Cassandra Voices

Tag: Neil Burns

  • 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

  • The Synaptic Twerking of Consciousness

    Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures… There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it. 
    Sigmund Freud from Civilisation and its Discontents (1930)

    One sees it traversing through the garrulous troughs on social media, particularly X (formerly known as Twitter), and in the comments section on YouTube. For example, ‘Dads car,’ and, ‘Mums SUV’, rather than ‘Dad’s car,’ or ‘Mum’s SUV.’

    It is time-consuming to learn how to punctuate and, thus, write correctly – adhering to the rules. Many find concentrating on this to be a chore. One comprehends, but… it is unadulterated, plaintive laziness.

    This is not ‘Grammar-Nazism’ as the meme-led, cultural clichéd term goes. This is about improving one’s writing, working harder, avoiding inertia and Mediocrity. Many prefer verbal communication and visual stimuli to sitting down to write – in a chair ‘old school’, the traditional way.

    An instantaneous gratification culture is alive and well. It descends into a podgy finger flicking on a dimly lit screen of an evening, absorbing those dopamine hits. Bobbing and weaving through the electronic morass. Jiving and twisting. The synaptic twerking of consciousness.

    We, as human beings, have become slovenly. Infantilised, as we pig out on junk food. Recumbent and ‘comfy’, as we wade through the internet’s offerings. Night after night.

    WALL-Es

    That scene in the Disney Pixar movie WALL-E with overweight patrons onboard the flying-in-space cruise ship on hover chairs flying around onboard, never walking, watching big screens that tell us when to eat and when to chill. These humans reflect what we have become: our seemingly ambiguous comfort in this obesity has been normalised.

    This is where the capitalist market has led us. There is profit in wanton laziness for those who make the products of greed readily available and easy to consume. They do not want to give up that income stream, and into the troughs come the snouts that munch, munch, and munch amidst the squeals.

    Shucking up gallons of fizzy drinks. Snuffling down handfuls of sweets and munching upon oil-laden fries. Scoffing on crisps, cakes, and biscuits to fill that sugar, fat, and salt desire, with little or no real nutritional value to help our brains and bodies function.

    This writer has been guilty of the above, overeating junk food. It leads to diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, and long-term health complications. It is a work in progress to avoid being bowled out at fifty, succumbing to gout, fat-infused valves, and diabetes.

    The idea of spending, as one young person informed me of late, ‘the evening/night scrolling through TikTok,’ is a sad indictment of where many have arrived. We delight in the displayed lives of others on the smartphone’s small screen. But is there anything to be learned from this narcissistic intrigue and fascination?

    This writer believes there is a correlation between poor diets and sedentary lifestyles. It is about accepting banality as the status quo and not desiring to work harder.

    Image: Maria Geller

    Mediocrity

    Mediocrity, as a movement, is parasitical. It moves onto a host, infects it with its form of banal idealism, and then moves on to the next victim, where it implements the same process. Replication. A bacillus of sorts.

    Mediocrity feeds into apathetic mindsets that have been taken over by the synaptic-feed outlay. It encompasses newspapers, mainstream media, and much of what is posted on the internet. It promotes and projects an idealistic self-image. Differences are highlighted and ultimately vilified – leading to racism – day in and day out.

    Terms such as ‘Shock’ and ‘Fury’ in online news articles feed into that visceral, tribe-on-alert, emotive response that keeps people in that Sartrean fear of ‘the Other’, compounding accepted, interjected biases.

    We are also constantly exposed to false standards of measurement. There is a multitude of inane, beige, loquacious, naive, idealistic, and elegiac minds all desiring the same thing – to be rich and famous.

    As Freud states in the opening paragraph of Civilisation and its Discontents: ‘It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement – that they seek power, success, and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.’

    Having a million social media followers does not generally bring financial success – it is illusory. These individuals, who are generally beneficiaries of marketing campaigns, have become false prophets. Mediocrity is a virus, burning through media outlets, claiming there is only one way.

    Because of its extensive reach and influence, Mediocrity is not readily noticed and thus rectified. It has become entrenched. The indomitable rise of Mediocrity coincides with a fall in proper adherence to punctuation and grammar rules.

