Funny Ha Ha

The other day a friend asked me to recommend some funny books to him because he was "feeling a bit down". I told him that it was probably better to watch a funny movie or a funny TV show instead but he said that he "really wanted to read a book" which is a rare enough emotion in humans these days that it ought to be cherished; off the top of my head then I came up with a little list of my favourite funny novels. These are in no particular order - certainly not in order of which is the funniest or best - just in the rank in which they popped into my brain. Some of them, obviously, are funnier than others but they're all good. I also decided to limit myself to one book per author so that if my friend found one author he liked there would be others he could latch onto like a comedic lifebelt in these troubled times...

hey remember back in the day
when Gwyneth Paltrow wasn't
the most hated woman in the world?

1. Decline and Fall - The first and possibly best of Evelyn Waugh's books. A young man is sent down from Oxford and tries to make his way in life.
2. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - while not as good as the Radio Series this is still some funny stuff from Douglas Adams. 
3. Summer Lightning - by PG Wodehouse. You realise I could have picked any of a dozen books here, but even the preface of this book had me in stitches.
4. Cooking With Fernet Branca: James Hamilton-Paterson's modern comedic classic of love and misunderstanding in Italy. 
5. Three Men In A Boat - Victorian humour hasn't aged well but this is the exception that proves the rule.    
6. Emma - Jane Austen: If this doesn't cheer you up you probably need medication. 
7. The Innocents Abroad - Mark Twain casts a jaundiced eye on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. 
8. Dog of the South - Charles Portis. Portis's funniest book? Well its certainly up there. A man goes to Mexico looking for his ex wife. Trouble ensues. 
9. Inherent Vice: Thomas Pynchon's wittiest and most accessible book. A mystery novel set in a Santa Monica hippy community.
10. The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis. Everyone seems to prefer Lucky Jim but I thought this was funnier and sharper. Old geezers celebrate the life of Dylan Thomas...
11. Hollywood - Charles Bukowski: The dreary old git could be a laugh riot when he wanted to be. More or less the true story of the making of "Barfly". 
12. Platform - Michel Houellebecq. Possibly the funniest Frenchman since Voltaire and one of the funniest books of the last 10 years. A French sex tourist goes to Thailand and gets up to no good. 
13.  Zuleika Dobson - Max Beerbohm. 100 years old but it still tickles the ribs. A beautiful girl arrives at Oxford and causes mayhem. 
14. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller. War and madness on Corsica in WW2. Heller's best book and one of the best WW2 novels. 
15. The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman - Angela Carter is not to everyone's taste but I loved this. 
16. Crash - JG Ballard. Again not everyone will see this as a comedy but it really is. 
17. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas - Does this count as a novel? Its one of the funniest books of all time so I hope that it does. Hunter S Thompson goes to Vegas to cover a sports event....The scene with the bath, the radio and White Rabbit....
18. White Teeth - Its quite a serious book but there are some very funny set pieces. Zadie Smith's best I think. 
19. Mort - Terry Pratchett. This is Pratchett firing on all cylinders and when he was at his most inventive and hilarious. A rip off/homage to Death Takes a Holiday.
20. Into The Heart of Borneo - Redmond O'Hanlon. Ok this isnt a novel. Its a journey Redmond OHanlon took with his friend the poet James Fenton into the, er, heart of Borneo. Its smart and very funny. 

Anyway that was my top of the head list. I'd be happy to hear your suggestions below...

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Five New JD Salinger Novels

Really interesting story in The New York Times this weekend that apparently five new JD Salinger novels are on their way beginning in 2015. Why 2015? Well that'll be five years after Salinger's death so presumably that was a stipulation of the old boy's will, whose faithful executor is his son Matt...
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What are the five new Salinger novels about? Well the Times really has no idea but apparently two anonymous sources have revealed to Shane Salerno (the director of a new biographical film 

a rare photo of Staff Sergeant Salinger

about Salinger's life) some intriguing details. One of the books is going to be "a story-filled manual of Vedanta religious philosophy, with which Mr. Salinger was deeply involved with" which doesn't, admittedly, sound so terrific. Another book is going to contain several new stories about the Glass family who have already featured in Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey and Raise High The Roof Beams & Seymour An Introduction. For those of you who, like me, struggled to say awake through the latter book this will not be particularly welcome news either. But it's not all doom and gloom: apparently there's also a novel or a collection of stories set in Holden Caulfield's extended family which is quite exciting to me because they really are an interesting bunch: Holden, DB, Phoebe and even poor Allie were all smart, introspective and funny writers. Another Caulfield family book? Maybe even a sequel to Catcher in the Rye? Yes, please. 
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But the bit of the story that made me choke on my Cornflakes on Sunday morning was the news that Salinger has written not one but two World War 2 novels. JD Salinger, as I've blogged about before here, had a very interesting war...He was in the Counterintelligence Corps and participated in D Day, the Normandy campaign, the liberation of at least one concentration camp and he also fought in the notorious Battle of Hurtgen Forest. In another well known incident JD Salinger and Ernest Hemingway together "helped liberate" the bar of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Even a mediocre writer could make a good book out of that material and Salinger, well...
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There's not much to look forward to in these troubled times but if despair is making you think about jumping in front of a train I'd say don't do it. At least not now. There will be a new Patrick Leigh Fermor book out in September, a new Coen Brothers film out in December, Paul Thomas Anderson's version of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice will be out in late 2014 and best of all the first of five new JD Salinger novels hits the shelves in 2015. That's got to be worth waiting around for, no?

