Cassandra Voices

Tag: society

  • Public Intellectuals: Fyodor Dostoevsky

    In an age of unrestrained Russian-bashing, the figure of Fyodor Dostoevsky might seem a provocative choice for this Public Intellectual series. He remains, however, in my view, the greatest writer of prose fiction who has ever lived. His greatest novels The Devils/Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) are, frankly, unsurpassed in world literature.

    As I see it, other great Russian novels of his time, Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev and Anna Karenina (1878) by Leo Tolstoy are just a notch below; perhaps reaching the heights of Crime and Punishment (1866) or The Idiot (1869), the two lesser of his four great novels.

    This is to assume that his other works are of lesser value. Yet in the novella Notes from an Underground (1864) as well as White Knights (1848) Dostoevsky surpasses The Death of Ivan Illich (1886) by Tolstoy.

    The anti-hero of Notes from an Underground anticipates a form of government where:  

    All human actions will then of course be calculated, mathematically, like logarithm tables up to 108,000, and recorded in a calendar; or even better, well-intentioned publications will then appear … in which everything will be so precisely calculated and recorded that there will no longer be deliberate acts or adventures in the world.

    This he suggests would create a reaction, in the form of a dictator:

    I, for example, wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in the midst of all this reasonableness that is to come, suddenly and quite unaccountably some gentleman with an ignoble, or rather a reactionary and mocking physiognomy were to appear and, arms akimbo, say to us all: ‘Now, gentlemen, what about giving all this reasonableness a good kick with the sole purpose of sending all those logarithms to hell for a while so we can live for a while in accordance with our own stupid will!

    In fact, across Russian literature only Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov wrote better short story writers. Besides being a master of the short story form, Chekhov was primarily a playwright. Unprecedented in world letters, he is almost the equal of Dostoevsky, but not quite!

    In Russian letters thereafter only the great novels of Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and the Margarita (1967) and The White Guard (1925) the latter of which perfectly encapsulates – unlike our official media – the reasons for Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. Many Russians (and indeed some Ukrainians) view what was the breadbasket of the Russian empire as integral to and inseparable from Russia itself.

    Portrait by Vasily Perov, c. 1872

    Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?

    In a famous monograph (1959), Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?, George Steiner argued that the two authors represent polar opposites in the Western canon, the former epic, utopian, and aspiring to achieve heaven on earth – with all its attendant dangers. The latter, for all his peasant Christianity and hatred of nihilism, asserting the pre-eminence of free will, while portraying a world beset by evil, intrigue and deceit.

    The great Russian effete of a later era Vladimir Nabokov, lecturing in exile in Columbia University claimed he despised Dostoevsky’s vulgarity and excess. Of course, unlike Nabokov, Tolstoy or Turgenev – the latter of whom Dostoevsky had a fractious relationship – Dostoevsky was not an aristocrat. He was not a blue blood. His father was a ‘mere’ country doctor, murdered after a descent into dissolution and an echo, Freud argues in Dostoevsky and Parricide (1928), of the central theme of The Brothers Karamazov. Moreover, Dostoevsky was profoundly anti-Catholic

    It should also be said that Dostoevsky was an editor, journalist, and social critic, which could be a dangerous role to play in Czarist Russia. He was really a philosopher in that all his great books are novels of ideas, and display in all its fullness the eschatological imagination. An intellectual of the highest rank, and superb jurist and penologist, not just in terms of the immense amount of attention devoted to questions of justice and the criminal process in his work – not least the trial of Dmitri Karamazov – but also heavily influenced by his penal servitude in Siberia.

    Also, uncomfortably for this writer at least, he was a deeply religious man, and there was no hypocrisy evident in this outlook. He acquired a deep religious faith from his mother during his childhood, quite contrary to the secular temper of his age. While I distrust this, I understand in Freudian terms its aetiology.

    He was, however, deeply anti-Catholic. At one point his apparetnly omniscient Idiot, Prince Myshkin exclaims:

    In my opinion Roman Catholicism isn’t even a religion, but most decidedly a continuation of the Holy Roman Empire, and everything in it is subordinate to that idea, beginning with faith. The Pope seized the earth, an earthly throne and took up the sword; and since then everything has gone on in the same way, except they’ve added lies, fraud, deceit, fanaticism, superstition, wickedness. They have trifled with the most sacred, truthful, innocent, ardent feelings of the people, have bartered it all for money, for base temporal power. And isn’t that the teachings of the Antichrist?’

    Dostoevsky, 1847.

    Early Period

    In his school years, splendidly documented by his great biographer Joseph Frank he intervened to protect children against thugs. On his way to the prestigious engineering school, where he was accepted in 1831, he was horrified by an act of savage brutality against a peasant he witnessed at a coach station. Later, through his hugely influential periodical Diary Of A Writer – not unlike Charles Dickens’ Household Words or All The Year Round towards the end of his life – he declaimed against a brutal flogging of a serf by an aristocrat, who was put on trial and justly punished. There is no doubt that from the get-go his sympathies were with the little man. Thus, like Charles Dickens he was the chronicler of his time in Time.

    Thus, for his entire life no matter how famous he became he was always an advocate for the poor, students if they had legitimate grievances, those falsely accused, unless, unforgivably, they were Jewish. Poor Folks (1845) is of course his first novel and is a huge success and a minor masterpiece. It is, however, an elaboration of that greater Russian work Dead Souls (1842) by Gogol whose awful theme is the purchasing of dead peasants’ souls for profit. The ultimate extension of the landlord class. This is again prescient for our times.

    Poor Folks was acclaimed as the first exercise in social realism, and the plight of self-abnegation before corporate feudalism. Here we find words relevant to our neoliberal age: ‘Judge whether one was right to abuse oneself for no reason and be reduced to undignified mortification.’ Today’s serfs are subject to social media targeting in an age of surveillance and consumer capitalism. Our very identities are mined for data.

    Poor Folks was followed by The Double (1846), which though not among his great novels expresses the split personality – a dominant theme in his oeuvre to come –  as later do Oscar Wilde in A Picture of Dorian Grey (1891), Robert Louis Stephenson in Jekyll and Hyde (1886), and more recently Naomi Kleins’ Doppleganger A Trip into the Mirror World.

    Vissarion Belinsky

    Belinsky

    During this early period Dostoevsky came under the influence of the intellectual Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky who was torn between the veneration of the poor – a form of Christian humanism – and an overarching commitment to materialism. The book expresses that conflict.

    The success of Poor Folk led him to being welcomed into intellectual circles. An unfortunate association with the Petrashevsky Circle, however, led to him being exiled to Siberia and then conscripted into the army. Moreover, he strongly believed he was about to be executed as the Tsar staged a mock execution of him and his co-conspirators in Samonkey Square. Interestingly, one of those involved in his persecution was Ivan Nabokov, a distant relative of Vladimir Nabokov.

    This terrifying event it is said to have turned his head grey. It scarred him for life and was fictionally recreated in The Idiot (1869). We may assume that the description of the plight of a person sentenced to death by the state in The Idiot is biographical, considering his own experience of narrowly avoiding the Czarist firing squad. By comparison with the fate of a person assailed and killed by brigands he says: ‘the whole terrible agony lies in the fact that you will most certainly not escape, and there is no greater agony than that’. He asks: ‘Who says that human nature is capable of bearing this without madness?’

    That and Siberia, where he underwent extreme hardship led to the fascination that engendered Crime and Punishment. In Siberia, as diarised by his biographer, he became less interested and mistrustful of the application of the letter, as opposed to the spirit of the law. Dostoevsky was never a literalist in legal interpretation terms, and was acutely conscious of the law’s failings. He was treated barbarically and barely survived. The law and its failings went on to dominate much of the rest of his fiction.

    He returned a felon but quickly contributed to Time magazine, along with several other journals thereafter as editor and contributor, and to his next defining book The House of The Dead (1854), which offers a far better examination of the gulags than Solzhenitsyn.

    Hans Hobern’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb.

    Nihilism

    This period of incarceration led to the development of a complex dialectic through his life. His hatred of nihilism – a phrase actually coined by Turgenev for the character Bazharov in his masterpiece Fathers and Sons (1862), alongside his warm embrace of Young Russia, a movement recalling Thomas Davis in Ireland and Disraeli in Britain. It was a progressive movement for reform in Russia, not least in seeking to ameliorate the conditions of the serfs.

    Dostoevsky despised the nihilistic attitude, expressed ironically in Turgenev’s masterpiece: ‘That is not our business let us have a grand clearance first.’

    The Russia of his lifetime, from Nicolas I onwards, was a time of great political turbulence and the development of revolutionary cabals often to reform the plight of the serfs. There was also a dialectic perfectly conveyed between Turgenev and Dostoevsky of a need for Russia to become more European. Turgenev, the aristocratic exile, argued for to become more autarchic. Dostoevsky sided with the poor folk and Mother Russia but not in a shrill way. The idea he coined, evident as early as 1861, was Pan Humanism, within a Russia influenced, but not dominated, by Westernisation.

    The success led to a degree of European decadence, and for the rest of his life he was often abroad and in debt, though finally happily married after a string of unhappy relationships to Anna, his stenographer who he adored and was most attentive to.

    What became a gambling addiction developed during his peripatetic European travels, and put enormous stress on his wife. Yet, in a moment of epiphany, after essentially losing the family silver, he finally gave it all up. His great novella The Gambler (1866) offers a frenzied portrayal of an illness, which destroys lives – as I have witnessed during my professional career. It also provides a lacerating attack on enduring national cultures. Here, Russians are portrayed as gambling riskily and haphazardly, Germans methodically and in a philistine way, while the French display an elegant decadence. How times have changed.

    Prior to The Gambler there arrived the seminal existential text, unique in his oeuvre, Notes from Underground (1865), which predates Sartre and Camus by an epoch but is no doubt influenced by Kierkegaard.

    The self-reflexiveness of the narrator in that he is both accused and accuser, torn between rational egoism and a concern for others. This is the Dostoevsky dilemma, and a prelude to the themes of the great novels to follow.

    So on to Crime and Punishment (1868), written for the establishment Russian magazine Messenger, and a final step towards financial stability. It is his most famous and widely read work. To say it is not his best work would be true, but misleading in that within it scope it remains one of the great works of European literature.

    The novel is the prototypical detective novel. Without this there is no Wilkie Collins or Raymond Chandler. The anti-hero Raskolnikov is torn between a nihilism inspiring an Übermensch sense of superiority, and a Christian piety. Here Dostoevsky anticipates the serial killers and corporate monsters of our age.

