An Allegory of Labour

The Art Kettle

‘Art has come to be defined,’ says The Art Kettle, ‘as that sphere of practice, that set of objects, that institution, for which questions about the nature of itself are central, and use or purpose are set at nought.’ As a result, the argument follows, contemporary art is powerless to resist the system of Liberal Democracy within which it exists – and in fact colludes with state power by ‘operating to contain a growing population of allegedly “free” thinkers, speakers, movers and livers’. The minute a piece of political resistance is placed in a museum, its content is sanitized by questions concerning its status as a work of art. Brian Haw’s demonstration against the war in Iraq was made illegal, dismantled, rebuilt into an artwork in the Tate, where we think not of Iraq but instead: ‘is it art?’ Sinéad Murphy has presented a fairly damning case in The Art Kettle, although her proposed solution in the world of craft seems to me a little retrograde. Might we not work through the problem instead somehow? A much easier question to ask than to answer, that.

At just 86 pages, The Art Kettle is a slender volume indeed. What’s more, I read it on Kindle. The question we might do well to consider then is this one: ‘is it a book?’

A version of this piece appeared originally in the May edition of Totally Dublin.

Baxter: The Apartment

If that last sentence seems phrased in somewhat familiar terms, it is because I lifted most of it from Gabriel Josipovici’s 1996 essay on W.G. Sebald, whose ghost haunts every room in The Apartment — and almost every decent hall in contemporary literature, too. Told in long, justified paragraphs without the aid of quotation marks or chapter breaks, The Apartment’s debt to Sebald is clear from the beginning. ‘The more I try not to ape other writers, the less myself I sound,’ Baxter writes in A Preparation for Death. ‘I imitate; I repeat; and new selves emerge. Originality is not forged anew; it is borrowed. […] My favourites seethe through me. They boil right out of my eyes and ears and fingertips.”

My essay on Greg Baxter’s The Apartment appears over at 3AM Magazine.

New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Colm Toibin

Although mainly renowned for his work as a writer of fiction, Colm Tóibín began his life in print writing non-fiction for the likes of In Dublin and Magill. The outlets may have changed and his stature has certainly grown, but Tóibín has never really ceased to write journalism of one kind or another. His books of non-fiction – Bad Blood, Signs of the Cross, Love in a Dark Time, to name just three – are published at least as frequently as his novels.

His latest offering, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, is comprised of fifteen essays on writers as diverse as Thomas Mann, Roddy Doyle and James Baldwin. The title is undeniably stylish, but it overreaches somewhat in its effort to impose a unifying theme upon these essays about writers and their families. It might as soon have been called New Ways to Talk About Henry James. Granted, there are no essays dedicated solely to the subject of The Master and All a Novelist Needs, but James’s name still manages to appear over fifty times in just 288 pages. Tóibín has not quite killed the father – but then, who has?

The collection’s opening gambit, an essay on the role of aunts in the nineteenth-century English novel, is nothing short of magisterial and shows what a deep thinker Tóibín is on the subject of the novel. ‘A novel is a pattern,’ he writes. ‘It is our job to relish it and see clearly its textures and its tones, to notice how the textures were woven and the tones put into place. We must look for density, for weight and strength within the pattern, for ways in which figures in novels have more than one easy characteristic, one simple affect.’ This is literary criticism at its finest and will surely be anthologized before long.

The rest of the book is divided into two sections – ‘Ireland’ and ‘Elsewhere’. The essays on Irish writers (Yeats, Synge and Hugo Hamilton in particular) are consistently more original and illuminating than those on international writers, which are often little more than summarized biographical narratives. The quality of the first half far outweighs that of the second. This unfortunate imbalance, signaling Tóibín’s own inability to kill the mother(land), upsets the texture of a collection which, although perhaps woven in a hurry, is nonetheless made of some very fine silks indeed.

A version of this piece appeared originally in the April edition of Totally Dublin.

