Alan Walsh

An immodest proposal to combat Dublin rent prices.

2017-08-24T10:37:00.000-07:00

For a while now, renting in Dublin, along with cities like London, Paris and New York, has been impossibly expensive. It seems there's no end in sight either, with glum projections of exploding rental prices on a near endless loop.

It seems late stage capitalism has evolved urban rental beyond being something affordable for the traditional family unit. Both members of a couple work now and, even with average salaries, affording a home in the capital proves a huge ask.

It's at times like these society digs deep and evolves to meet the challenge threatening its very existence. The traditional couple is dead. Killed by landlords. All hail the menage a trois.

Nowadays only three full salaries can provide the funds needed for city living. Bills would only be increased minimally as the family Bolognese can surely stretch to one more plate. Carpooling with 3 instead of 2 should help drastically with the city's traffic issues and create less pollution. And people are far more likely to find love if that special someone is open to sharing their lives with twice as many people. That's half the amount of time needed on Tinder. Three salaries, one double bed.

Arguments are now easier resolved given there's now a mediator on hand or at the very least a democratic vote now counts for something in a landscape where marriages break down and come apart faster than ever before. Holidays are suddenly more affordable also.

Car and home insurance, those other two foes of the happy family unit are also suddenly tamed with a third income. Finally the middle class is resurrected from the ashes.

Now, initially there may prove some resistance from the traditionally short sighted institutions who actually legally bind relationships. But in time surely the powers that be can only grow more convinced how big an improvement just one more addition is to the ancient old world tradition.

Exhausted parents now have a baby sitter and an invaluable extra pair of hands. Childcare is made more affordable as well. The homestead is easier cleaned and boozy nights in take on a far more social feel. In a world where people are making increasingly less love, with three lovers the sex becomes much more available, between all 3, a cosy 2 or even the more traditional 1.

More sexually and emotionally gratified people living for less in urban areas, creating less pollution and traffic. Occupying less tables in restaurants but spending more money. The only question now is why stop at 3?

"The Founder" - National myth and the art of the deal.

2017-06-19T16:20:00.003-07:00

Every day, the fast food restaurant McDonald's feeds 1% of the world's population. It started out a tiny burger joint in San Bernardino, California. The McDonald brothers, who had failed to break into Hollywood, failed to make it owning a cinema and failed at owning a drive in, decided to refine their product in one last-ditch attempt to break even.

The Founder is the story of American Capitalism. Specifically, the two kinds of American Capitalism. That which was brought over from Northern Europe with the first settlers. And that which developed as the Twentieth Century progressed after the war. All told through a neat little story about flipping burgers. The German sociologist Max Weber wrote a book about the first kind. It was called 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'. In it, Weber argues that Protestantism, and especially Calvinism, provided the foundation upon which Capitalism could properly thrive. The Calvinists believed very firmly in the existence of a heaven and hell. They also believed there were a finite number of seats laid out in heaven. A practicing Calvinist would never know, until he or she died, whether or not they'd lived a good enough life to be admitted through those pearly gates.

It was essential, then, for your 16th Century Northern European Calvinist to toil away thanklessly. To build his business steadily, contribute to his community and take a meagre portion so he could get by until he was called by his God. It was this dogged, conscientious business acumen, Weber argued, steeped in the mortal dread of the fiery afterlife that enabled Capitalism to prosper and small businesses to flourish. It's no coincidence that the Northern Europeans who settled the North of America in the 16th and 17th Centuries were by enlarge German and British Protestant stock. Scottish Protestant families like the McDonalds would have numbered greatly in those first ships over to the New World.

Benjamin Franklin laid out the ethos pretty concisely.

Remember, that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labor, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides. [...] Remember, that money is the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six, turned again is seven and threepence, and so on, till it becomes a hundred pounds. The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker. He that kills a breeding feline taint, destroys all her offspring to the thousandth generation. He that murders a crown, destroys all that it might have produced, even scores of pounds.

There's a protracted scene in The Founder which is necessarily tiresome. It involves the McDonald brothers perfecting their revolutionary 'fast food' system. They chalk down some lines on a tennis court, denoting where the grill is, where the fryer sits and the serving stations, and then painstakingly test out how their new employees will function between those lines. They pause, wipe out and redraw all the lines again and again until the system is perfected. It's at this point you start wondering if you've bought into a two hour ad for McDonald's. But you haven't.

For Weber, this steadfast ethic lay in stark contrast to the Catholic outlook. For Catholics, it was possible to sin, to be lax, to slip from your duties, and spend time enjoying yourself. This was because all you had to do was confess to a priest and you'd be grated absolution. Your seat was once again guaranteed in heaven. At an early point in the movie, we witness Ray Kroc, the titular 'founder' a failed milkshake machine salesman, alone in a motel room, drinking cheap whiskey and listening to an LP called “Power of the Positive” by a fictional author named Dr. Clarence Floyd Nelson. It's a fictional recording but a very clear reference to the work of Norman Vincent Peale. It's what was at the time called 'New Thought' but is currently more widely recognised as 'Visualisation' or The Secret. In the recording, "Nelson" recommends a ' a never-ceasing flow of energy' and maintains that individual persistence trumps any talent or genius. Belief, visualisation and an ethereal mysticism are all a person needs to get ahead. It certainly got Peale ahead. He presided over the wedding of Donald and Ivana Trump in 1977.

It gets Kroc even further. In stark opposition to the McDonald's failed attempts at building a franchise slowly and with cautious regard for standards, Kroc immediately buries himself in vast amounts of debt pursuing his lone fantasy of making it. The phrase 'American Dream' is bandied about a tad loosely here. Corners are cut. Powdered milkshake replaces the original milk-based product. Ray ditches the wife who's supported him into his fifties for a younger, blonder model. Ray then ditches the McDonald brothers. He owns the real estate. He owns the restaurants. Kroc winds up bullying up a deal with the brothers to claim legal rights to their name and their 'fast food' technique. Most of the second half of the film is a procession of ugly scenes where Kroc does the brothers over again and again, to the extent one winds up hospitalised. It then transpires neither brother ever received a cent of the royalties they were promised.

The film portrays Kroc as a man possessed. Heedlessly pursuing a dream at the expense of everyone he knows and gambling everything he has. And he makes it. Why, he's invited to lecture at an event with Ronald Regan, the president who used to get his speaking cues direct from the president of Goldman Sachs stood right beside him. For John Lee Hancock, the careful, Protestant Capitalism of Northern Europe has been usurped by the quasi-mystical fantasies of the individual 'hero's journey'. Hancock leaves us with a portrait of a man of fire and belief who works hard and gets everything he wants. But the people he burned to get there and the price paid are what lingers as the credits roll. In a closing scene, Kroc explains to one of the brothers, what he bought wasn't their system. It was the name. McDonald. It sounds so genuine, he maintains. What's inferred is the history, the stock, the generations of labour.

What's interesting about The Founder is how easily it could have been told as a story of individual triumph against adversity. Against the nay-sayers. The small-thinkers. You could even potentially film the same script that very way. It bespeaks an American mainstream culture taking a hard look in the mirror. I haven't seen a film like this one released by a major studio since maybe the eighties.

Header image: GQ.com

American Honey and the anti-love-story

2017-03-05T16:10:00.002-08:00

I don't mean to come across like one of those lone-fisted, self-righteous, middle class timeline revolutionaries (I say middle class, I just bought a 400 euro car) shitposting about the rights of people with whom I never interact. I say I don't want to come across that way, but I definitely will. I used to be active, I'll just say that much. But when I watch movies like American Honey I'm drawn to recall what used for me to distinguish actual leftist material by people who meant it from Guardian op-eds by guys living in Kensington. The real stuff told you what to do at the end. The purpose wasn't to get you to share the piece so you appeared all torn up about a bar chart, it was to get you out on a street someplace holding a placard. American Honey almost, almost has that feel. But instead of telling you what to do, it shows, like great cinema ought.

It's revolutionary in the way it takes a pretty standard set of tropes, the all-American road movie, a cluster of sexy, outlaw youths, a banging soundtrack and loads of luscious landscape photography, and presents an inversion of everything a movie like this typically says. It's the story of a teenage girl, Star, who we're initially introduced to dumpster diving for food with two young children, returning to an abusive stepfather and negligent mother, living in a kind of squalor shocking to witness only because you simply never see America shown this way on screen. Not without it being glamourised somehow. She bumps into Jake, played by Shia Lebeouf, and a gang of lost-boys and girls careening around in a van and causing chaos at a local supermarket. Jake offers Star a job in Kansas and, bereft of any other options, she accepts, abandons her family and gets in the van.

What she finds she's joined is a nomadic matriarchy constructed along tribal lines. The game is everyone has to sell magazine subscriptions to stay in the van. They do this door to door, approaching people in car-parks, bus stations, truck stops and oil fields. Like all true salespeople they sell themselves more than the magazines and say anything and everything to make the sale. Jake, as the top-salesman, is tasked with showing Star the ropes and right away, the initial connection between them sparks into a passionate and alluringly forbidden affair. Forbidden because Jake seems to be the property of Crystal, the aforementioned matriarch, who organises the accommodation and transport and enforces all the rules the guys and girls in the van need to stick to in order to keep on the road. Like any tribe, seemingly pointless rituals are key to the identity and success of the project. When one guys drops his trousers as a joke, the tradition is all the other guys give chase and play-fight him into submission. When anybody happens to play 'We found love' by Rihanna, everyone has to drop everything and wild out like crazy on the spot, the two worst sellers have to fight it out at end of each month and all of this is conducted in a patois of military style callouts, slogans and inter-group slang designed to bond the unit.

The most important of these traditions, though, is no couples. Jake explains to Star after they've made love that they've got to hide it from the group. It seems like you can fuck, but you definitely cannot have a relationship. The movie then becomes about Jake and Star burying and fighting their burgeoning young love in a way the viewer anticipates will end with some kind of ferocious romantic tragedy. Blood and gunfire and retribution. But this isn't what happens. In fact it's the exact opposite.

None of these kids are on their phones. Star has to borrow one at one point to check in at home, but aside from that, this is a generation and class of kids detached from an kind of a screen. They watch TV at night in motels but digest the content the same way they use the constant hip hop being blared over the van radio while they freebase and pass around the vodka bottle as breakfast. They use it to bond. The content doesn't matter. They sing along to every song the way drunks do arm in arm while the staff in clubs are already mopping up. The music is to keep them together. It's not to sell them any notions of love or wealth or freedom or political ideals. They consume it within the tribe for explicitly tribal purposes. And they're not consumers. The clothes they wear are picked out by Crystal to help them sell better in whichever district they're headed next. The food they eat and where they stay is based on what they can scare up. The only identity they have is a group identity, based in the songs and the rituals.

Visually, the film recalls everything from Easy Rider to Badlands to Larry Clark movies, which is intoxicating enough, but conceptually the story is taking us somewhere else. Jake isn't fucking Crystal. Crystal, the only person with her own motel room, fucks two, three guys a night according to her whim. She won't allow monogamy. Star has found a lifestyle which has reverted back to pre-capitalist, maybe pre-feudal times. Nomadic, skill-based, property-less, sharing commune, only one where they never once make it a political thing, never once speechify on why or where it came from. It's also decidedly not a utopia. It's brutal. The fight scene between losers is cold. They point out how the group frequently abandons poor sellers on the side of the road, only because it can't afford to carry them.

The film presents all of these rituals and laws as something Star comes to accept easily, not out of being politicised or radicalised in any way, but because she's coming from nothing. She hasn't got a phone to check in on Facebook. She can't bingewatch box sets of MadMen on a 20 year old TV with 4 channels. Fashion and nutrition and exercise and partying and the concerns of a modern nineteen year old have never been on her radar. Marx never proposed revolution as morally correct, or even as a choice. He presented it as an inevitability. What Andrea Arnold does with American Honey is to present a revolution that's bloodless and simple and almost natural progression for an underclass of forgotten people. Here's where she makes it interesting. Romantic love.