    The prosecutor Petrovich is the voice of atonement and represents Dostoevsky’s sense of guilt before God. The book is also a condemnation of extremism and lawlessness.

    When the prosecutor first hauls Raskolnikov into custody he expresses curiosity about an article that Raskolnikov wrote called ‘On Crime’, in which he suggests that certain rare individuals – the benefactors and geniuses of mankind – enjoy a right to ‘step across’ legal or moral boundaries if those boundaries act as an obstruction to the success of their idea. The prosecutor, in a much kinder way than the approach offered by Camus in The Outsider (1942) – who was hugely influenced by Dostoevsky not least in his play of The Possessed/Devils (1959) – finally forces him to confess.

    The Idiot (1871) is the book that pleased Dostoevsky the most – and is arguably his most disciplined novel – and there is much of him in it. The central character of Prince Myshkin was much influenced by Dostoevsky seeing Hans Holbein’s Dead Christ (1529) painting. No doubt it expresses his deep faith in the decent and Christian man.

    Yet Myshkin’s other-worldliness is the cause of his self-destruction, along with death and chaos wrought on others. The crucible of Russia at that time augments dark Dostoevsky’s mysticism. It is deeply personal and invokes his mock execution and epilepsy. It is a work that is curiously relevant to our time of vaccines, compliance and control, where 90% of humanity are to be treated as cattle, a process which can be achieved through re-education and vogueish Social Darwinism.

    Joachim Schnürle

    The Devils

    This brings us to the great citadel of world literature and in my view the greatest novel ever written The Devils (1868). At the time Dostoevsky was much influenced by the malign neglect of the civilised anarchist Herzen and his criticism that nihilists wished to abandon books, science and instead embrace destruction. Herzen in a famous polemic, echoing Dostoevsky’s own ideas I suspect, argued that Shakespeare and Raphaël were higher in the pantheon than socialism, nationalism or the emancipation of the serfs. The immediate sensation which precipitated the novels was the activities of the real life murderous Nechaev, a model for many of The Devils.

    Towards the end of The Devils, one of the conspirators Lyamshin is put on trial and asked ‘Why so many murders, scandals and outrages committed?’ He responds that it was to promote:

    the systematic undermining of every foundation, the systematic destruction of society and all its principles; to demoralize everyone and make hodge-podge of everything, and then, when society was on the point of collapse – sick, depressed, cynical and sceptical, but still with a perpetual desire for some kind of guiding principle and for self-preservation – suddenly to gain control of it.

    The novel is the greatest condemnation of extremism in the history of ideas, containing his essential credo that once you have rejected Christ it is possible to go to inordinate lengths of evil. The book provides almost a replica of the current political climate where anarchy and extremism prevail, and in the midst of it all is the crucial figure of native Dostoevsky ambivalence, Stavrogin – a man who is torn between good and bad impulses, but the nihilism and decadence prevail.

    The essential argument is that materialism, nihilism and decadence will stop at nothing and boundary after boundary will be crossed in the descent towards the personal and societal abyss.

    Dostoevsky response, or antidote, is to assert that humanity must take collective responsibility in a Christian way. Thus, when Stavrogin reveals his appalling crime to the elder Tikhon, the latter responds by asking the forgiveness of Stavrogin: ‘Having sinned, each man has sinned against all men, and each man is responsible in some way for the sins of others. There is no isolated sin. I’m a great sinner, perhaps greater than you.’

    After its publication, and his resumption of journalistic activities with The Diary of a Writer (1873-1881) he was widely acknowledged as the greatest living writer in Russia. He finally settled in his homeland, holding court both in letter and visitations to an increasingly enamoured public. In essence, he became the moral conscience of Russia.

    Though the Diary of a Writer – finally published in totality by Scribner’s – contains some of his greatest short stories. He also rages against injustice and took a keen interest in the criminal process.

    Dostoyevsky’s notes for Chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov.

    The Brothers Karamazov

    Thereafter he began his final novel The Brothers Karamazov. His sensitivity to injustice, it must be said, is afflicted with one blind spot, lest this piece be represented as hagiographical! He showed a lifelong hatred of Jews, who he and Turgenev too often caricatured, in the most vicious of terms. When a Jew was correctly acquitted, he bemoaned the verdict. In this sense he a creature of his time, but also trespassed a moral boundary.

    His antisemitism was a product of at times, a Little Russian mentality and his sense of the volk, so there is a negative and abhorrent mysticism here of old tensions, resurfacing in our age. Also, his embrace of what might be described as Populism at this stage has dangerous relevance to our time.

    Many of his great books were written like cliffhangers under enormous stress explaining the fervid prose, and as every book of his final novel – three years in genesis – came out the public reacted in a way not unlike the London public’s reaction to the death of Little Nell. His work, along with his literary peers, forged Russian consciousness, for better or worse.

    This culminated in a famous face off where all the intelligentsia of Russia attended an event to celebrate Pushkin’s anniversary. A feud had been brewing for decades between two opposite visions of Mother Russia, one represented by Turgenev with his condescending attitude towards the poor folk and his internationalism; the other by Dostoevsky who represented the Christian Tsarist nationalist strain.

    Dostoevsky’s great speech at the banquet is well worth reading. It effectively destroys the reputation of Turgenev and had the impact at the time of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream.’ It ends in a beautiful expression of compromise and Pan Humanism, envisioning a Christian Russia sympathetic to the poor, but receptive to other cultures, urging respect for tradition but acknowledging a need for reform and tolerance.

    It arrived while he was writing The Brothers Karamazov, by which time the debts, the epilepsy, the chaotic lifestyle and huge fame had taken their toll, He was writing around the clock to complete it, with old father time breathing down his neck.

    This book is a foundation stone of literate moderate civilisation, containing everything of the selfless Christianity and love he espoused, embodied in the character of Aloysha, who is a more modulated version of Myshkin from The Idiot. It contains some of the greatest passages in literature, including The Grand Inquisitor dialogue, and culminates in over one hundred pages of the trial of Dmitry Karamazov for parricide.

    It should be said that like Dickens, Dostoevsky distrusted lawyers, not least their tendency to allow their eloquence to overflow at the expense of the truth, and their blindness to the moral consequences of their action. The representation of the defence speech in Karamazov is deliberately weak. Even though, as the book makes clear, Dmitry is morally guilty for his monster father’s death, he is not legally guilty. Yet the defence lawyers seem to rely on the mercy plea, and on a confused argument suggesting implicitly some people deserve to be killed. Not exactly a full throttle defence, but one recently evident in Ireland.

    Dostoyevsky identifies a broad moral continuum between a capacity for the highest and basest thoughts and deeds. If any character represents the views of Dostoyevsky himself it is perhaps the chief prosecutor Ippolit Krillovitch, who, uncannily, like the author, dies within a few months of the novel’s central events: the apparent patricide, and aftermath, of the wily and debauched Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. His sons represent different faces of a timeless character, and in the ensuing trial Krillovitch draws attention to the inadequacies of each. So searing are the insights that Dimitri is prompted to thank his own prosecutor, admitting that he: ‘told me a lot about myself that I didn’t know’.

    Krillovitch describes those of the Karmazov ilk as having: ‘natures with such a broad sweep… capable of encompassing all manner of opposites, of contemplating both extremes at one and the same time – that which is above us, the extremity of the loftiest ideals, and that which is below us, the extremity of the most iniquitous degradation.’ He adds: ‘others have their Hamlets; so far, we Russians have only our Karamazovs.’ That Karamazov archetype surely extends beyond Russia.

    The reception to The Brothers Karamazov was ecstatic, and his finances looked permanently healthy, but accounts of the time show how frail he had become. The multiple social engagement at this stage were not helpful and a stroke occurred after some final pieces in Diary of a Writer, many published after his death.

    All of Russia mourned the death of a man who had been sent to Siberia. They had lost their great writer and intellect.

    Dostoevsky’s funeral,

    Legacy

    For our present age there is much to ponder over Dostoyevksy’s legacy. First is the need for the assertion of Christian, or humanist values. This includes the establishment of community, even if, as I would argue, this remains secular in its guidance. Moreover, we must protect the poor, the falsely accused and the defenceless. Moral nihilism in all its guises must also be opposed. And the devastating effect of extremism should be portrayed.

    We should also be alive to the excesses of Dostoevsky in a tendency towards Populism, veneration of an abstract volk and the denunciation of minorities, including Jews.

    Overall, he stands as the greatest intellect literature has produced, a mystic and theoretician, as well as a practical journalist. Moreover, the novels contain far more insightful philosophy than most arid books of philosophy,

    Along with Leonardo da Vinci, and even more so than Shakespeare, I would go so far as to say that he is the greatest genius that has ever drawn breath. I suspect he would have been distrustful of da Vinci’s cosmopolitanism and veneration of science. Sparks will surely fly if they ever meet!

  • “We Bury the Funsters” – Lethal Weapon Revisited

    With Christmas fast approaching, a familiar debate will resume in homes, offices and their Zoom equivalents as to what constitutes a legitimate Christmas movie. Much of the banter will centre on Die Hard as the preeminent example of an action movie which has legitimately crossed into the holiday season category. Some may even cite it as the film which kick-started the whole sub-genre.

    Nobody could deny Die Hard’s success in this department or its undoubted brilliance as an action film but the honour of first Christmas action movie belongs to another.

    A full year before Lieutenant John McClane dragged himself resignedly into that ventilator shaft in Nakatomi Plaza, Lethal Weapon exploded onto our screens in a hail of automatic gunfire, launching the concept of the Christmas action movie, while also providing the template for the modern video game (waves of anonymous baddies dispatched prior to a showdown with the end-level boss).

    This is the film which cemented the use of the 9mm as the weapon du jour for all self-respecting action heroes. In one audacious set-piece, the character Riggs pours bullets from his 9mm Beretta into a disappearing helicopter containing an enemy sniper; a scene which no anachronistically-red-blooded male can fail to mentally re-enact while awaiting his photo call in the white-pillared, lavishly-terraced hotel garden of a friend’s Spanish wedding reception.

    As it approaches its 38th anniversary, the original Lethal Weapon is a film worth re-visiting as a snapshot of 1980s American chutzpah (or, perhaps, hubris) and a keystone in the development of the modern action movie; particularly what would become that genre’s relentless dedication to bullet-fuelled narration and the many bizarre justifications the makers of these films contrive to sustain the destructive pace.

