Disillusioned Lefty

Without Clout

2009-01-25T11:38:00.007Z

Or have Morgan and Howard fooled us by presenting this overhyped, shallow media event as some great battle for truth between two great forces of modern democracy: media and politics? Answer: yes, we’ve been conned. Frost/Nixon is a historical fraud, a mind-boggling travesty of the truth. Let me hasten to add, however, that it is without doubt the most gripping, entertaining, dramatically clever and fascinating fraud I’ve ever seen.

What?

Cosmo Landesman today points out that Frost/Nixon is historically inaccurate, underlining, for instance, that the late night phone call from Nixon to Frost on which the film balances did not actually take place. But, as you've read, he thinks it's a gripping piece of cinema in any case. I think he's wrong. It's an utterly predictable film.

The going gets tough for the Frost camp, as Nixon is found to be quite good at being interviewed, and it stays tough for a lot of the film. But things start looking up (as they threaten to do throughout the film) when Frost's researcher does two days of research, the tables are turned, and the tough going is overcome. All this as the film heads conveniently into the home straight, ready for the happy ending which comes when Frost elicits an (historically inaccurate) apology from Nixon for Watergate.

I don't think there's much drama in this film at all.

Even the exagerrated apology is tame. Despite the film's portrayal to the contrary, the viewer is left wondering, firstly, if Nixon didn't get away with it after all, and secondly, how Frost went on to such stardom on the back of such a poor interview.

An entertaining, but by no means gripping film.

The Frog

2008-12-18T10:38:00.002Z

What a wonderful bird the frog are-
When he stand he sit almost;
When he hop he fly almost.
He ain't got no sense hardly;
He ain't got no tail hardly either.
When he sit, he sit on what he ain't got - almost.

YOU COULDN'T GIVE THEM AWAY

2008-12-18T10:32:00.004Z

Walking into Trinity early this morning, I saw a woman employed by the Irish Independent to give out free copies of their newspaper. Of the five people whom I saw walk past her, all five refused her generous offer: a sight more refreshing than the icy matutinal air.

Revidalance

2008-12-18T10:14:00.005Z

As well as being twin towers of 20th century intellectual life, Gore Vidal and the late Susan Sontag share the honour of being the favoured grandparents of the New York Review of Books. I can't remember the amount of times each has been the subject to yet another essay published its hallowed pages, just as I can't be bothered to find out. But figures aside, the answer is often. And so, again, in the holiday issue of the review, we're treated to another essay on each. The difference between the two, however, is that the new essays on Sontag generally say something new on Sontag. Not so with Vidal, poor thing, who, with the publication of any selection, collection or reflection in the last five years, seems to have had more or less the same essay written about him and published in newspapers, magazines and reviews.

Back to Black

2008-12-18T09:54:00.003Z

When he got out of the lift on the thirty-ninth floor he could hear the telephone ringing in his office. He fumbled the key into the door and scrambled to the desk and seized the receiver - What is it, he wondered, that is so irresistibly imperative about a ringing telephone?

This comes from The Lemur, John Banville's third outing under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, which - at less than 200 generously-spaced pages - I had the pleasure of passing an afternoon alongside. The work is inconsequential, written to satisfy the coffers before the critics, but, for a book whose plot offers neither the pace, nor the suspense of Black's first two outings - to say nothing of The 39 Steps, written by John Buchan and alluded to above - it is nonetheless an enjoyable read. Much has been said about the difference between Banville and Black, yet, as The Lemur ably demonstrates, they share their strengths and weaknesses. Banville is often weak on plot, while Black, writing with a brow admittedly less furrowed than Banville's, is redeemed in this instance by an acuity of both observation and expression - two features which owe everything to the furrowed brow behind the mask.

Wouldn't make a bad Stephen's Day occupation.

TAKE DOWN THIS BOOK / AND SLOWLY READ

2008-11-21T16:03:00.007Z

"And I quote from memory," they parenthesise.

There's something very irritating about those writers who, when quoting poetry in print, mention that they are doing so without reference to the text. There's no need to quote fallibly from memory when, in the age of the internet, a printed edition is always at hand. And, if you can quote infallibly from memory, there's no need to overshadow the chosen quote. Poetry worth memorising is more remarkable than memorising the poetry.