People like Adorno for years posited an idea of romantic love as a red herring. Romantic love, for a revolutionary, is a distraction from what a person truly yearns for, which is community and to be part of the nurturing group. Monogamous, romantic love between two people was designed to focus on the self, divide property up and segment communities. Right from the start, traditional monogamous love is painted as corrupted and corrupting. Star's stepfather, her mother and the environment in which they exist is toxic and doomed. But Star inevitably sees her narrative with Jake as something paving the way for a glittering future together. He for his part gives her gifts and flies into a jealous rage at the idea she might have sold herself sexually. Both characters seem headed for the tragic-romantic end, but then something else happens. Crystal pulls rank. Jake is banished. When he returns, passions have cooled. This brings us to the final scene. The van full of youths stops by a lake to bed down for the night. They start up a campfire, begin dancing around it, like any ancient tribe would have, leaping over the flames for sport, and Jake secretly hands Star the gift of a small turtle. One of many gifts from him she immediately gives away. But this one she gives back to the water. Star looks for the longest time at the group she's adopted as her community. Then she walks into the lake herself, emerging moments later to shoot upward, lashing back her dreads like a rebirth, like a baptism to something all-new. It's a scene many struggled with. I found it fascinating. She's relinquished her romantic aspirations. She's given away Jake's turtle. She's part of the tribe now. She's learned to love not herself, but the group. The film is about someone learning not to love.

As a married man, who, let's face it, very naturally loves his wife, this presents a really confrontational outlook. Everything else I can imagine buying into, the attitude to media, property and ritual is all fine but learning to get past the love of an individual I've already fallen in love with, is shocking to me. This is what good art does. It confronts you with yourself. This sounds like some fucking aphorism you might witness on BBC4 in front of a carefully lit Caravaggio, but cinema like this nourishes you and really, annoyingly maybe, gets you talking this way. Much to the dismay of probably everyone.

Naturally American Honey went overlooked at every awards ceremony and is currently running around 79% on Rotten Tomatoes, but I can't recommend the film highly enough.

5 ways to connect with modern Irish culture from abroad

2016-04-23T18:14:00.000-07:00

5 new ways to connect with your Irish Heritage

For anyone with an links to Ireland, whether you're a native, you're an ex-pat, you're part of the diaspora, or just a welcome visitor to our shores for whatever reason, the Irish culture you're familiar with might not be what you always imagined.

People have a very definite idea on how Irish music is supposed to sound, on what Irish food tastes like, how the Irish films play and how Irish Books should read. But, like any culture, Irish culture has evolved into a fluid and dynamic heritage, connecting what people think of as Irish with the myriad influences to which Ireland has been exposed over the years. Modern Ireland is careful to preserve its identity, the identity it struggled for so long to gain ownership of, but is also keen to fit that into how people think and live now. Here are 5 ways you can connect with your Irish heritage in modern Ireland, whether you're Irish, Irish-American, British-Irish or from anywhere else.

Irish Beer Heritage

1. Drink an Irish beer, but not a Guinness.

You'll see it on St. Patrick's day, you'll see it in every Irish movie, you'll see it on Friday and Saturday nights up and down the country, men and women standing in pubs drinking a pint of the black stuff. And why wouldn't they? Guinness has been incredibly successful in branding itself not just the Irish national drink, but as a very real part of our culture and how we see ourselves. But Guinness is by now means the only Irish beer people drink in Ireland. In fact, increasingly, Irish drinkers have expanded their horizons to include a much more varied bar tab. If you're looking for an alternative to the most famous stout, then both Murphy's and Beamish have long brewing traditions in Ireland and are the first choice for many drinkers outside of Dublin. O'Hara's is a great little brewing company down in County Carlow and they've come up with a really nice stout of their own too.

Cider has become a hugely popular drink in Ireland over the last 5 years too. If you're visiting, especially suring the summer months, you can expect to see large groups of drinkers with pint bottles of Bulmers cider out in beer gardens the length and breadth of the nation. Orchard Thieves is a cider which is been widely publicised more recently around the country too, and is really growing in popularity among younger drinkers.

If lager is your preference, then Guinness have recently hit the craft lager market with Hophouse 13, a refreshing, full bodied lager very different to the Danish brands people are familiar with here. Tom Crean fresh Irish lager, is another of the craft Irish beers which have cropped up in the last while. A little stronger and slightly harder to find might be Finn McCools, which is brewed up in Northern Ireland. Once again, O'Hara's have a nice, smooth tasting lager called Helles style, which might be a little easier to find.

Irish Cinema Heritage

2. Watch these Irish films that aren't Derby O'Gill and the little people.

Irish cinema has really matured. Drawing on a pretty strong cinematic tradition, we've been seeing a very strong crop of young film makers and actors gaining a large amount of international attention of late. None moreso than the list of nominees at the 2016 Oscars ceremony. While I haven't included any of those films on this particular list, a simple google, or glance at IMDB will gain you a far more in-depth insight with what's happening currently in the Irish movie scene.

In Bruges

In Bruges stars Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes, in a tale of an Irish gangland assassin sent to Bruges for a final trip after having committed a mistaken execution, where he must await his fate. What sounds like a grim and violent plot is actually a hilarious and human tale from the pen of Martin McDonagh. It hits 84% in Rotten Tomatoes and provides more than one memorable moment and a whole heap of memorable quotes. And, perhaps most of all, it may actually convince you to visit Bruges.

Frank

Frank is a funny and fascinating film from Lenny Abrahamson, probably the best Irish film director of the moment. It stars Irish / German actor Michael Fassbender as the eponymous hero, Frank Sidebottom, losely based on the musician from england in the 80s but transposed to modern day California. Frank wears a giant papier mache head over his own head, on and off stage. It's tender, funny, quirky in a non-annoying way and actually boasts some pretty good music.

Disco Pigs

Disco Pigs stars Cillian Murphy and tells the story of two star-crossed lovers who have grown up in houses beside one another and both indulged their crippling social misfit status to form and unbreakable bond. Adapted from teh Enda Walsh play, when faced with separation, dark and crazy things happen in a pair of virtuoso performances by then young Irish actors.

Adam and Paul

Adam and Paul draws on everything from Samuel Beckett to John Steinbeck to tell the tale of two down-and-out junkies wandering Dublin city aimlessly trying to get by. For the most part an exercise is some pretty bleak but really smart gallows humour. You'll find yourself in turns laughing and shocked by the outcome.

Intermission

Including a who's who cast of Irish actors of the last few years (Colin Farrell, Cillian Murphy, Colm Meaney to name the main stars), Intermission tells the tale of a young lover's (Murphy) brush with a crazy gangland hood (Farrell) all in the name of love. Colm Meaney's turn as a hard as nails Dublin gangland cop obsessed with Clannad is worth the viewing price alone.

Modern Irish Music

3. Listen to these Irish musicians that aren't U2.

Simple Kid

Hailing from Cork, Simple Kid, actually packed in the music business after 2 CDs but there are haunting rumours of a return to the stage after a few years off. When we was gigging he was one of the most innovative, smart and likeable musicians in the country.

Lisa O'Neill

Straight out of Cavan. Lisa O'Neill plays smart, personal, melancholy and quirky songs in a style smudging between folksy and indie. Involved, challenging and moreish. A really singular voice if you're interest in what's happening in Irish music right now.

Bell X1

Nothing wrong with old fashioned good tunes and Bell X1 have hit upon using these to tell intricate, personal stories far beyond the boy meets girl. Awkward and dinky, but swelling with some really beautiful moments, Bell X1 have been at it a while now but are still one of the biggest draws in the country.

Villagers

Darlings of the Irish indie scene (and indie press), Villagers have been putting songs out a while since their hugely critically acclaimed debut CD a couple of years back. I wouldn't be a massive fan personally, but it's hard to overlook their very individual vibe and the charismatic vulnerability of their lead Conor J. O'Brien.

Aphex Twin

What, you didn't know he was Irish? Hailing from Co. Limerick no less, Richard D James is one of the most original DJs and musicians of the last fifteen odd years, with chilling, overwhelming tracks you can't help but return to no matter how unpleasant.

Irish TV shows

4. Watch these Irish TV Shows that reflect a different side to the country.

Father Ted

Although not technically made by an Irish company (it was filmed by Channel 4 in the UK), Father Ted stars all Irish actors, was shot in Ireland and was written and directed by Irish staff. As soon as you take a look you'll understand the shw simply couldn't be more Irish. Telling the story of three Cathlic priests posted on a lonely island in the middle of nowhere, the farcical set-ups, repetitive characterisations and shoddy production values shouldn't work, but so do. A must-see cultural reference point for what's Irish today.

Pure Mule

Small town Ireland is just like your small town, wherever you are. Kids and adults alike are bored and disenfranchised and there's nothing to do but drink copiously, take a whole lot of pills and sleep around with people you shouldn't. It's easy to get caught up in the melodrama of the plotlines while missing the point being made about the myth of a rural idyll.

Love / Hate

A million miles away from The Wire and The Sopranos, the Dublin gangland scene was so successfully portrayed in this show HBO bought up the rights and are making an American version. Glamour-free, filled with big characters and gut-wrenching tension, Love / Hate tells the small time gangster tale in gritty, ugly and cold terms.

The Fall

A Co-Production with the BBC, The Fall stars Gillian Anderson as a tough London Detective out to catch the horrific murderer played by Jamie Dornan across a fraught Belfast backdrop rebuilding itself after the troubles. Not that easy to watch, there's a lot being said here about women and social roles in a shifting landscape that would ruin the show to simply state.

Moone Boy

Purportedly based on actor Chris O'Dowd's own childhood, Moone Boy is a crazy, coming of age sitcom based in a tiny, grey little town in the 1980s in Ireland, where everyone smoked, women were fighting for a voice and weirdos seemed to flood every nook and cranny. Very funny stuff.

5. Read these Irish Books that aren't Ulysses. What Irish books should you read?

The Spinning Heart
Donal Ryan

Telling the tale of a small Irish down during the market crash in Ireland in the years following 2008, The Spinning Heart sets out to tell a number of smaller tales, each one dedicated to an individual character in the town and intertwined with events in other stories. A simple idea, but cleanly done, measured and relevant and memorable.

The Butcher Boy
Patrick McCabe

The monologue of a deranged young boy in a small town. Hang on, could this be a theme in modern Irish culture? Well yes, and this is where it started. Yet to be bettered, the butcher boy is a harrowing tale of a young boy in a dreary town, riven with the demons of his imagination and driven to monstrous acts.

Room
Emma Donoghue

Now a global hit film made by the aforementioned Lenny Abrahamson, Room tells of a mother and daughter held captive, told through the eyes of a 10 year old boy. Both a harrowing thriller and uplifting tale of maternal love, Room is a unique and unforgettable reading experience before you ever go near the screen version.

City of Bohane
Kevin Barry

Tribal gang warfare in Smoketown, a crazy, distant and grim region beyond the beyond. Told in Kevin Barry's singular voice, Bohane's old enemy is back in town and blood is about to flow.

Sour
Alan Walsh
And finally, you can always try my own book, Sour tells the story of an old Irish myth as a modern murder mystery, full of the heroes and monsters of the old Irish stories recast as local wild characters.

Conor Harrington: Ireland's Baroque Graffiti Master

2016-01-30T15:52:00.002-08:00

All sound and fury

The only issue of Irish Arts Review magazine I ever bought was the one with a Conor Harrington on the cover. Not that I have anything against the magazine, I was just thrilled they were finally recognising the guy. Turns out they weren't, but it was still as arresting a cover I'd seen of theirs. I first encountered Harrington's work when a guy I worked with in London appeared after lunch one day having just bought a print of his looking fairly pleased with himself. Right after work I shot straight over to the gallery in Soho where there were the conor harrington prints for sale. It was just one of those especially pleasant moments when you discover an artist in any field and it really connects with you. I was arrested right away by the insanely vivid colours in the graphic-design feel mixing with the old school comfort of someone's sheer technical ability in rendering a vintage style figurative piece. I'm not saying Maser couldn't reel off something like this (in fact they recently collaborated) but the part of me that likes looking at Caravaggio met the part of me that likes Stefan Sagmeister and for the first time the two of them sat down and shared a beer.

What Harrington does so well is hit you with the visual equivalent of comfort food, old nineteenth century style dramatic figurative portraits, and distress them, tangling them in exaggerated smears, wipes, colour blends and striking fraphic-design style layout techniques now pretty common in urban graffiti. He takes the road originally tread by Caravaggio, in laying down black as the base from which everything spreads, heightening massively the visual contrast, the to overlay an urban palette of eye-searing primary colours, contrasting the bold, flat line of what would be considered pretty traditional graffiti fare, with the subtle, blended chiaroscuro and sfumato more modern graffiti artists are using almost casually. Which is a fancy pants way of saying he does shading pretty well and it looks nice next to black and flat colours. It's the scale and drama of the pieces that take your breath away though. Those two guys having a rumble are giants, like fucking Gulliver, stumbling around that side street wall. It's not unusual to see large pieces now, but it still feels strange to see an image you'd expect to come across in a museum or national gallery collection, smeared over off-grey spackling and let drip so the whole thing looks like damaged film.