    The ostensive plot of the film revolves around an investigation into the death of a young woman called Amanda Hunsaker, a “troubled teen” (to borrow that oft-used tabloid phrase), who, over the opening credits, snorts cocaine, disrobes and leaps from a penthouse balcony in downtown LA, smashing into a parked car below; all to the jaunty accompaniment of “Jingle Bell Rock”.

    The investigating detective is Sergeant Roger Murtagh, played by the wonderful Danny Glover, a veteran LAPD detective approaching retirement and already planning the many fishing trips he will partake of when he finally hangs up his trusty six shooter.

    It quickly emerges that Miss Hunsaker was poisoned, therefore, even had she not taken her ill-advised naturist leap, she would have died anyway. This seems a curious waste of bacchanalian ammo but 80s action movies were nothing if not bracingly steadfast in their observance of the twin pillars of liberal excess of that era: toplessness and cocaine. The new evidence means the case has suddenly become a murder investigation. At this point, old-school action movie fans may worry that this early plot twist portends cerebral challenges to come but, rest assured, The Mousetrap this ain’t. No mystery will be conceived between the credits which cannot be solved by copious rounds of automatic gunfire or by ploughing a hastily commandeered vehicle into it.

    Murtagh’s professional woes are amplified by the introduction of his new partner, Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson, eyes still swiveling from his tenure as Mad Max and sporting a mullet which, even in 1987, seemed extravagant). Riggs is a recently-widowed burn-out case who the police psychiatrist—in what, these days, would amount to a serious breach of data protection regulation and client confidentiality—has warned may be a suicide risk. The scenes depicting Rigg’s breakdown are actually rather moving but, this being the 1980s, are wholly in service to the plot. Accordingly, an encounter with “a jumper” in a later scene is barely empathetic, serving only to highlight Riggs’ cold-eyed efficiency. This brutal sense of purpose will come to the fore as the story introduces Amanda Hunsacker’s father, who served in Vietnam with Murtagh and took a bayonet in the lungs en route to saving Murtagh’s life (“That was nice of him,” deadpans a suitably unimpressed Riggs).

    “Have you ever met anybody you didn’t kill?”: Danny Glover as Murtaugh and Mel Gibson as Riggs.

    The Vietnam war casts a hefty shadow over proceedings. 1980s viewers would have been more than a little familiar with that particular conflict, having— by that point—been subjected to a veritable barrage of ‘Nam movies and would, therefore, possess the requisite shorthand to follow Hunsacker’s various references as he informs Riggs and Murtagh of his involvement with a group of ex-military operatives called “Shadow Company” (the US military really ought to give more consideration to the naming of their units; one can’t imagine “Rainbow Unicorn Company” getting mixed up in this sort of illicit activity). Shadow Company have organised a shipment (drugs of course since this is distinctly pre-Amazon, when it seemed the only thing anyone shipped anywhere was kilos or “keys” of cocaine) only to find that the police may have already been informed of the planned exchange.

    You see the problem (or, more accurately, a problem) with Shadow company, as highlighted by their main (possibly, only) customer, is that they are using mercs (mercenaries, not German cars). Clearly Shadow Company’s pre-sales brochure could have been clearer on these matters but this appears to be something of a red line for the customer in question, having, it seems, gotten used to dealing with regular street criminals who are, presumably, a more reliable breed and less given to prostituting their skills for the sake of a quick buck.

    The customer’s distress produces a wonderfully wacky scene in which the head of Shadow Company, General Peter McAllister (played with relish by Mitchell Ryan’s eyebrows) demonstrates the trustworthiness of his merc employees by having one of them, Mr. Joshua (a perpetually snarling Gary Busey), suspend his forearm stoically above the customer’s flaming cigarette lighter.

    “Mr. Joshua, your left arm, please…”: Shadow Company take their accreditation very seriously.

    Some clients might baulk at employee torture during a business meeting but this was the 1980s, before HR and concepts of workplace safety had gotten completely out of hand. Suitably reassured, though a little PTSD-ed, the customer departs to presumably close out the paperwork.

    The client’s concern about mercs, however, is rather borne out by Shadow Company’s response to the knowledge that the police may be onto their shipment. It seems Shadow Company are not the sort of agency to treat delivery dates with flippancy. If only more suppliers were so committed; imagine how many LUAS lines, Rainbow Gardens or National Children’s Hospitals we might be sitting on now (though contract negotiations of the Shadow Company kind may be a little too intense for your average junior minister). It also quickly becomes apparent that these mercs take a similarly blunt approach to InfoSec. By way of keeping everything mum, Shadow Company proceed to blow up a prostitute’s house using mercury switches (“Gaflooey! That’s heavy shit!”), embark on a drive-by assassination of Hunsacker from a passing helicopter (Mr. Joshua inexplicably dressed in cricket gear for his shift on sniper duty) and kick off a war on the LAPD by shooting Riggs and abducting Murtagh’s teenage daughter. This provocation merely galvanizes Murtagh and Riggs who embark upon the cerebrally direct plan to “bury the funsters”, to borrow the wonderful substitute phrase used in the censored version of the film when it was aired on terrestrial television in the 1990s (the golden era of television censorship; the art form reaching a pinnacle with the fabulous reinterpretation of Midnight Run, containing the excellent “I’m going to stab you through the heart with this broken pencil”). It seems the solution to the endless paperwork and unreliability of the American justice system is to shoot all the bad guys before they can lawyer up. There is, of course, a long tradition in American action movies (and increasingly, in real life) of police officers conveniently “forgetting” their badges; a legal loophole which allows them to more efficiently eradicate unwanted sections of the criminal underworld. The Lethal Weapon films take this to a spectacular new level. At the end of the film, LA’s finest cordon off a crime scene so that they can stage an embryonic version of the Ultimate Fighting Championship between Riggs and Mr. Joshua. In the second installment of the series, shrewd application of this technique allows Riggs and Murtagh to bypass the tiresome diplomatic immunity privileges of their South African antagonists.

    “Gaflooey!”: Riggs and Murtagh deal with the aftermath of Shadow Company’s somewhat robust approach to InfoSec.

    It’s worth mentioning that Shadow Company represented an “America First” approach to villainy at a time when home-grown talent more than held its own in the “bad guy” market—a situation soon to be undermined by an abundance of cheap foreign imports (see “Gruber v. McClane, 1988)”). It will be interesting to see if the new direction for American politics ushers in a return to home-produced miscreants.

    What really makes Lethal Weapon tick is the chemistry between the leads. Gibson (before he adopted a more method approach, which somewhat seeped into his personal life) is all frothing angst and distemper while Glover is brilliant as everyone’s dad trapped in a cop movie, muttering lugubriously to himself (quite possibly about the immersion being left on), attempting to rap and beat-box at the dinner table (to the mortification of his kids), making crude Dad jokes and showing off so much for his new alpha male partner that he forgets to take the bins out, earning a chiding from his eldest daughter. Yet, there is an obvious warmth between the mismatched pair which carries the film along and is a big reason for the success of the movie franchise. The lack of a similar rapport between the leads is probably a good reason why the more recent television reboot didn’t work. That, and that the world had moved on and what worked in the 1980s doesn’t necessarily work anymore.

    Indeed, much has changed since 1987 and this makes the original Lethal Weapon a fascinating re-watch. It’s not surprising that there are many areas where it strays beyond what would be acceptable today but this was a film and a franchise which always seemed displaced from reality even when reality was the 1980s and that tonal weirdness is even stranger looking back from a modern world in which, it seems, more-and-more so-called leaders would prefer we all travel backwards in time.

    It’s particularly interesting to see Lethal Weapon’s foreshadowing of the faux-disassembling of macho male culture. In it we glimpse the beginnings (and, given what’s happening now, possibly the endings) of men’s reckoning with their emotions, including a detective who confides his belief that he’s an “80’s man” because he cried in bed, adding that he was not with a woman (“Why do you think I was crying?”); the faltering baby steps towards some sort of male introspection (“Do you want to hear that sometimes I think about eating a bullet?”); the commodification of male culture hinted at by Riggs when he suggests their putative reward for dispatching the bad guys will be “shaving head” commercials. Side note: Why men’s apparel never embraced the bare-torso-with-denim-jacket look (sported by Riggs in the final act) is beyond me (though it remains a summer wear staple in some parts of Dublin).

    In subsequent sequels the Lethal Weapon franchise will, in its inimitable way, wrestle with Apartheid (“Free South Africa, you dumb son of a bitch!”), wildlife preservation (“Mom, Dad killed flipper!”) and — laughably — gun control (being careful to ensure that said control doesn’t extend to its gun-toting heroes). The writer Shane Black confessed he fretted daily about what the director, Richard Donner, would see or hear on his drive to the set which he might suddenly decide to include in the plot.

    For anyone questioning why sexism isn’t on that list of inclusions, I would propose that the whole Lethal Weapon franchise is collectively a powerful argument against men being allowed to run anything remotely mission-critical for the human race.

    Yet, for all its apparent moral probity, Lethal Weapon conserves its wagging to a single finger lest anything disturb the main task of depressing the Beretta’s trigger while spent cartridges spew from its belly with the metallic effervescence of a jackpotting slot machine. The screenwriter, Shane Black, is far too savvy for all of this to be taken completely serious and Lethal Weapon is a film which becomes more enjoyable the less seriously it is taken.

    So, as we count in another Christmas, there is no better time to revisit the OG in what has become a burgeoning movie subgenre. Modern audiences have embraced the concept of non-traditional Christmas subjects so what better way to shatter the hegemony of saccharine Santa Claus films than by watching a scowling Gary Busey unload his clip into a television set showing a reforming Ebenezer Scrooge.

    This holiday season, I invite you to a 1980s genre-crossover feast where we shall follow the spicy starter that is Gremlins with the palate-cleansing Lethal Weapon before closing out the seasonal fare with the hearty Die Hard. But, as you marvel at John McClane’s heroics in Nakatomi Plaza, remember that none of this would have been possible if Riggs and Murtagh had not “buried the funsters” in that first high-octane offering.

  • Still Life: Photography Competition

    Cassandra Voices is delighted to be collaborating with the charity Collateral Global on a photographic competition depicting life under lockdown, open to professionals and amateurs alike. It will culminate in the production of a photography book to be published under the Cassandra Voices imprint. The winning entry will receive a first prize of €1,000, with over €4,000 prize-money available in all.

    Over the course of the lockdown period, we reached out to a number of photographers who published their work on our website. These included stirring images from Bali (Indonesia), Porto (Portugal), Mallorca (Spain), Dublin (Ireland), Vietnam, Italy, Greece, Lebanon and Dun Laoghaire (Ireland).