Geoff Dyer: Zona

His new book, Zona, is ostensibly a summary of the film Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, a director he calls “cinema’s great poet of stillness.” It is a testament to how high Dyer’s star has risen in the last few years, for while there are few people who could have written this book, there are fewer still who could have gotten it published. It is also an account of Stalker‘s production, a vicarious autobiography, a state-of-the-culture address, and a meditation on cinema and youth. It is, in other words, a secondary text that aspires to the stature of the primary.

My essay on Geoff Dyer’s Zona appears over at The New Inquiry today.

Lars Iyer: Dogma

Lars Iyer is the first literary polemicist whom I’ve experienced live, as he happens. Since the publication last year of his first novel, Spurious, he’s received a lot of exposure for ‘Nude In Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss’, his essay published in The White Review which announced the death of literature. All that’s left for writers to do, he argues, is mourn its passing. It’s hard to know how lasting this death will prove, but since it currently lies prone, it is appropriate that Iyer’s new novel bears all the qualities of a good wake: despair, drunkenness, laughter, philosophy, indirection.

A sequel to Spurious, Dogma is little more than a record of conversations had by two disaffected academics: Lars, who narrates, and his mentor, W., who berates, bewails and bickers. The pair go on a lecture-tour of America, during which time they outline the rules of their new intellectual doctrine known as ‘Dogma’ — after ‘Dogme 95’, the avant-garde movement of that other Lars (von Trier). These rules start out admirably (‘Dogma is Spartan. Speak as clearly as you can. As simply as you can.’), but become more ridiculous as time — and drink — passes (‘always use Greek terms that you barely understand.’). Before we know it, Dogma ceases to be spoken of in the present tense and begins life in the past. To the surprise of nobody who’s read Iyer’s essay in The White Review, Dogma has failed.

Dogma succeeds, however, for it is a witheringly funny novel, filled not just with philosophical humour but also a banter exhibiting the unexpected angles of Iyer’s frame of reference. “Is he angry because he’s fat?, I ask of the singer in Modest Mouse. – No, he was angry and then he got fat’, W. says. Do you think he minds being fat?, I ask. – ‘He has other issues’, W. says.” With the exception of Finnegan and possibly Ned Devine, Dogma is a wake anyone would be happy to have. Literature may or may not arise like Finnegan. No matter what happens, though, you can be absolutely certain that somebody will make a fortune impersonating it, as they did Ned.

A version of this article originally appeared in the March edition of Totally Dublin.

Ben Marcus: The Flame Alphabet

Because the terms of propaganda, public relations and even cliché can be quite literally dangerous, language is often described as being ‘toxic’. The danger of such language is an indirect one, though – it always exists at one remove from the harm it causes. Would that this were so for the characters of The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus’s novel in which exposure to the speech of children causes adults to become so physically unwell that certain descriptions recall nothing so much as Edmond de Goncourt’s harrowing account of his brother’s last hours before dying of syphilis. As time passes, the language of adults becomes similarly toxic, people begin to die off, crisis is declared and the protagonist, Sam, finally arrives at Forsythe, a secret lab where he is charged with inventing a new, less toxic language. The subtext could not be a clearer manifesto for serious writers. A welcome change from the arrogant and retrograde certainty of Franzen and Eugenides, Ben Marcus is one of only a few American writers attempting to engage with the problem(s) of language.

This article originally appeared in Totally Dublin in March 2011.

Long Exposure

A photo shows a counterweight
of no great former glory.
On rusted limbs it balances,
a rusted thing in counterpoint
to nearby crystal palaces,
conventional multistories.

The shot appears inside a slim
imagined volume of nocturnes,
all told in ‘a vernacular
of ruin’ and shot through brumous light
of moon (to lend what’s known as ‘atmosphere’).
Unsigned – a fact of some concern.

Here are two ways to think of long-
exposure: to the elements,
which spreads an iron oxide rash
across this large arachnoid frame;
and to film, where the long-held flash
bestows an air of permanence

not just upon the counterweight
but on corroded longcoat who
inspects the frame and wonders if
a line of verse could ever be
so fraught, indeed so fricative
it cut the reader’s tongue in two

and had him calling— trying to
call for a tetanus shot.

