Cassandra Voices

Tag: Neil Burns Cassandra Voices

  • Bullying: It’s You, Not Me

    Bullies can take many shapes, forms, and disguises. It seems a daily occurrence that can be defined as repeated behaviours that are intentional or have malicious intent to cause fear or to instil feelings of superiority in the bully, while also causing anxiety and hopelessness in the victim, due to the bully’s relentless behaviour.

    Northern Ireland, where I grew up, is a hotspot for bullying. It seems to thrive in an environment where tribalistic differences are constantly debated, leading to hostility, sectarian violence, hatred, and ultimately, often, murder.

    When I was a boy, from about the age of six for a few years I was indeed a bully myself. I should add that I have been bullied many times.

    Anyway, I bullied a girl at primary school who had an eating disorder. She used to make large bubbles with her mouth because her stomach was troubled. I mocked her over it, because I was a damaged child and did not know any better. She was thin, wore glasses, and I was a pig-ignorant, angry little boy with blonde hair and blue eyes. It was as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, adults used to say about me once they realised, I was a bully without an emotional processor.

    But I could not understand what I was doing due to poor emotional regulation and underdeveloped emotional skills. One thing was certain: I was damaged.

    I come from a broken home and a troubled, all-encompassing background where violence was often inflicted by a parent or guardian. They were young themselves and did not know any better.

    I was constantly on the defensive. And I remained so for decades. Fight or flight with pounding anxiety, cortisol coursing through my system.

    It is a difficult paradigm to break – the cycle of aggressor abuse and the inflicted aggressions, both verbal and physical.

    I was aggressive and used to demand that other school kids bring in a football to school until two much tougher brothers roughed me up out the front of the school on the grass one afternoon. And the bullied girl’s mother accosted me at the school gates, calling me out, rightly so, but I did not know any better. My bullying was reactive without conscious thought. My prefrontal cortex was not developed. Anyway, that was the end of my primary school bullying career.

    Cottonbro Studio

    Bullying in Adulthood

    There is always an opportunity to make money, poke fun at someone, or treat someone like a lesser human being; and here’s the thing: people definitely do, and try to do it, daily.

    I have watched several TEDx Talks on bullying and other YouTube videos on the topic. There seem to be two types of bullying: implicit and explicit.

    It’s a complex human behaviour to gauge on the social barometer. That is, many people are involved in these actions. It is part of us. Indeed, one wonders which circle of Dante’s Hell houses bullies and what they have awaiting there.

    Is it a deliberate choice or a visceral response to something in their psyche? Sometimes, individuals with damaged self-esteem find it challenging to know how to repair themselves. They have become so deeply traumatised that they cling to what they know, or rather, have become.

    There is the Dark Triad of Personality: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and, in a pitiful corner, Psychopathy, which is quite common in Northern Ireland if you ask me.

    In Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis, he posits that some individuals employ mind games and manipulate others’ emotions to achieve their goals.

    In my teens, a bigger mate bullied me because of his size and skill as a fighter. Needless to say, we are no longer friends.

    A few years ago, he emailed to ask how I was and say that he missed me, or something to that effect. I replied telling him that he had bullied me, and I had dark thoughts about getting revenge on my bullies.

    He emailed back, saying he didn’t believe it, that he, it, the bullying ‘was that bad.’ But he was – he was a bully. He is probably still in denial.

    In some ways, he was a rather unusual character. I believe he was bisexual and concealed it, using aggression as a coping mechanism. He also tried to project an image of being a tough man.

    In Northern Ireland, the projected image of ‘don’t mess with me sunshine’ is all. The knuckle-dragging image of the hard man, the person feared and respected for his reputation as a fighter, is deeply ingrained in the collective, broken Northern Irish psyche.

    Loudmouth

    When I turned eighteen, I was quite the loudmouth, and a young, tough bloke at a local disco bullied me.

    One night, he was waiting outside the disco, itching for a fight, slouched against the wall under the arch of the local hotel. I was walking alone, leaving the disco, and he decided to pick a fight with me. He approached and swung a big, balled-up fist. I took it without ducking, as I was intoxicated – as usual – and he clocked me. Since I was skinnier and therefore fair game, it was on for him.

    He thumped me, and I staggered away. Afterwards, I sat on a low stone wall, and I think I had a bloodied nose – I cannot quite recall, but I do remember putting my jeans in the bath with warm water and salt, which drew the blood out of them.

    On another occasion, I was a bundle of nerves due to anxiety, excessive drug use, and simply not being well. I suffered from cannabis-induced psychosis and alcoholism. When he came over and threatened me I soiled myself. I sat there in the front seat of my mate’s car, let it happen, and wetted my trousers. I didn’t show anything to my friends inside the car, but that’s what occurred. The bully left after realising I wasn’t taking the bait or accepting the challenge of a fight. I was very skinny then, not eating properly, and most likely he would have beaten me to a pulp.

    Years later, I wanted to attack this individual. Full of rage, I was letting him dominate me in a way. I often thought of killing him. Decades of pent-up rage came to the fore in my psyche, and I was not going to lie down and take it anymore. The fact is that he was an ignorant halfwit and would have had little insight into his behaviour.

    Then there was the self-proclaimed ‘Christian’ in a homeless hostel in Belfast. A ‘Baptist’, ‘turn the other cheek?’ They were full of shite. He was, and probably still is, a narcissist who ‘knew better’ than the rest. He bullied me, well, it was institutional abuse, while I was resident in a homeless hostel. He became insanely jealous of the friendly relationship I had with one of the female staff. Getting through that situation over a year severely tested me because I had finally a bit of strength about me then, and I wanted to test that out.

    After that there was bullying, from a verbally abusive, ‘celebrity’ chef, who I worked for. He called me ‘a useless bastard.’ because I didn’t dress a plate of raw salmon to his standard. I informed him that I would not talk to a dog the way he talked to his staff, and I walked away not to return. He was well known as a bully. One day, allegedly, he grabbed one of his smaller trainees by the neck and pinned him up against a fridge. Needless to say, he doesn’t come across as a bully on the television or radio.

    Image: Pietro Lang

    Owning up to my own Failings

    I intentionally bullied a rather large, but chilled out guy with whom I shared a house as he was one of the laziest people I have ever met. He would not lift a finger to keeping the house in shape. He lay in bed all day nursing a hangover, something I had plenty of experience with.

    He was angry with me, but I later apologised and explained I only tried to motivate him when he lay in bed all day. Once I pulled him and his mattress off his bed and took him downstairs, as it was a lovely day outside, and he was lamenting his life while suffering from a hangover. This was his, or rather our norm.

    One day, I made a loud noise behind him in the kitchen, as he didn’t know I was there, which startled him while making a sandwich. He held a steak knife in his hand, turned around, and said: ‘Just you wait, Burnsy. One day I will get you.’

    Bullying also occurs in relationships. They must always be right. They will gaslight you into believing that you are the problem. They play the victim and are rather good at emotional manipulation. They cannot comprehend that a relationship is a collaboration. They call the shots, hold the power, and you must bend to their ways.

    I have been gaslight into believing that I was always the problem. Playing the victim is a form of emotional manipulation. Some cannot comprehend that a relationship is a collaboration. They must call the shots. Bullies rarely change. I work on it.

    Yet, sometimes you have to act aggressively when no other option is working.  Once, back home, a letting agency with questionable ethics, known for rather shoddy practices, failed to answer my calls, refusing to return a deposit of £527.00 owed to me. They dragged their heels and told me one date and then another, and wouldn’t pay.

    The owner has been done for fraud multiple times. It seemed as if the ‘management’ were trying to rip me off for the sheer fun of it. So, I went to their office and told them they had ten minutes to pay me, or I would have to get a bit rough. I got my money back within an hour or so.

    Robert Greene

    Robert Greene on Bullies

    Robert Greene, in his book The 48 Laws of Power, doesn’t explicitly discuss bullying as a primary topic, but he does address behaviours and tactics that are often associated with bullying, particularly in the context of power dynamics and social interactions. He highlights how insecurity and a desire for control can motivate individuals to engage in manipulative and aggressive behaviours towards others.’

    I do not stand for bullying nowadays. Although I wonder whether challenging or confronting a bully is really only a Pyrrhic victory? Or perhaps it’s a way to square the circle of your own trauma. I will leave it the reader to decide. I wrote this piece to confront my own mistakes and bullying behaviours to help build clarity and humility in myself, from now on.

    Feature Image: Mikhail Nilov

  • The Powerful Nature of Addiction

    Back in 2016, I was embarking on a road towards sobriety after nearly eighteen years of committed alcoholism, homelessness, depression, and, in many ways, desperation. I needed to change. However, I did not know how or where to begin. I started with ‘one day at a time,’ taking small, manageable steps. If I don’t drink this week, I will try it next week. That was my mantra, and that’s how it went initially.