This afternoon, in any case, I at last found my way into the Yeats exhibition in the National Library. There's a small room in which a few of Yeats' poems are projected onto a screen, while recorded voices - famous, infamous and not famous alike - read them aloud. I somehow suspect that Ulick O'Connor's recital of 'When You are Old' was derived from memory alone. For, while his lively, polytonal voice carries the music of Yeats' poetry better than, say, the recorded efforts of Sinéad O'Connor, in at least two instances, Ulick gets the words mixed-up. Instead of "nodding by the fire", we hear "sitting by the fire"; and instead of "the sorrows of your changing face", we hear "the changing sorrows of your face." A pernickity point, perhaps, but every word is important in poetry - in shorter poems especially; you'd expect that the exhibition's curator to agree.

A Dreaded Sunny Day

2008-11-08T03:33:00.017Z

Though less than one year ago I lived no more than ten walking-minutes from its gates, until last week I had never strolled through the decorated aisles of Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris; a non-act of laziness disguised as nonchalance. When, last week, I at last got around to visiting the cemetery, a weak winter sun scaled the morning azure like some great air balloon in the distance, its light bouncing off the cobblestones to make the cracks in between appear darker still.

And then I came upon this, an impressive tomb marked:

CROCE-SPINELLI ET SIVEL

MORTS A 8600 METRES DE HAUTEUR.

Intrigued, I did some research.

In April of 1875, at the dawn of the Third Republic, Joseph Croce-Spinelli and Théodore Sivel died of asphyxiation during the ascent of their air balloon Zenith to over 8,600 metres, an altitude unheard of at the time. The scientists were survived by their colleague and co-pilot Gaston Tissandier, who at 8,000 metres had passed out, before again waking at 6,000 metres to find his both colleagues dead, having bled from the mouth, and the balloon cascading dangerously towards the earth. He roused himself sufficiently, and landed the balloon safely. Though he had become deaf, Tissandier went on to flourish as a scientists, as an aviator, as a chemist and as an editor of his own scientific weekly, La Nature; an owl of Minerva spreading its wings at his colleagues' last dusk.

I left before seeing either Oscar Wilde or Jim Morrison, Père Lachaise's most famous denizens, but on parting, I did see pictures of each on postcards for sale next to the cemetery's back gate.

Keats and Yeats are on your side.

Fluctuat nec mergitur

2008-10-29T15:07:00.003Z

The first chapter of John Banville's new novel The Sinking City (in corso) is, for some reason, available to read on the Manchester Review's website. I'll be reading it tomorrow on a flight to Paris.

Winterwood

2008-10-12T16:58:00.006+01:00

The men of the mountain! I said, just for the laugh.

"Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades," said Vladmir Nabokov, the author of the great confessional Lolita, "Let us worship the spine and its tingle." It was with the close of Patrick McCabe's Winterwood, whose narrator Redmond Place differs only from Lolita's in his unwillingness or inability to know himself, that I last sat down, artistically delighted, a tingle felt not just between the shoulder blades, but upon my cheeks. Winterwood, my first exposure to McCabe, is a psychologically labyrinthine tableau — often reminiscent of David Lynch's Twin Peaks — consciously painted with the simple, progressively darker brush-strokes of a stylistically unsophisticated, structurally manipulative narrator.

Domestic Bliss

2008-10-07T14:14:00.003+01:00

Order, order.

Nothing to show for the autumnal month of this year's summer holiday; there's only so long self-discipline will hold. But the mind is perked this week by the resumption of college, alongside which will resume, I hope, the normal, shaky service renowned in this quarter of the internet.

Who ate all the pi?

2008-09-01T16:02:00.004+01:00

The photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson confesses his great passion for geometry. "I do not believe in God", he said, "but I do believe in pi." He might have liked the composition of this, a photograph of someone called Yves, taken in 1967, which I found in a bundle of old polaroids left long ago in the pocket of a duffel-coat I bought second-hand in Paris this summer.

Arabian Nights

2008-09-01T14:25:00.005+01:00

One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.

