I spotted this tram stop poster on Acland Street in St Kilda today. It's for the city of Boston and is an attempt to encourage visitors to come to Boston in the wake of the negative publicity generated by the Boston bombings and the subsequent shoot out in Cambridge and Watertown. At first glance it might seem to be a poor use of Boston taxpayers money - doing an advertising campaign for the city 10,000 miles away in Melbourne, Australia, but I think it's a smart move. Once a place gets tarred with a negative brush, especially in relation to terrorism the legacy can last for decades. Northern Ireland had only half a million overseas visitors last year whereas the Republic of Ireland had over six million overseas visitors. Five and a half million visitors to the south of Ireland chose not to travel to the North, despite the fact that the scenery is better, the people are funnier (and friendlier) and because we don't have the Euro everything is cheaper. Why didn't they come? Because they're afraid. The legacy of the Troubles has engendered a false belief that Northern Ireland is a risky place to travel to. Of course it isn't at all. A tourist is statistically many times more likely to be robbed or raped or murdered in Britain than in Northern Ireland; but none of that matters: it's all about PR which is why the city of Boston is smart to go global and go early with the idea that everything is fine. I have a lot of affection for Boston - I have family there and I've spent 15 of my last 20 summers in Massachusetts. I have subjected myself to vitriol many times by wearing a Yankees cap at Fenway, I'm with Jonathan Richman on Roslindale and I still maintain that the greatest ice cream in the world comes from White Farms in Ipswich. This situation is not without irony however. Boston is the only place in the world where I've seen collecting tins on bars for the so called "Real IRA". The horrific 1998 Omagh Bombing cured everyone in Ireland (save for a few mentally ill sociopaths) of any love for the "Real IRA" but in Boston the message that indiscriminate bombing is a moral evil hasn't quite penetrated to the darkest corners of Southie. Maybe the Marathon bombings will change that too. In any case here's hoping that the City of Boston's world wide tourism campaign works. We'll see. Tuesday, 30 July 2013
I spotted this tram stop poster on Acland Street in St Kilda today. It's for the city of Boston and is an attempt to encourage visitors to come to Boston in the wake of the negative publicity generated by the Boston bombings and the subsequent shoot out in Cambridge and Watertown. At first glance it might seem to be a poor use of Boston taxpayers money - doing an advertising campaign for the city 10,000 miles away in Melbourne, Australia, but I think it's a smart move. Once a place gets tarred with a negative brush, especially in relation to terrorism the legacy can last for decades. Northern Ireland had only half a million overseas visitors last year whereas the Republic of Ireland had over six million overseas visitors. Five and a half million visitors to the south of Ireland chose not to travel to the North, despite the fact that the scenery is better, the people are funnier (and friendlier) and because we don't have the Euro everything is cheaper. Why didn't they come? Because they're afraid. The legacy of the Troubles has engendered a false belief that Northern Ireland is a risky place to travel to. Of course it isn't at all. A tourist is statistically many times more likely to be robbed or raped or murdered in Britain than in Northern Ireland; but none of that matters: it's all about PR which is why the city of Boston is smart to go global and go early with the idea that everything is fine. I have a lot of affection for Boston - I have family there and I've spent 15 of my last 20 summers in Massachusetts. I have subjected myself to vitriol many times by wearing a Yankees cap at Fenway, I'm with Jonathan Richman on Roslindale and I still maintain that the greatest ice cream in the world comes from White Farms in Ipswich. This situation is not without irony however. Boston is the only place in the world where I've seen collecting tins on bars for the so called "Real IRA". The horrific 1998 Omagh Bombing cured everyone in Ireland (save for a few mentally ill sociopaths) of any love for the "Real IRA" but in Boston the message that indiscriminate bombing is a moral evil hasn't quite penetrated to the darkest corners of Southie. Maybe the Marathon bombings will change that too. In any case here's hoping that the City of Boston's world wide tourism campaign works. We'll see. Sunday, 28 July 2013
a post from 2011.......
The Way of the World, Nicolas Bouvier's story of his 18 month journey from Yugoslavia to India, undertaken 55 years ago with his friend Thierry in an unreliable Fiat is my book of the year so far. It was first self-published in Switzerland and has now been rereleased in a lovely edition by NYRB books complete with an introduction by the Marcel Proust of travel writing, Patrick Leigh Fermor.
...
Bouvier and Thierry had no money at all and they blagged their way to India by charming the locals, writing newspaper articles and organizing art exhibitions. No one undertakes journeys or writes travel books like these anymore. The friends went slowly and observed places and people and thought about them. In Iran they are thrown into prison and nearly killed and a contemporary book editor surely would have made Bouvier play up these events, but he was his own editor and told the story his way, underplaying the drama and concentrating more on the prose and personal reflections. The Way of the World unfolds slowly with passages of lyrical sweetness and no histrionics. Thierry and Nicolas remain friends but the latter's hatred of the former's ability to sleep in all circumstances becomes pathologically funny as the book goes on. Still, Nicolas doesn't complain about anything much until late in the book when he goes on a hilarious 3 page Jeremiad against the effrontery of the flies of Asia. Sleep also becomes a bit of an obsession. Here's a little paragraph from the Quetta section:
...
Opposite the entrance to the Station View [Hotel] a very robust beggar was stretched out in the shade of a plane tree on a folded newspaper, which he changed every morning. Despite a long career as a sleeper our neighbour was still looking for the ideal position which very few people attain in this lifetime. Depending on the temperature he tried out variants evoking in turn breastfeeding, the high jump, a pogrom and love-making. He was a courteous man when he was awake, without that gnawed prophetic air that Indian beggars so often have. There was little misery here and much of that frugality which makes life finer and lighter than ash.