No, he thinks not.

The lifting bridge by Sheriff Street
stopped lifting long ago.

This poem appeared originally in Icarus, Issue II, Vol LXII.

Bolano: The Third Reich

Roberto Bolaño died in 2003 but left behind four completed novels, including his masterpiece 2666, a book whose physical size is matched only by the enormity of its critical acclaim. A relatively slimmer affair, The Third Reich consists of diary entries taken by Udo Berger, the German champion of war-strategy games, as he holidays in Spain with his girlfriend Ingeborg. Soon Udo starts a game of Third Reich against El Quemado, a deformed and spectral figure who sleeps on the beach. Looking down on the soldiers, dictating what moves they will make, Udo comes to represent the Author. Reminiscent of the game of chess played in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, their match grows increasingly intense as it becomes apparent that there is considerably more at stake – for Udo and for literature itself – than mere gamer’s pride. This is subtly-told lament for the death of literature. I just can’t figure out whether it’s fitting or not that it comes from a writer almost ten years dead.

This article originally appeared in Totally Dublin in February 2011.

Geoff Dyer: Zona

A page, 1.5 line spacing, possibly even 2.0, with large font, no smaller than 12pt, the sort that quickly fills up space – a book-load of space – on which is written: ‘An empty bar, possibly not even open, with a single table, no bigger than a small round table, but high, the sort you lean against – there are no stools – while you stand and drink.’ Geoff Dyer starts at the start and continues in chronological order in this hugely digressive summary of Stalker, Andrei Tarkovksy’s 1979 film about three men –Writer and Professor, guided by Stalker – on a journey through the magical, if potentially perilous Zone in search of the Room, a place where your innermost wishes come true.

Zona is an intensely idiosyncratic book. There are few authors who could have written it, fewer still who could have gotten it published. With perhaps the exception of But Beautiful, there are no Geoff Dyer books currently in print that aren’t in some way or another autobiographical. ‘An account of watchings, remembering and forgettings,’ Zona is no different. As Dyer progresses through the plot of the film, he makes constant personal digressions in plain text, parenthesis and extended footnotes. Some of these digressions are inconsequential and often a little annoying – we could do without the numerous reminders that Dyer’s father was an extremely frugal. But many of them are amongst the best passages in the book.

In one such footnoted meditation concerning the relationship between youth and cinema, Dyer writes that ‘it is rare for anyone to see their – what they consider to be the – greatest film after the age of thirty. After forty it’s extremely unlikely. After fifty, impossible.’ How fortunate it is, then, that we have Dyer-as-Stalker to direct us – me, anyway – toward films like Stalker before suddenly it’s all too late.

This article originally appeared in Totally Dublin in February 2011. 

PONT BLANK

‘Pont Blank’, the piece of speculative criticism in which I uncover a sinister plot in the history of modernist photography, appears over at The New Inquiry.

THE ART OF FIELDING

Chad Harbach is one of the founding editors of n+1, that thrice-yearly publication at the vanguard of American literary hipsterdom. He is a talented writer: his plotting is expansive; his prose is clear; his eye for detail is obvious. What a pity, then, that he chose to write not a piece of serious literature, but a page-turner lodged so firmly in the middlebrow you half-expect the squash players from Ian McEwan’s Saturday to invade the baseball park that is this novel’s main stage.

The Art of Fielding is an 82-chapter tragicomedy in which hunky athlete and scholar, Mike Schwartz, arranges for underdog protagonist, Henry Skrimshander, to come to Westish College on a baseball scholarship (yes: another American campus novel) where he is introduced to an assorted cast of mildly eccentric, but generally two-dimensional characters. A well-crafted plot, in which Skirmshander drags the Westish Harpooners from abject failure to turbulent success, generates a narrative propulsion that never quite succeeds in masking the fundamental thinness of the novel. Harbach writes of the current age as ‘an era when even the athletes were anguished Modernists’, but he himself writes as if Modernism had never occurred, as if the reliability of the written word had never been called into question.