Germaine Greer talks football. After decades of hardship and storm, the sun peaks over the horizon, ready to dawn on Manchester City. Super-rich Arab investors have bought the club from human-rights abuser Thaksin Shinawatra, our prodigal son Shaun Wright-Philips has returned from South London, and at the moment, as the transfer window remains barely ajar, it looks like we're about to nick Dimitar Berbatov from underneath the noses of rivals United. Give me back, give me back the wild freshness of Morning!

A Study of Writing Habits

2008-08-31T11:59:00.006+01:00

I like The Fall, and Mark E. Smith especially. He's a Man City fan, after all. But I wonder just how qualified Una Mullally is to submit, in the esteemed pages of one national newspaper, that Smith's autobiography is "one of the best music autobiographies in recent times," when she herself has read from it only "a good few extracts" according to her piece. Not hailed as, not regarded as, but is. Some extraction, that. If she'd read the whole thing (no mean feat at 256 pages), I suppose she'd be entitled, if still not disposed, to drop the approximation and call it the unbounded best of the lot?

I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul"

2008-08-27T22:03:00.006+01:00

In 1968, the year Man Utd won the European Cup and one year before Kes appeared, Ken Loach made a curious little documentary drama about Everton FC called The Golden Vision in which players are interviewed, officials attended and supporters orchestrated and observed. Everyone involved spoke with an unreserved erudition of another day and an assured humility of, in footballing terms, another age. Unfortunately there's no sign of it on the internet, but BBC 4 showed it last week, so perhaps it will once more pop up some time in the near future. A great social document, it's certainly one to look out for.

In what I presumed to be footage a few years older than the documentary itself, an FA official is asked to speak about the increasingly common inclination of fans to hurl abuse at players, referees and each other. He opined that such fervour was a regrettable aspect of the game, but that if (as he supposed) letting off steam in such a fashion stopped young men from starting, say, race riots, then it was a tolerable, even necessary aspect of the game, too - which I suppose is true enough.

It had been some years since I'd last gone to a football match, and longer still since I'd last sat through a League of Ireland match, but last night, with peculiar alacrity, I agreed - volunteered, really - to go to Dalymount with my mother to see Bohemians take on Drogheda. We arrived at the ground, passed through the turnstile, bought (terrible) fish and chips before kick-off, and I was surprised to find a great wave of nostalgia creep up my spine and come to rest between the shoulder blades. But when the match started I felt no propensity to shout anything at anyone as I suppose I had a decade ago.

It was at around this point in this post that I had planned to write a few words about the social aspect of football: about how much more tribal the game feels on a smaller, more indigenous scale; about how menacing a few voices, half-a-dozen flags and one or two drums can seem from the opposite side of a stadium; about how worrying it is that so many football fans seem unwilling to accept the fallibility of players and officials, and unable to draw a distinction between the referee and his decisions. But as half-time approached I thought better of that essay because, primo, I'd come across as a pretentious old bollocks, and, secundo, by the looks of it, race riots had been forestalled in Phibsboro for at least another night.

Bohs won two-nil, and the referee's a wanker.

I'll just say one word: 'Tony Wilson'.

2008-08-26T03:20:00.006+01:00

Without any real intention of doing so, I ended up watching, I think, every episode of Britain From Above, the recent BBC documentary series in which Andrew Marr imparts wisdom bestowed upon him by the skies, plus a team of researchers and experts. The show was actually a lot more interesting than it sounded and, despite the occasional descent into green-and-pleasant-land patriotism, Marr does come across as quite a genuine, genial, affable bloke. But whenever he came down to interpret any of his less mechanical flights (by paraglide, say), it took great effort to remove from mind this image of Tony Wilson - genius, poet, twat - as played by Steve Coogan in 24 Hour Party People.

LOST / FOR ALL EYES BUT THESE EYES

2008-08-26T01:29:00.006+01:00

This blog has never nearly been one to get thousands of hits a day, and in recent months the numbers graph has fallen from the modest heights up which it once so gallantly crept. But below passes a fairly consistent (if unalarming) tide of returning visitors, and I think that suits the somewhat garrulous voice I've found, or been found by, in the few years I've been doing this.