What I like about the images is what I think they mean, at least what they mean to me. Anyone who's read John Berger's Ways of seeing or anything influenced by it, will be pretty familiar with the idea that traditionally, art was a weapon used to maintain the social status quo, by lauding images which enforced an idea that the wealthy and powerful were somehow, well, better, than regular shmoes like us, something to be aspired to, to dream about becoming, rather than question. Kind of like episodes of the Kardashians. Conor Harrington takes the language of this kind of social hegemony, always considered the paragon of refinement and unimpeachable quality, but in actual fact brutal and calculating, and marries it with an art form traditionally associated with social protest on behalf of the voiceless working class masses. He's not the first to do it. he won't be the last, but the way he does it is just so fucking cool. It kind of reminds me of that old war movie 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', by Tony Richardson, which uses every visual trick in the book, down to costume, grain of film, lighting and colour to convey a feel of an established biopic of wartime heroics, only to absolutely lampoon and tear down every character on screen as an idiot. And all of it looking just gorgeous. Dead Meat and When we were kinds are especially good examples. Finding an original conor harrington for sale would be phenomenal, as would being able to afford it.

He doesn't necessarily mock the characters within his pieces either. In fact, I'd say he's pretty much revelling in the high dramatics this old baroque style of painting can yield up, and the contrast they offer to how an artist can tag an urban street wall (down to the effects of a badly handled can of spray paint). Our whole concept of what is beautiful in art has been absolutely defined by this traditional, salon, academic style of painting since before even guys like Giotto were accepting commissions. We have a contemporary art world struggling to redefine what we think of as aesthetically pleasing on either a visual or intellectual level, freeing itself from pictures of gallant rich guys and their possessions and dramas. I like Conor Harrington;s work because it challenges how I relate to it. I like the comfort-food, mashed potatoes and gravy, of the salon style portraits rendered with expert care. I can't help it. But I love how new it feels. I love how cheeky it is. I don't feel angry or full of class warfare or even challenged politically at all very much. Maybe there's something to be said here about the Bullingdon Club feel to a lot of the characters, the way the upper class is portrayed as violent, blood soaked, armed. Something to fear.

But the pictures are visceral, steeped in the counter reformation feel of high-drama, rich colours you could almost want to eat, laid down against the cold electric pinks, blues and burning oranges in razor sharp straight lines, or muddied in and out of what look like layers of wall tags going back years. Walls in public spaces used to belong to these depicted characters, now they belong to us. The revisionist feel of taking something old and worthy and turning it on its head is something that appeals especially to me. I've recently had a book published which takes the old Irish myth Deirdre of the Sorrows and retells it as an absurdist modern murder mystery. I'm currently working up a story drawing in everything from Gatsby to Great Expectations to the Matrix. I think this is where things are now. We're only now beginning to understand aesthetics and what they've always meant. we're starting to look at pretty things which have always been accepted from a social perspective. You couldn't be blamed for fostering some hope based on this kind of an outlook.

Alan Walsh

If you're interested in re-visioning old pretty things, my novel, Sour, retells an old Irish myth as a modern absurdist murder story.

New Goodreads giveaway!

2016-01-09T17:43:00.002-08:00

I'm thrilled to be starting a new giveaway on Goodreads. A free copy of the book could be yours!
Enter for a chance to win one of five Author-signed copies of 'Sour', the latest, most unusual mythological thriller from Pillar Publishing.

A re-telling of ‘Deirdre of the Sorrows’, updated to the modern day, re-imagined with bizarre local characters and set in a fictional Irish countryside. In a desolate Irish town a local paper boy goes missing. Conall, a beetroot-faced, mule of a man, makes it his business to find the boy. What starts out a small undertaking, unfolds into a journey of strange rural experience, bizarre natural occurrences and warped small-town morality, revealing the shocking tale of a young girl horribly imprisoned and two boys fixed on rescuing her.

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Sour

by Alan Walsh

Giveaway ends January 20, 2016.
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Here are the first five pages of my book. If you like them, why not go ahead and buy it?

2015-12-12T15:52:00.005-08:00

Conall Donoghue sours his porridge with at least two lemons. I know it because I can see into his kitchen from my kitchen, and I can see him pounding away with that spoon, eating his oul porridge under his light-bulb of a morning, or plunging his sink for teabags, or trying to make that dog bring him slippers without chewing through them for holes. You’d want to see him sitting there behind his paper each breakfast, and his wife Molly, driven twelve fifteenths demented with him ranting about the exchange rate on the yen. Make you sick so, he would.

Now, from here I can’t see what goes on in the other rooms. I can only see the kitchen, the back porch, the hall, the guest bedroom, a third of the back garden, through the side passage and into the driveway. And when the shed light is on, part of that too, but I’m sure I can pretty much bet the house he’s on about the same kind of crap in all of those places as well. He spends an ungodly portion of his time in that kitchen, though. Behind that paper, ranting and yammering about the Middle East and Kate Beckinsale’s overbite, eating his oul stews. My heart goes out to that poor unfortunate woman in there, with him since he retired. Man lost his mind soon after that, you ask me. Ask anyone. He was coming home, see, one night from Brady’s, late, with the dog Red Bob, when he witnessed a fatal accident. I think that changed him. It was steady stout and whiskey since a horse of his came in good the three o’clock at Chester, and that dog was like a guide dog to him on the unlit roads that run in this part of the world. He fumbled to hold tight on to its ears the full four mile limp home after closing up, and if he fell or wandered out onto the road or stopped behind a tree, which he did, the thing roared mad barks at him till he was back on true purpose once more. Well, this one horse-winning night, Conall was the halfway back home but he’d wandered out through some gate into a soft part of a field full of weeds, and thought to himself that it might just make a good enough bed for him, with the dog losing the mind across the road for growls and barks. There was a moment of stillness, then these wild white beams shot to life out of nowhere, only burning yellow the whole road. A second later and they shrunk down smaller and smaller and then a tiny wee car only tore along the tar macadam right at them, full speed, and the driver screaming to clear out the way, calling them all the foul names he could muster in his imagination till the car only jolted, swerved, rolled and finished upside down in three odd foot of ditchwater, wheels still spinning and the fella inside killed.

Thing about it was, Conall was wearing his green jumper with the orange stripe at the time.

The boy that went and got himself killed was Billy McKinley. He was a piano tuner from two towns over, and he was racing his way to urgently tune a piano, so the story went. Conall didn’t expect to witness Billy McKinley’s death at 4.17am off the North Road, but that he did. A whole party load of people were waiting in a room one town over the other direction with an out of tune piano, trying to keep safe some whiskey for Billy as a means of payment, but in the end it went drunk. People only found out the truth the next day. Billy’s car rolled four times. Billy inside bit out his tongue and spilled the leavings of his can and hit the dashboard at the same speed as the car was travelling, eighty eight miles per hour. What I’m getting at here is Billy’s blood-curdling revenge. Conall is willing to swear on any religious book you set before him that Billy McKinley, the speeding piano-tuner, haunts his green sweater with the orange stripe even today. Whenever he puts it on, he can feel Billy in the room, sitting in some chair with his empty spilled can, raging at him. More than once he claims to have heard a piano go playing out of tune at him. This is what happens when a man retires. He loses perspective. I put it down to this, what happened when Conall’s morning newspaper didn’t arrive one morning.

He was sitting at his table with the dog Red Bob at his heel, shovelling his porridge like an old plough.

“Sure isn’t yesterday evening’s paper as good?” his wife said. “What can have happened since last night? I’ll go fetch that for you.”
“Arragh, don’t stir. The boy will be along now. He came off his bike by Barrow’s field when that bored daughter they’ve got on their porch morning till night tried out catching him in the head with stones, or he stopped and talked another boy into splitting his round on account of the headwind bad enough to stop birds taking off, and how far up the hill we are. I’ll give him some talking to when he arrives, count on that much.”
Conall made it to his tea and toast, and then to another slice with marmalade, then a yoghurt, then some watermelon.
“Will you not stop eating breakfast just to have the paper with it? You’ll boil the guts out of yourself with indigestion,” his wife said. And that he did. Conall came from a long line of Donoghue men who ought really to have stuck to a diet of lettuce, carrots, beetroot and water on account of their acidic constitution, but instead saw nights spent bedridden, rolling in reflux agony lived out as some type of war declared between their body and themselves, and how they would no way be first to flinch. Pints, pastry, cigarettes and olive oil all went into the arsenal. Whiskey, sherbet, cream cheese, the kind of things to scald through a man’s guts and echo through the whole room doing it, all of that went down as an out and out act of war. His wife Molly, bolt awake beside him in the sheets listening to the thing seethe and froth and the swearing out of him, wild enough to churn butter.
“Look,” she said to him, “the racing isn’t on till three. Why not head down to Dannagher’s and ask what happened to the paper? Better yet, buy one.”
“Not the point, is it? I mean, we had a trusted agreement. It isn’t about me having to go down there and get it myself. It’s about them bringing it me. Anyroad, it’s already the afternoon. The morning press is out of date. Goes out of date soon as you finish your toast and anyone knows it.”
“Well, I’ll not have you moping and sulking around this house ‘till your horses arrive on screen at three. I’ve things to do. I’m meeting the girls. You need to go down there and kick up a little. I mean, what if the paper doesn’t arrive tomorrow?”
This hadn’t occurred to Conall.
“You’re right. If they think I’ll take this lying down, they’re only odds on to pull it again. And me paying the subscription at last year’s rate. I’ll wreck that little fecker, so I will.”

Conall walked the four odd mile road into town with the dog Red Bob at heel and his stick heard a good acre in every direction smacking off tarmac, shocking crows out of trees and disturbing field mice in the long rushes. Going the lazy way you veer leftward and cut across Foyle’s rested field to save following the long curve, designed for haulage trucks only and to no other man’s benefit, so Conall and the dog Red Bob kept their heads low on account of Dan Foyle being a vile, desperate daytime drunk and conjuring jealousies in his head, about his wife and men in the town. You’d often as not see squad-cars parked on his land, called out under the lie that his farm was under attack by robbers, just so the guards would arrive and look the place over and who knew, turn up a man in his underpants hiding out under hay bale or low between the ditches with electric pink lipstick all over his frozen white body.
“He bought that lipstick himself, specially in Gray’s pharmacy,” Conall told the dog Red Bob. “Bought up all nineteen sticks. So he’d know if he seen it on a local man, what it meant. Gray’s never got any more in for how god awful ugly it is.” Sure enough, there was a squad car at the porch.

Conall knew the land better than any man in the town. Forty two years he worked as grounds man at the Clonliffe Estate. He had dragged that place up out of raw wilderness with his own hands, sunburnt and rained on and frozen, sober and drunk. He knew well every thicket, every stray weed-patch, and had named all the deer, the grouse, the horses and the waterfowl, and they weren’t always polite names either. There was one deer he just called Bastard. It was a gold brown buck, and whenever he saw Conall he charged him, head on full-tilt, and there were chewing noises out of his mouth like he was trying to talk. First time out, Conall figured him for possessed. He got to know the buck though, and how he had named him well. His father, Conn, had been grounds man before him too, but had kept the flora nice and thick and wild and good for hiding in for local hoodlums, rebels, robbers and any folks hunted by the realm. He had taught young Conall what it is to trap an animal, how to foster a certain tree or flower in just this place, which ones like rivers and which hate them. Which ones hate people too, and intentionally cause them to sneeze. He claimed there was only a Puca hiding in there too, deep into the gorse.
“True wilderness attracts true wildlife,” he said. He claimed the Puca liked to drink local poitin with him and smoke oul cheap tobacco, and rate the women in the town out of ten. He had a roving eye. Tell ye the truth, the conversation out of the Puca was a little coarse for Conn, especially after enough to drink, which was saying something, so Conn had to learn the local area that little bit better to be sure of avoiding him on the harder moonshine nights. Conall never did find that Puca when the job fell to him, and he cleared all of the gorse away. Fact was, he doubted its existence.