    By April 2020 over half of the world’s population had been placed under some form of lockdown confining them to their homes, or other residences. Although the period of obligatory confinement lasted for only a few months in most countries, it created unheard of visual landscapes, particularly in urban areas, including orderly supermarket queues, empty highways, prison-like apartment blocks and unusual wildlife sightings.

    As the initial restraints eased, we all became acquainted with curious and strange additions to our lives, reminding us of an apparently ubiquitous virus and efforts to contain it. And yet, beyond the eerie silence, those visiting hospitals were confronted by what seemed like wartime conditions. Requirements to wear face masks generated an unsettling anonymity, compounding rules on social distancing.

    Although there was broad consent in most countries for these measures, vociferous protests erupted nonetheless. Fear and loathing were at times directed against those who refused to be vaccinated, as well as stigmatised minorities and healthcare workers.

    Collateral Global is conducting this global competition to gather photographic images open to all evoking this unforgettable period. A panel of esteemed judges will select fifty of the best to be displayed on their website and to be used in a forthcoming publication. Winning entries are also expected to be displayed at photographic exhibitions in a variety of locations.

    Apart from receiving a copy of the book, a range of cash prizes will be offered to all those selected. The overall winner will receive a $1,000 prize.

    Entrants are asked for a set of images capturing the essence of the lockdown period 2020-2022, the date and location, and a short description explaining their choice (up to 200 words) in English.

    All submission are through the Collateral Global website.
    Note: Cassandra Voices is not accepting any submissions directly.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Managing Risk in Psychedelic Assisted Therapy: Lessons from Adventure Sports

    I spent twenty years working as an adventure sports guide.  In my early twenties, I was a whitewater guide on rivers like the Zambezi and White Nile in Africa. In my thirties I worked as a mountain leader, guiding trekking expeditions to Kilimanjaro,  Everest base camp, the Andes and the Himalayas. While it may seem that those working in such fields may be risk-takers, and it may have been true about me in my early twenties, the reality is adventure sports guides are constantly assessing risk, and are in some ways hyper-attuned to risk.

    For the past six years, as a psychotherapist and co-founder of Inwardbound psilocybin retreats in the Netherlands, almost a thousand people have come through our retreat processes. This article explores my perspective on risk from these differing viewpoints. While it may seem that these are very different worlds, I believe there are a lot of similarities between managing risk in adventure sports and in psychedelic assisted therapy.

    My own personal story is one of outward bound to inward bound- at the age of about thirty due to a series life crises (heartbreak, injuries and tragedies I witnessed in the outdoors) I began to look at more inward self-reflective practises such as meditation, yoga and therapy, which slowly and over time, led me to the work I am doing now, not in a planned way, but through the path of my own lived experience.

    As my time working as an outdoor guide was coming to an end, I began to be much more interested in adventure therapy than adventure sports. ‘Being in nature’ rather than ‘doing in nature’. This period coincided with my training as a psychotherapist and moving towards psychedelic assisted therapy.

    Since I was a child, there is something in me that was drawn to exploring the boundaries of my known world, and to going first, more by accident than design, whether that was the first descent of a whitewater river in Iran, or setting up Ireland’s first psychedelic therapy organization. Why that is, I am not sure, but it is in my nature, and I enjoy helping others explore their own personal limitations too and to grow beyond the boundaries of their known world. I do this work with psychedelics motivated by a belief, from my own lived experience and from what I have witnessed, that this work has the potential to relieve human suffering and improve people’s lives.

    On the Nature of Risk

    Life is inherently risky. We make decisions every day to take risks, and few would like to live in a zero risk world. Often, the most significant and rewarding achievements in our lives involve a degree of risk – whether falling in love or starting a business. But today we live in a very risk averse society. In other societies and cultures, through necessity, a higher degree of risk can be seen as acceptable.

    Scouting a rapid on the Blue Nile, Ethiopian highlands 2004.

    It is also true to say that as adventure sports guides or as psychedelic assisted therapists, we have an ethical duty of care to our clients. And so we also must protect ourselves and our clients, especially people who are vulnerable, from taking on too much risk.

    1. Psychedelic-assisted therapy is inherently risky.

    There are certain risks with psychedelic assisted therapy that do not come, or are greatly lessened, in other forms of therapy. These risks include the risk of psychosis or spiritual emergency (kundalini awakening), Hallucination-Persistent Perception Disorder, headaches, nausea, anxiety, dissociation, having a disappointing or underwhelming trip, the increase levels of transference and projection, ontological shock, the altering of metaphysical beliefs or spiritual beliefs, and the risk of being traumatized by a very challenging psychedelic experience. The more serious risks listed here are rare, but they do exist.

    Psychedelic-assisted therapy also has the potential to be, perhaps, more rewarding and beneficial than other forms of therapy. Therefore, we need to create a model of access that minimizes risks and maximizes benefits. We also need to take a critical attitude to what Timmy Davis of Psilocybin Access Rights calls “a hypertrophied risk aversion”.

    We witness this frequently on our retreats, where sometimes people have emotional breakthroughs and  process traumas that have been unprocessed for years or decades,  processing the ‘frozen present ’of trauma as Dr Ivor Browne called it. We often see incredible transformations on our retreats. Physical transformations- literally people looking different afterwards, like a heavy weight had been lifted off them. The stories of transformation and rebirth and redemption. The deep, real, authentic gratitude. Giving voice to those whose voice had been lost or forgotten. An inner change from ” a sense of hopelessness to a sense of hope”, as one of our clients put it on a recent integration call.

    The question, then, is how best to balance the risk/ reward ratio?  If psychedelic assisted has potentially life-changing therapeutic benefits,  what level of risk is ethically tolerable?

    1. We need, as a field, to accept the reality of these risks, not deny them or hide them, and to learn how best to mitigate them.

    There is sometimes a tendency in the ‘psychedelic renaissance’  for proponents of psychedelic assisted therapy to be messianical. It would be more prudent for us to acknowledge and accept the reality of these risks and take steps to mitigate them. We need, as a field, to be more open about talking about adverse experiences. Our job as those working in the field is to define, acknowledge, communicate and mitigate risks as best we can.

    1. The difference between risk and consequences

    Researchers such as Professor David Nutt have demonstrated that psilocybin, for example, has a very low harm score compared to other drugs. While the risks involved in working therapeutically with psychedelics may be low, the consequences may, on rare occasions, be high. It is important to distinguish between the likelihood or probability of a risk occurring, and the consequence or severity of that risk, which may be minor or major.

    Blue Nile, 2004

    In adventure sports environments, risk assessments fall within several broad categories, known as the risk likelihood/ severity matrix. This framework may be helpful for the field of psychedelic assisted therapy when thinking about risk. It is also important to consider potential benefits when talking about risk, and to consider the difference between perceived risk, and actual risk. There is also a clear distinction in risk assessment when making personal decisions, and when leading a group in the outdoors.

    Risk Likelihood/Severity Matrix

    a) The first category is low risk likelihood and low consequences. We could say micro-dosing falls into this category. Teaching novices in an adventure sports environment should fall into this category. In terms of the difference between perceived risk and actual risk, sometimes beginners learning a sport may perceive a high level of risk in a situation where the actual risk is extremely low, learning to climb on an indoor climbing wall, for example. Likewise in psychedelic assisted therapy, sometimes participants can present with increased levels of perceived risk, fear of the unknown. Managing people’s fears, anxieties and expectations is a vital part of guiding in the outdoors, as it is in psychedelic assisted therapy.

    b) The second category is low risk and medium or high consequence. I would put most psychedelic assisted therapy, when done in a carefully controlled set and setting, in this category. Guiding a group on Kilimanjaro would fit into this category. Statistically, Kilimanjaro is a very safe mountain for an almost 6000m peak, but, on rare occasions, the consequences can be high (heart attack or high altitude pulmonary or cerebral edema, which can be fatal).

    Kilimanjaro, 2018.

    c) The third category is high risk likelihood and low consequence. For example, climbing a challenging bouldering problem where the likelihood of falling is very high, but the consequences, falling a few meters on a protective bouldering mat, very low, at most causing a sprained ankle.

    c) And the fourth category is high risk likelihood, high consequence. This last category is usually reserved for people at the peak of their ability taking personal responsibility for their decisions who want to challenge their limits. This last category is unsuitable when guiding a group in an adventure sports environment, unless guiding at a very high end, such as guiding an expedition to K2, and would be unsuitable for psychedelic assisted therapy.

    A version of the risk likelihood/severity matrix.
    1. On the importance of screening

    Careful screening can lessen the likelihood of certain risks occurring. Screening and preparation was also very important in adventure sports, especially when guiding treks to remote high altitude locations, making sure people had the required level of fitness and no major health contraindications. On our psilocybin retreats we have recently been turning away approximately 60% of applicants. While this is necessary and makes sense from a risk management perspective, it is challenging from a business perspective, and also leaves a significant group of people in need of help without a therapeutic pathway. But we do this to reduce the possibility for ourselves, and our clients, from taking on things that we or they cannot handle.

    We work with what we call the ‘walking wounded’, the average human being with their hopes and fears and traumas, not with people in deep psychological distress or who are very unwell. Such individuals may be better off served in a medical model with more specialized care. It is also important for us to be aware of our limitations.

    However, careful screening is not foolproof, as sometimes clients do not disclose, or perhaps are unaware of,  or are in denial about, relevant psychological or medical issues. People sometimes can lie, even to themselves, especially if they are in deep need of help.

    Sometimes participants present on a retreat in a very different psychological mindset they presented with during screening and preparation.  We have found other factors than the usual contraindications to be relevant, such as presenting with an overwhelmed nervous system or in the midst of a major life crisis.

    One of the challenges of working with psychedelics is dealing with the unknowns of the unconscious. By definition, we do not know the contents of our unconscious mind. Despite careful preparation, sometimes people have experiences that they did not expect or were unprepared for.

    It may be that certain substances such as 5 meo DMT or iboga have higher risk profiles than, say, psilocybin. It may also be that certain substances have greater potential benefits for high risk cohorts of people,  such as iboga/ibogaine for severe addiction, and ketamine for suicidality,  which means the risk-benefit equation is different for those substances.

    I believe that the risk of being traumatized by a challenging psychedelic experience can be mitigated by skillful and dedicated integration. I have found that helping people find meaning in their suffering can change what was previously seen as a very negative experience into a positive therapeutic one. One senior therapist in the US  told me that he believed almost anything could be held therapeutically, depending on the capacity of the therapeutic team and the strength of the therapeutic container. While this may be true, it does not take into account just how challenging it can be to hold very difficult therapeutic processes for the therapists and participants involved.