    Titivillus, a demon said to introduce errors into the work of scribes, besets a scribe at his desk (14th century illustration),

    Punctuation in History

    As far back as 260 BCE (Before the Christian Era) in China symbols were being used as full stops on bamboo texts to indicate the end of a chapter. Around this time, Western scholars used scriptio continua, text with no separation between the words. The Greeks were using punctuation marks consisting of vertically arranged dots from the 5th century BC as an aid to oral delivery. After 200 BC, the Greeks used Aristophanes of Byzantium’s system (called théseis) of a single dot (punctus) to mark up speeches.

    In addition, the Greeks used the paragraphos (or gamma) to mark the beginning of sentences, marginal diples to mark quotations, and a koronis to indicate the end of major sections.

    To take two forms of punctuation, the comma and the semicolon. The comma is widely attributed to Aldus Manutius, a 15th-century Italian printer who used a mark now recognized as a comma to separate words. The word is derived from the Greek koptein (literally ‘to cut off’).

    Meanwhile, the semicolon is first attested to in Pietro Bembo’s book De Aetna (1496). In English it is most commonly used to link (in a single sentence) two independent clauses that are closely related in thought, such as when restating the preceding idea with a different expression.

    Among great exponents of punctuation, essayist Thomas Carlyle’s 1829 paper ‘Signs of the Times’ employs commas, semicolons, and dashes to break up his sentences and usher in and connect content. Similarly, Herman Melville’s divine usage of the semicolon in his seminal 1851 is evident throughout his almost biblical, classic Moby Dick.

    A semicolon can waver back and forth like the tail of a young fry salmon, or a whole raft of them can glitter and flip like sardines caught in a net. A semicolon can work like a wooden gate, allowing the woolly sheep of greater meaning to enter greener pastures, enhancing the experience of reading.

    I notice online that some scholars believe that semicolons are pretentious and overactive. So, is this writer just cribbing the numbskulls of opacity? Are we in a fugue state?  A place of unlimited bohemianism. Or am I mixing aphorisms?

    There are rustling hedgerows of commentators who draft in writers such as James Joyce, saying he ‘kept punctuation usage to a minimum.’ Maybe for Ulysses, but please do not allow yourself to be locked up in the one house of another writer’s style for justification and throw away the key. This is how a particular style becomes overgrown, with mossy banks, thorny thickets, and crabgrass obscuring the view.

    I recall a history lecture where the American lecturer said that commas in an academic essay amounted to a crime. This may be true of an academic paper which is dedicated towards a particular arguments that employs texts to make it, but not in a more literary style.

    Gertrude Stein seemed to take umbrage at ‘unwarranted’ punctuation with her grandstanding as a grammarian. She was the one who did the heavy lifting in terms of criticism – employing an academic register in her prose to disenfranchise good punctuation usage further. Stating: ‘I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.’

    If we embark upon this model, this mentality, we enter a Stygian process – one that slips off the banks and bobs on down to the underworld – into a void of immutable darkness and further self-perpetuating ignorance.

    You see punctuation can give writing its function. That is a litany of small symbols denoting how that particular nuanced form acts or functions. A sentence can be a sentence, but punctuation can jolt it into life. Some may say it is a question of style. I say it is a question of slovenliness in an age of electronic meandering.

    Feature Image: Roman Odintsov

  • 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

  • Gull

    Try to envisage Odysseus, on stiff headland, on the Western Atlantic coast of Ireland, tilling the soil with an ancient looking hoe. His hands are dry, chapped and his thick fingers curled around a parched shaft, steady palms supporting the implement, with which he works effortlessly. The slap, jut, and pull of the short blade into the earth turns up an odd purple worm which twists its belly upwards to the hot palpitating sun; and a hessian sack, half-filled with grass seed ready for planting, is slung over his back; its strings stretched across his well-defined, sinew-led, shoulder. Small dragon neck swathes of lime-coloured samphire shoots slowly emerge in sandy verges of the high field where he works. There is not a cloud in the endless ream of blue sky.

    When he spreads grass seed, as he has done in the past, many times, the canvas bag becomes a sail and his hand arcs as minuscule seedy flints shoot out over fertile mother earth and come to land among waxy ribbons of grass.