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What Dungeons and Dragons Teaches You About 9/11, Conspiracy Theories And, Er, Real Life

A blogpost from October of last year...
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As Jesse Ventura might have said conspiracy theories - like religions - are for the weak. I was thinking about this after hearing the news that Martin Sheen and Woody Harrelson are to appear in a 9/11 truther movie in 2014. 9/11 truthers believe that the World Trade Center was taken down not by planes but by a controlled demolition done at the behest of the Bush administration so that they could have a pretext for invading Iraq. Truthers believe that there is a massive conspiracy at the heart of 9/11 just as JFK truthers believe that President Kennedy was shot by, well, take your pick: the mafia, LBJ, Nixon, pro Castro Cubans, anti Castro Cubans, the KGB, the CIA, a clumsy hung over secret service agent, the military industrial complex etc. etc. Truthers are frightened people and what they are afraid of more than anything is the randomness and chaos of the world we live in. Truthers hate the idea that a lone lunatic could have shot the president and changed the course of history (I'm surprised there aren't more Gavrilo Princip truthers) or that 19 religious fanatics could have found a way to kill 3000 Americans and provoke the country into a massive and predictable series of over reactions. Racial scapegoating conspiracy theorists hate the fact that their own shitty lives could be the result of bad decisions and bad luck: for them it's far more comforting to believe that an evil conspiracy is running the world instead of shit happening just because its happening. For 9/11 truthers like the dim witted Sheen family it is more soothing to believe that President Bush was an evil genius rather than a lazy incompetent who ignored the August 6th CIA briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike US Targets". 
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Truthers of all stripes would have benefited from a childhood playing Dungeons and Dragons. In the D&D world you learn early that randomness can upset the best laid plans of mice and men; you also learn about organisational dynamics and why conspiracies are always self defeating in the end. Let me unpack that latter point a little. In D&D you can choose between six different alignments: chaotic good, chaotic neutral, chaotic evil or lawful good, lawful neutral, lawful evil. Chaotic characters tend to think only of themselves, lawful characters are more rule bound. Good characters tend to promote good ideals, evil characters evil ones. The Nazis were lawful evil, pirates chaotic evil. Robin Hood (if he existed) was chaotic good, King Arthur (if he existed) lawful good. Do you get the picture? I hope so because I'm done explaining and my point is that when you play a lot of campaigns you learn that chaos gradually seeps in everywhere. Regimes and campaigning parties are constantly buffeted by chaotic events and almost always fall apart in the end, but the most successful parties are the ones that have a balance of good and evil, chaotic and neutral. Lawful evil parties and lawful good parties collapse quickly because they just don't have the flexibility to cope with events. Also the more chaotic and evil characters you have with you on the campaign the more likely they are to betray you all at the end when their interest outweighs the group interest. Classic prisoner dilemma situations abound when D&D campaigns and conspiracies start to fray because every person added to the conspiracy increases the chaos already inherent in the system. I don't know if there's a law of conspiracy theories but if not I'm going to invent it now: McKinty's first law of conspiracies states that "Every individual added to a conspiracy doubles the likelihood that the conspiracy will collapse." 
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Luck is very important in the game and also in life. Luck rewards bad people and punishes good ones. When my pacifist 11th level cleric was killed by a Storm Giant on a 20 roll of a 20 sided die it was just plain old bad luck. It wasn't fair, but I didn't fly off the handle into madness. I mean what can you do?* When Prime Minister Macmillan was asked what might blow his government off course he is supposed to have said "events, dear boy, events." I don't think its a stretch to say pace Ventura that organised religion and conspiracy theories are both crutches for people who can't face the brutal exigencies, cruelties and randomness of our world. Maybe a good dose of D&D is what these people need instead. Or, then again, it could be that this entire blogpost is just an attempt to make up for a geekily misspent youth...
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*You can pray to Odin to resurrect your cleric. Our Dungeon Master used to give Odin a 1/100 chance of answering your prayer...