    That was when I happened to be in Manchester on my way from Salford, where I had been staying in a homeless night shelter, and walking into town to go to work one Sunday morning, when a fresh-looking can of Carlsberg was sitting all alone on the low or a brick wall near a small park. As to where its owner had gone, I had no clue. Still, I wanted to down that can of fizzy beer. I wanted to guzzle its beery contents down my throat and for it to wash around freely in my guttiwuts (as they put it in Clockwork Orange). Filling me with the desire for more beer, to smoke fags, and to fall about like a drunken imbecile, not being at all the responsible person that I used to be and aligning foolish behaviour(s) I know all too well – being the eternal alcoholic bum.

    Cut to the previous year prior, 2015, on a Sunday, the first of November, I had the worst hangover of my life, and wanted to kill myself. I simply had had enough of being an alcoholic.

    The scenario was that I was at Birmingham International Airport’s train station, lying on a bench in the small waiting room, suffering from a desperate hangover, holding onto a sausage baguette with congealing red sauce in a paper bag, murmuring in pain. I didn’t see how I could continue in life, having failed at it so badly.

    I wanted to throw myself under an oncoming train.

    I had been out on the lash in Birmingham the night before and spent a lot of money on a premeditated drinking session. The following day, I jumped on an earlier train, and the conductor came round and asked for my ticket and, inspecting it, said, ‘You’re an hour early; either buy a new ticket which will cost you £35.00 or get off at the next station and wait for your train.’ I choose to get off.

    Feature Image: David Kwewum

    Sobering up has been rather hellish. Seriously, it has.

    For the first five years, I was ill. I was lethargic and had a rumbling stomach. I believe I developed GERD (Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease), where the lining of the stomach is decimated due to all the booze I tipped down my throat, where it swilled around in there like a dark, seething, twisted, broiling sea.

    During my recovery, if I drank strong, cheap tea bags, the tannins in the tea played havoc with my liver, leading to a dull, searing pain in the lower right-hand side of my upper body.

    In 2017, I went to the GP in Derry, where I was living in a hostel, and he informed me I was having recurring liver infections. He didn’t know what I knew.

    I had a liver scan. There was some ‘superficial’ scarring on my liver, the nurses at Altnagelvin Hospital said. If it was superficial, I didn’t want to know what actual, deeper scarring felt like. No way. This had been painful enough so far.

    The reality was, after years of alcohol consumption, I had liver disease – let’s make no bones about it, leading to recurring infections. And my diet was atrocious, which contributed to my poor health.

    I drank far too many fizzy drinks. I scoffed far too many biscuits – once I sat down with a cup of tea, I would ‘clear the decks’ in terms of consuming high-sugar and high-fat content junk food in one sitting. Tunnock’s Teacakes were a firm favourite; I could consume at least four in one go. I ate crisps by the tonnage and ballooned to nearly fifteen stone in 2020. That’s big for someone of my height of 5ft 7¾, with a small enough frame. I was a greedy, unmitigated, irresponsible (health-wise) git.

    Two years ago, I went to the GP for a checkup as I was feeling lightheaded and had chest pains. My blood pressure was up six points, and I had high cholesterol, I was informed. I was on the danger alert for a heart attack. I think I have had some minor ones. Or Angina, at least. That or it was the GERD.

    These days, I rarely drink fizzy drinks. I seldom eat crisps and opt for baked ones. I would have a chocolate bar at least twice a week. Rarely more than that. I prepare most of my meals from scratch and mostly drink water.

    I recently saw an advertisement on a billboard at 8:44am for a pint of the black stuff, and wanted to imbibe it so badly that I considered going on the ‘drink.’ I swear to goodness that one millisecond glance up at that foamy pint with roasted barley, and I was there with one in my hand, ready to take a good draught.

    That is the powerful nature of addiction – that pull is as strong as it ever was, even though I am currently nine years alcohol-free.

    It takes work to remain sober. I don’t think I ever will be free from alcoholism.

    Only now can I say that I am not drinking. And that’s what I intend for the foreseeable future.

    I’m aware of the downsides, and it’s far from ideal: the anxiety, the guilt, and the worthless feeling(s) that soaking oneself in booze brings.

    At least now that I am sober, I can focus on my hobbies, including writing and making music – two things which bring me joy. And if that gets me out of bed in the morning – I now rise every morning at around 5am – sleeping right through from the night after usually going t to bed around 10pm.

    That is something which I can control and manage. I opt to be busy, which is something I aim to maintain. Things change when people have to.

    Feature Image: Pixababy

  • Ode to the Sausage Roll

    In George Orwell’s 1939 novel Coming Up For Air, at the beginning of chapter 4, issue is taken with substandard food products, which do not taste like the product promoted and, indeed, taste like something else:

    At this moment I bit into one of my frankfurters, and—Christ!

    I can’t honestly say that I’d expected the thing to have a pleasant taste. I’d expected it to taste of nothing, like the roll. But this—well, it was quite an experience. Let me try and describe it to you.

    The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren’t much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly—pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was fish! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.

    This brings me to mass-produced sausage rolls. We have been socially engineered to accept inferior products due to being ‘always on the go’ and ‘eating on the hoof.’ Thus one may enter a high-street establishment – the name of which I will not mention here – to purchase one of their sausage rolls in an act to stave off the morning hunger.

    Yet, it is a tube of pink cooked sludge – faintly reminiscent of pork –encompassed in a uniform pastry that is almost parcel-tight; a small, perfectly wrapped parcel.

    Imagine venturing into the post office and asking the lady behind the counter,

    ‘Can I post this sausage roll to Scandinavia here, please?’ With a stamp attached to one corner and a Sharpie scrawl to its destination. Would a mass-produced sausage roll make it in one piece to say, Gothenburg?

    I have eaten them.

    In a pinch.

    Don’t get me started on their bean thingy, which gives me rising acid reflux like molten lava in the chambers and corridors of the heart.

    The problem is with quality, which the main protagonist is concerned with in Robert M. Pirsig’s modern, philosophical treatise work, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.

    Quality has dissipated due to mass-produced products.

    I remember in Botanic, Belfast, on the city side of the small hill, there was a bakery beside a laundrette. This was twenty-odd years ago. I remember they sold great sausage rolls. Inside, along with the pork meat was a little chopped-up white onion. The flaky, buttery pastry was fresh and delicious. A wee drop of red or brown sauce and I was in foodie heaven. The staff were friendly locals, and I recall the hearty chatter and warmth of the welcome. That bakery is long gone. I am unsure of its name now, which escapes me. Sadly.

    Wee bakeries – the one on Chapel Lane, city centre Belfast – served great homemade vegetable soup and sausage rolls. And Fifteens. Oh, yes.

    There was one near The Arches, East Belfast, and I was in one day as the baker was letting warm soda farls clatter onto the baking table. They were still steaming warm, fresh from the oven. I wanted to hit one with a drop of butter and strawberry jam, taken with a mug of tea. Who hasn’t wanted a fresh soda farl with crumbed ham, cheese, and tomato? Or a soda farl made with treacle? Or with Indian cornmeal?

    Years later, I would work with very that baker during nightshifts in a homeless hostel – how strange being in Belfast is at times, an almost Jungian synchronicity on the one hand, but due to the size of the city, perhaps no happenstance at all. He told me about the early morning starts and the wee bakery on the Woodstock Road, the cramped workspace above the shop. The lone baker works away in the early morning, while patrons sleep deeply through the morning darkness. Hard, honest graft.

    In 2001, I recall being in Sallynoggin, Dublin. I was labouring for a plasterer at the time. We were in Dublin, travelling up and down from the North over the course of a month or so, and in a Spar, I saw chicken-filet burgers – proper ones, bread-chicken-filet burgers with lettuce and tomato – and they looked delicious. There were also big sausage rolls with grated cheese in them, so when you warmed them up, they created an unctuous cheesy goodness with the meat and pastry. Oh my.

    When we enter a reality of accepting inferior products, we become ‘modified’ slaves to the corporate dominion and accept the way things are…

    I don’t accept.

    It’s easy to call into a high-street establishment without thinking.

    It takes a bit of choice to make a better decision to opt for a better product to consume.

    The other day, I was in a wee ‘local’ bakery and had a sausage roll with a drop of red sauce and a hot cup of tea; on a cold January day, it hit the spot. I left refreshed and warm, entering the biting, frosty air, wrapped up in my coat as I trudged home.

    You could support the local bakery. Goodness knows they need it.