The counter rolled past 100,000 today. So, to anyone (loquacious or otherwise) who finds the time to drop by every so often, thanks very much indeed, whoever you are.

Your skin what?

2008-08-24T17:05:00.004+01:00

In Greece, I floundered when it came to sunburn and mosquitoes. I had no idea why I was coming out in bright red hive-like bumps every morning. It wasn't like I had been eating my skin nemesis, Weetabix.

Has anyone ever actually sat down and read the Sunday Tribune? I did, and was witness then to some of the most lame, irrelevant, affected, poorly composed opinion and feature journalism the country's broadsheets have to offer. A veritable right of passage, and all before midday.

She hasn't got one knee to stand on

2008-08-23T15:17:00.006+01:00

With youth, by contrast, everything is new and fresh and a growing experience. The years between 18 and 28 are hugely formative. The influences on the heart, soul and brain are immense. With time, those influences become even stronger. I spent the ages of 18 to 20 in France, and even now, those times pop up in my night-time dreams. When I return to Paris, today, it is not the Paris of now that I experience, but the Paris of my 19th summer, and the ambience seems as familiar as the Sandymount streets of my childhood. That's what you bring to a relationship when you marry young: the total freshness and deep imprint of the brain's early formation.

Pacing eagerly today through the Independent's magazine in search of what looked like a very interesting piece on Lorraine Kelly, I stumbled upon Mary Kenny's article about (deep breath) that most sacred of institutions: marriage. I don't know why I read it, but I did. It's a terrible piece and, I do solemnly swear, Mary Kenny is a terrible writer. Today she writes that, at 19, Peaches Geldof has chosen the perfect time to marry because, later in life, it is the memories from that gilded era which will burn brightest. Of course, such fond, puissant memories are likely to set unrealistically high hopes for the second marriages which, later in life, young disciples of Kenny will inevitably be forced to pursue.

Je ne suis pas un photographe

2008-08-12T17:49:00.014+01:00

But like everything else in great demand, people try to own it.

On the internet, it is possible to find with some ease decent reproductions of just about any old painting. So it was not without some confusion yesterday that I was witness to great crowds in the Louvre spending less time looking directly at paintings than they did through the eyes of a camera or, worse, a camcorder. I had a sneaky glance at a few of of those screens, and what I saw captured was of invariably low-quality, generally off-centre, sometimes even partially obscured by the back of someone's head. Oh lordy!, I exclaimed, at the thought of those who, some time in the future, will be forced to sit down and endure the holiday spoils of those aspiring auteurs and photographes - including, particularly, the aspirants themselves.

[Pause]

2008-08-11T02:29:00.008+01:00

Livvy Thompson, sitting beyond David, deplored these women who talked baby-talk. She felt that her own appeal to me was more serious. 'Mr Armstrong has got to play in the next set,' she said warningly. 'Hoity-toity!' thought Betty Vermont (she never used the expression aloud, as she was not certain how one pronounced it: it was one of her inner luxuries).

There aren't many words that I would ever use in conversation whose pronunciation I would stumble upon. That is to be taken as much a testament to my inarticulacy as it is to my articulacy. It is true, I think, however, that in some cranial cavern or other, the reader imagines the words on the page pronounced by the voice inside his head, without which (or is it whom?) the music in prose would seldom be performed. Here's just one quick bar of notes which I generally omit from the, er, symphonies for fear of tripping over them: antipathetic, autochthonous, coeval, elegiac, epithet, inchoate, placable, stoical.

What about you lot?

Theatre of Dreams

2008-08-09T22:36:00.006+01:00

What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?

Sebald, on dreams, in The Rings of Saturn.

It's funny I should have come upon that passage today, because, as a lively dialogue progressed in a well-painted dream I had last night, I became concious that one of my characters, my little brother, did not know how he was to answer a question he was due to be asked. And sure enough, when the point of inquisition came along, despite attempts made to jog his memory, my brother stood stunned, everything stopped and I woke up. Not that funny, actually.

What manner of theatre is it, at all?