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Elysium

Neill Blomkamp's films are beginning to fall into a predictable pattern: 1. A fantastic opening act full of exciting philosophical and visual ideas. 2. A second act where the grinding story wheels begin to wear you down and stretch your patience. 3. A third act that's just as dull and tedious as every other Hollywood action movie from the last twenty five years. Why is it that every young director gets bullied or cajoled by movie executives and script doctors into having their lead goodie and the lead baddie get into a fist fight at the very end of the film? Don't they know that everyone over the age of 15 hates these final confrontations? They are beyond tedious and yet we see them again in every James Bond or Batman movie or any other actioner. We hate them. We all hate them. Only teenage boys with testosterone and sugar and Coke giving them the fist punching jitters are capable of liking these denouements. 
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Neill Blomkamp is an intelligent guy with a sharp sense of humour and an overdeveloped sense of allegory but his career in the movies is already heading down that path beat by Christopher Nolan. Now I know a lot of will think that that's a good thing but you're wrong. Christopher Nolan has become a hack. A stylish hack but a hack nonetheless. He's made two philosophically rich and intelligent films: The Prestige and Memento and a whole bunch of other hacky action films. Yeah I know a lot of you thought Inception was a smart film but it wasn't. Inception is a smart film for dummies. If Inception had been a clever film about dreams it wouldn't have been an action movie within an action movie within an action movie it would have been closer to what adults really dream about most of the time: sex. (A French  director should remake Inception as an erotic thriller within an erotic thriller within an erotic thriller.) 
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To make matters worse for Blomkamp both of his feature films so far have been hits so he's going to get surrounded by yes men and unctuous studio types who'll keep pushing him (like they pushed Nolan) to make films for bright 13 year olds who'll be able to tell their friends in the playground that District 9 was really about apartheid and Elysium was really about Obamacare. Success seems to destroy all artists in the end unless they have a very strong will. But it is possible to hold out against the man. Stewart Lee, Werner Herzog, Crispin Glover, David Lynch, and Louis CK prove that you can hit the big time in TV and the movies and still hold onto your artistic integrity. I hope for his sake that Neill Blomkamp's next film is either a total bomb or such a huge hit that he never has to worry about money again and can ignore the executives pushing him towards these bone crunchingly dull Hollywood endings. 

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Kill List

the two hit men about to get way out of their depth...
one of the few non spoiler pictures of Kill List available on the internet

If you're a sensitive soul like me you should not watch Ben Wheatley's Kill List. I watched it last night and I was pretty darn disturbed. So disturbed that I stayed up for hours watching the utter head pounding banality of the live stream of Mike and Mike on ESPN2 in an attempt to get some of the images out of my mind. It didn't work. Even when they replaced one of the Mikes with a different guy who wasn't called Mike and Alex Rodriguez's insane attorney called in to the show with a crackpot conspiracy theory about the New York Yankees. And speaking of conspiracies... 
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As I've explained here before I have an empathy problem which prevents me from liking horror films. I wasn't prepared for Kill List's third act because I thought that the movie was going to be a conventional thriller about hit men. It isn't. About two thirds of the way in it goes in an entirely different direction. The acting is great, it's beautifully shot and if I were giving out stars I'd probably give it four and a half out of five but I don't really know who to recommend Kill List to. Horror film fans will probably find it too tame whereas thriller fans might not quite buy into the denouement and the scenes leading up to the denouement. I don't want to tell you any plot spoilers because surprise is a key element here but it's defintely got a sort of a (I'm going to put the following sentence in white text on a white background that you can only read if you deliberately highlight it) Pulp Fiction meets The Wicker Man vibe. Ok? 
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Neil Maskell was a fantastic leading man and it was really nice to see Michael Smiley, the actor who played "Tyres" in Spaced, giving a brilliant, low-key, brooding performance but I hope he doesn't mind if I prefer to think of him in Spaced and never try to think of anything in this film ever again. 

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"There might be blood on the paws of that dog, but it's smug complacency that killed Ian": The Comedic Brilliance of Sightseers