  • The Nascent Age of the Self -Involved

    One must begin by asking a begging question: is literary criticism, in Ireland, dead?

    Recently, reading Susan Sontag’s 1966 essay ‘Against Interpretation’, this reviewer noticed the absence of the pronoun ‘I’, which has become ingratiated in the ‘I’ singular, the most fantastic, the singular phenomenological self-view.

    The singular ‘I’ – the Me, Myself, and I routine. This reviewer sees this everywhere due to social media. Me, Glorious Me, forever Me, and Me. Like some demented character from Roald Dahl’s children’s book adapted into a musical.

    In Susan Sontag’s piece, in the essay’s opening channels, she discusses Mimesis – Mimetic theory from the Ancient Greek world, and how Western consciousness has since seen all art as a representation of the past. This is a fair and accurate point. Some musical pieces of the modern era are inspired by what has gone before – take Poculum Harlem’s A Whiter Shade of Pale – some of the music was borrowed from Johanas Sebastian Bach (Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major (BVW 1068), movement II, better known as the ‘Air on the G String’) and Intertextuality and other forms of tweaked reproduction for the public, consuming sphere. In other words, capitalism.

    Has the woke agenda razed the literary Towers of Babel to hark on with their overt, aggressive liberalism so that anyone with a rational, logical mind with an understanding of a particular subject outside their, the philistines’, own parameters are pillaged and vociferously vilified if they dare have a masculine view/take on, in, a broader sphere?

    Oh, if we could be visited every day with the dove of learning or visit Borges’ library to select another book after returning the one we have read back to its endless shelves.

    Or will they, the literary critics, routinely be ignored and silenced into oblivion as to engage in something outside of their (the braying rabble) comprehension – is to admit concession to something?

    Susan Sontag.

    Bonfire of the banalities

    Social media has helped create agentic and situational narcissists by the acreage, who are self-involved, selfish, and unable to challenge themselves to see a world beyond the digital screen in front of them with scrolling videos. On and on it goes … like a long narrative poem dedicated to the self.

    The era of banality is thrust upon us. There is, no doubt, a proliferation of mainstream publishing content waxing lyrical about this and that, but when you question writers on what and who they have read they shy away from answering. Why?

    Mainstream mediocrity is part of the problem.

    They are fearful of criticism. They cannot contend with criticism because its connotation is ‘not to like,’ which impacts their overt sensitivities and victimisation mindset(s). Fear is integral to them being found out for the half-baked, badly-read charlatans they really are.

    In the Irish Literary Scene, Wokeism is a dominant model the media has embraced.

    The Philistines’ rendering of Art toward annihilation through their immaturity and blind-sided emotionality sees a casual shift towards to a lesser formulation in production and the end product. The celebration of the banal – the cumulation of a taping a banana to an art gallery wall. What is this tokenistic, attempted gesture or symbolism? A chimpanzee’s take?

    A middlebrow mediocrity has taken most of the literary, mainstream positions and loves nothing more than to espouse its own form of ‘I, I, me myself and that of my friends’ view.

    They do not really serve literature – the thing itself, Art; instead, they serve the din and hype spin for the work they are trying to publicise.

    It is tonal naïveté due to a lack of maturity. Instead of seeking logic, they seek out an entirely narrow pedestal upon which to place themselves. This is their desire: to be talked about, admired and adored. It could not be any less further from the childhood pages The Princess and the Pea or The Emperor’s New Clothes, straight from the Fairy Tale Rule Book. Rule No.1: Take an arrogant, self-involved, aggrandising trait and go through many tribulations to finally learn humility. And peace of mind. I see it playing out in real time. Facetiously.

    Humility is a great virtue one may have to learn in life’s travails. This is the paradigm I see time and again in life and on the socials.

    All works of Art should speak for themselves. As in, the work should speak for itself.

    Silence by maturer, and should know-better, enablers who stay mute. To take a stand is to raise one’s head above the parapet, and who wants to be dog-piled or cancelled by the braying rabble once they start?

    RDNE Stock Images.

    Nepotism in Ireland

    This is not complex—we do not have to draft in hermeneutics to examine the Nepotistic biases. Nepotism is an unutterable word in Ireland, North and South, but it is dominant. It is so dominant that those in positions of power live in a kind of comfortable, headstrong, warm denial that there is no Nepotism in the literary Arts in Ireland. Ireland and Irish people have a way of not looking at the end of their introspective fork … why?

    What they forge on the bow of their ship, without foresight, is the transitory nature of the imbued self in the nectar-sweet plateaus, which they seek to ascertain and commandeer for their greed – the promotion of the self.

    They seek to publicise their own and only agenda – themselves. It has become entirely predictable and wholly pedestrian.

    They do not read critical literary theory – therefore, they are not considering critical literary theory. If you do not read or consider theory, how can you know what a logical take with substance is, and what it is not? To weigh up literary theories and ideas help enshrine the mind’s understanding of prior accepted literary texts, never mind toward growth and maturity.

    Ireland, North & South has always had nepotism and nepotistic biases – you have to be ‘someone’ to get published. Where does this way of prejudicial thinking come from?

    The perfect image represents the proposed product displayed, but the product is a much inferior facsimile. It has crept into the literary world, too.

    Overrated Novels

    A lot of mainstream novels have a naïve bluntness in terms of tonality. In terms of literary Art, seeking out relational emotionality, as the model for the plot is overrated – there, I said it.

    The predictable chatter and babble that encompasses spin are endless. It is senseless. It has no basis in logic, and this hyperbole operates in a moral vacuum with tendrilled emotionalism as its core foundation.

    Take any mainstream novel, the college-girl mentality has read this work and resonated emotionally. The formula is predictable: the girl meets the boy and falls in love with the boy. Falls out of love with the boy. The developing mind relates so much with the story and the characters that they overrate the novel. It has been heavily publicised by the capitalistic dyad of agents/publishers to make money and profit, and it appeals the sensibilities of young women who have their own money to purchase it.

    It is not, however, Art. Again, it is a novel, verging on the YA formula, to reiterate this point, to drive it home: sells an easily digestible plot that is relational and has relatable characters of young types to readers within its flimsy paragraphs. The writing is wooden and clichéd, and it runs along the vein of ‘Sam sat down, uncorked the wine. Then he tried some…. While Michelle munched on a croissant.’

    This prose is immature, tiresome, wane, and tedious to the committed reader. These clauses and sentences are flat. Where along the way did well-written prose lose its pomp, jolt and creative juice to arrive at this stale juncture? A good, sturdy breeze would blow its walls and roof away.

    Like taking a gondola down the Tigris. Like sending a bowling ball skirting along a millpond.

    They soon lose their gloss these books. Once braced around the work, when the PR scaffold is taken away and is no longer there, it is sent plummeting to the depths.

    To spell it out plainly for the Philistines, they diminish Art. They admonish themselves.

    This has descended into a cultural ‘war’, pitting defenders and lovers of Art against the emotionally-led, shallow comprehension (not yet developed in an emotional sense) Philistine(s).

    And then others have dictators in the wheelhouse, and what they say goes…

    To be a literary critic in 2024 is to be an exile. To scratch out a meagre existence in the swampy fens while within the walled citadels of comfort – on the internet – poets, flunky wizards and flaky white witches dwell with their immature poetry and mulchy sentimentality.

    Syncretism and Neoplatonism are required. Over time, what is needed is based on a hegemonic principle – and it happens without much effort. The strongly composed works hold up, and others, the ones that were once regaled with great infinity, now have a wilderness of non-plussed minds that do not engage at all. Shameless!

    Criticism leads to Censorship

    The reviewer of this piece dealt with some of the mentalities above, but it did not go well.

    One well-known literary magazine editor in Ireland had asked for articles on homelessness, and I had a piece ready and fired it off. I received an initial email response saying it had been received, but then there was nothing. Silence. I emailed again, and eventually, after about four or five months, I received a reply which stated, ‘This was the best piece out of them all, but I cannot publish it due to possible legal reasons down the road.’

    I had changed names in the piece. No one was identifiable unless the main culprit involved became prissy, but they are not a literary lover, and why deny a person’s literary voice? The editor patronised me with a tardy sign-off, talking of homelessness generically as a terrible thing, while I was currently experiencing it, probably unbeknownst.

    I was annoyed and let loose a volley of sentences criticising some of the work I had already read in Ireland, saying he was, in a way, silencing me and my work. He did not reply and continued to refuse my submitted work. I did not know the guy, but after viewing some videos of him online, I realised that he comes across as an individual in a position of power and, in my experience, cannot take any criticism. Petty then.

    On reflection, my response was immature, yet here was an editor who was not brave enough to take a chance on a ‘new Irish writer,’ and continued to ignore any work I submitted to their magazine. I ceased all contact as it is a waste of energy competing with such a narrowminded, selfish mentality. This is censorship, pure and simple.