Dannagher’s was a post office, a newsagent, a hardware store, a certain kind of bank, a certain kind of bookies, a pub and an undertaker. Paul Dannagher sat on a high chair behind his counter all day, smoking and reading the newspapers cover to cover from off the shelf. All he had to watch for were the schoolboys robbing out of his sweet jars, and the animals that from time to time made it in for shelter out of fierce weather. The only animal allowed in was the dog Red Bob, on account of how he seemed to possess that one true pure charisma. Everyone in the town said it, and he could get away with what he liked. He put this to the test, too. He chewed duvet covers off Mrs. Gallagher’s washing-line two weeks straight, he fouled up the Eire Óg pitch something wild after ruining the orchard out the back of Lacey’s field. Anyway, it was things like this. So, on that morning, the dog Red Bob arrived in the front door through the hung beads and Paul Dannagher set down his cigarette and newspaper.
“Well if it isn’t the high king,” he said. He fetched out a tin plate and a piece of the oul sandwich he was finished with anyhow, and laid it down by the dog Red Bob.

Want to read some more? Buy the book here on amazon

Do you know what happened to Deirdre?

2015-10-29T06:54:00.002-07:00

Deirdre of the Sorrows
It's one of the most famous tales in Irish mythology, but so many Irish people don't know anything about it. It's like a cross between Rapunzel and True Romance, Bonny and Clyde and the little mermaid, only it's hundreds of years older and much more bloody.
It's the story of a howl from the belly of a pregnant woman. She was preparing food for her visiting high king, Conchobor, when the unborn baby within her let out a craven screech, unlike anything anyone had ever heard. It was enough to set his soothsayer on his feet.

"This child is cursed," he said, "she will be born too beautiful for this world. She will cause horrors and bloodshed, war and mayhem." He took his seat again at the table. "It's what no one wants to hear, but you need to kill her now, before it's too late." The mother was horrified, letting out a screech of her own and dropping her serving dish onto the tiles, but the king stood by her. He promised to take the child away when she was born, raise her as his own in seclusion from the outside world where she could do harm and, when she was of an age, marry her and make her his queen. It was what no one wanted in particular, but it was the high king's will, he had spoken and so it was decided.

It was many years later that Deirdre was out in the enclosed yard, in the grounds of the high king's castle with her handmaid and the conversation had come around to talking about men, once again. In all her years, Deirdre had never seen a man. None had been allowed next or near her by the king, to provide against the horrible prophecy coming true. But still, she had in her mind the kind of man she would have preferred to the king. She pointed out a raven, drinking blood from the snow in a nearby field.
"When I'm of age, I'll have a man with skin as white as that snow, hair as black as that raven's feathers and cheeks as red as that blood, and I'll accept no other."
"You're promised to the king," the handmaid protested, "he's raised you to become a great queen."
"We shall see," Deirdre said.

It wasn't much longer until she found a man with exactly that appearance. He was working for the king in a nearby field. A young man by the name of Naoise, one of the sons of Uislu. Right away, she ran over to him and jumped on his back, refusing to let go until he agreed to run way with her and protect her from whatever happened. At first, Naoise refused, knowing full well Deirdre was promised to the king, but the more he looked at her, the more he realised he was already falling in love, and was ready to do anything for her. Finally, Naoise agreed to run away and take Deirdre with him. He recruited his brothers and formed a formidable party of warriors, fleeing into hiding from wherever the high king could find them. The king was furious, and dispatched a crew of ferocious trackers and killers to find them, headed up by Fergus, his most prized warrior, who hunted them to the very edges of the land and even as far as Scotland.

Finally, an offer was sent to Deirdre, Naoise and his brothers. The High King would spare their lives if only they would return to his castle with Fergus. Well, they deliberated. It seemed risky, but truly, they had no place left to go really, lest they stray into lands they had no knowledge of. Deirdre agreed and they gang were escorted back to the High King's castle. What awaited them there, however, was not forgiveness and certainly not amnesty. Naoise and his brothers were killed immediately by Fergus and his men, and dumped in a large pit, which was covered over quickly with fresh soil. Deirdre was left a prisoner again, only now it was to get even worse.

The tale ends with Deirdre aboard a chariot with Conchobor, the high king, and his chief warrior, Fergus.
"Deirdre," Conchobor asked, "whom do you hate most in all the world? Is it me?"
"No, sire, it isn't. Not quite."
"Who then?"
"Why, it's Fergus. The man who murdered my beloved and his brothers."
"Very well then. As a punishment for trying to escape, you shall be shared between myself and Fergus for the rest of your days. "

This final horror was too much for Deirdre. She looked ahead and spied a low hanging rock approaching and then, when it arrived, she raised her neck so it would catch her head and take it clean off. This was her final revenge against her king.

So there you have it. Not the cheeriest of tales, but then this is Ireland. If you were interested enough, I'm launching Sour. my novel based on the myth at a bookshop in Dublin on November 5th. More details here if you're interested.

Or read an Amazon Kindle sample here:

How to tell if you're in a Patricia Highsmith novel.

2015-09-22T16:07:00.000-07:00

How to tell if you're in a Patricia Highsmith novel.

You happen upon someone from an especially wealthy background, much less deserving than you of such luxury. This happens weekly.

Your knowledge of classical culture, from delighting in Leider by Schubert to correct appraisals of 50s American expressionism is shared by your whole social circle.

All the 50s American expressionist paintings are fakes, painted by someone you murdered.There are certain colours of sweater, hemlines, hats, cuff-links and turns of phrase that people deserve to be murdered for.

At some point you will visit a foreign city and sample its teas and customs with a certain air that these customs are where we have come from, and should never be fallen back upon, though you will have a phase of going native, if only for an afternoon, and if only with some impoverished local who you'll thoughtlessly hurl in the trash as soon as it all stales.

Conventions in afternoon alcoholism must be observed at all times. Gin and tonic as an aperitif follows the two beers for lunch and the afternoon Calvados with coffee.

You might be gay, but it would be boring to actually say so.

Italians, French, Spanish, British and American waiters all behave completely differently, but each one adheres strictly to their national pattern. The same is true of taxi drivers, receptionists, dogs and people drinking coffee, carefree on sun-drenched patios.

You have an enemy. You may not have had one since primary school and you're fully aware life is plenty tough enough already, but you have one nonetheless. At times it will feel like you have the upper hand, then the reverse will seem true. The whole chess match will invigorate you out of the non-homicidal stupor in which you've been languishing for months.

Identities are boring. Change yours at will by adopting phonetic accents of comic genius.

Wash often, but only as a metaphor.

A visit to your next door neighbour must be preceded by a sealed letter two weeks in advance, inquiring as to their general good health and knowledge of local gossip. This is to be followed up with an afternoon telephone call, between Calvados and gin, where you can verbally dance around your mutual loathing and the plots you're fostering against one another. An invitation will then swiftly arrive by card to dinner at theirs the following night.

Nothing beats socialising with people you hate, especially in the company of people who don't especially care either way. Lace every phrase with codified references to ways you can blackmail them. You struggle to decipher their codified references.

You never derive any pleasure from food. Tinned sardines on dry crackers would do it, and frequently does, served by your maid on the veranda overlooking the tennis court with champagne.

You believe pop music is for children and Jazz is where the line is drawn as far as tolerable musical decline from Monteverdi.

There is probably a wife or girlfriend somewhere you really ought to be getting back to if only you could be bothered.

If you liked this, you might like my novel, Sour, telling an old Irish myth as a modern murder story:

There isn’t any science to any of it.

2015-06-20T05:48:00.003-07:00

We found Black dead drunk slumped over his desk the Tuesday morning. Bottle of compound beer emptied by his screen and several more rolled off to other places. People crammed into the room to see and right away began trying to bring him to. I said:

"Why not let him be? The guy's just won is first sale."

But it wasn't a popular sentiment.

We had spoken and knew each other a little. Both of us had joined up to the compound the same day and waited in reception together. He was at his snout plenty, scratching it, rubbing it over. He wore a full pressed suit and tie owing to how he had just come from work. He was sanitary for a badger but there was a lot of something came masked by his cologne and I couldn’t be sure but it seemed he sported a black eye. The receptionist brought me through to the interview room first of everyone to meet the three recruiters behind the desk.

"We have to prevent certain types making their way in here." They told me. "We have to ensure we don't get any kinds who just show up, take in a few meals, enjoy something of a holiday only to leave. Then there are the types on the run from the law, from debt collectors, from their wives." They asked me what my job had been.

"I worked in freight. A stevedore. The guys that load and unload ships. I was one of those." As it happened I had worked in advertising but it was no concern of theirs.

"We've decided to put you on probation. We need you to prove you really want to be a part of what we're working for here. It's no party. We're a no nonsense operation. We all chip in, quite often above and beyond. For that is what it takes. It gets tough. There are early mornings. Late nights. The crops require constant care and attention. Are you sure you still want it?"

"I definitely want it."

"Another thing is we have to confiscate all you've brought with you. In the commune we share everything equally."

"You mean my car?"

"Yes, the car."

"That's all right."

"And everything else too. You no longer own anything."

Afterwards Black told me he made the mistake of coming forth with how he had been a salesman. On account of how lying was behind him. The compound was to be his fresh start. He opened his wallet and showed me a photograph of his house, of his old car and his boat. He told me he hadn't sold them, he had given them away. That was all a part of it. These things were but symptoms of his illness. This place was the cure.

I met him again about a week and a half later. I was out in the field spraying the sprouts for flies. He passed me coming back in, still wearing that full suit. The rest of us were all in the casual sweatshirt and jeans type get-up they handed out at registration. He said to me:

"I can't understand they haven't given me anything else to wear. It's all I have with me. They keep washing and handing it back. I thought they'd supply us with a toga or robes or something. I feel like a real weirdo in this."

He showed me a photo of his son, Martin. He kept talking about this kid. He seemed the difficult type. He was a cellist. In the photo it seemed like the boy was looking right through me. But he could do no wrong by Black. He was only the one half badger. He lived back out there with Black’s ex-wife. They had helped him through much of the drinking and the clinic but had been dead against his hanging it all up to join a commune.

The three behind the desk had informed Black he had a month to pull in two large in sales or he was out. That was his probation. He had to sell the vegetables. Then after that it was three large. All this farmed produce needed to go toward paying for irrigation, electricity, the kitchens. They needed someone to sell it.

He sat by his desk early morning into the evening.

"Afternoon miss, I only called to inquire if I might be able to interest you in the finest, the best value for money organic produce from right here in the..." Then he went back and redialled.
"Good afternoon mam. I wonder am I talking to the manager of the shop. That's, yes, that's fine too. Well, I was calling to see if I might be able to interest you in the very finest, the very freshest..."

"You look like you're on tough detail." I said. I poured him a coffee.

"It's not easy either. Try selling vegetables from a hippy commune. Everyone believes all we do around here is sit in circles smoking pot beneath the oak trees."

"That or worse."

"Worse, exactly. Go try selling groceries from a drug addled sex farm. But I can do it. Two large in a month, I have to. I have to do it. I can't go back out there. It's cut throat."

He utilised age old techniques peppered with new methods like what he told me was neuro-linguistic programming. He only mentioned positive things. He made sure their answer to his every question was yes. It coaxed favourable chemicals out of the brain. It set lucrative patterns of speech. Then, each night, the managers brought him in for a full report. He produced his flow charts and projections. It usually ran till late. We would some of us stay up and listen outside. I couldn’t take much. It felt bad hearing a badger go through that kind of thing. They are proud animals and that sounded awfully demeaning.

I tried talking with him some at suppertimes. He talked about being a failed painter. He was a failed poet too. Everyone in sales is deep down something else. But when he visited the west, or the countryside, and he stood alone beneath a ferocious yawning sky in every direction, with an equally ferocious sea out before him, that was the only time he was content. He gave that a lot of thought. So one evening he had packed up his car and told his wife it was all done with. That was where the black eye came from.

Then the Monday night he strode in suit jacket over one shoulder, tie loose and already somewhat drunk. He had his figures all printed. He was sure and reminded them that he was the king. Yessir. Sale agreed. He had picked out his preferred bed in the full time dorm. Preference in pillow too. He yelled a whole lot about commission. That they didn’t know with whom they were dealing. That there had been a masterclass gentlemen. Kind of thing you can’t teach. It went on. He lectured them just as long as it pleased him then slammed the door in his wake.

A few of the stoats helped him to his room and he was allowed sleep it off. There was a whole lot of hot air but in the end nothing further was done about it. He hadn't drunk any more than his commission got him anyhow. I was put on cleaning duty. He had gotten through two cartons of cigarettes, the nine beers and a hip-flask and there was ash everywhere. He had really enjoyed himself in there. I for one was glad he had made the sale. I would have missed him. And when it came down to it we were all of us in the same boat.