In March 2005, an article by the editors of n+1 optimistically stated that ‘an opening has emerged, in the novel and in the intellect. What to do with it?’ To judge by Harbach’s novel, that question was later answered by the editors with a pledge to fill said opening with realist novels no different from those that had come before. This is an accomplished, but profoundly unambitious debut that actually seems written for the big screen. So much for the vanguard.

This article originally appeared in Totally Dublin in January 2011.

THE MARRIAGE PLOT: JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Mitchell is in love with Madeleine, who is in love with (and later married to) Leonard, who is a brilliant polymath suffering from manic depression. This is the exceedingly dull plot of this reheatedly realist novel with which Jeffrey Eugenides, ten years after the success of Middlesex, is attempting to rescue contemporary American literature from some supposed postmodernist orthodoxy.

The book is set in 1982. We know this because Talking Heads, Billy Idol, Invisible Cities, New Wave, post-punk, shoulder pads and a host of other cultural references are crowbarred into its first ten pages. Yet for a novel so anxious to place itself in a particular time, it is surprising how heavily strewn it is with anachronisms, which seem inadvertently mimetic of the book as a whole. Students reading literary theory are described as ‘hipsters’, at least fifteen years before the term came to be used as such. Leonard, who has never left America, uses a Moleskine notebook, fifteen years before they began being sold internationally. One student has a poster of ‘Cassius Clay’ on his wall, eighteen years after the boxer joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Muhammed Ali. Elsewhere, some Greek men are described as reading the newspaper the same way they once did in Constantinople, the fall of which occurred some two hundred years before the first newspaper.

Eugenides’ prose is characterised by a similar carelessness. Though clearly unaware of its meaning, he uses the term ‘gray eminence’ to describe an old, ineffectual professor. All the while, readers are treated to such well-shaped adjectives as ‘CEO-like’, ‘Phyllida-like’, ‘dream-like’, ‘tunnel-like’ and ‘discipline-like’. Something is later described as having ‘an ice-cube’s chance in hell’. Take note, Jeffrey: a rephrased cliché is still a cliché – and that goes for your entire novel, too.

This article originally appeared in Totally Dublin in December 2011.

Diana Copperwhite

Not many people know this, but I wake up next to Diana Copperwhite every morning. A few years ago, one of her shows was reviewed in the Sunday Times. Without reading the review or checking the name of the artist, I cut out the illustrative reproduction and pinned it to my bedside wall. It wasn’t until I visited ‘An Island from the Day Before’, an exhibition including some similarly muted portraits, that I realised whom I’d been sleeping with all these years. The recurrent rainbow motif belies the sinister edge to these vague impressions of figures and fixtures hovering just within the threshold of the visually intelligible. Copperwhite’s hectic compositions are the visual equivalent of a mistuned radio; we seem to be picking up one, two, often even three visual frequencies at once – yet the subjects remain silent, silenced, forcibly somnolent. Perfect bedfellows, then, you’ll agree.

A version of this piece appeared originally in Le Cool Dublin. The exhibition will be on show at the Kevin Kavanagh until November 12th.

Belinda McKeon

It was way back in October 2010 that I first asked Trinity graduate, Belinda McKeon, to do an interview with Trinity News. But since Solace, her novel exploring the tensions between a farmer and his academic son, had not yet been published, any interview would have to wait. It was not until five weeks ago, in fact, during the week of her book launch, that I sat down to talk to McKeon. In the time since then, Solace has received both critical and popular acclaim. Yet it is only now, on the eve of a deadline almost a whole year since the interview was originally proposed, that I’ve taken it upon myself to actually write the piece. Deadlines, as McKeon herself will freely admit, can have such a mobilising effect.

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How did Solace come about?

It actually started out as a short story I wrote for the first Davy Byrne Awards in 2004. I hadn’t been finishing anything, so it seemed like a good deadline to work towards to get a piece of fiction together. But of course I ended up writing it the night before the deadline, which is pretty typical of me. I wrote it overnight. It was about five or six pages and it wasn’t really a story. It was very obviously a fragment of something – a scene between Mark and Tom, playing on the kind of tensions which ended up being developed further in the novel, the tensions between a father who’s a farmer and a son who wants to build his own academic life in Dublin. There were several things present in a very undeveloped and inchoate form.