    An individual I met at university bravely stood up and questioned the selected nepotism. They are now part of the tiny, elitist cabal in ‘literary’ Dublin, and once told me in a private message on social media that they ‘deserved it’ – to be part of the select few. I couldn’t help but notice they were in a relationship with someone running a literary magazine.

    If your face fits. If you are ‘someone,’ you are in. That is, if you are fulfilling an Ireland Ltd PR spin function. You are censored and ignored if you are intelligent, rational, and well-read, because being well-read strikes fear into the philistine. They respond with a snarl because you may be ‘better’ at something than them, and they cannot have that. In the depths of their rotting psyche, the insecurity bubbling away in the pitch of their being, they really know that they are the better. This is how immature and petty these scenarios roll. Awful.

    But they won’t engage with the criticism because engaging is a way of dealing with it, and they don’t want to. They want gloss, spin and saccharine nonsense – here today, gone tomorrow.

    Some more rational and democratic literary outlets will see the literary merit, but … those are rare. Support goes to the mainstream, as that’s where the money is.

    Literary Art will always outlast the mediocre after the rabble stops squabbling and the dust settles.

    Feature Image: Lukas Kloeppel

  • Anatomy of Disgust – Northern Irish Style

    This piece is not intended to provoke. It is more a look at the way people’s minds are shaped, how people think, and how that is articulated towards others.

    I realized something was ‘ratten’ in the state of ‘Norn Ireland’ when I was about four. My half-brother of about six or so and I were walking the street just on the periphery of our Nationalist Catholic housing estate, whereupon a teenager brandished a samurai sword, and with a twist of anger in his face said to us: ‘Youse are Fenian bastards.’

    I was perplexed even at that young age. We would venture around the estate pretty often so it was nothing new being out on our own during the day but this situation was … as I would grasp later, characterised by something that I would often hear in the rising and vitriolic anger during my life

    ‘Dirty Fenian bastard!’ and, ‘Fucking black bastard!’

    These sectarian epithets, ‘terms,’ are learned from family members, from the local community, whether it be friends, etc., and were reinforced in those communities when I was growing up. Handed down. Indeed, I have repeated some sectarian hatred and bad language myself to tarnish ‘the other side’ i.e., the hated, and much-vaunted, enemy.

    They are known in psychological terms as Interjections – or interjects. Which can be defined as the unconscious acceptance of terms, ideas, and personality traits of parents, guardians, and others we are close to when developing.

    This language of physical revulsion, termed ‘the Sartrean Other,’ is purely tribal; a visceral reaction to ‘difference.’ The anatomy of disgust – physical revulsion. One is revolted by this other person, who does not worship the same way and that is to be feared, ridiculed and mistrusted – whole-heartedly.

    Bigotry came swarming from the pulpit, the soapbox, and the barstool from fervent rhetoricians stoking tensions. Revisionism is a strong pill that many swallow. Leafing out the hurts and wrongs of the past from the blood-soaked history of the place. Darkness lies there amongst the weeds where goblins live and thrive. The goblins of fear-mongering suspicion – like you have an aura around you defining you as a being from a particular community, and once confirmed that aura becomes a symbolic role: to hate, to destroy, and to kill.

    I have witnessed the teeth-binding, red-faced fury of hatred during a riot in Belfast when the two tribes were pitted against each other – the furore of two communities each on one side of the road separated by the police.

    © Daniele Idini.

    The din was deafening. I remember thinking to myself, ‘What circle or balcony of Dante’s Hell is this?’

    Reinforced bigotry, non-capitulation, and plaintive victim-hood have been the two imposing forces that have fitted so succinctly into a certain kind of joint which once forged is forged into eternity in a union of unrest and hatred.

    I once worked in a factory setting in East Belfast and while on a break went over to the table in the canteen. A colleague pulled out a chair, put the book he was reading down into an open holdall – a Noam Chomsky work by the way – and smiled. His arms were swathed in tattoos. He was stocky but friendly with me. I cannot recall if we chatted much or not but I did wonder if this fella was a Loyalist paramilitary. By the look of him, I’d opt for, yes, but looks can be deceiving. One thing is for sure, he looked like a tough individual.

    Afterwards I wondered about the Chomsky book and thought to myself, ‘Fairplay, you’re reading Chomsky of all folk. For East Belfast, that’s a brave step in self-education.’ I smiled to myself at this autodidact. It was Chomsky’s Who Rules The World?

    I told these guys like him, and guys from East Belfast during my shift and on the assembly line, that I was in recovery from alcoholism and do you know what? They listened and nodded their heads and some said, ‘Yeah, my Da was an alcoholic. A terrible alcoholic. Fairplay to you that you are working on it.’ I replied, ‘Sorry to hear that, and, thanks.’ It was gracious. Maybe God was looking over me. Who knows?

    I was never queried if I was ‘A taig?’ I have no idea if they thought it. I surmise that it was because I was quiet, well-mannered, and honest with them: ‘I am from Ballymena and I am in recovery from addictions.’ Which is true. I was, and I am.

    I worked late a couple of nights and through the night, a few shifts, at the factory and was never, ever questioned or challenged. I worked hard, and in many regards, was silently respected for my hard work.

    Then a couple of years ago, I was working with a few guys from the Shankill and, again, do you know what? We became rather friendly.

    Shankill neighbourhood. © Daniele Idini.

    After our shift(s), they gave me lifts up home to a Nationalist area. Maybe seeing where I lived. Possibly. But that’s the cynic in me, maybe, showing some caution too.

    Don’t get me wrong, thirty-odd years ago I could have been taken to a quiet area say, up further than Ballysillan, made to get out and down on my knees and blasted in the back of the head with a gun – a couple of shots for good measure. ‘There goes another Fenian bastard.’ The supposed killers may have said. Blasted into eternity. Like the other victims of sectarian violence. Boom. Gone.

    But sectarianism doesn’t just hold a grip on the minds of people back home, from working-class ‘sectarian’ communities. Indeed it can apply to people who refer to themselves as ‘Christian’, and who can be just as evil as the balaclava-clad gunman.

    I know because when I was homeless, and in a homeless hostel, in Belfast. I was harassed by a naïve, and arrogant member of staff who would profess themselves to be a ‘Christian’. Their harassment was down to pure green-eyed jealousy. Their religious ethics, and morals, were overtaken by the temper of ‘Getting one over on another human being.’ Because they felt inferior.

    Basically, I was getting some attention from a female member of staff, who was to be my ‘link worker.’, This other member of staff did not like this and wanted to put an end to it. There was nothing going on, we just got on, but people noticed. Nothing would happen, nevertheless, this person glowered and bristled in their own way. It was selfish and clearly jealousy.

    That’s a pretty bad situation to be in if you feel you have to harass a homeless person in a hostel just because you wanted other staff members in the hostel to worship you.

    If you ask me, that was a disgusting way to act toward someone who was going through a difficult, and vulnerable, situation – someone without a familial home or any support. I was coming to terms with my alcoholism, but still in the early stages of accepting the reality and had not hopped on the wagon by that stage. I was struggling.

    I also remember working with a young woman from Loyalist Tiger’s Bay on a project, in Belfast. We were chatting together and she said, ‘You know, Neil, there’s no difference between us, this sectarian and religious stuff.’ And I replied, ‘You know, you are 100% right.’ Her conversation released me from the infinity of it, and I knew things would be different from then on; meaning I would have to leave in order to move on with my own life, and be free of it.

    People in power, usually part of some particular establishment have a vested interest in preserving the statelet and write about it – with bias. As in, our side, our argument is more legitimate than yours. Hogwash.

    Things can be different. As I have outlined my experiences in that factory and with those guys from the Shankill. I simply listened to their story. They listened to mine.

    It would be great if you could challenge yourself and listen too. You may learn something. I know I did.

    Feature Image: The Cupar Way ‘Peace Wall’ © Daniele Idini.

  • The Cult of Literary Narcissism

    No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity, but I know none, therefore am no beast.
    William Shakespeare, Richard III

    I anticipated the takeover of the vast majority of the publishing industry by fourth or fifth-wave feminism. It has been in the mix for five years or so, and it dominates this arena; and not just mainstream publishing, but most alternative avenues too, as far as I can see.

    These mindsets want fluffiness. Cats. And Tote bags with witty slogans in an interesting font. There are writers whom they laud and publish; and their work, at best, to quote an agricultural analogy (Not just Beckett), is fair to middling.

    Writers are reaffirmed by their agents et al and subsequently develop and own this logic of, ‘I am being published; therefore, I am good.’ But by whose metric? Your own? Qualitative? Profit and dross.