I cleared up the charts and sales sheets and finally a chocolate bar wrapper and a receipt. It was a credit card receipt. It was in the name of Martin Black and it had just paid out two large. I pushed it to the bottom of the bag.

They moved him by the window in the main dorm. He got himself a bedside locker at that. And a couple of days at ease, they didn’t even call upon him to work crops. He hunched over the fence afternoons in shirtsleeves rolled up and watched us. I tried to make out how his face seemed but a badger is inscrutable. Thursday came by the first of the month. I visited the office on cleaning detail and he was back in there. His suit jacket caught the light handsomely. He had the coffee machine emptied already by ten am.

Image courtesy CollegOrama

Samuel Beckett's style.

2015-06-07T10:35:00.003-07:00

You leave both your albums at home, I said, the small one as well as the large one. Not a word of reproach, a simple prophetic present, on the model of those employed by Youdi. Your son goes with you, I went out.

This, excerpt from ‘Molloy’, might be one of the few instances in Beckett wherein we get something like a glimpse behind the curtain. Notoriously vague as to the explanation of anything he ever wrote, “If I knew what it was about”, he said, “I would have said it”, Beckett is an artist of pure form, almost perhaps to the extent of which the ensuing content might take its import purely by relation to it. In that it ensues. In that something must ensue from form. Throughout the development from the post-Joycean pyrotechnics of ‘More Pricks than kicks’ through to the clipped monotone utterances of the very latter stage, much more striking than the fixation upon the paring down of prose there can be traced the development of a simple, almost binary relation running through close to every sentence. Nowhere is this more visible than in his mid to the beginnings of his latter work, a period encompassing in particular The Trilogy and The Four Novellas.

No less than the sense that these works are made up from endless heaps of meandering digressions, each superceding the last, to no discernible end other than to have something told, we are indoctrinated quickly into pleasant familiarity with the peculiar timbre, a constant cadence establishes itself through these pieces and we acclimatise ourselves to a pattern, a sequence of patterns, presented as fiction.

Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps I shall survive Saint John the Baptist’s Day and even the Fourteenth of July, festival of freedom. Indeed I would not put it past me to pant on to the Transfiguration, not to speak of the Assumption.

A typical Beckett phrase the like of this makes a scaffold of its dead language, the cliché, in this case two; I would not put it past me and not to speak of. To this foundation can be added anything, any flight of fancy or self indulgence or, as in this case, technical nous, (the echoes between John the Baptists fate and resonant images from Bastille day or quirks like festival of freedom and pant on), in full confidence that it can be easily stomached thanks to this grounding in the banal. This banality Beckett becomes dependent on to clear a path for him, both through the gluttonous stylistics that marred his early work , forcing it into a palatable, dare we say it, bite sized, shape, and also imbuing the narrator with some sense of normalcy, even if it’s only the pretence that he’s too exhausted to bother with thinking up a more interesting way of saying it.

The Trilogy represents the summit of Beckett’s prose because it’s the point where he has honed this sense of dead language past the near catatonic lists of ‘Murphy’ and ‘Watt’ and established it as perfect counterpoint to the sudden linguistic tangents his sentences constantly shock us with. He has abandoned both the urge to dazzle the reader and to numb him into submission and introduces a new sense of tongue-in-cheek, nurtured through Mercier and Camier and the Four Novellas, in which any horror or any significant incident is punctuated with a certain kind of knowing grin.

One of these days he will astonish us all. It was thanks to Sapo’s skull that he was enabled to hazard this opinion and, in defiance of the facts and against his better judgement, to revert to it from time to time.

There are no less than six cliches in the above phrase and in The Trilogy, a steady reliance upon cliché develops, particularly in the first two books. Cliches are the bread and butter of the sandwich, sentences frequently kicking off with some or other platitude or using one to conjoin two or more eddying streams of prose. A large part of the quality of Beckett’s writing comes from not being able to guess where it will have gone by the end of the sentence, let alone the following one, or the narrative, and this goes as much as anything for the rhythms. Cliché invests the same sense of cold, almost mathematical, language for which he had previously struggled with lists and drawn out variables, while initiating a particular form based in the appearance of spontaneity or off-handedness. It’s as if each sentence, or phrase, is started off, or built around, a stock dead frame and then, once the floor has been given it, is allowed wander at random off in any direction until it eventually dies, at which point we begin anew. Practically the only way this can be arranged into a narrative of any progression would be in the first person, struggling to tie narrative ends together through acrobatics of lateral thinking. These acrobatics, or rather the relation between these and the dead language, become the point of the prose.

The use of cliché emphasizes the notion of given ‘stock’ language, handed to, or even enforced upon, the user. A lack of all thought, personality or any welling up of feeling into verbal expression. A phrase with a seemingly universal significance which actually serves to express nothing. Moreover, its use here is so self conscious that it almost actually achieves what Beckett had so long striven for and so often referred to. In hanging the structure of his prose from it, cliché, by its emptiness, by its communication of linguistic vacuum even extending to thought, robs every phrase of any hope of actual, verifiable communication. Something which by its very nature expresses that there is nothing to express and no way to express it.

Scrupulous to the last, finical to a fault, that’s Malone, all over.

That’s the bright boy of the class speaking now, he’s the one always called to the rescue when things go badly, he talks all the time of merit and situations, he has saved more than one, of suffering too, he knows how to stimulate the flagging spirit, stop the rot, with the simple use of this mighty word alone, even if he has to add, a moment later.

The more you read a sentence like this, trawling for cliché, the more blurred the lines become between what it is you’re after and what might possibly qualify. Parts of sentences such as ‘he’s the one’ or ‘knows how to’ or ‘a moment later’ carry that sense of having come packaged almost as much as ‘stop the rot’ and this extends deeply into every phrase. No longer is it a case of cliches peppering otherwise creative prose and a safe juxtaposition, but the very same prose, even what could be called ‘high’ Beckettian prose, verging almost on poetry, begins to read suspiciously.

He would stand rapt, gazing at the long pernings, the quivering poise, the wings lifted for the plummet drop, the wild reascent, fascinated by such extremes of need, of pride, of patience and solitude.

There’s little doubt that a significant part of Beckett’s reputation as a writer comes from passages the like of this, pointing to a keenly poetic bent, never fully satisfied with his attempts at poetry. But no longer does it appear devoid of cliché. Aside from ‘he would stand’ and anything else someone might be able to spot, the sense of a kind of banality in cadence rings very much true. Gazing at the…, the…, the…, the… Extremes of …, of…, of… and…

The sense of all language being cliché.

What writing in the French drew out of Beckett was the sense that he had lost all language , had mummified his natural English with the straightforwardness of a Romance Language while at the same time setting down a kind of French that seems it’s been translated from an English text.

Anthony Burgess was fond enough of the following phrase from ‘Murphy’ to return to it time and again as an example of how ‘satisfactory’ Beckett’s English was.

The leaves began to lift and scatter, the higher branches to complain, the sky broke and curdled over flecks of skim blue, the pine of smoke toppled into the east and vanished, the pond was suddenly a little panic of grey and white, of water and gulls and sails.

WB Yeats and what we talk about when we talk about Ireland.

2015-05-25T02:21:00.002-07:00

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel and Fionn McCumhail has precious little to do with the price of onions. You’re probably never more Irish than when you’re stuck watching windscreen wipers on the commute home, listening to Sean Moncrieff. But if someone were to ask you what it means to be Irish you might not say that. The idea of a national identity is something we probably only encounter at the match, when some local band makes it big abroad or when we slate ourselves over how little we protest compared to elsewhere. In other words, it’s only really when we’re set beside another country that we see what makes us different. Our national identity for almost the last hundred odd years is the story of us differentiating ourselves from another country and no one had more say in that than the poet WB Yeats, who celebrates his 150^th Birthday this year.

Different people take different things from the old stories. Cuchulainn has appeared in everything from the Guardians of the Galaxy comic book to Final Fantasy video games. The Táin has been illustrated by Louis Le Brocquy and re-told by Thomas Kinsella and Ciaran Carson, not to mention the album by Horselips. It’s the same way you’d explain to a tourist how Fionn McMuchaill built the Giant’s Causeway. These stories are still alive in strange and sometimes very modern ways. The phrase; ‘let me sing you the song of my people’ is an internet meme some long time now but, to paraphrase Voltaire, if there wasn’t any song any more, it would be necessary to invent one. While we all know Yeat’s role in this, the thing people don’t tend to talk about too much is what a singularly strange man he actually was, even among poets. Yeats had this massive role to play in what Ireland means and perhaps the largest influence on him came from the occult, which is something often briefly touched on but never really discussed. This is interesting because without this unusual obsession he would probably never have achieved what he did. It was the combination of all three of his obsessions: nationalism, poetry and the occult that lead him to playing the role he did in defining how we thought of ourselves as a culture.

It was in 1884 that Yeats read a book called The Occult World by AP Sinnett. The book aimed to introduce Theosophy to Europe from the East and pretty much right away Yeats became convinced of the reality of this aspect of the occult and in particular of the teachings of one Helena Blavatsky. Blavatsky was a world famous mystic who had founded the Theosophical Society based on what were up till then secret Indian and Tibetan teachings. Theosophy is an esoteric pursuit which places a single, divine, universal mind operating behind all teachings and cultures and determining all events, all of which an adept much work to uncover for himself. “The mystical world is the centre of all I do and all I think and all I write”, Yeats wrote in 1894. It seemed it was maybe a little too much at the centre of things for him. Yeats was eventually excommunicated from the Theosophical Society by Blavatsky for taking part in practical experiments, something strictly forbidden. As a reaction to that, his next move was to join up with a group called The Order of the Golden Dawn, a much more hands-on mystic sect which numbered among its ranks Aleister Crowley, probably history’s most famous Satanist. This group encouraged members to actively experiment in order to demonstrate their power over the material universe and Yeats experimented freely on his friends and acquaintances, writing of having undergone some pretty shocking visions. The thing about all of this is how often throughout his life he mentions this kind of thing as a chief influence on this thought. Thankfully it wasn’t the only one.

Around the same time, Yeats became one of the followers of Douglas Hyde’s Gaelic League. The league strove for the De-Anglicisation of Irish culture and the promotion of a national Celtic identity. Yeats thought the best way to do this was to write the old stories of the Irish people, but in English, the language in which, he said “modern Ireland thinks and does its business”. According to Yeats, folk art "is indeed the oldest of the aristocracies of thought ... it is the soil where all great art is rooted." Combining this belief with his fascination with the occult led to Yeats focusing on the supernatural aspects of Irish folk life, in contrast with many other writers of the time. Clearly still under the influence of the Theosophists, Yeats continued to announce things like: “The fairies are the lesser spiritual moods of the universal mind, wherein every mood is a soul and every thought is a body." Yeats devoted the book Celtic Twilight to taking this particular aspect of folklore and transforming it into poetry. His book Mythologies delves deeper, incorporating his own visions of spirits, while at the same time helping to establish him as the preeminent collector of Irish folklore.

To say Yeats arrived at the national poetic agenda alone is a little unfair. There were actually plenty of segmented little groups working away at the cause. One such group was called the Young Irelanders; Thomas Davis, John Blake Dillon and Charles Gavan Duffy numbering among them, and they worked hard at trying to promote national poetry through the romantic ballad, which they saw as the supreme form of public art. These were not the songs of the people, but instead more of a high-brow invention, intended more for the parlours and the salons. Yeats was introduced to the Young Irelanders and their books by the revolutionary John O’Leary and by that time their aim was not just national ballads, but to encourage a national identity, unifying the country behind a single cultural idea. Yeats straight away realised that these men weren’t anything like great poets and seemed to believe a lot of things contrary to his own views. In his lecture “Nationality and Literature”, published in 1893, Yeats states that all national literature is maturing from epic to lyrical, like a tree which “grows from unity to multiplicity, from simplicity to complexity” A young nation, not yet fully formed and yet to achieve national and cultural unity, is still at the epic stage. It’s the epic which forms a unity and defines social structure, rather than the lyrical. Yeats saw the epic legends as the ideal way to represent a fledgling social consciousness as they are “made by no one man, but by the nation itself through a slow process of modification and adaptation, to express its loves and its hates, its likes and its dislikes.” Ancient art would be a unifying national force because it speaks to the people’s unconscious identity. Yeats believed the way to achieve this in modern times was to rekindle a relationship with the folk and mythological themes with which, we know, he had a particular relationship.