    The man looks now over a fluttering Atlantic Ocean, and it could almost be the Aegean Sea. It roars, breaks, and shatters into lucidity and calm, with white horses crashing on out further, out towards the ellipsis of the infinite horizon of his gaze. Gleaming, smooth black cattle, way off to his right, graze in a greenfield, in a verdant county. A county older than the Celts. Even Mother Nature does not know of its name. The herd, glistening, serves as a bovine footnote of nature’s essayistic form. They bellow and holler at each other with an incongruity that floats on the air. A brocade of whitethorn keeps them penned in. The enigmatic cattle are dark forms, staples of a slowly sifting tenure and lenient to the west’s wilder ways and moods. It suits them to bellow here in the hull of infallibility, amid the streaming whitethorn, sea Campion, and sandwort. The whitethorn is in flower, billowing, and its scented blooms are carried by the wind.

    Atop these cliffs, sat Eoghan whose hands were worn, he rubbed the soil and clasped his hands together to smell the earth, the olfactory bulb flickers, antediluvian and almost pristine in a broken social world. He drew a deep draught and took in the living earth with one unbroken breath. These were the elements, indeed, the pastures of his making. After a few minutes of solitude, he heard the scrunch of footsteps on seashells and sandy screed in a lane nearby. Eoghan turned his head to see a girl in her early twenties walking towards him.

    “Hi-yah”’ she called out as she approached. He cleared his throat, smiles, and replies,

    “Hello there; nice day…”

    “Oh, aye, it’s a grand one, that’s for sure…”

    Coming closer, he noted her translucent plastic sandals, linen-white shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt of navy blue with white stripes. Her auburn hair, worn in a ponytail, danced and bounced as she walked in the golden sunlight. She studied him and then cast a glance at a shred of olive green kelp which had blown up from the shore and was now stuck to the barbed wire fence on the headland.

    “Bladderwrack… I believe they call it,” he said mildly.

    She turned to him with an almost startled look, her tawny eyes furtive and her lips thinning, then biting her bottom lip she said,

    “That’s a rare auld name for some seaweed, isn’t it now?”

    Eoghan nodded and smiled up at her in the summer sun. She dropped down onto her knees just in front of his sitting position.

    “I remember, the other morning, on Inch Island, disturbing an old heron that was in a settled way…” he began.

    “What happened?” She exclaimed, looking at him more attentively.

    “I was just walking past when he looked at me,” he continued in a quiet voice, “and rose, languidly, from a clutch of rushes and off he took, one foot trailing behind the other slightly and flapping away towards Lough Swilly.”

    “Sure. It must have made a good picture. Did you upload it on to Instagram?” She asked smiling.

    “No.” He replied, softly, “No Instagram.”

    “Then what use is that?” she said, giving him a look of yearning.

    “Mother Nature has the table ready and all we have to do is go and eat. When I rise very early in the morning and go out to nature, I like to immerse myself in the landscape, to see the countryside come alive and open up in front of me; to see bright buttery gorse flower flourish, to smell honeysuckle; to smell wild garlic in woodland, Nature’s larder.”

    She was quiet, looking nonplussed and uncomprehending. An uncomfortable silence then passed between them.

    “Are ya on Snapchat or Twitter?” She asks her voice suddenly brightening.

    “Twitter?” He tentatively queries.

    “Yeah.”

    “No.”

    “Why? Are you eighty, like?” Her teeth glittered with the brightness of the sun as her mouth curved into a cynical smile.

    Eoghan looked down from the headland towards the sea; the sea breeze caught his thoughts and corresponded with the ripples in the blue torn water. He drew a deep breath as if to acknowledge her persistence.

    “Well, I guess, I just don’t really like this modern stuff …is the honest answer,” He replied turning his blue eyes back on her hazel brown ones.

    “We live in an age,’ he began again, but looking at her, taking stock, he realised he did not know her name. She comprehended this and gave him the thought he was seeking.

    “Aoife.”

    He smiled.

    “Aoife, we live, as I say, in an age known to thinkers, and to those logical enough to figure things out, as Neoliberalism. In an age of instantaneous gratification, of wishes granted instantly. And this is a kind of curse, this culture is a throwaway culture, and it’s not really for me that stuff…these belief systems.”