I don't really keep up with the latest trends in cinema so I hadn't heard about Ben Wheatley until a month ago when I began to read reviews of his latest film, A Field In England, which apparently divided the British critics into those who hated it and those who thought it was merely a disappointment. I haven't seen A Field In England but the trailer looks fantastic. On Friday night Ben Wheatley's second feature film (or perhaps third, Wikipedia wasn't completely clear about this) Sightseers (2012) was on TV here in Melbourne and I thought it was one of the best British films I've seen in years: maybe the best British film since Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, which I've blogged and raved about several times here. 
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How to describe Sightseers? Well like all really good films its sui generis but I suppose if it fell into a genre that genre could be low-budget-black-comedy-British-road-movie. If I was pitching it to a distributor I would say that it's Thelma and Louise meets Carry On Camping meets Deliverance. Directed by Ben Wheatley it stars Alice Lowe, Eileen Davies and Steve Oram. It's the story of Chris, a ginger bearded chippy left wing Brummie who wants to show his girlfriend Tina his favourite places in England on a week long caravaning holiday. These places include a tram museum, a pencil museum and Ribblehead viaduct. If you like deadpan British humour you're in for a real treat as this is an extremely funny film. I haven't laughed this much at anything since Steve Coogan's The Trip or series 3 of The Thick Of It. It is dark and it is violent which is why it's definitely a black comedy but my God is it funny. If you're not familiar with British accents you should watch it with the close captions on because you do not want to miss a single line of this dialogue. The film's script seems to have been at least semi-improvised and how any of the actors managed to keep a straight face is beyond me. What else to say? It's beautifully shot, the soundtrack (Soft Cell and Vanilla Fudge) is perfect and the dog Poppy/Banjo is the funniest border terrier on film since There's Something About Mary. 
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Unlike most of the people in the British film industry Ben Wheatley, the director, is not some posh boy who went to private school which is why this film seems light years removed from cheesy heritage cinema fare like The King's Speech or Downton Abbey or the endless tired, recycled adaptations of Agatha Christie and the Victorian era novelists. Boarding school boys know nothing about contemporary British life which is why their films are always so staid and dull and inauthentic. It is true that heritage cinema seems to play well in America but like a Big Mac it's just a fat and sugar fix that's not really very good for any of us. Like Fish Tank, Sightseers is relevant, lively, satiric, contemporary film making at its best and I'm really excited about seeing Ben Wheatley's other stuff when it becomes available here. 

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Creep

my essay from Radio Silence, issue 02, published earlier this year...

Even White Boys Get The Blues: Radiohead’s “Creep” 

One of the late comedian Patrice O’Neal’s most watched videos on YouTube is a short radio interview he did on KITS San Francisco where he dissects the Radiohead song "Creep". He wonders about the strange power “Creep” seems to have over white men of a certain age, speculating that it digs deep into the confusion and angst of Caucasian males in America, perhaps mining some rich seam of inadequacy, helplessness, and loserdom. For O’Neal, “Creep” and the movie Fight Club are the holy grails of contemporary American Whiteness. Black men, O’Neal says, don’t react to “Creep” or Fight Club in this strange obsessive way, but for young white males these two cultural touchstones describe perfectly what it means to be a man in an increasingly complicated, gender-neutral, multi-ethnic world.

           I first saw Radiohead play“Creep” in September 1992 at The Venue Club in Oxford on the same night that parts of the music video were shot. I wasn’t that impressed with the group, who I hadn’t heard of before and who seemed to be rather posh boarding school boys completely out of step with the times. As many of us saw it back it then, real music, authentic music, was the blue-collar stuff we were hearing from Seattle bands such as Nirvana, who had triumphantly closed the Reading Festival a couple of weeks prior. Kurt Cobain and Thom Yorke came from different planets. Cobain had been a homeless junkie who lived under a bridge in Aberdeen, Washington, whereas it seemed that the worst thing that had ever happened to Yorke was a bad experience with the bleach bottle in the hairdressing salon.

           It wasn’t until I heard “Creep” again a couple of months later on the BBC that I knew it was going to be a very meaningful song in my life. The DJ said something about it being the “radio edit,” so I went out and bought the single, closed the curtains of my university digs, and listened to it on my Grundig hi-fi. The song begins with Yorke’s whispered vocals:

When you were here before

Couldn’t look you in the eye

You’re just like an angel

Your skin makes me cry

You float like a feather

In a beautiful world

I wish I was special

You’re so fucking special

And it’s at this point that Johnny Greenwood hits us with a wall of noise from two open fret chords on his distorted electric guitar. The effect is jarring and disconcerting, no matter how many times you hear it. As you’re still recovering, Yorke’s scaldingly existential chorus cuts to the quick of all your teenage/twenty-something/middle-aged angst:

But I’m a creep

I’m a weirdo

What the hell am I doing here?

I don’t belong here

Is this a universal feeling? Almost certainly. One of Mark Twain’s best jokes was to send a telegram to a dozen of his friends that said: “Flee at once. All is discovered.” And of course, as Twain says, they did. When Steve Jobs passed away, the headline in The Onion was the apt: “Last Man in America to Know What the Fuck He Was Doing, Dies.” In 1978 Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes coined the term “imposter phenomenon” in a paper in Psychotherapy Theory, Research and Practice to describe women in graduate school or white-collar professions who felt as though they were frauds. Healthy majorities of women in every field felt this way, and subsequent studies found virtually the same feeling among American men.