    Many seem more interested in being revered as ‘a writer’ than creating Art. This is the cult of personality – a celebrity projection of the ultimate performer, different from the norm. They believe they are special. The core issue is, I believe, that the celebrity culture now at work in the book industry places an over-emphasis on persona and mythos as persona – a literary, bookish cult – whether it be hyped-up media or others, at the behest of Art.

    One is reminded of the lines from Bukowski’s The Genuis of the Crowd, ‘Beware those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone’; and ‘Not being able to create Art, they will not understand Art’.

    Peering into some of these marketed texts, I do not see a lot of literary merit among the prose. Pallid, wane, and an emotionally-led, safe register is my takeaway. More like Young Adult books than adult fiction. The age of banality is upon us.

    Charles Bukowski

    Every sentence should fight for its place…

    I suspect that this is part of a wider, individualistic desire, for fame, fortune, and glory. To be looked upon and admired. Put on a pedestal. To have the fine robes of a writer bestowed upon and wrapped around you. Speculated upon in your sartorial elegance.

    I hear them on the radio and see them on the TV, these writers of ephemera, here one day, gone the next. Until the next one comes along.

    It’s a Warholian, factory process of endless, emotionally-led drones pumping out emotionally-led, dry, grey mush. The sentences are short and adverbs are plentiful, John loves Trudie. Trudie really loathes John. Fred absolutely dislikes Stewart. Or, DCI Kelly DI Slater, investigates…

    These novels are tumbling dice and have little or no truck with pushing the literary envelope. They lie prone on the racks and shelves in stores and in the minds of their reader. Would you not rather have something that inspires you to shout from the rooftops? I relate to this! This sentence here is bloody brilliant! Look, the prose is literally leaping off the page. It burns!

    The reality that they fail to recognise this is disheartening.

    When was the last time Middlemarch was talked about? Dickens? Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar?

    To quote Howard Jacobson, ‘The problem isn’t with the novel, it is with the reader.’ In an age of frenetic online activity and electronic meandering there is a distinct lack of originality. A absence of creative juice. And a dearth of creative reading.

    Challenging books…

    Aspersions cast on, for example, James Joyce’s Ulysses, which many have not read, are immature, and rooted in a jealousy that the text holds a higher position in the literary pantheon than their offering(s). Disingenuous assaults are derived from manifest insecurity.

    They scoff at bigger, therefore harder, and difficult – but they would not come it and say it – literary texts. Due to the social embarrassment that this may cause and what might be inferred. They do not like to be embarrassed socially. This has its roots in a more organic state of grace.

    They do not desire to read ‘challenging’ books, preferring a certain reading homogeneity and inevitable selective stasis. They do not care for a rampant display of maleness. The kind of masculinity on show, say, in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer is scorned and discredited. Man as Dog is the ravenously portrayed symbolism.

    But freedom of expression should be allowed. Even in Miller’s canine-like, Parisian existence. If a man is de-fanged, de-barked, and thus emasculated, where is he to go? To be banished into exile? To become prohibited? Becoming chthonic beings like the Morlocks in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Subterranean, knuckle-draggers whose jobs(s) are to fertilise and provide financial support. If that is even the case in these attitudes.

    We are in an interesting meridian. I wonder would Tropic of Cancer be published today?

    The demographic target for the marketers is predominately female, but it does not commandeer in totality and speak for all things literary.

    Their mandate is revenue – at all costs. No matter if the book is well-written. If it has a plot, narration or thought-provoking, relatable characters. They are only interested in appeasing the god of Profit.

    James Joyce 1882-1941.

    Art and Persona

    Entering a Joycean reverie of Leopold Bloom allowing ‘his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it’s not too big bring on piles again.’

    In the proverbial outhouse, we recognises our shit stinks, like everyone else’s. Are you a writer at all times? In bed, a writer? Asleep, a writer? At stool a writer? Walking down the street?

    I have to inform you that, you are not a cut above. Your Art should be your Art and you should stay the hell out of it, if it’s Art you are creating. You deny your organic, biological self but continually project the ideal that you are indeed a writer, and all must lay down prostrate before you and worship at your altar.

    That is the central tenet here, the separation of one’s Art and persona; both are not one and the same. They are mutually exclusive. They should be de-compartmentalised. Art is an exposition; a creative process and it emerges predominantly from, boffins say, the right hemisphere of the brain.

    It comes down onto the page and then it’s gone; albeit it remains as text. Except the marketers wants to conflate the two. Look at this Kurtz-like, mysterious figure, look at the chatter around them. If there is none, we will create it ourselves.

    Beat those jungle rhythms. Not letting the work speak for itself. The vehicle of the plot. An ensemble cast of characters. Dialogue. You know, the three basics of the novel. The holy trinity.

    Writing as surrogacy: a biological denial forfeited into writing projects and projections of the writing, literary mother who gives birth to ingenuity and creativity.

    There is a certain emotional naiveté at work here.

    Being noted as special is an inherent part of being desired to be seen as a writer. It locks into an awakening narcissism so succinctly.

    Gatekeepers

    As agents, they behave like Amazonian women and gatekeepers. If you do not play into their modal form(s), you will be truncated below the waist and stung with arrows.

    I recently undertook a couple of counselling courses. On a Level 4 Diploma, in-house, I was the only male left in a classroom of a dozen or so females including the two female tutors. One of them, I believe, was a feminist and was going to put the squeeze to get rid of me, a male. She succeeded.

    I believe there are other feminist cabals that spring up in offices and colleges and publishing houses, and if you don’t like cats and cutesy stuff, and you’re a manly man, with a hint of aggression, possibly, towards them, or unconsciously dominate with your masculinity, in any way, you are a danger. And will be ostracised.

    It’s a form of sexism of course – in, on, their own terms. They circle their wagons. They have vested interests – their own cultish mentalities. Dance by firelight.

    But what they forget is that if it were not for men, as writer and academic, Camille Paglia relayed: ‘If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.’

    Paglia had it down too when she relayed that a lot of angry women who had been hurt by men were now in positions of power wanted revenge, and to make all men suffer because of their experiences.

    A bit like Estella and Miss Havisham at the beginning of Great Expectations, who emasculate Pip and desire to see him become passive. They want masculinity to be humiliated, suffer, and become truncated below the belt. They want men to be their inferiors, servants, and in the end, inert eunuchs.

    What a cadre of selfishness, rank hypocrisy, and flaccid tribalism.

    This Jungian projection of man in the female mind as an unconscious symbol of taker, abuser, and destroyer is a possibility.

    In Newton’s Third Law of Motion: for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. If object A exerts a force on object B, object B also exerts an equal and opposite force on object A. In other words, forces result from interactions.

    Men work in the dirt. They mix concrete. They lift and lay blocks. They raise buildings. They work on boats. Rigs. Implement dangerous jobs. Men write too. And some men write, craft, brilliantly. They should be respected. Not all men are dangerous predators. It is a dual thing. Let’s value compromise, equality and respect.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Ciaran Carson: The Dichotomy of Being

    Belfast writer, and poet, Ciaran Carson carried a black flute with silver keys on its main body, which he would screw together to play sometimes. In class. At Queen’s University, Belfast.

    He once asked me, “What would you have liked to become in life?”

    I answered: “Either a master carpenter, a mathematician, or a pianist.”

    “I agree with the master carpentry, I wanted to become one of those myself.” Ciaran replied earnestly.

    Once in a writing group – the infamous Group – he gave me a lot of advice on a poem, which was inspired by the infamous Blackbird of Belfast Lough poem, putting his own literary stamp on it. To this I responded: “Ah, but Ciaran, that wouldn’t be my poem anymore, it would be yours.”

    He considered this for a moment and said, “Maybe, maybe.” A couple of attendees came up to me afterwards and said: “You did well to challenge him there.”

    You see, Ciaran, sometimes could get inside a person’s work, kick its rafters down and plant new foundations – his own. That didn’t really endear him to some participants. I think he resented my protestation, but on reflection probably thought I was correct. A person’s writing can become a surrogacy, so they can be precious about it. If someone wrestles that babe in arms from them it creates difficulties.

    Ciaran was a dichotomy, like myself; as we all can be. Blowing warm one moment, cold the next. I recall him with his horn-rimmed glasses, tweed blazers, and pork pie hat. Like a detective from a 1950s novel, set in middle England; or possibly a character from Z-Cars.

    He amused me. I suppose I amused him sometimes, when he wasn’t bewildered by my anxious nature at that time. I felt a lot of social anxiety which I was not in control of. He too stuttered and became nervous. It jammed him up. I was jammed up in my own head, so, I related to that. I empathised by nodding.