    The imbroglio of her young mind sent her into a dream state. Yes, she thought this young man, this guy was, “Oh, Janey-Mac, pure gorgeous,” but she was still on the faltering line between being a young girl, and the precipice which would send her into womanhood, and which had not yet been delivered fully formed to her feminine threshold. Just then her phone buzzed. She shook off her teenage sensibilities and looked at the phone’s screen.

    “I have to go,” she said, looking back up to him. “Me Mam wants me to look after our Daniel, a wee dote.” And she took off, saying as she went, “Hope to see you around sometime,” smiling. He smiled as he watched her disappear into the horizon.

    Early the next morning, very early, before any hint of daybreak, Eoghan was at the water’s edge in Inishowen, by Inch Island. He was in deep silence as images entered into his consciousness: yew trees; blue milk; a honey drop caught in pure amber sunlight, wheat-chaff which dances away in a furmy haze; three girls were strolling across a golden beach, past a wooden curragh laden with salt and beginning to crumble into wisps of wooden flakes that disintegrate in the hand. Insects given a firmer design by ancient runes with Neolithic symbolism, crawl, swirl and settle down to become geometrical shapes and patterns, known as Celtic Art. They retire and pass into the art and geometry of stone. A cow’s loin and flanks turn on a spit over a fire pit in the hill fort, Grainán of Aileach. The creature’s dead eye, bulbous, staring, almost bull-like, reminded Eoghan of the tearful eyes of sage storyteller, Paul Auster. Whose gaze could strike the bullseye of fear and desire among those he knew with big, wet eyes, like he had been crying. Bull-eyes.

    A crowd of screaming dark crows broke from branches where there was no tree trunk or tree and scattered across the immediate skyline of his memory’s eye. A spearhead of mackerel which were shifting and turned in a giant ball in the ocean; the sky darkening and rabbits and hares quaking in laneways; stars agleam in a bowl of night water strewn with a garnish of seawrack, seaweed, a mermaid’s shawl.

    He exhaled for a long moment and slowly opened his eyes; the sun continued to traverse its solitary hike towards the noon-time hour. He was down upon his haunches, almost kneeling, but had begun to rise. Feathers grew over his skin like a soft suit of pallid armour. He rose from the reeds, water dripping off his golden, feathery membrane, and gave out a loud piercing squark. He took off towards the beckoning sun which knew the bipedal, avian shapeshifter. This majestic bird that was soon flying high and then gone. Unwatched by man.

  • 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.

  • Review: Strumpet City

    Picture the scene: the small backyard of a tiny working-class pub in Belfast at around 8pm on a dark Autumn night. I am smoking with a friend, older by a few years, and with way more life experience, talking about books. A dim-light is ebbing away, further subdued by the frosted glass of the bar-door. He looks at me and says: ‘Strumpet City (James Plunkett‘s 1969 novel) is a good book’. I did not take the time to ask about the work as the conversation was rolling along, covering other novels about Ireland which we had both read, and were reading, or intended to read.

    Here were two talking heads, tongues loosened and wagging after a couple of pints. Yet somewhere in the back, ploughed, crow-lifting fields of my sub-conscious, the adjective ‘Strumpet’ and the noun ‘City’ lodged as an unlikely pairing; lighting a candle of intrigue that would burn inside my brain. A decade has sailed past since then.

    Cut to a month ago, and I am in my local library with the mad literary hunger on me – the reading hunger. This is where one desires material to satisfy personal taste and preference. For me this is for a well-written and narrated book. And not what I find so demoralising: one that bends down on one knee to the easily accessible, clichéd fountain whose water(s) flow tepidly, and which is, in the beginning, saccharine sweet but gives way to a brackish and unpalatable torpor.

    I pick the work up and thumb through its 549 pages. A novel of heft, requiring dedication it seems. I bring it to the desk, and steal away into a showery, sun-lit Wednesday evening with the novel safely stowed inside my bag.

    Strumpet City is an historical-led novel which sets out… well… this is a work which, ostensibly, is about the Dublin Lockout(s) of the early twentieth century, narrating fictional, and real, lives of the people involved, including the almost mythological Union leader, Jim Larkin (1874-1947), who James Plunkett previously worked for as his secretary.

    This is a novel of coal, ash, and soot. Of wasps amongst blackberries; of hunger and of greed; a novel of slum dwellings and collapsing dockside houses; a work which radiates a stench of unclean bodies and souls, in dire need of cleansing and thorough rituals of purification brought to task.