            When “Creep” was released as a single in the U.S., it peaked at number two on the Alternative Modern Rock chart, and the video went into heavy rotation on MTV. The subsequent Radiohead album Pablo Honey was something of a commercial flop in both the U.S. and U.K., and Radiohead’s reputation was not cemented until their two ground-breaking mid-nineties albums The Bends and OK Computer, both of which went multi-platinum. Radiohead became famous for their intellectual, introspective sound and Yorke’s plaintive, wailing vocals.

            When I went to see Radiohead at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre in the summer of 2001, Rolling Stone was calling them “the biggest band in the world” and the NME declared they were “the world’s most important band.” Radiohead’s music was being discussed in serious newspapers and by critics in highbrow venues such as The New Yorker. One thing missing from all this was “Creep.” Somewhere around 1996, Thom Yorke grew sick of the song and so it vanished from Radiohead’s set lists. Despite the pleas from crowds, Radiohead stopped playing “Creep” completely, although occasionally Yorke would tease the audience by humming a bar or two before launching into something else. At the 2001 Red Rocks concert, Radiohead gave what was subsequently called one of their greatest gigs, but of course “Creep” was absent, and I wasn’t the only one who nudged through the traffic jam back to Denver feeling a little disappointed.  

            Yorke wrote “Creep” about a girl he used to follow around at Exeter University. He was a funny-looking kid with a skinny, asymmetric face, and the girl was unimpressed by his moody introspection. He channelled his depression into the song, which was first composed as an acoustic solo piece. The melody is not entirely original, and when it was released as a single, credit was shared with Mike Hazelwood and Al Hammond who wrote the Hollies’ song “The Air That I Breathe.” “Creep” was by no means the first song to deal with social panic, but it was perhaps the first hit since Peggy Lee’s 1969 “Is That All There Is?” to wear its existential colors on its sleeve.

            The second verse is even more wrenching than the first:

I don’t care if it hurts

I want to have control

I want a perfect body

I want a perfect soul

I want you to notice

When I’m not around

You’re so fucking special

I wish I was special

But I’m a creep

I’m a weirdo

What the hell am I doing here?

I don’t belong here

The song ends with the girl, who Yorke had been staring at and stalking throughout, running away from him in fear and disgust:

She’s running out the door

She’s running out

She runs, runs, runs…

Whatever makes you happy

Whatever you want

You’re so fucking special

I wish I was special

But I’m a creep

I’m a weirdo

What the hell am I doing here?

I don’t belong here

I don’t belong here

The genius of “Creep” is identifying this common anomie. We’ve all been to that place (the Pitts and Clooneys aside), that moment when our object of desire rejects us, often in a public and humiliating manner. We’ve all felt that the game is rigged against us and the world belongs to a club of the rich and powerful, a club we will never be permitted to join. “Creep” is a song for the kid in the corner with his hoodie up, not sporty enough to hang out with the jocks, not geeky enough to fit in with the nerds. That kid grew up and became us.

            Perhaps as Yorke won more accolades and got more praise from hangers on, he grew uncomfortable singing “Creep.” He didn’t feel like a creep anymore, and he felt like a phoney when he sang it. That changed in the late summer of 2001. My wife and I were in London when we heard that Radiohead were performing a special show for their hometown crowd at South Park in Oxford. Like thousands of ticketless others we took the train there, climbed over the inadequate temporary security fencing and watched the concert in the light English drizzle.

            It was perhaps because of this rain that during a second encore there was an equipment failure and Radiohead were unable to play the song from the album Kid A which they had rehearsed. Yorke turned to Johnnie Greenwood and asked, “Es ist kaput, yah?” Without waiting for a response, he launched into “Creep,” to the amazement and delight of the crowd.

            Steven Dalton of the NME described what happened next: “Everybody within thirty miles of Oxford sings along, soaked to the bone, bonding in the Biblical downpour that even Thom Yorke was powerless to prevent because Radiohead are not gods; but for these two hours, at least, they were godlike.” Since then the song has rotated in and out of Radiohead set lists but it is always a crowd favourite and it always will be. Solace for an alienated teenager picked on at school, solace for a middle-aged man passed over for promotion, solace for someone stood up on a date.

           African-American musical heritage is so rich that a band like Radiohead seems unnecessary for black American males. It was with wry amusement that Patrice O’Neal would watch his white friends freeze and get very quiet when “Creep” came on the radio. For comedic purposes, he pretended not to know why, but like all good observers of the human condition, he knew that there was no real mystery about it: Everyone gets quiet when they’re playing your song.