    I thoroughly enjoyed read his interesting book Shamrock Tea.

    His take on Dante was widely embraced and commended internationally. He spoke to me one day about when he was in Italy, where learned folk indulged him, calling him Professore or Maestro! But when he got back home he was still just a “specky bastard.”’ So he mused, with a smile on his face. Such is the iron-raw vernacular of back home.

    Belfast. Image: Fellipe Lopes.

    In his poem Snow the tic-tac-toe meter and the pat-pat of the table-tennis bat, of the flicking rhythm of the flakes at his window, was successfully achieved.

    Ciaran’s mind was shaped by the conflict. How could it not be?

    I recall one Presbyterian writer at the Seamus Heaney Group aligning Ciaran with Republicanism because he was from West Belfast – even though he had the same surname as one of the founders of Ulster Edward Carson. But West Belfast was a good enough reason for him. He thought Paisley was right, the IRA needed to go around in sackcloth and ashes to atone for their sins.

    That barbaric violence, as he saw it, was only inflicted on the Unionist community. But there was little mention of redress for the Loyalist pogroms against the Nationalist community since the 1920s.

    Ciaran didn’t respond too much, but I knew the association would have encroached on him. I once had read in an Irish newspaper piece that Ciaran was asked why didn’t he join the struggle. He answered honestly: “I was too scared.”

    He had Protestants in his family background. Also, I am sure, some Republicans but that’s the dichotomy of Belfast. Grey areas. Not black and white. Not binary. Coded. Just a miasma of deeply ingrained historical decisions made, and mandated, by people who have long since passed on and probably don’t give a Frenchman’s fart now.

    The Cupar Way ‘Peace Wall’. © Daniele Idini

    He enjoyed my poetry. At times.

    There was one which I have lost now about, well, it was my take on John Masefield’s Cargoes set in Latin America during the period of the Aztecs and Montezuma. At least that’s what one of his students on the Master’s course, a Brazilian lady, told me after class one day.

    Inevitably I became persona non grata at Queen’s because I would not suck up to those with a modicum of power and who were established writers there.

    I recall one senior person looking at me one day in a one-to-one like I was a piece of cake. I wondered about his heterosexuality, felt uncomfortable, excused myself, and left. It was confusing and I did not go back. Doubtless, he verbally discredited me to his peers.

    Another established writer was angry that I got onto a post-grad course that they were running and more-or-less told me so in a sit down meeting: “There’s the door. You don’t belong here.” Because I did not worship them and their work. And I struggled with my English composition (Some change there, huh?).

    That was hard to take. I was hurt by that. I was embittered for a while, but I had experienced a lot of rejection already by that stage in my life. In truth I was in the depths of alcoholism at the time, and found it a real strain to really buckle down and focus. But I still had a creative brain, and a universal beat.

    I think Ciaran sensed that because it was his partial reference, and another’s, who got me on to that post-grad course, but that annoyed some people. Power struggles, ego, and insecurity all played a part in the mentality of the Seamus Heaney Centre.

    The last time I met Ciaran was in 2017, I was homeless, again, and limping from out of the Industrial temps’ office in Shaftesbury Square, securing some work in a bakery in East Belfast, he looked at me, and I looked back, but we both headed on our separate paths.

    I emailed him a while later but he did not respond. I had heard he was seriously ill by then. He was a heavy smoker and so was I.

    When he passed away, I wondered about the fait accompli eulogies by those in the narrow academic world in Belfast. I wondered about his dichotomous way of being.

    Ciaran wasn’t perfect – who is? But I am richer from the experience of meeting him, interacting with him, and learning from him. He was a very sound writer, read extensively, questioned, loved his music, and knew his literary onions.

    Wherever he is – I hope he’s happy.

    Ciaran Carson – 9th October, 1948 – 6th October, 2019

    Featured Image: Gerard Carson

  • Gay?

    In the insular, it felt like it at times, enforced statelet of Northern Ireland, sexual repression was a thing. (And probably still is.) 

    Faggot. Queer. Bent. Gayboy. Bender. Fruit. OOOOooooooooo like an effeminate caricature: going around, mincing, limp-wristed, and nothing but a bum-watching, bumboy. These were some of the names I heard levied at me when I was eighteen and on into my twenties.

    At the time, my mental health was on skid row. I had depression, was low on self-confidence; suffered terrible social anxiety, and an alcoholic experimenting with harmful drugs . I did not realise at the time that I was in pain due to my background. Yes, family and subsequent cognitive development. Impaired. Yes. Immaturity. And I was unwell. Really. I did not stand up for myself. I had no response to these verbal demarcations.

    They used to say, ‘Burnsy, why haven’t you got a girlfriend then?’ And I would take – as the colloquialism goes – a reddener. Pure scarlet. Flustered and embarrassed and already a wreck. I started to think maybe I was. One of them, and I was struggling with my sexual identity. My gayness was trying to come up to the surface and out. But I was suppressing it.

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    I can recall some twenty years later, sitting in a working-class bar, one Saturday afternoon two decades ago, in Belfast, alone at a table with a drink, and coming to the end of the line on the subject – asking myself: ‘Am I gay? Do I really want to be in a relationship with a man?’

    I knew that this situation had become a neurosis in my mind. And I had to venture out there to find out. I went online and looked at Transexual escorts in Belfast. I picked one. Of an Asian background. I went to a hotel the next week and found out that I was not gay after all. The physicality of what is a man’s frame/body and the presentation gender of a man, was, is, something that I was not attracted to. At all. And that’s fine.

    My sexual identity had very little bearing on my mind’s stunted growth. It was all familial.

    Image: Marina Azzaro

    There was the time whilst I was living in Dublin that I went along to a reading group after being asked by a guy who is gay. I knew he was gay and did not have an issue with it. I did not have a secret fantasy or agenda to get better acquainted. During the reading, he tried to play footsie, or, leggsy, rather, under the table with me and I did not reciprocate. From then on, he has given me the old round around and does not converse or communicate and I thought that was rather selfish, but there you are.

    Indoctrinated media draws very clear lines on the subject of sexuality: binary codes, definitions and stereotypes.

    I do wonder about the repression back home, though, the religious doctrines and institutions which repressed people and silenced others. The subsequent abuses.

    I did wonder for a long time about homophobia and innate homosexuality and violence meted out in manifest self-anger as one reads and hears so often about attacks on gay men. Gay women. Gay people.

    People are people they have their preferences and proclivities.

    I went on a trip to Berlin a couple of years ago to visit the museums and check out the city. Cut to a Friday evening; there was slight drizzle and when I was walking down through Rosa Luxemburg-Platz, I saw a man in full-make-up, a pink latex jacket, leather biker’s hat, a black mesh over his face, black leather trousers, and black boots, and to me, he looked happy. Free. I was happy for his freedom and thought to myself, ‘You wouldn’t see that in certain areas of Belfast on a Friday night. Sadly.’

    You just don’t know the great struggles people have in their lives.

    Live and let live.

    Feature Image: Felipe Lopes

  • David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

    I have a mild neurosis, situated in Utopian wish-fulfillment, of the ideal that I often step in a prelapsarian coppice with slats of warm-light breaking the gentle canopy and then filtering on down through the trees to come to a swirling perceptible rest and thus luxuriating golden on the forest floor.

    The morning fontanelle, in its softwarm glade, peeping out, making way for noontide, and the ossified skull pivots towards Jupiter; my dumb-wondering skull swinging gallantly to the heavens, and then back again to the social world, where the overtly self-conscious auteur can record the very thing itself, Kantian logic. Which, is, seemingly, scant upon the ground these post-modern, non-ideological – apart from vast consumerism and neo-liberalist agenda(s) – days.

    Recently, I looped the meta-modernist, hyper-realist circle and reached for David Foster Wallace’s encyclopaedic, metadata novel, Infinite Jest (1996); I figured that while sedate prose is at the behest of book sellers, and publishers, means – and modes of production for the masses – I thought “To hell with this, give me a novel with shtick.” So employing a reposed epidural, I plugged into Foster Wallace’s acicular vein, man, and plunged the diviner right on into the other side.  And it is shtick all the way.

    Sigmund Freud.

    Civilized Sexuality

    In section two of Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930) on ‘Civilized’ Sexuality Morality and Modern Nervous Illness he opens up by drawing a distinction between the ‘natural’ – rampant? –  sexuality in the human, and the subservient, moral sexual behaviour in ‘civilized society,’ which delineates into sublimation, leading to one’s efforts being thrown wholly into Art and cultural activity.

    One could assert that David Foster Wallace, straddled the tumescent, guilt-ridden world of the former and then found his comfort, and solace, in the latter, where the rotating, tangible Gods are more within one’s reach if they exert themselves and actually get down to it and, libidinal energies aside, write.