    There is an alcoholic priest who loses his mind due to the drink, whiskey, and on one occasion, topples a coffin off its trestles. It tips over, and the enclosed incumbent resident, due to the lid springing open, falls out, rolling on to the floor. The widowed wife, upon seeing this, screams and two priests soon come over, calm her down and take her away from the morbid scene. The priest, a Father Giffley (memorably played by Cyril Cusack in a memorable 1980 RTE adaptation), is found, soon thereafter, prostrate at the foot of the altar, face-down, unaware of the immoral chaos he has just created and is dozing away.

    There is Rashers Tierney, the almost toothless, romantic wanderer who is dirt poor but in the ownership of a rarefied wit and tongue which darts rebuttals in defiance of perceived, and real, attacks; with his mongrel, Rusty, and a penny-whistle in tow. Rashers, as my Belfast friend would have said, ‘Hasn’t a bar in his grate.’

    Father O’Connor is the moral authority in the book, a ‘sky pilot’ who turned his back on the riches of a diocese more becoming of his class. He finds his spiritual bedfellow in the form of Mrs. Bradshaw, the face of female humility; in contrast to the encompassing greed of her ideologue, capitalist husband. However, there is an artifice to O’Connor too, which yields a quavering hatred to his position as sitting tenure in the local, disenfranchised, Dublin district which he does acknowledge but does not run away from, which would be the coward’s option. No. He has staying commendable power and you feel for him.

    There is a terrible accident at a coal yard and you feel empathy for big Mulhall and the further poverty his family will suffer in its wake.

    There are wonderful characters, including Fitz, Hennessy and Mary, set against the backdrop of the 1913 Lockout; striking dockers; the stamping foot(s) of the law and the piercing, shrill whistles of authority. This novel, let me tell you, has a social-economic range, and has it in abundance.

    This is not a work to compare to the quotidian, creative deliciousness’ of Joyce’s Ulysses. On this, I have read a good few books, and have many, many more to grapple with, but having read some of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekov, and other Russian masters’ creations, this work here, Strumpet City, is, in my view, the Irish equivalent, and a masterpiece.

    Feature Image: Jim Larkin

  • 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).

  • The Literary ‘Outsider’ Novel

    Does an age of frenetic online activity afford time for literary masterpieces, especially Outsider Novels, transcending what is considered ‘normal’?

    He whose vision cannot cover
    History’s three thousand years
    Must in outer darkness hover
    Live within the day’s frontiers.  

    The above stanza is from a twelve-book, poetry collection by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which was inspired by the work of fourteen century, Persian poet, Hafez.

    Rather than take the above stanza as concrete, it is worth taking it as an allegorical device, and metaphor, for what this piece sets out to champion: the work of the literary Outsider.

    With various electronic devices such as, the laptop, smartphone, iPad, and media outlets like Netflix, YouTube and other broadcasters, vying for our attention(s) – and successfully so – one must enquire into whether serious, attentive reading means anything anymore?

    Has the modern age – the tempered, electronic milieu – filtered out literary tomes?

    The very idea of ‘The Outsider’ literary work may be unnerving in what is an age of tantamount addiction to a frenetic social media; what the writer Will Self refers to as ‘bidirectional media.’ The resulting anxiety disinclines us to engage with what many may deem ‘difficult’ books, or ‘heavy’ tomes. Knocking the bottom out of the known literary universe.

    It might be said in relation to reading such books: who has aeons of uninterrupted time? In response you might say that the pandemic and lockdowns have afforded us such time. Note: no banana breads were harmed in the writing of this piece.

    Critics sometimes venture towards difficult literary works from a canon such as that identified in Harold Bloom’s tautological, yet, feverish and impassioned, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. These are the works of literature which ebb in from the external to the field of the Literary Arts, and which Bloom eulogises in his reviews.

    In 1812 by the Russian artist Illarion Pryanishnikov.

    War and Peace

    Who has read Tolstoy’s big bangers? War and Peace anyone? History’s frontiers fought over during the Napoleonic Wars, backed up with sweeping pastoral symphonies; with a charge of Russian calvary sweeping through the narrative, backed with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. A silver Samovar dispensing tea in the officers’ mess, the colour of unearthed rubies; tea sweetened with a cube of sugar, held between the drinker’s teeth.