Do you know what you are going to write before you sit down at your desk?

No, it comes to me. There’s an actual physical element to it. Unless I’m touching the computer keys or have a pen to paper, it won’t come. Whatever way my brain is wired, there seems to be a relationship between the action of writing and the release of material. Sometimes imagery comes during the off-time. If I’ve been keeping a good routine, an image will pop into my head when I’m washing dishes or taking a walk. But that can’t be a conscious thing. You can’t think, ‘I’m going for a walk to think about my novel’.

MFA programmes have come in for a lot of criticism in recent years. Can you talk about your experience of the course at Columbia?

I went to Columbia with a very specific demand. I wanted to have deadlines. You’re there for two or three years, you have constant deadlines and everyone around you is trying to finish their book. That has a very motivating effect. But I honestly don’t think I got a whit of formal training out of the course. But then I didn’t go in looking for that. I went there to force myself into an action that recognised the seriousness of finishing the book. And so I agree with a lot of the criticism of MFA programmes. I think an awful lot of them are just rackets. I did have a very good experience at Columbia. It was also a very mixed experience. There were some absolutely superb teachers, many of whom were teaching almost academic seminars about, you know, the novel. I didn’t have a class on how to write a sentence or a paragraph. But the deadlines were very important and I met some really terrific writers who are now my readers and peers.

Do you have any intellectual insecurities?

Too many to even articulate. I feel a huge nostalgia for when I was at your stage, when I’d just finished my undergrad and was immersed in so many different genres, reading and learning so much every day. If I have an insecurity, it’s that that slackens when you leave academia. Journalism does that to you as well because you become an expert in everything for ten minutes. When I was an undergrad I would just live in the library, completely immersed in it. I don’t really do that so much anymore. I had such a great time in Trinity. I took each of the writer-in-residence workshops – except one, which I didn’t get into – which were great. The first year I did it, Paul Murray was a fourth year at the time and he was in that class. That’s where I first met him. He was telling me recently that Skippy Dies was started as a short story in 1994. He wouldn’t have been even twenty at the time. I mention that because, as I said, Solace came out of a short story six or seven years ago; Skippy came out of one from almost twenty years ago! These things lodge and ferment. That’s what they should do, anyway – which is why the deadline for my next novel is causing me quite a bit of anxiety. I feel I should probably have negotiated a little more time for myself.

Have you had time to sit down and work on that?

I have had time. But I haven’t really availed of the time very well. It’s a strange experience to be writing a different novel to Solace. A little bit painful, actually. In some ways I feel like it’s my first novel. But I am just doggedly writing down all the crap, because I really believe in the idea of a shitty first draft. Claire Keegan says that certain stuff has to burn away before you can get to the core of what you’re writing. Yeah, you just have to write through the shit really.

The article originally appeared in Trinity News in September 2011.

Sean Scully: Cut Ground

One of the world’s leading abstractionists, Sean Scully seems to me to be a bit of an arsehole whose constant, often contradictory, attempts to explain and intellectualise his own work give rise to the suspicion that Scully is not just an arsehole, but also a charlatan. By giving his paintings titles grounded in specific phenomena (‘Titian’s robe’, ‘red sky’, ‘cut ground’), Scully negates his previous claim that his work means both ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’. If a painting aspires to mean ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’, surely it cannot also mean ‘something’.

Of course, there’s a certain enjoyment to be had in weighing up Scully’s international reputation against this suspicion of charlatanry. But as it turns out I think it’s largely unfounded. ‘Cut Ground’ is a texturally and chromatically articulate exhibition; a pulse seems to emanate from deep within these heavily-layered grid paintings, which are held together not by the names or explanations offered by Scully, but (as Flaubert put it) by the internal strength of their own style.

A version of this piece appeared originally in Le Cool Dublin. The exhibition will be on show at the Kerlin Gallery until November 19th.