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If Scotland Secedes Should Shetland Skidaddle?

a post from last year that gets more relevant by the day
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If Scotland leaves the UK in 2014, it would make a lot of sense for the Shetland Islands to secede from Scotland. An Independent Shetland would have roughly the same population as the Faroe Islands but it would be much wealthier as most of the UK's North Sea oil reserves would lie within Shetland's territorial waters. Shetland's bonds to Scotland are tenuous. Until the fifteenth century Shetland was part of the Kingdom of Norway and the last of the Norn speakers did not die out until late in the nineteenth century. Shetland is closer to the regional Norwegian capital Bergen than it is to Edinburgh (if my estimate on Google maps is correct); Norway you'll recall is the only country in Europe which has weathered the recent financial storms with aplomb because of its vast Government Pension Fund which will have assets close to a trillion dollars by 2019. Shetland would be foolish to join Scotland which will probably have a great deal of difficulty making ends meet, like Ireland (or God save us, Northern Ireland). Independence or some sort of reunion with Norway would make much more sense culturally and especially economically. 
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And of course as Shetland goes so presumably does Orkney. And it wasn't that long ago that the entire Western Isles were part of the Kingdom of Norway either. Kintyre used to be part of the Scottish-Irish kingdom of Dalriada and why shouldn't the Gaeltacht in the north and west have its own country rather than be dominated by Scots speaking lowlanders? The UK government is already looking at the idea of declaring part of former Dalriadan land as UK sovereign base territory... It all gets rather complicated doesn't it? Look, I'm not saying that the Scots shouldn't vote for independence next year but once the secession box is open who knows what might come out of it. If the Shetlanders have any sense they'll keep all that lovely North Sea oil for themselves. A Burj Khalifa in Lerwick would look great wouldn't it? 
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But then again maybe some long term thinking would help. Nationalism is a vulgar eighteenth century phenomenon and its sinister stepchild jingoism came along in the nineteenth century just in time to wreak havoc in the twentieth. I believe that a few centuries from now nation states and nationalism will seem like a curious and utterly pointless phase in the history of mankind and all those people who died for the honour of nations will be mourned anew as victims of an ugly meme invented in post Renaissance Europe that sadly went on to infect the entire world. We'll see.

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Sinead Morrissey

Last week Belfast Lord Mayor Mairtin O'Muilleoir appointed Sinead Morrissey as the city’s first ever Poet Laureate. It was an inspired choice: Dr Morrissey is the author of five collections of poetry, she has been widely anthologized and has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize three times. Determinedly apolitical Morrissey rejects the labels ‘Unionist’ and ‘Nationalist’ as ‘exclusionary’ and devoid of nuance which is precisely the kind of nimble tight-rope walking required for a poet laureate in a divided place like Belfast. I saw Sinead Morrissey read for the first time last January during the worst of the riots caused by the removal of the Union Jack from Belfast City Hall. I was supposed to do a radio interview at the BBC but because of promised paramilitary road-blocks and demonstrations the police were advising people not to travel into the centre of Belfast at all.

I went anyway on an empty train. Belfast was a ghost town with only a few bemused tourists wondering why the shops were shuttered and the police were in full riot gear. The BBC had a skeleton staff and after my interview I went to see my old pal Dave Torrans at No Alibis (Belfast’s only mystery bookshop) who told me that he had almost no customers. He asked me if I wanted to go with him to a poetry reading where he was hoping to sell a few books. I agreed and we hiked across an eerie, evacuated cityscape with helicopters hovering over East Belfast and ominous curling pig-tails of smoke on the horizon. The poetry reading was at the Ulster Museum near Queens University and despite the road-blocks and the bomb scares the room was packed to the rafters. I shouldn’t have been that surprised - poetry is taken very seriously in Ireland and from bardic times to the present today poets have often been celebrities. Queens is the place that Philip Larkin and John Hewitt called home in the 1950’s and which, a decade and a half later, nurtured the talent of Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Tom Paulin, Derek Mahon, Edna and Michael Longley among many others.

Sinead Morrissey, born in 1972, is a representative of a new generation of poets who began writing after the first IRA ceasefire in the early 1990’s and the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Morrissey’s themes are refreshingly contemporary and seldom about the Troubles. She looks at home life and her own personal mythology where she investigates the rich literary traditions of Britain and Ireland and further afield.

When it came time for Morrissey’s turn to read that chilly Saturday in January the atmosphere in the room was electric - in the silences we could hear army helicopters and distant yelling and the boom boom of baton rounds being fired. Morrissey didn’t in fact ‘read’ any of her poems: her oeuvre was entirely memorised and her performance was in the manner of the Celtic fili or court poets. Her poems were from her new collection Parallax (which can be purchased here on amazon) and included a long, poem entitled A Matter Of Life and Death, which was partly about the Michael Powell film of the same name which had been playing on TV as she had been going into labour a few days after her grandmother had died.