    Or Tolstoy’s more subdued asides, with bucolic scenes of bleating lambs; and navvies sitting down in a wooded glade to consume their lunches. While out there in high summer, in the protracted Russian steppe, brown bears nosey along through tall grass to hallowed fishing grounds. With a scurry of gnats flitting at their ears.

    Or what about Joycean punnery – the nightbabble of Finnegans Wake – or Beckettian gurglespeak?

    If the safe, go-to novel is a halfway-house where thoughts run easily along the neuron-led rafters; where sable-eared bats hang, unruffled, in the belfry; where a forgotten greenhouse with cracked panes of burping green glass dwells in the back garden of the mind, they are there serving as a concrete, model village. Known territories; safe catch-all neighbourhoods, which imbue the reading-self with tangibility.

    There has been a loss of faith in big difficult books due to less than attentive mindsets; and upon latching on this, Mediocrity Inc., sweeps in to garner easier-to-read works, which dominate book charts. What does this say about the demographics so enamoured by ease of access?

    Literary, like most paradoxes, operate through conflating, and contracting, obligations. They are in a constant state of flux. (Not helpful for the binary-seeking world of the definite article, which Mediocrity Inc., often seek out to nail to the masthead.)

    Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels, William Blake (1808)

    Self-Made

    When all the joy of writing is being sucked out of it by marketing mentalities, then things are in a bad way; they are, rather, Miltonesque: bleak; morally obtuse. Greed has taken over the minds of formerly, we hope, reasonable people.

    Quality dissipates in such trends.

    If you put your faith in the superficial, then the meaning of actual literature – that with substance – is diluted. Worship at the golden calf and you cannot expect your palpating thirst to be quenched.

    However, the brave, writing for themselves, writer(s) will always venture out towards a different plane to help buck these acclamatory, accepted trends. The strongly composed novel could be summed up as a transference of the quotidian whereby one’s will becomes the whole of the fictional law in an expansive, infinite world.

    Will Self is such a writer whose output is ‘challenging’. A writer, thinker, who goes it alone and does not yield to the Mediocrity Inc., whose plaintive, rebellious, immature cries rail that they know better, but which do not.

    Outsider Novel

    The stolid mentalities who often quip, “I couldn’t get into it”, say this, because, I believe, they are not prepared to challenge their perceptions of what the Outsider Novel means to them – an ungraspable leviathan which slips away into the listless fog.

    Five or six literary Outsider ‘heavy’ novels from the Western Literary Canon dominate and stand on the rostrum; representing the cornerstones of the literary house that encapsulate the Canon.

    Two have already been alluded to, and then there is: Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman. Bellicose in its exposition from conception to the screaming infant through to his uncle’s nose and to maturity.

    One of the first ‘Outsider’ works, it is inspired by the Rabelaisian, and inhabits the world of the absurd and the fabulist. There are long paragraphs on his Uncle’s Toby’s European adventures with his servant, Trim, and of course, reams of information on the prowess of his conk. It will have you amused if not bewildered at the thought of how he got away with publishing it in the 18th century.

    James Joyce’s Ulysses is a tome in tribute to the mimesis of life, and everything which Joyce termed ‘A shout in the street.’ It takes the epic towards modernism, and a rebirth of consciousness in the early-to-mid twentieth century. There are diegetic elements to the inner monologues of the characters and the streets of Dublin. You will find an urban mammoth with its quarry caught upon its wide tusks, braced with metal struts to keep the weight of the tome from falling.

    This is no Cuneiform script to procrastinate over, it is a layered, complex novel to be discovered. Through two main characters, Leopold Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus we find an unparalleled commentary on twenty-four-hours in Dublin on June 16th, 1904. That is the plot. Simple. Yet, all-encompassing. Tributaries, feeding into the literary infinity pools of the Liffey, and further afield.

    Hopefully readings of Ulysses will soon resume in Sweny’s Pharmacy.

    Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest

    Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is thronged – absolutely imbued – with a myriad of characters, and a talking lightbulb. Each copy of Gravity’s Rainbow should include its own Philharmonic Orchestra to play alongside the running-hare-prose. It is about the Second World War and V Rockets and their trajectory before falling to Earth on the places where a main character is having coitus.