It was around then that Yeats began calling himself “The Celt” and put himself forward as a kind of update on the traditional idea of the Celtic bard. Celts had already been given a special place in the zeitgeist at that time by people like Matthew Arnold, who, in a culture awash with dichotomies like masculine/feminine, emotional /intellectual and natural /industrial, ascribed to Celtic culture a feminine, natural and emotional character as opposed to the masculine/ utilitarian Teuton, and within that Celtic culture, bards were a kind of custodian of culture, knowledge and even prophesy. The thing was, William Butler didn’t actually have any Celtic blood in him whatsoever. He came from the middle class Protestant Ascendancy. To get around this, he rejected an ethnic idea of the Celt and instead tapped into the idea of a hazier, cultural ancestry, combining Theosophy and Paganism and claiming it as “the only true religion of the Irish.”

What you start seeing in Yeat’s poetry and plays from then on is a combination of the heroic, the epic and the transcendental. There’s another world, another condition to be achieved. I’ll stop here and flag the fact that this pretty much the MO of every practicing religion since the dawn of time too, but there are singular Theosophical elements you begin to notice emerging. The most obvious example of his combining poetry, nationalism and the occult is the poem “To Ireland in the Coming Times.”, written in 1892. After claiming his place in a list of national poets, he continues to link Ireland’s past with what is to come and highlights the role of art in this. Artists are the only ones who can talk about “things discovered in the deep/where only body’s laid asleep” and their work alone can bring about a supernatural world “For the elemental creatures go/About my table to and fro,”. The occult is mixed in with the mythological, pagan and artistic with “elemental beings,” and “Faeries dancing under the moon/Druidic land, Druidic tune.” The idea of Ireland as a mystical, other-worldly place, peaceful, feminine, emotional and profoundly “Celtic”, far from the grinding, industrial horrorshow of Europe, becomes a core theme in poems like ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and “Into the Twilight”. The transcendence of the individual into this quasi-spiritual realm doesn’t only mirror the nation transcending into freedom and cultural identity, but also the transcendence of the world into a higher supernatural plane. Oisin venturing to Tir Na N’og is another example, as is Cuchulainn’s Fight With The Sea.

As he grew older, Yeats tried to distance himself a little from the pagan and occult themes in his work, from the stories of automatic writing and the famous séances, maybe after criticism from people like Auden, calling it “the deplorable spectacle of a grown man obsessed with mumbo-jumbo of India.” I happen to think it makes his work more interesting, more layered and if we really are thinking of Yeats when we think of Irish Mythology and Irish culture as a whole, asks more questions about the role the occult and Theosophy had to play. Maybe Dan Brown could get a thriller out of it.

Alan Walsh.

This post was originally for the blog over at the Irish Literary Festival

If you enjoyed that, I've written a novel, Sour, retelling an old Irish myth as a modern murder story:

Summer at Maghermore : A Short Story

2015-05-09T10:17:00.000-07:00

    It was early and no one was anywhere near the shore but for an old man sat against the rock nearest the tide, draped in a long towel, who watched out for the light to break. It was still a little like night to venture out and he sipped from a flask he had brought to warm him at that hour. The first call of gannets had woken two surfers inside of their camper van and they sat, with tea, and watched the old man, wondering why he was out alone so early and on such a remote stretch of beach.

    "He’s trying to kill himself," one surfer said.

    "Why do you say that?"

    "No one would arrive out here so early. He’s working up courage, drinking from that flask, maybe rum. He seems unsteady."

    "Then why did he change into that swimsuit? Why the towel if not to dry off?"

    "Who knows what occurs in the mind of a suicide? Maybe he wishes to seem normal, like it might look an accident."

    They crouched behind the wheel of the van with the light off so as not to be noticed in all of the silence and darkness. The only thing to move was the low branch stooped over the old man’s rock and the loose strands of seaweed in the breeze. The gannets and gulls began to circle more frequently and the light began slowly to come in. When the water was lit well enough to make out, the old man folded his towel down into the bag where he had packed his clothes and placed his flask on top of the rock beside it. He began walking out toward where the water washed the first pebbles on the shore.

    "There, he’s going to do it. We can’t just allow it to happen."

    "He doesn’t look anything like drunk. He’s just testing the temperature."

    They both silently got out of the van to watch from the shade, keeping sure to remain very still. The old man stood a while with the water reaching only his ankles. He adjusted his shorts, tucked up underneath where his belly hung, and crouched down to place his hands into the foam. He brought water up to rinse through his hair and down his face, doing this a number of times. He ventured out a little deeper, knee deep and then to his waist, and allowed the tide lap his belly and upper arms while he looked out at the sky gradually changing colours.

    "Where are you going?"

    "I’m going down there. It’s probably even a crime to stand by and watch someone kill themselves, doing nothing."

    "You don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s just taking a dip."

    The man craned his knees to have the water cover his chest and then wash over his shoulders. That early it was still cold enough to throw you off if you didn’t take enough care. He went through this motion a couple of times, then finally dunking his head the whole way under to come up again wet all over. Sure of his footing now and far enough from the shore, he pushed forward into a forearm stroke, letting the water catch his weight under the belly and kicking hard as he could manage it. It churned water high in every direction, his strokes weren’t quite timed to replace one another in the water and his kicking legs weren’t strong enough to breach the surface and push him on. He floundered sideways, unable to bring his following arm round in time to keep afloat and kicked down to touch the bottom again. He stood a minute out as far as the water reaching his shoulders and took a few heavy breaths. He washed some more of the tide through his hair. Bending his knees further, he let the tide lap up to his lips and nose and pushed off again, horizontal to the shoreline, this time with greater effort and more foam thrown up about him. His legs kicked harder and he forced his arms on through the water ahead. But he was already off course, and soon heading diagonally out from the tide to where the bottom began to slope off. The push and thrashing soon tired the old man. He quit to stand still a while again, but he had ventured a little far out of his depth. His shoulders dipped under quickly to his surprise, taking his head down under as well and he had to reach right away into another forward splash, even out of breath, to make it in close enough to shore to touch down.

    "He doesn’t know about us. He thinks he’s all alone out here. He can’t even hardly keep afloat. It’s still almost dark and there’s no one for miles."

    "He’s teaching himself to swim."

    "Why would anybody do that at this hour, miles from any possible help? At that age."

    "Maybe that’s why he’s out here."

    "He’s well into his eighties easy. He was unsteady getting out there across the stones to start off with. Hazard to himself. There have to be laws against people acting out of recklessness with their own well being."

    "There aren’t any people out in the water at this time. No one to pay him any attention back on shore either, to get unduly worried. He can concentrate freely."

    The old man was back down into another stroke, this one a little sharper, tighter to the line of the tide. He seemed not to kick as much froth up around him either. A number of gulls had settled on the moving surface, content to drift and watch. He only made a couple of feet along before having to touch down again and catch his breath. He knew he was doing it all wrong, that his timing was off, he was pushing too hard and without any grace. Stood deep in the tide, he tried to figure out how to better it with his next go. He waded out a little deeper and practiced moving just his arms, each over the shoulder in turn, slowly as he could, for imagined in this lay the key. Then, remembering what he had seen others do, he began rolling his head from side to side in the water, breathing in one side and out the other. He stood in place and did this a little while. The younger surfer watched him, shaking his head. The man took another breath and lunged forward again, this time in the opposite direction. Again, he kicked up a lot of froth and began to stray diagonally outward, but it seemed a little more contained a motion than before. He couldn’t maintain it for very long and hadn’t gotten the breathing right. He lacked the strength to keep stroking any length and had to stop to again pretty soon. The younger surfer shook his head some more.

    "You know he’ll be back out here tomorrow morning."

    "He looks that type."

    "And we’ve taken the place up by Maghermore. So we won’t be here."

    The light had by then come in enough that the rock, the trees and camper van and both men were clearly visible and the old man, seeing them, wet his head one final time in the foam and began to stride his way back into shore through the water. He reached the stones and collected his bag and his flask from the rock, made his way back up the shingle slope and past the camper van, saluting the surfers with a nod as he went. Both of them nodded in return.

    In a little while, they had suited up and prepared the boards, they’d locked up the van and headed down to the shore themselves. It was still early but the waves were starting to come in a little harder and break with more force. They paddled out far enough and caught what they could, but the waves weren’t as lively as they had been earlier in the month. That was why the younger surfer has suggested moving on up to Maghermore, where it was said to be rougher. They had planned to pass the summer there but had left it too long. He brought his board out past the furthest rock and let the sea rise and drop him until he felt there was enough in it to try and make it back in on. Each time he did it, though, it tapered off and he was left wishing he had left it longer. A few of these and he had given up. He relaxed and watched his partner fight to drag some life out of the waves, sometimes even getting a little. He sat on the surf board, flat on the surface of the water, and thought about that old man, wondering if he’d be out there the following morning and if he’d ever succeed in teaching himself to swim. It was too dead to surf. He paddled back into shore and lit a fire back by the van. He dried himself off and began to prepare breakfast.

If you enjoyed that, you might like my novel, Sour, an old Irish myth retold as a modern murder story:

10 ways to get your short story published in a magazine.

2015-05-03T04:25:00.001-07:00

Getting your story published in a magazine is a great way to showcase your writing ability, get your name out there and grab the attention of editors, agents and publishers. Once you're writing to a good standard, it shouldn't be too difficult to get noticed by the magazines, but in many cases writers try the same things again and again to no benefit. I've compiled a simple list of points that should help set you up for a successful submission.

1) Read the magazine you're submitting to.
This sounds pretty obvious. It's not all that obvious to many writers. Read at least a whole issue, ideally, read more. What this will do is give you a pretty clear insight into what the editor likes. He or she is your target market. Your YA tale of forbidden school-yard werewolf romance, no matter how well written, won't appeal to someone only publishing gritty social angst stories. It's all too easy to shoot off multiple emails to lists of magazines with a copy-and-paste intro and an attached word doc of your story. You're playing the game a little like a lottery there and chance are you'll get pretty much the same results.

2) Pitch the story in your intro email.
This is maybe not so obvious. Editors of these magazines aren't always working full time and have a limited amount of hours to trawl through submissions so a quick pitch, outlining tone really helps. A simple few words out to suffice, think clickbait. This doesn't need to be a synopsis. "Alexandra and Wesley are classmates united by an unusual preference for dog treats. Mr. Jeffries wants to know why they never meet during a full moon."

3) Address the email correctly.
Be specific. People can tell when they get blanket emails. Address the editor by name, mention the magazine, talk about the style and themes the magazine goes in for and why your submission would fit in exactly. This shows you've taken the time to get to know the publication and that you actually care about where you get published.

4) Care about where you get published.
This seems pretty obvious but only submit to magazines you're actually interested in. You might find a publication run out of someone's backyard shed, using a combination of fonts making it look like a ransom demand, you might happen upon a magazine where they dedicate a few pages to the opinions of the deranged, blinkered or worse. Look for magazines you actually like and respect.

5) Show the piece around to people before submitting.
Writing is a solitary endeavour, but as soon as you submit something it no longer stays that way. The whole process of getting a story out to people, in whatever medium, is highly collaborative, so get used to working with others in getting your work the best it can be. Show it to honest critics. Friends who fawn over your prose are no good to you. The ones who sit you down and list how and why a thing isn't working are invaluable. The greatest mistake a writer can make is thinking 'this person just doesn't get what I'm saying'. Your job as a writer is to make people get what you're saying. Feedback and second and third and ninth drafts is part of what you do. This will help massively.

6) Use standard formatting.
Comic Sans, random bold text, font size experimentation, trying out different margins, spacing, colour as ways to express your individuality are out. You express yourself through the words. The rest should be as undistracting as possible.

7) Read as many short stories as you can.
Read the greats, of course, Carver, Hemingway, Alice Munro, Chekov and so forth, read them to bits, but read younger, current writers too. Be aware of how people are writing now. Find your own voice.

8) Tell a story.
I know, I know, but vignettes, exercises in prose styling, crazed narrative experiments and 'what-if' fan fiction is tough to find a home for. Very tough. Know what your story is, know what it says. Make sure it has a beginning, middle and end, conflict, and all the things a good story ought to have. When you're a seasoned pro you can turn around and mix it up.

9) Submit to one magazine at a time.
Wait for their response. Worst case scenario is not two rejections, it's two acceptances, for then you must contact one magazine with the bad news and know that they will never entertain an approach from you again. Be respectful to the magazines, try and forge a bit of rapport, follow them on twitter, retweet them.