    On social media, namely Twitter, a few people remarked that they had undertaken the David versus Goliath battle with Infinite Jest and retreated to safe passage, beaten some two hundred pages in. I suppose this may be permissible in others but not for anyone prepared to leave their comfort zone. So, with a slingshot in hand, I strapped on my leather sandals and headed out to the dusty milieu to grapple with the colossal swinging giant.

    The plot is tertiary to Wallace’s intellect and ego in flux. In fact it is pure vaudeville to the main circus, big-top act which is the intellect of Foster Wallace himself, and the pre-frontal cortex mythology which he conspires to create and then exudes, seemingly, so effortlessly.

    Did Foster Wallace write a capable work? That is down to the moral subjectivity of the reader, and relative comprehension of what literature is, and how far they are willing to travel to meet such a work.

    This is not a linear prose tale as we know it. What I deduced, and I have to be honest here, I skim-read some of the work, but what I was able to perceive was that a protean plot; a Joycean attempt at a quotidian epic; an idea enough to shake anyone in their cotton socks and rubber-soled plimsolls.

    David Foster Wallace.

    Nomenclature

    Foster Wallace’s reliance on nomenclature and acronyms are, well, trifling when you forget all the organisations he coins; we do know, for example, that O.N.A.N stands for Organization of North American Nations, a kind of dystopian superstate which is comprised of Mexico, the United States and Canada; and that the novel takes place during ‘The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment’ Y.D.A.U.

    It opens with tennis. Wallace was a court man, he liked to court tennis, and he schlongs his racket into being more often than enough into this work.

    Primary locations include the Enfield Tennis Academy (‘ETA), Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House  and a mountain location outside of Tucson, Arizona.

    Many characters are students or faculty at the school or patients or else staff at the halfway house; there is a multi-part, philosophical conversation between a Quebec separatist and his US government contact, which occurs at the Arizona location.

    The claustrophobic, proposed cannabis-deal waiting scene, near the start of the novel, is very telling about Wallace’s, one assumes, own neurosis’s about the partaking of cannabis, and the whole surrounding miasma of paranoia; the distinctive middle class, sweaty-palmed, heart-thumping moment-by-moment judgements formulated in the expectant mind of what is going on there in the less-than-fictional, delusionary, environmental ‘transaction.’

    We find ourselves in his fastidiously tidy, and small, apartment with the narrator, the best kind of writing which Foster Wallace is known for, where he is at home with the foetal type of self-hatred and mild-drug use which enveloped his almost Jacobean, rebellious nature.

    As regards technology, he talks about ‘cartridges’, film and the goal of the Americanised society; a cartridge, the end game; senseless cartridge which when one watches they become a stupefied, quivering wreck in front of the flickering images never to rise again – a kind of reverse Lazarus  – dead-eyed and owned.

    In terms of characterisation, there is the guy who is mad about tennis and optics, who sticks his head in a microwave, only to be superseded by his prodigal, talented son. Then there is Orin Junior. Mental Health sufferer; Kate Gompert – whom I believe is Foster Wallace spliced with Orin; Demerol aficionado Don Gately; and the whole Incandenza family clan.

    Main Plot Themes

    There are four main plot themes to be mindful of: First, a fringe group of Quebecois radicals, the AFR, which plans a violent geopolitical coup, and is opposed by high-level US operatives. Next, various residents of the Boston area who reach ‘rock bottom’ with their substance abuse problems, and enter a residential drug and alcohol recovery program, where they progress in recovery through AA and NA. We also find students training and studying at an elite tennis academy run by James and Avril Incandenza, and Avril’s adopted brother Charles Tavis. Finally, the history of the Incandenza family unfolds, focusing on the youngest son, Hal.

    More peripherally we have the minutiae of Foster Wallace’s comprehension of U.S pharmacology drugs, available for those requiring a hit. The theme of Québecois separatism. The City-scapes, wherein the psychogeography of the narrative feels sterile, offering a mish-mash of flimsy, dilapidated rooms in recovery house, Ennet House and the Tennis Academy, Enfield. We also find a transvestite junkie, in the toilet squirting and paranoid about voiding of the bowels.

    Not an Easy Read

    Infinite Jest is not an easy novel to read. It is a half-empty, farmhouse grain-store of nine hundred and eighty-one pages, with additional footnotes, which Wallace could not crow-bar into the main text; you have to do a lot of the work yourself, which for the unattended, ephemeral mentality of the nowadays impatient-person may be a difficult concept to grasp.

    This is a work that should come with a complimentary Dictionary and Thesaurus. One assumes that to write this David Foster Wallace swept out The Urals with a dustpan and hand brush. The event itself is not too masterful but the brushstrokes of ingenuity and dedication to his Art, were – are.

    David Foster Wallace was a deck-side sailor who learned to bind his ropes tightly, then lash the rigging onto his work and raise it, creaking, up from the plumy depths, on up far into the azure, heady swirling heights, and this has to be applauded, the meridian of achievement in the literary field, for what Foster Wallace implemented was no easy feat – the writer, and the unyielding precipice of the empty page –  and then to storm in and fill it with some, any, kind of syllogistic meaning, wow, just wow.

    Is Infinite Jest a supercilious comment on American society? Of course, it is.

  • Literature: Ireland’s Last Minotaur

    In Ireland, North and South, the Arts Sector, currently, is a sinecure. Those middle-class mentalities which dominate, and, indeed, hold most high profile positions, would argue vehemently against such – as they would see it – an offensive statement, but nevertheless I believe it to be a fair characterisation.

    ‘Stephen says bitterly, “It is the symbol of Irish Art. The cracked lookingglass of the servant.” This was Stephen Dedalus’s view in Joyce’s modernist magnum opus, Ulysses, and we find this idiom pre-settling into an ‘independent’ Republic as a statement on colonial subjugation, and a lack of confidence in the national character. And since that imperial rule withdrew, neoliberal, self-serving attitudes, have moved – and settled – in as they have done across the Western World.

    With the arrival of mass market production, relentless advertising and consumerism, which took over Irish sensibilities around twenty years ago, Ireland became no different to elsewhere.

    Up to €7 for a pint of ‘Stout’ in Temple Bar?! Dublin rents going through the roof, past the cloud-clapped ivory towers and beyond into the dazzling astral heights, for pure unadulterated profit. This is an Ireland I do not care to recognise anymore. Everything, including morality, is up for sale.

    With the internet, one can purchase the ‘lookingglass’ and have it in your hand the next day if one so wishes; but it will, inevitably, end up being tossed away, into landfill, soon thereafter. We live in ephemeral ‘throwaway’ times. Qualities like validity, truth and morality are diminished – and indeed ‘blend’ into ‘fiction-meets-truth’ in an Orwellian-era of ‘fake news’, outright lies and endless spin.

    Ireland enjoys intellects but only if they are not overtly clever, and don’t create a sense of inferiority. Does the cracked lookingglass serve as a basis for the national character or identity?

    Indoctrination and Subjugation

    A deep resonance of shame bubbles up from oppressiveness, whether it is indoctrination through the Catholic Church and a State which could not separate the two; and, in the wake of centuries of Viking, Norman, and indeed Anglo-Saxon, subjugation a deep hurt has not even been addressed. The need for a healing process in the collective psyche has not been considered by the remote heads of the post-modernist, mildly liberal, and increasingly secularised state.

    Ireland was banished, but she was not razed and buried; she would return. And return she did onto her fertile isle, on the edge of Western Europe – the land of milk and honey, so rich in potential and verdant imagination.

    It is true: I am in love with Ireland as landscape; and the mythical potency brings to mind an unconforming otherness – which espouses freedoms that rouse the romantic variant in a wanderer.

    There is, however, now the prescient, palpitating and unresolved issue of the published writer: the ego, which conflates on the surface area of their proposed brilliance, leading to the belief that they, and their literary output, rival, and even surpasses the authors of literary Classics. In effect, canonising their own brand – this is where we are.

    Let me add, that the Western World’s Canonical Works are up there for a reason, they are regarded as ‘the Classics’ and should be read and championed as such. A ‘Classic’ can be considered a strongly composed noteworthy book.

    Among the writers who are generally considered the most important in Western literature are: Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, Horace, Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, François Rabelais, Jean Racine, Molière, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Stendhal, Walt Whitman, Gustave Flaubert, Emily Dickinson, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Sigmund Freud, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett.

    First Usage

    The first writer to use the term ‘classic’ was Aulus Gellius, a second century AD Roman writer who, in the miscellany Noctes Atticae (19, 8, 15), refers to a writer as a classicus scriptor, non proletarius (‘A distinguished, not a commonplace writer’). Such classification began with the Greeks’ ranking their cultural works, with the word canon (‘carpenter’s rule’).