    1. Informed consent

    One part of managing risk is making sure clients are aware of, and give their consent to taking on, the risks involved. One challenge is that it is difficult to fully communicate the changes that may occur as a result of a psychedelic experience to those who have never had a psychedelic experience. Perhaps some form of standardized consent procedure could be worth developing.

    1. We also need to acknowledge that sometimes there will be consequences as a result of those risks, and come up with ways of dealing with those consequences.

    As a field, we need to accept that despite careful screening and preparation, on occasion things may go wrong. The parallels with adventure sport are prescient. In the outdoors, despite careful management of risks, occasionally things go wrong. Over a 20 year period of working as an outdoor guide, especially in the dynamic environment of whitewater rivers, I saw a lot of things go wrong directly and indirectly. This naturally leads to increased risk aversion over time.

    Azores, 2011

    This can perhaps be best illustrated by the following story. I am not a very experienced offshore sailor, but on one occasion, I crewed a catamaran sailing from the Azores to the UK. Halfway across the passage, 1000 km offshore, we hit some heavy weather. I noticed that the skipper,  an incredibly experienced sailor who had circumnavigated the globe several times, including the Cape of Good Hope, was nervous, more nervous than I was as a novice sailor. When I asked him about it he told me that on his first transatlantic crossing, as a relatively novice skipper, he had felt no such fear. I understood why. From his vast experience, he had become more aware of what could go wrong than I was as a relative novice.

    Overtime, you become more aware from lived experience of what can go wrong and the possible consequences. Things do not always go as planned. Often accidents in the outdoors occur, not in high risk situations when people are pushing their limits and very focused, but often in situations where the likelihood of a risk occurring was not particularly high. When you witness and have to deal with the consequences of serious accidents in the outdoors, it changes something in you.

    Northern Norway, 2006.
    1. Consequences I have witnessed in low risk situations

    On two occasions I have witnessed people having experiences that could be described as spiritual emergencies which can look very similar to psychosis. Neither case involved a high dose psychedelic experience. One case occurred after a vipassana meditation retreat on Maui. No psychedelics were involved, but other powerful practices, such as kundalini yoga, were. The second case involved a low dose of psilocybin, not at one of our retreats, but at an indigenous style ceremony.

    In both cases, although the behavior involved was quite bizarre at times (such as talking to trees and persistent shaking and twitching over several days) these people could be held in a supportive and loving environment in nature for several days which was enough to ground them and bring them back to consensus reality.  Sometimes people need more time to come back from ‘between the worlds’ after powerful psychedelic experiences.

    1. My own experience

    In my own lived experience, I recall having persistent hallucinations, double vision, dizziness and vertigo for a week after a Bwiti iboga initiation. The experience was one of the most transformative therapeutic experiences of my life, processing layers of shame I never thought possible. Even at the time, I understood the difficulties were a part of the process. Sometimes the most rewarding things in life are not easy. That said, I was very glad when my eyesight and balance returned to normal!

    It is also important to recognize that these risks are ones we all face, whether in a clinical trial, a legal retreat setting or an indigenous ceremonial setting. The fact of the matter is that any of us working in this field face these same risks. Some of the most difficult and dangerous adverse reactions I have heard about occurred at ayahuasca retreat centers in Peru.

    My point is that extended difficulties after a psychedelic experience could equally easily occur on a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins, Imperial College London, at a legal psychedelic retreat setting,  an underground ceremony, or an indigenous ceremonial setting in the Amazon.  The sooner we collectively acknowledge these risks and potential consequences,  and are able to talk about them openly without shame or fear of judgment, the better. Otherwise, a culture of secrecy, shame, blame and judgment could emerge. What is not in the light, will be in the shadows, as it were. We need to create a culture of self reflection, acknowledging that we can all make mistakes. We need, as a field, to be more open about talking about adverse experiences.

    1. On the power of belief and focus

    When running a large whitewater rapid, we would spend as much time as necessary looking at the line and the risks involved, all of the consequences and potential worst case scenarios. Then a careful assessment would be made, based on all relevant factors including river water level,  skill level, the team and the safety set up involved, on whether to run the rapid, or not.

    Scouting a rapid, Northern Norway, 2006.

    But, and this is the important part, once a decision has been made to run a whitewater rapid, that decision was taken in full commitment, focussing fully in confidence on the desired outcome, with no focus on the worst case scenario. In other words, completely focusing on where you want to go, not where you do not want to go. Focusing on what can go wrong when running a whitewater rapid is an almost certain way to ensure a negative outcome.

    Below Victoria Falls, Zambezi, 2018.

    Perhaps this mindset has some parallels with psychedelic assisted therapy. In the early stages of screening and preparation it is important to address, communicate and acknowledge the risks involved, assessing if it is the right course of action for an individual to embark on.

    Once a decision has been made, in consultation with the participant, that the therapeutic process is suitable for the individual involved, then it is important to move forward with as little doubt as possible, creating the right mindset for a positive outcome. At a recent conference in the Netherlands, “Unveiling the mind: Convergence of Hypnotic and Psychedelic realities”, many speakers emphasized the power of suggestion and belief.

    For this reason, it is important to prime the participants mindset carefully, creating an atmosphere conducive to a positive therapeutic outcome. This can include preparing them in advance for difficult feelings to arise, and emphasizing the normality and purpose of these feelings. Acknowledging that while the process may be challenging, there is a reason for undertaking it. In my experience, once a meaning can be found in suffering, it can allow even the most challenging psychedelic experience to be seen from a positive therapeutic perspective. I often tell my clients that I don’t do this work because I enjoy watching people suffer, but because a light can be found at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes the most challenging psychedelic experience can be the most therapeutic ones.

    It is also important to be mindful that the pressure of making the right decisions can be a heavy responsibility for those working in the field, so creating multidisciplinary spaces for open discussion and supervision is essential.  I am sure I am not the only person in the field who feels this, very deeply at times.This is not something I hear talked about too often, just how challenging this work can be for the therapists involved.

    To conclude, as a field we need to acknowledge the risks and consequences of psychedelic assisted therapy, to agree on how best to communicate, address and mitigate them, to consider what levels of risk are ethically acceptable, to address how to manage consequences, and to consider the possibility of standardized screening and informed consent procedures. In this, we can learn lessons from other fields such as adventure sports.

    This piece was first published in Jules Evans Estatic Integration substack https://www.ecstaticintegration.org/

    Feature Image: An Ethiopian woman crossing a class 6 rapid on the Blue Nile with a new-born baby wrapped in her shawl. A fall here would have meant certain death for both of them.

  • The Greatest Troubadour: Jacques Brel

    In search of the my favourite troubadour all roads lead to Flanders, Belgium, then on to France and French Polynesia. There, in the obscure cemetery of Atuona Hiva Oa – alongside the impressionist Paul Gaugin – rests the mortal remains of Jacques Brel.

    Aged just forty-seven, Brel had been under a settled expectation of death for some time, as a legendary smoker, and been commuting back and forth to the French mainland to finalise his last album.

    Belgiums regularly hail Brel as their greatest fellow citizen in opinion polls. For good reason.

    I greatly admire the French chanteuse tradition from Maurice Chevalier to Edith Piaf, and on to Juliette Greco. There’s Serge Gainsbourg too, and the recently deceased Charles Aznavour. Yet I regard Jacque Brel as the culmination of that tradition.

    It is the sheer volume of great songs that is most remarkable about Brel, and, unlike Gainsbourg, they translate easily, although they are often traduced.

    Thus, Les Moribund (1961) is about the ruminations of a dying man: ‘I want them to dance when it’s time to put me in the hole.’ In the Terry Jack version, however, which sold five million copies this becomes: ‘Goodbye my friend it is time to die when all the birds singing in the sky…. We will have joy, we will have fun, we will have seasons in the sun.’ Westlife even covered it. Yet it is a Brel song translated word-for-word with an identical riff. One can only assume copyright was secured.

    David Bowie was a huge fan of Brel, and most notably covered the iconic song Amsterdam (1964), as did Scott Walker who penned an album in English called Walker Sings Brel (1981). Brel was above all a performer. Thus, with sweat dripping and emotional grotesquerie to the fore, nothing in performance art history is quite like his live version of Amsterdam at the Olympia Amsterdam 1964. Ms Abramovich eats your heart out.

    Brel did live long enough, through terrible illness, to see worldwide acclaim. Many of his songs were respectfully produced through his involvement in one of the great Broadway musicals. Jacques Brel is alive and well and living in Paris (1968). It is a brilliant and haunting introduction to his songs, and an essential purchase for any music lover.

    Brel came from Flanders and chronicles the travails of the Flemish bourgeoisie, often with a full frontal attack, as in Les Flamandes (1958) – equivalent in its power to W. B. Yeats’ great poem September 1913, but also filled with charity, tolerance, and humanism.

    The apogee of his love/hate relationship with his homeland is the track Fils de or Sons of (1967), beautifully sung in the Broadway musical by Elly Stone. It is a kind of paean to all God’s children. I consider it one of the greatest songs about human aspiration and failure, jaw-dropping in its simplicity and clarity.

    Brel migrated to Paris at the age of twenty-four to work in a cardboard box factory, but was quickly lionised for his musical gifts. There was no fall from grace, as he became the totemic figure in French performance culture, and a national icon both in Belgium and France.

    Amsterdam is his most famous, although not in my view, his best song. It’s certainly one of the most disturbing renditions of human debauchery and self-destruction ever written, set in that city of contradictions, lovely and decadent in equal measure. Home to Rembrandt’s Night Watch and The Van Gogh Museum, as well as to the drugs trade and prostitution.

    Preferably it should be listened to in tandem with a reading Albert Camus‘ novel The Fall (1956), in which the apostate lawyer confesses his sins to all and sundry in a seedy Amsterdam bar. The lyrics are incandescent. Particularly in French and the song builds to a crescendo.

    Finally they drink to the ladies
    Who give them their nice bodies
    Who give them their virtue
    For a golden piece
    And when they have well drunk
    And pin their nose to the sky
    Blowing their nose in the stars
    And they piss like I cry
    On the unfaithful women
    In Amsterdam’s port
    In Amsterdam’s port

    Many of his songs build in a similar fashion fashion. Tempo is crucial, particularly in my personal favourite La valse à mille temps (1959). Here, Brel is ruminating on a park bench about life and love’s failings beside a giant Ferris wheel. Imagine The London Eye or The Riesenrad in Vienna. As the song unfolds it mimics the rotation of the Ferris wheel and gathers pace. Incredible, or incroyable.  I defy anyone to listen to it and not consider it as beautifully a conceived a song as has ever been written! It is as great as one of Shakespeare’s Sonnets or Love Minus Zero (1964) by Bob Dylan or Dance Me to The End of Love (1984) by Leonard Cohen. Greater in in fact.

