images from the Pessoa archive referencing philosophy and various philosophers.

    Pizarro’s fine scholarly research gathers editions and studies on a series of documents from Pessoa’s archive to help with future comparative research. The volume ends with a critical bibliography of Pessoa’s own works published in English, books on philosophy that he owned and secondary works on Pessoa and philosophy.

    Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy sheds a remarkably illuminating spotlight on the wonderous writings of Pessoa, but most importantly it instils in the reader a sense that sections of his ‘secret orchestra’ have yet to be heard, and that future exploratory journeys await.

    Feature Image: José de Almada Negreiros, Retrato de Fernando Pessoa.

  • Musician of the Month: Martin Mackie

    Martin Mackie is a singer and music producer from Belfast who has been living in Dublin for more than a decade. His latest single The Ballad of Christy Moore is a tribute, with a comical twist, to the Irish musical legend from Kildare. It is from Martin’s new album Temperance Songs, which will be released later this year. All of the songs on the album are about drinking and the peculiar relationship the Irish have with booze.

    The songs are about my own experiences with alcohol. Not just me personally but my family and friends. Rollovers, lock-ins, early houses, hair of the dog, and the booze blues are just some of the subjects. But I’ve tried to add a bit of comedy to the misery.

    The Ballad Of Christy Moore is folk tune, one of two on the album. The other is The Ballad of Brendan Behan, which I wrote with Craig Walker from The Power of Dreams. The Christy song is about me coming back after a weekend of madness at a music festival. I was hanging, as they say in Dublin. I had this weird dream or maybe even a hallucination that the ghost of Christy Moore was in my wardrobe, even though he’s very much alive. Christy’s a famous ex-boozer. So in the song he jumps out and starts lecturing me on the evils of excess.

    I was a bit worried what Christy would think of the song because there’s a line in it that describes him as being all ‘sweaty and hairy’. So I sent it to him. I was absolutely delighted when he sent me back a lovely postcard that said: “Dear Martin, Sweaty and Hair! Ride on. Christy.” And he drew a little guitar beside it. I’ve framed that.

    William Hogarth – A Rake’s Progress – Tavern Scene

    I got the whole idea for Temperance Songs from a series of paintings by the artist William Hogarth. The Rake’s Progress is a set of eight paintings showing the rise and fall of young man who ends up in the Bedlam asylum because of his partying lifestyle. I was gonna write a song for each painting but I found out the composer Igor Stravinsky had beaten me to that idea. You can’t compete with him so I had to change things. Instead I drew from my own experience.

    The track ‘Drunk For Fifteen Years’ features vocals by Waterford singer Katie Kim, who is another friend. That song is about a guy in hospital after a mammoth drinking session. Again, there are ghosts and spirits in the lyrics; that seems to be a recurring theme. I think there’s a lot of mystery to booze, the psychological effect it has on you when you drink and the downer you can get if you overdo it. Nobody in Ireland really talks about this stuff, beyond platitudes and clichés, so I thought it would be nice explore it in an album.

    There’s other songs such as a Lock-in for The Damned about a famous Dublin venue where people end up leaving, completely twisted, when it’s daylight. That’s normal behaviour in the music world

    The first single off Temperance Songs was released before the pandemic. It is called Magic Potion and it features a host of well-known musicians.  Kate Ellis, who is the musical director of the Crash Ensemble plays cello, Conor O’Brien, from Villagers, plays bass guitar, Eleanor Myler, from the shoegaze band Percolator plays the drums with Mackie on guitar and vocals.

    The video was made by long-time friend and collaborator Laura Sheeran.

    It’s an incredibly well shot video. Laura is such a talent in everything she does and she does a lot of things. For the video she does what the song tries to do…find beauty in the misery. We’ve been pals for years and she sings backing vocals along with Niamh Lowe on another one of the tracks on the album called The Apple.

    In Magic Potion, there’s a line “we’re the ones who wish good health with a poison chalice.” It’s weird the way we all say ‘slainte’ or ‘good health’ when this thing is classified as poison. I’m not an anti-booze crusader at all. But nobody really talks about the downsides of it, the ‘booze blues,’ or ‘the fear’ — the negative aspects.

    I was in Conor O’Brien’s house, from Villagers, and got chatting about the song. I recorded a demo with Ellie from Percolator and sent him it. This fantastic bassline came back in a style I would never have thought of in a million years. Kate from Crash Ensemble got involved and I went to Laura Sheeran’s house and recorded cello in her living room.

    So I went into the studio with Ellie’s drums, Conor’s bass, Kate’s cello and my vocals and guitar — and it sounded really good. Laura then shot the video for me.

    While Magic Potion is slow and menacing,, A Lock-in for the Damned whizzes along with the whimsical feel of a 1980s indie track in the vein of Orange Juice or Josef K and the tension between the jocular music and the slowly unfolding madness of the storyline was deliberate.

    Martin sings in the chorus, ‘I’d like to flee the madness but the door and me are locked’ — and most people in Ireland have found themselves in similar situations.

    I suppose A Lock-in for The Damned represents the party before the disaster and the following day of hell. It’s about me and my friends who would often have lock-ins at various pubs. You’re there all night. It’s just a free-for-all, and the spirits and the black pints flow and you’re leaving when it’s daylight.

    There’s something very, very odd when you’re walking along the street in the morning and you’re half-pished and there’s people jogging past you, or going to work, and living their everyday life. I thought it was something that’s not written about really.

    Alcohol can be a wonderful drug if used correctly, and we all enjoy times together and it’s good for relaxing, but it’s only good if you’re in a good space. But it never works, for me anyway, if you’re trying to escape your troubles or you’re feeling a bit down.