When the reading was over I helped Dave Torrans sell a surprising number of Sinead Morrissey books which were grabbed up the way celebrity cookbooks or the latest Dan Brown would be grabbed in other cities. I talked to Sinead about the Michael Powell film which was one of my favourites and I walked home through Belfast’s empty streets reflecting that this was a city where light and dark are always in close proximity and where, for good and ill, history and the symbolic representation of history and the written word are treated with such respect that the flying of a flag or the reading of a book really does seem like a matter of life and death. I can’t think of anyone better to unpack and illuminate Belfast’s dualities and contradictions than its new poet laureate. And here, courtesy of the Atlanta Review, is the poem Sinead read that day:  
...

A Matter of Life and Death

Sinead Morrissey

On the aftemoon I'm going into labour so haltingly it's still easy

to bend and breathe, bend and breathe, each time the erratic clamp

sets its grip about my pelvis, then releases—

I take a nap, eat lunch, and while you pen a letter to our impending offspring

explaining who we are, what there is on offer in the house

we don't yet know we'll leave, to be handed over

on his eighteenth birthday like a key to the demesne, sit front-to-back

on an upright chair in the living-room and switch on the television.

World War II. David Niven is faltering after a bombing op

in a shot-up plane. Conservative by nature. Labour by conviction,

he quotes Sir Walter Raleigh: O give me my scallopshell of quiet,

my staff of faith to walk upon, while a terrified American radio girl

listens in. It's all fire and ravenous engine noise—he can't land

because the fuselage is damaged and he hasn't a parachute.

Then, because he'd rather fall than fry, he bales out anyway—

a blip on the screen vanishing into cloud cover. The girl hides her face

in her hands.

The baby drops a fraction of an inch and the next contraction hurts.

I know I'm at the gentlest end of an attenuated scale

of pain relief: climbing the stairs, a bath, two aspirin, tapering down as

the hours roll on (and we relocate to hospital) to gas and air, pethidine,

a needle in the spine, and go out to walk the sunny verges

of our cul-de-sac like a wind-up, fat-man toy, tottering every five minutes or so

into a bow. Nobody's home. The bins are still out on the road

after this moming's pick-up. The light is slant and filled

with running gold. Back inside, the film has switched to Technicolor

monochrome: an anachronistic afterlife in grey in which dead airmen

sign in under 'name' and 'rank', the Yanks smack gum

and swagger, isn't this swell? and a legion of otherworldly women

with hair rolled high as dunes hand out enormous plaster wings

to the just-deceased. The dead are invoiced for,

like battleships or teapots, their names on the list ticked off

as they swing through each allotted doorway clean and whole

and orderly, the incomprehensible machinery of life and death

a question of books that balance. And there's this sudden tug inside,

rigging straining taut and singing, and I cry out for the first time,

and in you come to coax and soothe as though I'm doing something—

running a marathon, climbing a mountain—instead of being forced back down

into my seat by some psychopathic schoolmarm over and over again:

stay. And I think of my granny and her forty-six hours

of agony, shifting my mother from one world to the next, and how that birth

cut short her happiness at the Raleigh bicycle factory in Nottingham

where her youth was spent in secret war work, typing up invoices.

Back in heaven, there's about as much commotion as there's been in a million

years (a slight shake of the head by the woman in charge, a sigh)

because David Niven, who should have arrived but hasn't,

landed on a beach and (how?) survived, met the American radio operator

as she cycled home after the night-shift, and fell in love. He must be sent for.

Down below, they're already looking post-coital: picnicking in civvies

on a homespun Tartan mg in a Technicolor rose garden. I'm not supposed

to show up at the hospital for hours, or not until the cervix

has done its slow, industrial cranking-wide enough to be marked

by a thumb-span, and the problem is I don't know what that means,

or how to tell how much worse the pain is going to get (answer: a lot)

and so the aftemoon grows hot and narrow and you abandon

your confessions altogether and the botched clock of paradise with seven hands

across its face ticks on the wall. I've seen it many times, said my granny,

when a new life comes into a family, an old life goes out—

as though there were checks and balances, birth weighted against death

like a tidy invoice, and a precise amount of room allotted the living.

Before we inch upstairs to the bathroom to test what sweet relief

is granted, after all, by a bath and lavender oil, I catch sight of a magical marble

escalator, the original stairway to heaven, with David Niven

captive on its steps being hauled away to the sound of a clanking bell

from his radiant girlfriend, and I imagine my granny, who died three weeks ago

on a hospital ward in Chesterfield, making room as she herself predicted,

not dumb and stricken and hollowed out with cancer

but young, glamorous, childless, free, in her 1940s shoes and sticky lipstick,

clicking about the office of new arrivals as though she owns it,

flicking open the leather-bound ledger and asking him to sign.