10) Keep trying.
This doesn't mean keep sending the same story with updates. If a story doesn't make the cut in a magazine bite down on the fact and embrace it. Most of the time you won't be told why. The reason is either the piece is totally wrong for the magazine, the upcoming issue is dedicated to a particular theme and your story doesn't fall within it or it simply wasn't good enough. If it wasn't good enough, that's okay. It means you need to work harder. As a writer you'll always need to work harder. Craft what you do. Show it around. Beg, plead for criticism and when you get it, take it on the chin. Someone hating your piece and you addressing that makes you better. Someone liking it just keeps you at the same level.

Hopefully, these are of help, I'd be delighted to hear any other tips.

If you found that interesting, maybe you'd like my novel, it retells an old Irish myth as a modern murder story:

Someone ought to fire off a pistol.

2015-04-25T05:35:00.004-07:00

Someone ought to fire off a pistol.

Seems to me all of you think I’m just going to accept my mud-pile under all those flowers and a work-a-day headstone, far off any trouble in the old family dump of remembrance looking out over the bay. Well that isn’t to be.

I demand a tomb all to myself.

I won’t be hidden away someplace tranquil. I want to be right at the action, yes even after death. I will take my rightful place inside the city limits. Bang at the centre. Claim me the best possible spot. Obstructing traffic, disturbing locals and interfering with the property market. A place everyone sees me daily. One safe from the drunks, the cats, the weather, tourism and new architecture. Someplace Northside. Big ugly and gold and it needs to be an eyesore. I’ll have pillars in the Corinthian style, thank you kindly. Carvings of inconsolably bereaved angels, frantic in their grief, to attend the sacrilege of a world getting on without me. We’ll have a sculpture of me right at the top. Herculean, a cosmic beauty and wild with passion. I picture me glaring down in gold with fire and majesty at the people below buying their carrots and fish cakes. Yes, two three weeks the same people cried out dry at the wake will skip past the thing mindlessly on the way to Aldi. We know that. Worse if it grew into some God awful annual family ritual. Torturing generations on a wet Sunday.

All my possessions you can wrap for the poor. That or burn them. Now I think about it a pyre sounds apt. Include all my clothes, my favourite music and unflattering photos. Put in my clarinet and my correspondence case and my recipes. Then throw in my paintings, cushions and any gifts anyone ever gave me. In go my love letters, given and received. Include the Jack B Yeats for it is a damned fake anyhow. Burn it all up on the front lawn some hour most poor folks are already at work and ensure the smoke blows toward wealthy districts. Leave it respectfully burn out long as it naturally takes. Days if need be. And if the thing rages out of control then guide it towards the homes of the neighbours I liked the least. Maybe that’s a little harsh. Just their flowerbeds.

The funeral isn’t going off in St. Patrick’s, but St. Michaels, central Dun Laoghaire. Set out from there on an extended procession, kilometres long. I will be brought to my final rest inDublin at hellish inconvenience to everyone. Procession to be numbingly slow and accompanied by one of those New Orleans brass bands I saw go off well once in a black and white movie. Sickly quantities of incense, clouds of the stuff, hanging thick everywhere and bewitching the sinuses. Forests of tropical flowers spewing pollen into the hot air. Long, indecipherable bursts of Latin right out of the book of Revelation, ferociously declaimed. Try and find some priest blessed with old world panache when it comes to labelling the wicked.

At mass: The very best wine. No less than four eulogies but there is no upper limit. Cash is ready for hiring a young and beautiful whore to throw herself in hysterics onto the coffin right at the climax. You don’t have to go through with that one. Test how it feels on the day. I just liked the idea is all. Put pennies on my eyes just in case there happens to be something to that old ferryman story. No time to take chances. Go right ahead and laugh at this sentiment till it’s your own turn. Then after they sink me into the mud someone ought to fire off a pistol. At this sound everyone has to scatter. Fill in the earth double time and be done with the whole affair. Any lingerers: jail them for loitering. Keep one cop on hand for that.

Distribute anything surviving the pyre in order of seniority based on who loved me the most. Measure this by whoever it is works hardest seeing out all of these last requests. It can’t cost too much to have someone keep score of that.

On to the Obituary. Don’t imagine this is going on your regular style page along with all of the regular guys who couldn’t think of anything better than the regular. I demand a half a page minimum. One in each major broadsheet and two in any pair of tabloids you want. Make that full page in the tabloids and right at the front. Full colour photograph, doctored devilishly, of myself partying with Peter O’Toole, Behan, Francis Bacon, the Archbishop of Dublin, throw in a couple more like that, then maybe a group of exotic looking women and indistinct further characters on behind us. Alongside this in fat, Arial black, emboldened type: NATION MOURNS HER FAVOURITE SON. Or maybe: IRELAND LOSES A RARE GEM.

Then start out on the written part:

Michael ‘Bolivar’ Coughlin. A simple man. A beautiful man, (this is to run verbatim, otherwise I will haunt the very last of you right into madness ) passed from this world still raging against the forces that conspire to suck us all down. And he did it all with the grace and dignity fitting the more handsome examples of our wildlife, like the swan in low flight or wild hare on the bounce. His art, tragically burned by his grief torn family, is lost to us forever. All we do know was the sight of it caused Beckett to cease writing and Tarkovsky to begin making films. A known hellraiser in the capital’s bars, he loved nothing more than retiring to a distant spot on Inis Mór to contemplate the great matters among the buttercups.

He spent his final days exiled to his garden flower-beds, something people seem to think the elderly ought to have foisted on them. Why people think nurturing delicate things to life is a task for those drawing to an end mystified the great man. Maybe there was a poetry to it but if so he was too exhausted digging to ponder it. The beauty of flowers never mattered a damn to him. Far as he could tell the same colours were now available on food-packaging and tracksuits. You never heard of plants or flowers in those same colours called garish.

And here you have the front page article in the Times the following day. Somebody knows a copy editor in there who can swing it, I forget the name.

“They finally dropped the rain-wet flag over the Dail on a drizzling Tuesday which turned out to be his last. Three bright green stripes over the silhouette of a dove. The flag Coughlin had designed himself after liberating the nation. It flapped with splendour and poetry above the vast cascading banners flanking the imposing yet simple hearted likeness of Michael ‘Bolivar’ Coughlin commemorated on the front of the building. So named because he had rid the island finally and completely of the hated oppressor: its own political class, using only charm, guile, art, rhetoric, romance and bravado.

Beneath the banners gathered many exotic looking women, visibly bereft. Behind them, fully military guard of honour flanking the President. Between these and the main gates; gardai, international dignitaries, the press, great thinkers, one or two foreign kings and a retinue of archbishops, prime ministers, artists and bards. Stood to attention with the rest of the country as the national anthem came through over the courtyard tannoy the same as the nation’s airwaves. Two city centre parades, book-ending a week of national mourning.

How they contained a wild spirit like that to the garden is a wonder to itself. Some kind of family coup. Gentlest one you ever could think up. Small matters like the answering of his fan letters or when some visiting Nobel laureate arrived, from the few that still even remembered him, that he had to have someone there to help on his robes. The blood red Jaguar remained his, for a time. Then they let him know he was unroadworthy. Not even the car. Nobody paid him any heed any longer. He went unrecognised out among people. He took a walk down a main street. Not even a hello. He could simply go to the town and visit shops. He went and bought the food it damn well pleased him to. Like maybe Swiss Roll instead of the carrots he set out for, or soap, or motor oil. Then he would place it on the kitchen table where everyone expected carrots and it wasn’t ever the case he just forgot the things he had been sent for. They took away his whiskey. They replaced his cigarettes with medicines.

Finally they holed him up. They jailed him, called it a hospice. He expected that. Claim was it would keep him comfortable. His jailers were gracious Asian women in white and blue. They kept him drugged and helped him into and out of the regulation clothing. He got shown a whole lot of television intended to keep him in a vegetative state. Quiz shows and the horses. But on he raged. He was wildfire. The nurses loved him. They fought to bring him is tea, serve him his pills. They snuck him toffees and cigarillos from the outside world. He came to miss those visiting Nobel laureates. The jaguar too. He even missed the gardens. Turned out flowers weren’t worse than garish clothes people had on.

Leave it there. Pull any of that off and I'll try and get you those lottery numbers from the beyond. Don't bother checking any accounts, there isn't a cent. Just try and have history record me how I like. Only add that he is survived by his wife, Brida, whom he loved each day sweeter than any sensation he ever knew, his daughter Annette and his son Colm, who visited his bed each night until the end in the high dependency unit, St. Vincent’s hospital, and looked right into his father’s fading eyes though it agonised the both of them.

Alan Walsh

This piece was originally published in The Moth magazine in 2013

Glasnevin Cemetery image courtesy William Murphy

Why Ireland's most famous female character is also a feminist icon.

2015-04-18T07:30:00.001-07:00

That Deirdre of the Sorrows is still one of the most famous of the old stories in Irish folklore speaks volumes, I think, for how we see the downtrodden, the innocent and, in particular, women in Irish culture. That might come off a glib and sweeping statement but you have to wonder has all that much changed since the story was first told in Pre-Christian Ireland.

Setting the scene
The story goes that Deirdre was trouble before she was even born. The mystic druid, Cathbad, on hearing shrieking from within her mother's womb, advised the baby be killed, predicting it would be too beautiful and bring war and mayhem to the men of Ireland. Conchobar Mac Nessa, the king of Ulster, at this point steps in and takes the child as his own, as I guess kings were able to do then, promising to keep her safe from causing any trouble.

The tables turn
Conchobar brings Deirdre up in seclusion, with only an old maid for company, with the intention of marrying her himself when she's old enough. Now, so far this is all tapping into some pretty on-the-nose themes of women as property, women as the downfall of men, women as helpless to decide their own destiny and also as a gateway to some kind of chaos if left unchecked, which rings true with a lot of older myth, only even going back to as far as apples in gardens. What's interesting next is the turn the story takes. The scene is set, Chekov's pistols are mounted securely on the mantelpiece, but now we start seeing things from Deirdre's perspective.

Deirdre takes control
She tells the old maid that she dreams of meeting a young man with hair as black as a raven, skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood. Fair enough, this could be seen as her only character motivation being defined by men, which doesn't help us as far as the Bechdel test goes, but I guess these were different times. The old maid, Leabharcham, says she might be able to help out here and introduces Deirdre to a young warrior called Naoise, from the Uisneach family. Well, right off the bat, Naoise wants no part of this, knowing she's promised to the king, but it's not like he doesn't have eyes and can't see how outrageously beautiful the girl is. She finally convinces him to run away with her by jumping on his back and shaming him into doing it. What I find interesting about this is it shows her taking control. There are strong, powerful female characters in Irish mythology, Queen Medb being the foremost example, but here we see a young woman, controlled and dominated by men, breaking free of her own will and bending that of a young man to do what she wants. Sadly, this doesn't work out that well.

The action part
Conchobar learns of the escape and rallies troops to chase Naoise and Deirdre down. Meanwhile, Naoise has called in his brothers, some of the best warriors in the country, and the gang of them cavort from county to county trying to hide from Conchobor's soldiers, finally straying to as far as Scotland. Knowing this could go on forever, Conchobar offers a truce, saying Deirdre and Naoise and all his brothers can come back to Ireland and even back to his castle, without threat of retaliation, to work things out. Unfortunately, when they arrive, Conchobar has his chief warrior, Fergus, kill Naoise and all his brothers and immediately marries Deirdre against her will.

Things get worse. They won't get better.
The story finishes up with Deirdre in a chariot, riding along between both King Conchobar and the warrior Fergus. She's defeated, she's broken, she's owned again. She took her shot and it couldn't have gone worse. The king turns to Deirdre and asks her, "Is there anyone in all of Ireland you could possibly hate more than me?"
"Yes." She replies, "Fergus, who killed Naoise and his brothers."
"Then," says Conchobar, "I will share you with him, as a punishment." Here's where it ends. Deirdre, on hearing this, can't bear to be owned and shared and passed around. It's been said Deirdre represents a woman's need for independence, she expresses that here in the most powerful way imaginable. As the chariot is pulled along, it approaches a low hanging rock, just as it moves beneath, Deirdre raises her head, catches the rock and is decapitated. The tale ends here. Tragically, Deirdre has finally asserted her will in the ultimate way. She won't be owned. She won't be made queen against her will. Nor will she be shared.