    Brel like all troubadours, was a great romantic chronicler and penned an enormous amount of great love songs. Ne Me Quite Pas (1959) is one great hush. Although some of its power is lost in translation, that never stopped Frank Sinatra, Dusty Springfield, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond to name but a few recording it in English as If You Go Away.

    The English title is in fact deceptive, and conditional on some future whim from the object of desire, whereas ‘do not leave me’ is very much an expression of fear of imminent desertion.

    The other famous plaintive ballad is Quand on n’a que l’Amour (1957) which became an easy listening classic covered in English by Engelbert Humperdinck (If We Only Have Love).

    Yet, in my view his greatest song of unrequited love is Madeleine (1962). The Godotesque conceit is incredible, as the protagonist awaits Madeleine, who never arrives, outside a cinema. I believe it influenced Kaurismaki 2023 film Fallen Leaves, and is beautifully sung by Ellie Stone and Mort Shuman in the Broadway production.

    Brel’s relationship with Flanders was complicated throughout his career. On the one hand he sang lovingly of his flat country homeland, particularly in the extraordinary love ballad Marieke (1961) about a woman and indeed Flanders, but he also poured scorn on what he perceived to be the parochial nature of the Flemish, much like Flaubert’s dictionary of received ideas (1911) pouring scorn on the French bourgeoisie.

    So, consider this interview in which Brel said: ‘We have been conquered by everyone, we speak neither pure French nor Dutch, we are nothing’

    Les Flamandes, (1958) is a visceral masterpiece, a ribald and derisive music hall number about dancing Flemish women. Brel was unrepentant about its offensiveness , and on his final 1977 album – when at death’s door – he upped the ante with an even ruder song, Les F…, which accuses the Flemish of being ‘Nazis during the war, and Catholics in between.’

    It should be said that some of Scott Walker’s versions, Jackie (Jacky) (1959) and My Death (La Mort) (1965) are richer texturally and in many ways more enjoyable than the Brel versions, but when Walker has to reach for dark humour his Next/Au Savant (1963) does not reach near the mordant and sardonic Brel heights of the version.  A song about sexual abuse is also covered by Gavin Friday.

    Brel was also an expert in pathos and compassion. Consider the wonderful La Chanson Des Vieux Amants. ‘Of course we’ve had thunderstorms,’ goes the first line. ‘Of course, you took a few lovers,’ And candidly in the second verse, ‘time had to be spent well.’  One is reminded of the great French chanteuse Maurice Chevalier and his old muse in Gigi (1958).

    We dined at nine.
    Not it was eight.
    You were on time.
    No, you were late.
    Oh yes, I remember it well.

    Brel was an incurable romantic and indeed a quixotic figure who staged a French version of the musical Man of La Mancha by Cervantes, translated all the lyrics, directed the production, and played Don Quixote himself. Brel’s version of The Impossible Dream takes the mundane words and stokes up the intensity – not unlike Amsterdam – to the point of madness.

    His hopes, as he shuffled off this mortal coil, that his final album would slip out with little fanfare were dashed when it shifted 600,000 copies in its first few days. The generally begrudging French literati welcomed him back in a similar fashion to how they had once welcomed Voltaire before the French Revolution. In both cases death followed shortly thereafter.

    Commuting between France and French Polynesia, given the perilous state of his health, was hardly ideal. His final work Brel (1977) unsurprisingly deals with themes of death; he had sung enough about it even before he developed terminal lung cancer,

    In JoJo, a reflective and tear-stained tribute to an old friend, features the line: six feet under but you are not dead.

    ‘Of course there are wars in Ireland,’ he sings in the opening line, following up with everything else that is wrong with the world, ‘but to see a friend cry…’ he offers at the end of each verse, as if unable to finish the sentence himself through emotion.

    Well know there are wars going on everywhere, but to see a friend cry, a lover depart, someone who fails to meet you outside the cinema, that is the human condition. The focus is on the particular, not the general. He is ever the humanist.

    The songs are so incredible lyrically and musically only Dylan with almost four decades more longevity or arguably Paul McCartney or Cole Porter has written as many great songs in the history of popular music. In my view, he is the greatest troubadour of the 20th century, and the Belgians know it.

    Feature Image: Jacques Brel in 1962 by Jack de Nijs for Anefo

  • 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

  • Kneecap – Don’t Look Back in Ongar

    Out with the old, in with the new. In the same month that Don’t Look Back in Ongar (2024), the final (27th) instalment of the Ross O’Carroll Kelly fictional autobiography was published, the Irish-language musical comedy Kneecap (2024) quickly became the year’s highest-grossing cinema release.

    The differences between these two are more than apparent: the ROCK books and newspaper column have given us a satirical history of the south Dublin elite as the country bounces between booms and busts over more than 20 years, while Kneecap is the semi-biographical contemporary story of two working-class Belfast boys who team up with a schoolteacher to form Kneecap, the Irish-language rap group. But it’s also possible to imagine a baton being passed along here, especially when we regard the books and the film in terms of the linguistic shitscape that is modern Ireland.

    In the semi-fictional universe of ROCK, the contortions of the English language are the greatest source of comedy, the most pertinent commentary on class and gender difference, and the clearest exposition of Irish culture as being in a state of perpetual colonial aftermath. The bizarre renderings of various accents in ROCK, along with highly convoluted slang, its very narrow field of cultural references, and the characters’ sponge-like acquisition of Americanisms, are a turn-off for many. But they are flattering for readers who, by understanding the linguistic nuances, become themselves the objects of satire.

    Kneecap is more patently ‘about’ language. In the film itself and in the band’s music and branding (Kneecap is a band in the real world), language is described in the clearest terms as a political issue. The use of Irish, especially in the northern context, is an anti-colonial act – the campaign for the passing of Irish Language Act of 2022 in the British parliament forms the background to the story. Each word is a bullet fired for freedom, according to the mantra of the die-hard pre-ceasefire philosophy of one protagonist’s father (played by Michael Fassbender, who played Bobby Sands in Hunger some years ago). Alongside the fluently delivered postcolonial critique of language and empire, the film also plays on more subtle conflicts of personal battles fought with language – one protagonist whose parents have raised him in Irish and now refuse to speak it to him, another who refuses to speak English when detained by police, and another who hides his Irish-language musical activity from his language-activist partner.

    Cultural Divide

    These mutual misunderstandings will put ROCK readers in mind of the language barrier that is raised between Ross and his own son, Ronan, who has been raised in Finglas and speaks with a working-class Dublin accent. Now Ronan works in the highest government circles for his grandfather (Ross’s father), the Trump-adjacent Taoiseach. Father and son both speak English, and Ronan always understands Ross, but Ross often just does not get what his son is saying to him:

    ‘I shouldn’t be tedding you this, Rosser.’
    ‘You might as well tell me? I probably won’t understand it anyway.’
    ‘The Gubderminth ren ourra muddy.’
    ‘They what?’
    ‘Thee ren ourra muddy.’
    ‘No, it’s not catching.’
    ‘Thee.’
    ‘They.’
    ‘Ren.’
    ‘Ran.’
    ‘Ourra.’
    ‘Out of.’
    ‘Muddy.’
    ‘Oh, muddy! Okay, I get you.’

    The joke is partly Ross’s low intelligence, which is what he is referring to at the start when he says he probably won’t understand. Ross is completely ignorant, near-illiterate and unable to focus on anything requiring mental exertion. But he is firm in his self-identity and in the cultural values that count (rugby, private schools, luxury consumption, machismo, etc.). The joke is also of course based on class caricatures, and the working-class characters are treated with as much Swiftian mercilessness as anyone else.

    More than Swift, however, the contortion of English in the mouth of Ronan resembles the Joycean madness that descends on the language, on all languages, in Finnegans Wake in particular. When Ronan speaks, the Attorney General becomes the ‘Attordeney Generdoddle’ – and the reader finds themselves in the position of Ross, trying to transform this hibernicized monstrosity back into something comprehensible, back into the language of power. The ROCK books are full of these linguistic breakdowns and anomalies, of characters talking past each other, of language acting as a pick with which to dig even deeper into one’s own trench. The world of the ROCK books, like the language that is spoken in them, is chaotic, controlled by the wrong people, and full of injustices in every chapter. This dark portrait of Ireland, like the best satire, is delivered as a prolonged, stupid, sick, and yet funny, joke.

    Naoise Ó Cairealláin with Michael Fassbender in Kneecap.

    Labour of Resistance

    While the do-nothings in the south live free of the British yoke, the Belfast crowd are working hard at the labour of resistance. Education, self-motivation, organising are all positive attributes in Kneecap, which goes some way toward explaining the heavy emphasis on drug-taking hedonism that runs throughout, a careful counter to the characterisation of moralising busybody do-gooder that in other times and contexts has stuck so well to militant gaeilgeoirí. Indeed, when Irish does occasionally appear in earlier ROCK instalments, it tends to reek of worthiness, a tool for virtue-signalling southerners for whom gaelscoileanna are little more than feeder schools for the elite private institutions.

    That there is something important and vital at stake is absolutely clear in Kneecap. The achievement of bringing so many people to see an Irish-language film, both within the island and without, is enormous. The band and the film itself combine masterfully punkish attitudinizing and youth-coolness on the one hand, and mainstream institutional endorsement on the other. The Kneecap thing is slickly done and, with money from TG4, Northern Ireland Screen, Coimisiún na Meán and Screen Ireland, plus public endorsements from people such as Elton John and Cillian Murphy, and positive coverage everywhere from the Guardian to the LA Times, they will bring the Irish language and the reasons why it should be spoken to more eyes and ears than perhaps anyone has ever achieved. They also show no sign of toning down their solidarity with Palestine, which will surely hurt their chances when it comes to the Oscars, now that the film has secured the Irish nomination.

    Joyce jokes in A Portrait of the Artist that the best English in the world is to be heard in Lower Drumcondra. Ross O’Carroll Kelly would be dismayed to hear this, given that it is on the northside, but he would also have to admit that he is no judge. In fact, he might not even understand the statement, whether joke or not. Being in judgement about language, having an opinion of any kind, is a sophisticated thing in the ROCK universe. In a way, this is a kind of guarantor that the language that does get spoken there has a kind of spontaneous purity, as it flows with so little friction. In Kneecap, the characters can only dream of being so mindlessly expressive. When we look ahead to the process of unification that is surely underway at this stage, the unionist-nationalist divide will occupy much of our attention, but other, vast cultural gaps run through the island, as the difference between this book and this film illustrates.