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Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin would have been 91 years old today (had he not died of cancer in 1985). Larkin's reputation has only grown since the 80's and especially in the last decade & now, perhaps, most critics consider Larkin to have been the finest English poet of the twentieth century. I think so too in my unschooled opinion. For me WH Auden, TS Eliot, Ted Hughes etc. aren't quite in the same league, or rather, don't seem to get to Larkin's depths. I identify with Larkin to some extent, not with the pervy, racist stuff, but certainly with the gloom. He was born in Coventry (a city I lived in for 3 years) and spent several of his most fertile years in Belfast. His novels, Jill and A Girl In Winter are tremendous fun and his Collected Letters are fascinating. His jazz criticism is also pretty good (although he was prejudiced against all the musicians who innovated post 1945). Anyway, here's maybe my favourite Larkin poem of all, Aubade, which was published in the TLS in 1977. It is a thundershower of melancholy truth that came in the middle of one of Larkin's long poetic droughts.

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

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Miami Blues

I've been meaning to read Charles Willeford for a long time and when I saw this very attractive Penguin Crime edition for only 9 bucks (one third the price of regular paperbacks in Australia) in my local bookshop I knew that I could resist no longer. I've known about Willeford's bad ass biography for ages: a decorated tank commander with George Patton's Third Army in WW2, a pulp writer, a horse trainer, a bookie, semiprofessional boxer - Willeford was a man's man who drank, smoked and wrote in the old school Hemingway way. I only didn't read him before because Quentin Tarantino kept saying that he was his favourite author and that made me prejudiced against him. Which is a bit silly and immature of me I know.
...
Anyway I got Miami Blues and unfortunately the book broke 2 of my cardinal crime writing rules almost immediately: 1. It begins with a massive coincidence that nearly destroys the novel's credibility from the get go. 2. It's got a recipe in the end pages. Coincidences and recipes. Not designed to get on my good side there. But luckily these are the only flaws in the whole shooting match. Miami Blues is a wonderful novel: quirky, fun, off centre with a clean, gorgeous prose style that could serve as a model for anyone who wants to break into crime writing. Three characters are at the book's core: Freddy Frenger Jnr: a cheerful psychopath just out of San Quentin, Hoke Moseley a lugubrious detective sergeant in the Miami Dade Police and Susan Waggoner, Freddy's dim witted accomplice girlfriend. The book takes place in and around a Miami which is populated with crooks and eccentrics: some loveable some not. It's definitely a crime novel rather than a detective caper - Hoke does virtually no detecting at all - but that's all to the good as it allows you to relax and have fun. Critic and novelist Steve Erickson puts Charles Willeford up there with Philip K Dick as a genre fiction master and on the basis of this one novel I'd be quite tempted to agree with him. For me what makes Miami Blues so good is the brisk, cheerful, economical plot, the thoroughly convincing and well rounded characters and the palpable sense of place. If you've got those 3 aspects working for you in your crime novel you're not going to go far wrong. 
...
If you are going to get the book I do recommend getting it in this lovely green collectable Penguin edition which seemingly has been designed specifically for suckers like me. (Penguin undoubtedly realizes that even though you only come in for one book you'll probably leave with half a dozen titles in this series and eventually you'll end up buying all fifty in the set just because they look so nice on your book shelf.)

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The Ned Kelly Awards

I'm really pleased to tell that you my book I Hear The Sirens In The Street has been shortlisted for Best Crime Novel at the 2013 Ned Kelly Awards. This is the Australian equivalent of the Edgars or the Daggers so it's a really big deal for me and I'm very honoured and excited. I've lived in Australia now for five years and this award nomination has really touched me and made me feel like a proper Aussie. Did I celebrate with a VB tinny in my backyard over a barbie? Well no it's too cold for a barbie here in St Kilda (4 degrees tonight) but I actually was drinking a Victoria Bitter as I got the news via twitter from the great Jon Page. VB is not normally my tipple of choice but I was watching the Ashes last night until 2.a.m. and I guess the subliminal messages finally kicked in and today I brought home an eskie full of tinnies from the aghast and disappointed beer snob bottle shop owner on Acland Street. (Its just occurred that no one in North America will understand most of that last sentence. The Ashes is a cricket match, tinnies are...oh forget it.) 
...
In case you don't know I Hear The Sirens In The Street is the second novel in my series of books about Detective Inspector Sean Duffy of the RUC. This book takes place in 1982 in Belfast and involves the DeLorean scandal, the FBI, sex, violence, black Ulster humour and some other stuff. So thank you judges! Add here's to VB, The Ashes and Ned Kelly. Win or lose at the awards I'm really excited to be shortlisted with these great Australian crime writing legends.  

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