Women in Ireland.
Interestingly enough, at the time the story first emerged, women in Ireland enjoyed a position which would have been the envy of those in Greece or Rome or the East. They could own and breed livestock and, thus, make a living for themselves. They weren't completely subjected to the man and his family on marriage either. Yet they were still unable, as were men, to own property, it being owned by the king, and were still trapped within the conventions of a society still totally governed and operated by men. Deirdre's attempt to break free of that and her final, devastating act, represent a struggle for independence still manifested today across the world and here at home in a multitude of unresolved issues.

If you're interested in Deirdre, maybe you'll like my novel, which retells her story as a modern murder story:

Image courtesy of Druid Synge

Cuchulainn Reinvented: Guardians of the Galaxy, Manga and 5 more bizarre appearances.

2015-04-12T16:24:00.003-07:00

Most people know Cuchulain as Ireland's most famous mythological hero, defender of Ulster, warrior against armies and international lover ( he had a thing going on the side with a Scottish girl - worth looking up) but what most people don't realise is how Cuchullain has been re-imagined in modern pop culture. I've just written a novel re-imagining the different
cycles of Irish mythology into one small modern Irish town, so I thought I'd look this up and I wasn't disappointed.

1) Guardians of the Galaxy.
In the original comics on which the movie was based, Cuchulainn ( pictured above), The Irish Wolfhoud, is resurrected in the 31st century ( thanks to magic from the Book of Kells no less) to fight alongside the Guardians and protect the earth into infinity.

First appearing in Guardians of the Galaxy Annual #3, he's a "master of all forms of archaic combat" and on at least one occasion has to actually defeat the Guardians themselves in combat. His weapons appear to be what he calls his "throwing stick" ( the Gae Bolg ) and his ignorance of 31st century culture seems to be his only weakness.

Photo courtesy of Marvel Comics.

2) Slaine.

Photo Courtesy of 2000 AD

Slaine is an impossibly muscular and singularly brutal warrior from the pages of 2000 AD in Britain. In truth, Slaine is a mixture of both Conan the Barbarian and Cuchulainn, but the entire strip is set against a backdrop of Celtic mythology and in moments of particular trouble, Slaine descends into what he calls his 'warp spasm' which is unmistakably the ríastrad of Cúchulainn ( down to the one protruding eye ), as well as carring his barbed spear the Gae Bolg.

Slaine has been hand painted by a slew of impressive comic-book illustrators, none as famous as Simon Bisley, who imagined Cuchulainn as a monstrous landscape of blood flecked muscles and unkempt hair.

3) Final Fantasy.

Image Courtesy of Square Enix

Cuchulainn makes a pretty bizarre appearance in Final Fantasy XII as a bloated green monster, though his profile does say he was once fair and beautiful. He's the first demon players have to defeat. Despite his nickname being 'the impure' he actually becomes an ally if you defeat him.

You kinda get the impression the game developers randomly looked up International mythological hero names and went at re-purposing them without even a glance at who they actually were ( Shiva seems to have been done a particular injustice ).

4) Gargoyles.

Image Courtesy of Disney

This is the Disney version of the Hound of Ulster. In the second season of the Disney cartoon, the characters encounter a young Irishman who turns out to be Cuchulainn reincarnated. There's a bit of weirdness then with a Banshee and a giant worm and defending something that seems to follow the kind of lines only children are sophisticated enough to grasp.

Pretty dull rendition when compared to the previous though.

5) Political Murals.

Photo courtesy of Norman Craig ( Flickr)

It's perhaps not surprising for a hero credited with defending Ulster against all the other armies of Ireland ( often single-handedly) that he'd eventually be claimed by the politics of his home province. Often used in some pretty spectacular looking loyalist murals, Cuchulainn takes on an almost martyr like appearance but one of pretty big, if divisive, cultural significance.

6) Megami Tensei

Photo Courtesy of Atlus, Cave

Another pretty bizarre Japanese video game, Cuchulainn is a demon who can be summoned to defeat other enemies. He actually appears in many, many versions of this game ( even once as Setanta, his boyhood name ). You'd really have to wonder at the thinking behind leveraging the character for this kind of thing.

7) Tir Na Nog

Photo courtesy of Gargoyle games.

Yet another weird video game, this one for the Commodore 64 all the way back in 1985 ( before that for the Spectrum and Amstrad). Cuchulainn essentially has to wander Tir na Nog collecting items and solving puzzles. Dun Darach is another game released in 1985 for the Spectrum which was essentially a prequel to this.

To be honest, I'd imagine there are even more out there. In my own novel, Cuchulainn is reinvented as a traveller, Cuckoo, living peaceably with his wife after a lifetime of incredible fighting feats, which I thought was odd enough before discovering Final Fantasy. This has all prompted me to check out how other Irish Mythological characters have fared across popular media. I'll be posting more soon hopefully. Has anyone else seen anything out there?

If you're interested in this, maybe you'll like my own novel, Sour, which retells an old Irish myth as a modern murder mystery:

How modern mythology connects people from different cultures

2015-04-04T05:51:00.001-07:00

I was living in London when I started reading the old Irish stories again. I had gone there for work and had started missing home pretty hard. It’s a common thing for expats to try to reclaim a little of their identity by tuning into the radio for familiar accents, or listening to the bands making their name back in Whelan’s. I did both anyhow.

When I mentioned I was reading the old stories again, people would invariably ask me to tell one. This could be in a pub, in a friend’s flat late at night, on a park bench. I was working at a small design company at the edge of Soho. I was working mainly on code, which I hated, being a designer, and was finding myself a little out of place in the city.

The work was pretty intensive but the people were unusually friendly and at lunchtimes some of us might venture down to a pretty little park just off Tottenham Court Road and take our sandwich in the sunshine. They were from all over, South Africa, New Zealand, Pakistan, Slovenia, and they all took a particular interest in my book of stories. They all missed their homes the same way.

The story which came to me the easiest and I told the best each time was Deirdre of the Sorrows. Probably because it’s so evocative of so many other tales: Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, practically any story where there’s a damsel rescused by a young prince, only in the Irish version Deirdre is no mere damsel, she’s not rescued by any prince and it certainly doesn’t end happily.

Maybe it was the finale that made me enjoy the telling of it. How people would recoil, shocked. How they’d comment on the bleak Irish outlook.

There was that moment of silence after the end of it, in the sunshine, with the bees hovering by our half-eaten salad rolls. People were waiting to be told everything was going to work out. Perhaps it was this which inspired me to take the story and place it in today’s Ireland, which hasn’t seemed quite as bleak in quite a time.

I wanted to write a thriller, I wanted it to talk about the country today, the issues at hand, but I wanted it to remain faithful to the strangeness and shock of the original. For this reason I had the story told by a Puca, a supernatural creature from mythic tales, who speaks coarsely but objectively.

The story of Deirdre tells of a very young girl promised to the high king, Conchobor, who raises her from infancy to be his wife. Deirdre runs away from the king having met a young man and the king chases the couple, along with his brothers, as far as Scotland. He promises them safe passage home only to murder all the young men when they get there. The king then asks of Deirdre who it is she hates most in the world and she answers Fergus, the man who killed her beloved. He tells her that the punishment for her flight will be that he will share her with Fergus. Her reaction to this, and the end of the tale, comes when she’s riding in a chariot with both men and raises her head in sight of a low hanging rock , so that she’s decapitated.

The story deals with youth, in particular the mistreatment of the young, power, property and oppression. These are ordinary enough themes, but seem especially relevant in the Ireland of 2014. It’s relevant enough that another writer, Eamon Carr, was publishing another modern retelling of it, Deirdre Unforgiven, with the Doire Press at the same time I was with Creativia. His version is in verse and uses Deirdre to convey his outlook on the Troubles.

More interesting again is how these two reinventions are actually just the tip of the iceberg. People are retelling the old stories over and over in newer and more diverse ways. Last year Will Sliney wrote and illustrated Celtic Warrior: The Legend of Cú Chulainn, a graphic novel telling the story of the Táin Bó Cúailnge for a young generation. This followed on the heels of previous publications like Brian Boru: Ireland’s Warrior King by Damien Goodfellow and Tomm Moore’s Oscar-nominatedSecret of Kells, An Táin by Colmán Ó Raghallaigh and Róisín Dubh by Rob Curley and Maura McHugh.

There’s a sense that this isn’t simply a rehash of the leprechaun museum or twee Temple Bar bodhráns reeling in the tourist pennies, but that people are telling the stories as a part of who they are, the same way I was in the park, or when a few visiting friends from home in Greystones and I tried patching together the story of Oisin and Tir na nOg on the last Tube home to Bayswater to the bemusement of an otherwise sober carriage.

These stories were crafted over centuries by master storytellers. They come laden with historical and cultural significance and work as a touchstone for something real, a foundation speaking to us about ourselves whereas so much of modern storytelling, in whichever form, comes over as purely commercially driven or as a mere lightweight escape.

After I had finished in the park that day, Amir, who was from Pakistan, told a tale from his own culture. I don’t want to give the impression here that we habitually sat in circles on the grass, singing one another the songs of our people. These were guys who spent hours arguing over why Aaron Lennon wouldn’t ever make it into the Spurs first team or rating girls in the park out of 10 (I know).

We were by no means cultural attachés, but that particular lunchtime something struck which left us feeling a little closer to one another and nourished for the experience. Amir told the story of Heer and Ranjha. It’s a Punjabi tale, from his district, and is one of the world’s most famous and tragic love stories. Naturally I was too ignorant to ever have heard of it. In fact, none of us had. He told it fantastically. It’s about young lovers kept apart by a powerful, jealous rival, and it ends just as tragically as Deirdre. It’s well worth looking up online. Heer and Ranjha was remade as a film called Rockstar a couple of years ago in Bollywood.

Mythology and folklore are enjoying a resurgance internationally also. Guy Ritchie has just been taken on to direct a series of King Arthur movies. Television shows like Once Upon a Time and Grimm are reimagining the familiar fairytales of Europe in modern, urban settings. The latest series of Percy Jackson books from Rick Riordan tell tales from Greek mythology from the point of view of Percy. Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes by Cory O’Brien, which retells myths in casual online IM speak, became an Amazon bestseller (his website is well worth checking out incidentally: bettermyths.com – even though he doesn’t have any Irish ones on there). I watched an episode of Supernaturalrecently which featured changelings, a staple of old Irish fairy stories, as wicked mother-eating monsters. I won’t even talk about Thor and Loki.

There might be a strong smack of fan-fiction to all of this. Tapping a cultural heritage already very familiar feels quite like standing on the shoulders of giants. It certainly felt that way to me when I wrote It’s The Stars Will Be Our Lamps. At the same time I don’t happen to think it’s all that far from people sat around fires listening to the storyteller down the centuries. The good stories stick around and they always will in some or other form. It’s up to us to find new ways to tell them.

This article was originally published in The Irish Times website

If you're interested in Irish mythology, maybe you'll like my novel, Sour, which retells an old Irish myth as a modern murder story:

David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen owe everything to this one amazing writer

2015-03-29T15:40:00.004-07:00

I picked up a copy of Carpenter's Gothic about ten years ago and it was one of those instances where you get about ten pages in and realise how much the world of writing still has to offer you, that there will always be new and greater geniuses that you've never heard of and that thrills you in the way the potential of sunny Saturday mornings or long summer evenings used to as a child.

Carpenter's Gothic tells the pretty obfuscated tale of disenfranchised characters, an inveterate liar and his unhappy wife along with a strange visitor but reading Gaddis, at least for me, at least then, happened to be a whole lot like Listening to music. It almost ( Kill me for saying this ) didn't even matter what was happening, or at least it mattered less, because the prose was so crazily beautiful. The nuances shocked me, the way characters spoke across one another and how simple things like walking up a hill were phrased in Gaddis' Modernist way that foreshadowed everything I'd later read in Infinite Jest and The Corrections. His take on simple, common or garden Amercanisms, something I still read very much as a foreign language, were fascinating. I bookmarked them. I used to write down passages of his words. The simple but rewarding way you do that with your writing heroes.

The books are not easy to read. JR and The Recognitions ask a great deal of the reader, I'm told. Personally I couldn't put either down and, as with all books I truly love, I staggered my reading hours, hoping to drawn out every last second of reading time from each. To this end I have yet to read 'A Frolic of his own.' The fact it's out there makes the world a potentially better place. I might never read it.

Another reason I might never read it is because when I read someone I tend to take on quite a few of their writing habits in my own writing. I've noticed this only on re-reads. I once wrote a Science Fiction short story about the exploitation of the natives of a distant plant in the style of Samuel Beckett. To this end I need to keep away from Mr. Gaddis at least until I'm finished this latest book.