  • Review: Trump Rant by Chris Agee

    “Trump Inhabits Trumpistan”, writes Chris Agee in his rampaging poetic satire, Trump Rant: “Trump Is the Wolf of Washington”. Written over a four-year period from 2017 onwards, and arranged as an expanding series of mock-newspaper headlines, Agee’s book begins as an act of stinging personal portraiture and ends as a thorough-going investigation of America itself – which appears, over the course of the poem, as both an empire in decline and a dysfunctional democracy in crisis. “Trumpian Fever”, Agee writes, “Continually Reminds Me of the Civil War Build-up of the 1850s”. As Agee recognises, and as Mark Twain likewise knew, the past and present have a habit of rhyming through the flux.

    A US-born Irish citizen, based in Belfast, Agee is singularly sensitive to the totalitarian impulses and tribal resentments that the title-figure – a “Beacon of Malevolence” – has proven adept at mobilising, both in and out of political office. “Trump Is Ten Times Worse Than Nixon”, he insists, reminding us that the current Republican nominee for president “Openly Supported the Kenosha Shooter”, Kyle Rittenhouse, in 2020. Such precedents alter the civic atmosphere, toxifying public politics, possibly beyond repair.

    The Trumpian era, Agee suggests, is defined by ruthlessness, for “Trump” at heart “Is a Political Cutthroat”: a charismatic leader with brash demogogic tendencies, brazenly echoing white nationalist discourses in his bloated ascent to political power. “Trump Is Malcolm X’s “American Nightmare””, we’re informed: a proposition that feels at once historically grounded and chillingly prophetic.

    In this respect, the Rant may bear a resemblance to the work of Allen Ginsberg, combining oratorical force with a deep-running sense of cultural urgency. “Trump Is the Real Plot Against America”, Agee declares, “Trump Is a Mouth Who Loves Mouthing”. It should be said that part of the appeal of Trump Rant – what stops it from being merely abrasive and makes it, instead, thought-provoking and often funny – is its fizzing sense of how ludicrous Trump can be. It’s possible, indeed, that when faced with the former president’s one-man circus-show, laughter may be the sanest response. “Trump Is Impossible To Imagine as a Scuba-diver”, Agee quips, and any honest observer would struggle to disagree.

    “Trump Speaks No Languages (Not Even English)”, he continues, and we begin to understand the complex blend of fixation and anger that propels Trump Rant along its hurricane-course. Whereas Trump wields language like an ugly weapon, scattering falsehoods and distortions whenever he speaks, Agee, a poet, is using his words to hold up an accusing mirror to power itself. “Trump”, he suggests, “Is The Corrupted Dream”. The Rant, by contrast, might be thought of as a visceral attempt to re-galvanise the original promise – of language as a mode of truthful speech, and of the United States as a vibrant democratic republic (or what Langston Hughes called, with painful justice, the “land that never has been yet”).

    With his Democratic rivals staunchly committed to neoliberalism at home and genocide abroad, and his own party plunging ever deeper into a sludge-pit of weaponised nativism, toxic conspiracy culture and personality-worship, as a political figure Trump in 2024 seems as peculiarly emblematic as he has ever been: both homegrown product and representative man, incarnating the feral aggression and strange emptiness of American capitalism. “Trump Is a Tacky Gatsby Bamboozling the National Nick (We’ve Read It All Before!)”, Agee writes, and the tarnished nature of America’s self-mythology seems all the more polluting; the rot too rampant to be reversed.

    For all its declarative zest and referential range, Agee’s book is saturated with political dread: we read it in the shadow of things to come.

    Feature Image by DonkeyHotey – Donald Trump – Caricature, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66578850

  • Review: Father, Son and Brother Ghost

    Few writers can do grief and loss like John MacKenna. He is, without question, the John McGahern of the ‘Ancient East’. Where McGahern has put the villages and drumlins of Leitrim along the inland cusp of the ‘Wild Atlantic Way’ at the heart of his writing, the landscape of South Kildare, and its surroundings are integral to MacKenna’s works and that is no different in Father, Son and Brother Ghost where place is the sorrowful score to MacKenna’s libretto.

    Unravelling grief is the strange, poignant music of the heart: If ‘grief is the price we pay for love’ MacKenna paid that price. All MacKenna’s fiction revolves around Castledermot, The High and Low Terraces of Abbeylands where the MacKennas lived: The rivers Lerr and Barrow, Mullaghcreelan Woods, Kilkea, Athy, Carlow, the Sliabh Bloom mountains and the midland bogs looming beyond are accomplices in what becomes a landscape of bitter-sweet melancholy. This memoir, mimicking the prayerful intonation ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’ is a hymn to MacKenna’s older brother, Jarlath whose untimely death at 62 in 2005 left the writer so bereft that he has been writing and rewriting this memoir for seventeen years between various other pursuits, not least a plunge into psychotherapy as he told a packed audience at its launch recently in the library in Athy.

    Jarlath spent the bulk of his working life as a doctor in North Carolina. In this moving memoir, landscape and place become sites of consecration to a lost brother, evoked through fragments of joyful memories, where often, more harrowing family anecdotes and memories interpose – his mother’s tears when the family were leaving the Low Terrace for a larger house on the High Terrace because she was leaving behind three still born babies buried there at the bottom of the garden.

    The sometimes distraught attempt to recover this lost fraternal connection reaches back into his parents’ own history, and the increasing friction and disappointment between them, caused, it appears, by Jack MacKenna’s increasing dependence on alcohol. But if Jack MacKenna was an alcoholic, he was a highly functioning one. John, as the youngest child of three, experienced these tensions more intensely, as he was like an only child because his brother and sister were away at boarding school. They were all, to different degrees ‘survivors of their own small carnage’ but he ‘didn’t know it at the time’. Set apart from their neighbours by being the school mistress’s children, the yearning for belonging abides.

    Ten years younger than Jarlath, MacKenna is first separated from him when his adored older brother is sent to boarding school in Limerick while the younger brother is still an infant. In the escalating tensions of the home, Jarlath became John’s rock and anchor and his sense of abandonment in the older brother’s many absences is a source of anguish.

    It seems the younger brother only realised when Jarlath died that he had never overcome these earlier losses due to their many separations. The severances are amplified, not just by the large age gap, but by the fact that Jarlath spent his summers working in England during his college years when he first studied for an arts degree followed by a H. Dip in Education and then went on to study medicine.

    During these periods, Jarlath’s trips to Castledermot were brief but they are jealously recovered here. In choosing to pursue his medical career in America, the miles of the Atlantic Ocean eventually stretched between them, keeping the brothers geographically apart as adult men.

    Unsurprisingly, MacKenna conveys a sense of betrayal by all these ‘sunderings’ culminating in his brother’s death from motor neuron disease a few days after he visits him. They are only spared one last night together as Jarlath deteriorated unexpectedly. All this pours forth in torrents of  ‘unending loss’.  Loss is ‘the tiny, pitched hole in the sky at night or the sun’s hesitation about rising at dawn’. It is ‘a grief that has been given two decades to condense but it remains’.

    With incredible skill this ceaseless grief, punctuated by cherished memories is movingly retold – snatched scenes during school and Christmas holidays, pranks played, photos of the three MacKenna children on swings, at picnics, on car bonnets – photos, not provided in the book but described in the minutest detail. In this, intense nurturing of memory, MacKenna manages, not just to keep his absent brother present but to evoke both brother and disappointed father with immense love.

    MacKenna’s despair was so all-consuming that he lost his second marriage amid the wilderness of the fallout from his brother’s death and for this, he is not easy on himself. Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Simon and Garfunkle, Elvis, Mozart and even prayers become accessories in recovered memories – every child of the 60s will identify with them and the same goes for the rosaries and the stations of the cross. The smell of polish, beeswax and lavender evoking back-to-school nostalgia are experiences all those of MacKenna’s generation will easily identify with and they are all tinged with a hint of the sanctified.

    Equally, we all knew a Lal McKenna – his single aunt whom, not unlike the heroine of Joyce’s ‘Eveline’, sacrificed her own prospects of love and marriage to care, first for her younger siblings and after that, for her sister’s children in Athy where she lived-in with the family, and also served in the shop. We all know too of the shoe-box coffins where dead and premature babies, excluded from ‘consecrated ground’ for not being baptised were, instead buried in old, abandoned graveyards or other local hallowed spots.

    Jarlath’s kindness to the brother, ten years his junior are emotionally recalled as numerous amputations – the ‘tearing apart of what was their brotherhood.’ An image of their father, Jack leaning on a spade at the opening throws a shadow over the pages – a shadow ‘that reached back into the past eight decades’.

    The narrative is not chronological but rather moves joltingly from different decades and places – itself evoking loss and dislocation. We are plunged into Jack’s own displacement when, after his mother died soon after he was born, he and his siblings were moved to his grandmother’s house in Celbridge. When his father remarried, Jack McKenna and his siblings were moved back to Bluebell Cottage in Athy where his father, a train driver, was based. Jack McKenna followed his own father into work on the railways and eventually becoming a signalman and foreman in Athy. ‘We are a railway family’ MacKenna informs the reader and his father was an exemplary worker. MacKenna’s earliest dreams was to be a railway worker too.

    This beautifully crafted memoir on a grief that brings the writer to the edge of self-annihilation is full of hope too. We are ‘not just the people our parents make us but what we make of ourselves’ and we can ‘all if we are lucky, venture down the road of understanding and mercy’.  Like his masterful debut novel The Last Fine Summer (1997) this memoir marks MacKenna out as a dazzling virtuoso of the poetics of love and loss.

    Father, Son and Brother Ghost is published by The Harvest Press www.theharvestpress.ie

  • ENOUGH! Confronting Woody Allen

    These are extraordinary times. Last month serial sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein, had his 23-year sentence squashed; a Channel 4 documentary aired new sexual misconduct claims against Kevin Spacey, and Woody Allen and Roman Polanski are feted at the Venice Film Festival. ‘Hiding in plain sight’ – and having ruthless lawyers – still seem to work as a treat in the misogynist’s playbook.

    Let’s take Woody Allen. These days Woody Allen looks like someone’s favourite teddy that’s been savaged by a pitbull, but don’t be fooled – he’s as unrepentedly misogynistic as ever. And just as keen to claim his innocence: No Court Ever Convicted Me.