Déjà Vu

2008-08-09T04:53:00.014+01:00

Not bad, is it? The Valpincon Bather, it's called, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. It really impressed me when I saw it the other day.

Somewhere in the enisling prose of Ghosts, by John Banville, the narrator describes a murder which, I noticed, recalled another committed in The Book of Evidence, an earlier Banville novel. What an artful trick of Banville's, I thought, for keen readers of his work to enjoy. As it happens, Ghosts is actually a sequel to The Book of Evidence, a truth this keen reader failed to observe until some months later. Still, the idea of later work alluding to parts of earlier work for no particular reason remains an attractive one to me.

Say, is that who I, etc.?

Most Difficult

2008-08-03T23:09:00.013+01:00

Like the narrator in Molly Fox's Birthday, often home is just a place to crash - suggestive, perhaps, of some greater absence.

The first half of that sentence makes no sense, and the second half is terrified that it might. It comes from an Irish Times feature on Deirdre Madden, who has just completed her "most difficult" novel, Molly Fox's Birthday. Madden teaches literatures in Trinity and, by all available accounts, doesn't do so with any great degree of convention. Her classes, we've heard, point a keen eye on the anecdotal, on feelings towards and personal responses to the novel. Be that as it may, her novels seem to be fairly well-regarded, if prizes are anything to go by (an iffy if, to be sure). But however fawning, Sorcha Hamilton's feature does Madden few favours beyond flattery by comparison. I can't remember the last time I came across a less piercing, less interesting piece of literary journalism.

Her Crude Line

2008-07-29T02:00:00.003+01:00

I sat down to dinner yesterday with my girlfriend and a bottle of rosé.

"How is it?" I ask her. "Ah," she replies, "sure a rosé's a rosé's a rosé."

Mon Point de Départ

2008-07-26T02:14:00.009+01:00

What’s behind these last few posts about art, readers might wonder. There’s a type of person who moseys around art galleries when abroad, but rarely calls into their own country’s galleries during the rest of the year. I’m afraid that, going by the last few months' form at home, I can boast a fair likeness to the type. But it is not, as one might expect, my idle gallivanting through foreign galleries that has brought on this newfound enthusiasm - at least not exclusively. If what follows sounds a touch naïve, you will forgive it, I hope, as a harmless indulgence of gilded youth - spit, rub, haw, shine.

As I left the Tate last week, knowing just how little of its treasure I had actually appreciated, for just ten pounds I picked up a copy of Gombrich’s classic The Story of Art, a book which, now in its 16th edition, I had been intending to buy for some months, perhaps even years. It’s early days yet, I know, but I don’t think its any bold exaggeration to say it was the best ten pounds (or e12.63) I’ve ever spent in this, my short lifetime.

Gombrich’s is by no means an exhaustive account of art's history; and I, approaching its conclusion, am by no means a confident reader of art. But this simple, yet never simplified account has offered order where there previously was none, and in doing so has sparked in me the first real flames of interest which I think and hope will burn at varying heights for years to come. A cataract singes, and I begin tentatively to make unaided steps, linking the old and oft-explicated with the contemporary and largely unconsidered.

Pictured, for instance, is a piece entitled Fallen Star 1/5, which I saw in the Hayward the week before last. The angle on show here is not the installation's most dramatic. On the other side, there hangs lodged in this apartment block a model of the house artist Do Ho Suh grew up in. But on the side which I’ve offered, notice the three-tiered structure, and notice as well the internal development from the top floor to the bottom. On top, the rooms are unembellished and chaotic; in the middle, there is a dusty kind of order; and on the bottom, there is a sort of domestic austerity. Compare this with the development of, say, the Collosseum in Rome or the Doge's Palace in Venice, whose three tiers of columns progress formally from the Doric to the Ionic to the Corinthian.

It is certainly no great insight on my part, of course. But to notice, unaided, the similarities between two works some far departed from one another, both formally and temporally, even if the similarities don’t prove exact, is encouraging and, in a ludicrously nerdy way, tremendously exciting. What a happy coincidence it is that as this new quarter of creativity begins to open in my mind, on my feet I find myself strolling through the quartiers of Paris.