    Sounds mad, right? Yes. Quite, but fantastical and industrious. The prow of this literary Gridiron, in a reading, a universal, Manhattan bearing down on the sugary pap and mulch which is dished out – and is not at all, nourishing.

    Launch of a V-2 rocket.

    David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is totemic in its appreciation of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, with a nod to Don DeLillo, and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A trilogy, mainly, The 42nd Parallel.

    The plot of Infinite Jest is initially tertiary to Wallace’s intellect and ego in fluidity. The beginning is pure vaudeville to the main circus, big-top act which is the intellect of Foster Wallace himself and the prefrontal cortex mythology, which he conspired to create and then exuded, seemingly, so effortlessly. But did Foster Wallace write a capable work? Yes he did, but it is an apostrophic set of hymnals on tennis, drug addiction and geo-political set-ups.

    I looped the meta-modernist, hyper-realist circle and went along for the ride on David Foster Wallace’s encyclopaedic, metadata novel; figuring that while sedate prose is at the behest of book seller’s, and publishers – means and modes of production for the masses – I thought ‘To hell with this, give me a novel with shtick.’

    So, by means of 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.

    Foster Wallace’s reliance on using nomenclature, 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 in this work.

    This is not a linear prose tale as we know it.

    Transcendental Idealism

    These literary works fail to fall into the crushing jaws of a Western, ‘easy’ read sunset; they transcend the ‘normal’.

    The oddity of the largess of such peripatetic works are still revered by committed readers. Literature, and indeed, great literature was, and is, and will forever be, a magical portal which has the power to transport consciousness into another realm. Some works, some bigger, well-crafted works exist outside the normally accepted coda of what is regarded as ‘the novel,’ and do so by existing beyond the ‘day’s frontiers’, beyond paragraphs, in marginalia.

    And out there beyond the environs of ‘known-knowns’ lies the quotidian, infinite in its readiness to bypass the grassy verges of rhetoric, and up beyond ionosphere and stratosphere.

    On the y-axis of a line-graph in the evolutionary trajectory of the Outsider Novel, one could hope for, works which operate outside the perceived, ‘normative’ structures of the known, easy to digest novel. In a sense they occupy the strata of the strange, the unfamiliar; their tentacles reach into the dark nooks and cervices of the mind and bring lax grey-matter in there forward, and into pulsating, roving life.

    Kant’s house in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad).

    If one postulates further, and looks at Kant’s Transcendental Idealism in The Critique of Pure Reason, it can be said that space and time are merely formal features of how we perceive objects; not things in themselves, existing independently of ourselves, or properties or relations among them.

    Objects in space and time are said to be ‘appearances’, and Kant argues that we know nothing of substance about the things in themselves, of which they are appearances. He calls this doctrine (or set of doctrines) ‘transcendental idealism.’

    Ignorance along the lines of myopic conjecture about a novel one has not read, is the syphilitic chancre on the body of literature – based on appearances and perceived conjecture on what a novel is, without taking the trouble to read it. This is harmful, detracting from the creativity behind such a work.

    Literary Keys

    There are literary keys available to break those harder to ‘crack’ literary tomes. Those keys are in other books; yes, books which help you with books. Isn’t that what a dictionary is for, or a thesaurus for that matter?

    Take, again, Finnegans Wake, the indolent reader’s worst nightmare – they start by gambolling around in search of the missing apostrophe ignoring the entrée; and hell, they proclaim it to be the most difficult of books.

    In Christopher Marlowe’s adaptation on the stories of Faust, Doctor Faustus says, ‘Hell is just a frame of mind.’ The demonic Mephistopheles in Doctor Faustus does, however, imply a similar idea by saying that losing his place in heaven gives him experience of hell wherever he is:

    Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
    Think’st thou that I who saw the face of God,
    And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,
    Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
    In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?

    If one was to take the evolution of the novel, we could look at Sterne, Joyce then David Foster Wallace and who knows where the creative literary genre will head next?

    To Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann?

    Maybe the form has hit its parabolic arc, and now needs to descend for a while from its illustrious meridian.

    Break the mould – escape the insular, self-created Hell and free yourself. Read as far and as wide as the splendid sun, and beyond.

    Feature Image: Marilyn Monroe reading Joyce’s Ulysses in 1955 by Eve Arnold.