    Moreover, early Christian Church Fathers used canon to rank the authoritative texts of the New Testament, preserving them, given the expense of vellum and papyrus and mechanical book reproduction. Thus, being placed in a canon ensured a book’s preservation as the best way to retain information about a civilization.

    Contemporarily, the Western canon defines the best of Western culture. In the ancient world, at the Alexandrian Library, scholars coined the Greek term Hoi enkrithentes (‘the admitted’, ‘the included’) to identify the writers in the canon.

    If you are a writer with a couple of books in print, and if you deride these works because you are so high upon your stamping, nose-blustering, mighty charger, due to being published, I am sorry, but this is out-and-out naïveté. It is emotional, inferior narcissism and ego-led savagery and in its way, denigrates the reputations of great writers of the past and their output.

    Recently, reading an interview in which a writer stated that they did not, or could not, raise a little interest towards Jack Kerouac’s Beat Classic, On the Road, equating the experience with hitting one’s head ‘with a plastic spoon.’ – a petulant and unworthy response.

    Infantilised Youth Culture

    Infantilization of culturally accepted ‘norms’ through Happy Meals’ language, ‘LOLs’, and other solipsistic accepted ‘bant’ has led us down this cul-de-sac. Snowflake is used as a pejorative term. Other ‘trendy’ Smartphone-induced abbreviated terms such as ‘Merch’ and ‘Bae’: are now the common argot of an infantilised youth culture that permeates mainstream discourse.

    Any perceived ‘criticism’ of these so called ‘established writers’ i.e., a writer who has a recent published book on the shelves, is meted out with condemnations and calls the gallows! In this solidarity, an insidious, irrational, emotionally-charged cabal is missing the point.

    The media in Ireland love to promote long established writers and their works, but they routinely forget the Garret-based writers who slog bravely away by a figurative candle over their ‘Art’.

    Please, fellow scribes, do not ‘Drown’ your ‘book’ like Prospero. Do not become disheartened because you are not alone. Your magic is your own and do not let it die because of the success of mediocre fare, which publishing houses choose to release.

    Irish publishers, like UK publishers, and American publishers, are greedy for a quick return on profit and this mantra only serves their deity, the golden calf of money. Forget this wide-eyed, commandeering for a few hedonisms, and continue on.

    Yeatsian Revival

    Simply because Ireland has a vibrant literary-cultural inheritance – which came to the fore especially during the Yeatsian Irish Literary Revival from the turn of the twentieth century – should not, ergo, give prominence to literary reputations simply on the assumption they are part of a great tradition. Extreme reverence is the death-knell of strongly composed literature, which is kept in its primordial place for lack of oxygen, dragging itself off to the literary hinterlands, to peer through fissures of granite rock – redundant.

    There are simply too many Creative Writing Courses being run in universities, which gladly take a student’s money – assuming they pay it up front and often – in order to place their ego on a pedestal; but the massive issue with this kind of fawning is that it misses the whole point of literature, which is to enjoy the simple immersive experience of reading something new, fresh, challenging that sets you upon the unknown territories of an adventure, knapsack in tow.

    In Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come, the main protagonist, ‘Gar’ Gareth O’Donnell, has a public and private self, played by two actors. The mimetic structures of the ego, in the Irish Literary Art’s Scene(s) do not allow for any logical critique – this kind of thought is placed in emotional narcissism, firmly rooted in insecurity: the public image of oneself in a position of power and the private self behind pulled chintz curtains. Seemingly, the paradoxical self is difficult for the Irish mentality to examine closely.

    The Commentariat

    Who are the Irish commentariat on which these assertions are based? One does not have to look too far: remember when Roddy Doyle, a decent Dublin novelist, took a few naïve swipes at Joyce’s masterpiece:

    ‘Ulysses could have done with a good editor,’ Doyle told a stunned audience in New York gathered to celebrate the great man who is credited with inventing the modern novel.

    ‘You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top ten books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.’

    ‘I only read three pages of Finnegans Wake and it was a tragic waste of time,’ he added. ‘Dubliners was Joyce’s best work, but Ulysses was undeserving of reverence.”

    According to Richard Ellmann’s biography Joyce was once described as ‘A corner boy who spits in the Liffey.’ Jealously appears to lie behind denunciations such as Roddy Doyle’s.

    Working Class Writers

    The reality is that many aspiring Irish novelist are forced into work that prevents them from writing: no one doubts this, but many working class writers are living on the breadline; the cultural establishment response: ‘Ah, he’s grand’ desensitizes them to this struggle.

    They may console themselves, ‘Sure, he was rejected thirty-seven times.’ Well, Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected over a hundred times – so statistics have little relevance, especially considering a lot of agents don’t know their furnished onions from their hot potatoes? The author of Moby Dick, Herman Melville, died in abject poverty. Those who seek justification in ‘statistics’ lack in the cold reasoning of logic.

    The effete North – once a fertile ground for freedom of expression, and in around the harrowed fields of poetry, has been conquered by a small literary clique, who look out from their parapets, pouring scorn on anyone who dares to have the tenacity to write ‘good’ work – work which they see as threatening to their output.

    A few diminutive literary-based, artsy, types run pop-ups and suchlike, now and again, as an alternative to the mainstream, but some, most, fall like a bright star into the slopping wetness of the Lagan, or the Foyle, only to have their inner-core frazzled and inevitably extinguished – another avenue burnt-out.

    There will be those who will be quick to trot out, on horseback, with lances aloft, with ‘Ah, sure he has a chip on his shoulder,’ and other negative, quick-to-judge, comments. My riposte to this is: yes, I do have a chip, or rather the plural, ‘chips’, one on each shoulder, which helps balance me out. They will use the term ‘bitterness’, but ‘frustration’ is more apt. Ingratitude will be another conceited proclamation.

    Also, the Halo-Effect: this being the over-promotion of well-established writers, with no love left for the outsider, unknown writer. Ireland’s cultural media embargo on new and fresh writing is wan to say the least; anytime an important event comes along they wheel out figureheads. Michael Longley’s poem, ‘Ceasefire’ is often wheeled out upon a gurney; again to be speculated upon; again in times of conflict; but I can safely say Ulster Unionism, which Longley would identify himself with, would never get down upon their knees to kiss anyone’s hand except their aristocratic, they believe, betters.

    Ireland’s media has an infatuation with their well-established poets – poets who have been hanging around for thirty years –  waiting for them to come on stage to deliver homilies of breathy, dramatic words. A false panacea for ongoing violent times.

    The cult of literary reverence and priesthood in the Irish poetry scene is archaic, embarrassing, and non-progressive, and equates to the mystical sorcery in a Harry Potter inspired world of fakery. The ‘everyone wants to be famous’ and well-regarded, and thought highly of as a ‘writer’ is a trope which has simply gone too far.

    It is fine to have dreams and aspirations, but one has to put the hard work, through falling, in failure, by rejection, after derision, and in managing jealousy. One only has to look at the work which is coming out of university produced magazines to see this. Recently, I read a short story in an Irish newspaper, online edition, and I despaired. What I see is diaphanous clichéd fare time and time again.

    Given Up

    Not so long ago, I conversed with a very fine, and clever, female Irish poet who is not well known in Ireland. She told me that she has given up trying to have her work published in any Irish Arts-led magazines as her work is continually rejected.

    I have read her work, it is good, and all that I can summarise is that some of these Arts folk do not know what they are doing, but, or rather, what they really are doing is selecting the work of their chums and, indeed, the work of themselves, for publication.

    These are magazines which are supposed to have a fair-handed, even democratic, selection process for work which is submitted from the four tent-pegged corners of the island of Ireland. Nepotism is rife in the Irish Arts scene. If you are a friend of a friend, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, then you are ‘A-Okay, pal…I will get you published,’ literary merit notwithstanding.

    There are of course exceptions, with real talents. Colm Tóbín is up there with the alive Irish intelligentsia, as is John Banville, both are true novelists in the sense of sitting down to read, to learn, then to write their own work, in conformity with the traditional literary model, and they should be applauded for their due diligence. They have hauled long nets and reeled in empty lines for their patience and perseverance to their Art, to pay off in the end.

    What is to be done?

    Easy – read more books. Read the Classics. A good novel will lead you to a wood at dusk, whereupon you will find a finely woven thread of golden-silk, and, as night falls, slowly traverse the wood and feel, along with the golden-thread, a growing self-belief. That is the power of strong writing. Do not shy away from challenging yourself with any prejudicial assumptions around what a reading experience is, should, or could, be.

    Feature Image: Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) Studio Party (Soirée).