    Some days it feels as if #MeToo had never happened.

    So Woody is the guy who, since the very beginning of his career, made films about older guys glomming onto young women. Very young women. Mariel Hemmingway, in everyone’s favourite Woody movie, ‘Manhattan’, was sixteen-years-old. Sixteen! Being drooled on by a 40-something Woody Allen.

    When shooting wrapped on ‘Manhattan’ Woody drove her to her parents mansion and suggested she run away to Paris with him, where he would make her a star. Would there be separate bedrooms? Asked the kid. Eh, no.

    Praise the Lord (and pass the ammunition), that was the end of that.

    But Woody went on to make more, and more, movies featuring older men – very often himself – and younger, much younger women.

    Emma Stone, Allen, and Parker Posey at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015

    Cultural Icon

    Part of the blindness to this carry on arose of course from Woody being a ‘cultural icon’ for millions of Boomers. The softly-spoken, wonky-specked hero of their fav films, could do no wrong. Woody was their very own ‘Lovable, Neurotic Nebbish’.

    As Steven Kurutz of the New York Times wrote that Woody was the litmus test for all things groovy: ‘E. E. Cummings, Paris, 1930s jazz and the sophisticated, cultured world his films came to represent.’

    Apart from a few sharp eyed critics like Joan Didion who said Mariel Hemingway in ‘Manhattan’ was ‘another kind of adolescent fantasy,  a high-school senior with perfect skin, perfect wisdom, perfect sex, and no visible family’, or film critic Pauline Kael who asked, ‘What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?’

    Most people played along. It was just Woody, playing out his ‘predilections’. Hahaha. Then came real life.

    It turned out it was the same Woody Allen who groomed, seduced, and had a secret affair with his and Mia Farrow’s sixteen-year old high school daughter, Soon-Yi. A young woman whom he had been de facto father to for thirteen years. A young girl, chauffeured to him in his apartment still in her school uniform.

    When confronted by a horrified Mia – she’d found the pornographic photos he had taken of  Soon-Yi on his desk – Woody went full DARVO. Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim and Offender. Who cared if he destroyed his family and his partner Mia in the process? Certainly not Woody.

    He denied Soon-yi was his daughter, that he had been in loco parentis for over thirteen years. Denied grooming her. Denied that Soon-yi, a Korean street child, surviving on trash until adopted by Mia and then husband Andre Previn, was peculiarly vulnerable, having never even had a boyfriend until Mr Specs moved on her.

    No no no, wrote Woody. ‘Here was a sharp, classy, fabulous young woman: highly intelligent, full of latent potential, ready to ripen superbly’.

    “Ready to ripen superbly.”

    Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn in Venice in 1996

    Worse to come

    During custody proceedings it turned out, as Dylan would testify years later in her open letter to the New York Times that Allen had groomed her, and abused her, ‘doing things to her that she didn’t like’ for ‘as long as she could remember’?

    Immediately, the vast army of lawyers, PR wonks, ‘experts’ employed by him to destroy Mia Farrow and allow him ‘have’ Soon-Yi, switched their attention to destroying the evidence of his then seven-year-old daughter, Dylan.

    In a classic Toxic Dad move, Woody lodged a legal appeal to gain custody of his and Mia’s three younger children: Moses, Dylan and Ronan, saying Mia was an unfit mother. A harridan. A bully. A crazy person. Whom her children hated. That these ‘false allegations’ of abusing Dylan were manifestations of Mia Farrow’s ‘festering anger’ against him. Part of a ‘bitter custody battle’.

    Woody was the first to bring up the toxic ‘Parental Alienation’ defence now poisoning thousands of custody cases in both America, the U.K., even here in Ireland, whereby abusive fathers can get full custody of children when their lawyers assert the Mums have ‘alienated’ them against the same abusive Dad.

    According to one top US lawyer, it’s ‘easier for the Courts to grant custody to an abusive father than to believe the mother’. Thousands of women, and children, have suffered terribly. Little comfort to them that the guy who dreamed up this latest patriarchal wheeze hacked himself to pieces in his kitchen with a carving knife as local deputies moved in with child abuse charges.

    As Woody’s attacks on Mia as ‘harridan’ were amplified by an adoring press, lapped up by fans, interview after sympathetic interview was conducted with our man, ‘as New York as the Statue of Liberty’. It was box office. Who doesn’t love to see a super-rich, beautiful blonde with a large, multicultural family, taken down?

    Luckily, Woody overplayed his hand. The seven week-long custody case didn’t go his way.  The judge, to Woody’s and his expensive lawyers evident astonishment, denied him custody. In case anyone was in doubt as to why the Judge spelled it out: ‘Mr. Allen’s resort to the stereotypical ‘woman scorned’ defence is an injudicious attempt to divert attention from his failure as a responsible parent and adult.’ Hurray!

    Mia Farrow at the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes awards ceremony.

    No Criminal Conviction

    Sadly, attempts at securing a criminal conviction against him for the sexual abuse of Dylan foundered.

    First, the New York hospital who conducted ‘interviews’ at Woody’s behest with seven-year-old  Dylan, destroyed all their evidence, then claimed she had either been ‘coached’ or was ‘deluded’. Before any judicial process could take place they allowed Woody Allen to hold a press conference on the hospital steps to ‘proclaim his innocence’.

    The New York Prosecutor was apoplectic. But hey, Woody was Woody. He brought millions of dollars into New York, right? What was a seven-year-old’s ‘discomfort’ compared to that?

    A young NYC welfare officer who interviewed Dylan separately, believed her. He was ‘instructed’ to find her allegations ‘unfounded’. When he refused, he was fired. His superior said: ‘The elite do whatever they want to do. There are no consequences’. She  resigned.

    Meanwhile in separate proceedings in Connecticut where Mia and the children lived, another prosecutor believed there was ‘probable cause for a criminal case’. But it was this prosecutor and Mia Farrow who reluctantly decided to call a halt to further legal proceedings as putting a traumatised seven-year-old through any more of this brutality would be too much.

    Woody held another press conference: he was clean! More parties! More cheering!

    And he continued to make films, play jazz, and yes, actually get married to Soon-Yi. He was sixty-two, she twenty-seven.

    Most importantly, he got to keep his precious status as an ‘auteur’ and ‘proven genius’. One of the ‘greats’ of Western cinema.

    Ronan Farrow.

    Post Traumatic Stress

    He almost got away with it.

    His victims, daughter Dylan and partner Mia Farrow – though all the children in the family were affected –  were left with the pain, post-traumatic-stress, years of self-loathing, anxiety and depression, while he partied on.

    As Dylan wrote, ‘Sexual abuse is a life long sentence. It never goes away’.

    Woody said it was all ‘stupid’, ‘silly’.  There was nothing he could do. And, magic trick!, no court had convicted him. He was clean.

    Luckily, just when you think you’ve killed it off for good, the truth has a nasty habit of reappearing.

    It was the lionisation of her father at the Golden Globes in 2014  that drove Dylan, now a beautiful young woman in her twenties, into offering that open letter to the New York Times:

    For as long as I could remember my father had been doing things to me that I didn’t like…

    I didn’t like how often he would take me away from my mom, siblings and friends to be alone with him. I didn’t like it when he would stick his thumb in my mouth. I didn’t like it when I had to get in bed with him under the sheets when he was in his underwear. I didn’t like it when he would place his head in my naked lap and breathe in and breathe out. I would hide under beds or lock myself in the bathroom to avoid these encounters, but he always found me.

    Woody’s obsessive grooming culminated in taking the little girl to a ‘crawl space’ in the attic in the family home in Connecticut, making her lie on her tummy and watch her brother’s train set go round, while he touched her private parts, then penetrated her with his finger.

    He told her it was ‘their secret’.  That one day he would take her to Paris and make her a movie star.

    Horribly, the exact same line he’d used on Mariel Hemingway.

    Dylan’s letter to the New York Times was a bombshell. Twenty-two years after her mother’s initial disclosure of abuse, cultural indulgence towards male abusers had chilled. Significantly.

    Dylan’s younger brother, Ronan Farrow, who Allen had offered a ‘comfortable life’ to in return for speaking out against his sister and his mother, was developing a successful investigative journalism career.  His eyes were on that other elephant in the room of abuse, Harvey Weinstein.

    Crucially for Dylan, and for their mother Mia, Ronan became an ally.

    At first, he admits he was horrified at his sister’s public re-announcement of their father’s sexual abuse. He begged her not to. ‘It was the last association I wanted’. A bonfire in which friendships, powerful allies and those all-important connections would get burnt. Where Woody Allen’s ferocious spin machine would go into overdrive once more.

    Thankfully the #MeToo Movement was sweeping through the ‘entertainment world’.

    Woody’s ‘this is all too silly’ schtick began to look threadbare.

    Ronan’s book on the Harvey Weinstein scandal, Catch and Kill became a Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller. Hachette, poised to publish Woody’s memoir under the same imprint, pulped Woody, and championed Ronan. Amazon cancelled a four film-deal.

    The Tables Turn

    The coup de grace was a four-part HBO documentary aired in 2021, ‘Allen v Farrow’ made by Jane Doe Films. The details, painstakingly put together, paint an utterly damning portrait of an decidedly not nice little guy.

    Woody began to sound less sanguine, dismissing the actors who dared refuse to work with him, with: ‘That’s how actors and actresses are, denouncing me became the fashionable thing to do, like everybody suddenly eating kale.’

    As if kale had anything to do with justice. With little ones being abused.

    Rather prophetically justice has come for Woody and his ilk, Harvey Weinstein etc., via the media. The same media these men manipulated, for years.

    Far from being a ‘Trial by Media’ as these scions of the patriarchy like to characterise it, for abused women, going to the media, taking the fight to Twitter, or TikTok, or the New York Times,  is a ‘form of rebellion’. It is a way, said Baroness Helena Kennedy QC. with regard to yet another alleged sexual abuser, Russell Brand, for abused women to ‘throw a brick through the windows of the Criminal Justice System. A way of saying: You Have Let Us Down’.

    Throwing bricks through windows has a venerable feminist history. Smashing the windows of shops in London was an effective tool in the Suffragettes armoury. Not listening to us? How about this: Crash! Bang! Wallop! And down came the huge plate glass windows in cascading showers of splinters.

    The sexual exploitation and abuse of women by powerful men is still endemic in our culture.  However it is called out – through film, documentaries, social media, by incredibly brave young women like Dylan Farrow, by throwing bricks through windows – it is our way of saying ENOUGH.