Thursday, 25 July 2013
 |
| To hell with Frank Miller, I would have gone with Grace Kelly in the cart |
10. Dead Man. Jim Jarmusch's alternative western with Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer and a brilliant Crispin Glover. (Actually isn't Crispin Glover always brilliant?)
9. Meeks Cutoff. Kelly Reichardt's minimalist, feminist western starring Michelle Williams. No one saw this and its certainly not for everyone, but I think its an enchanting, hypnotic, compelling tale of a bunch of settlers lost on the Oregon trail.
8. High Noon. Carl Foreman's screenplay, Grace Kelly's close ups, the badge in the dirt, the action playing out in real time. If you don't like this film, I'm sorry, I just don't know who you are anymore.
7. The Searchers. Just about the only John Wayne film I can enjoy these days. Funny, dark, broody and beautiful. John Ford at the top of his game.
6. Paris, Texas. A guy is wandering in the desert. He has amnesia. The good news is that he was married to Nastassia Kinski. The bad news is that he tied her to a fridge and she set their trailer home on fire. His mission is to ride into town, bring mother and son together, ride out of town. Classic. BTW, "there is no safety zone."
5. Unforgiven. Clint's mission is to ride into town, kill a couple of dudes, and, er, ride out of town. It all goes to hell and then it rains. David Peoples wrote the script, Richard Harris stole the show. Gene Hackman was pretty good too.
4. Blazing Saddles. Richard Pryor was the unsung hero here and with him in it this might have been the greatest comedy of all time. Still there's the beans, the Nazis, the governor, Maddy Khan. What a flick. 1974 was some kind of Wunderjahr for Mel Brooks and then, alas, zilch.
3. For a Few Dollars More. Best of the spaghetti three. They laugh, they cry, they shoot each other's hats. . .Then the wonderful Gian Maria Volontè breaks out of jail, robs the bank at El Paso and after that it's all: laaah, laaah, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, dada, dah, dah, laaah, laaah, la, la, la, la, la, la, laaah etc.
2. The Wild Bunch. Sam Peckinpah says that this is what happens when men go down to Mexico. When I went down to Mexico I did some nice snorkeling and drank margaritas but when MEN go down there, they machine gun entire armies of baddies. In slow motion. Brilliant.
1. Blood Meridian. They havent actually made this film yet but the movie of it in my head is bloody awesome.
Tuesday, 23 July 2013
The Booker Prize longlist was announced yesterday and it was an encouraging sign that the Booker people want their prize to be taken seriously as an award for the year's best or, at the very least, the most interesting novel. Too often the Booker has gone to someone in a clique of white, posh, North London based writers who have written some dreadful old rubbish that has been reviewed favourably by their friends in the broadsheet press. The Booker for a long time became a kind of lifetime achievement award for someone who had said the right things, gone to the right parties and blurbed the right people. Or, if petty jealousies got the better of the clique, the prize was given to some random person from the Commonwealth that nobody had heard of.
...
But this year's prize is being judged by Robert Macfarlane who I respect as a writer and a man of integrity and whose range of interests is broad. Yes he's a privately educated third generation literary-type who lives in Cambridge (no surprise there) but Macfarlane is better read than most Booker judges and better travelled too. I expect he'll take his job very seriously and actually read all the books. (This doesn't always happen.) The longlist has excluded nearly all of the North London clique - much to their fury I expect - and has actively sought out writers from the Commonwealth and Ireland. Only Americans are excluded from the Booker Prize for reasons that are still obscure to me.
...
Anyway here's the list in full (below). I've read 4 of the books on there and I was happy to see that three of the authors are Irish. (Colum McCann better hope the judges don't find out that he has a US passport.)
...
...
But this year's prize is being judged by Robert Macfarlane who I respect as a writer and a man of integrity and whose range of interests is broad. Yes he's a privately educated third generation literary-type who lives in Cambridge (no surprise there) but Macfarlane is better read than most Booker judges and better travelled too. I expect he'll take his job very seriously and actually read all the books. (This doesn't always happen.) The longlist has excluded nearly all of the North London clique - much to their fury I expect - and has actively sought out writers from the Commonwealth and Ireland. Only Americans are excluded from the Booker Prize for reasons that are still obscure to me.
...
Anyway here's the list in full (below). I've read 4 of the books on there and I was happy to see that three of the authors are Irish. (Colum McCann better hope the judges don't find out that he has a US passport.)
...
Five Star Billionaire Tash Aw (Fourth Estate)
We Need New Names NoViolet Bulawayo (Chatto & Windus)
The Luminaries Eleanor Catton (Granta)
The Marrying of Chani Kaufman Eve Harris (Sandstone Press)
The Kills Richard House (Picador)
The Lowland Jhumpa Lahiri (Bloomsbury)
Unexploded Alison MacLeod ( Hamish Hamilton)
TransAtlantic Colum McCann (Bloomsbury)
Almost English Charlotte Mendelson (Mantle)
A Tale for the Time Being Ruth Ozeki (Canongate)
The Spinning Heart Donal Ryan (Doubleday Ireland)
The Testament of Mary Colm TóibÃn (Viking)
Sunday, 21 July 2013
 |
| locked and bolted from the inside... |
...
The bulk of my In The Morning I'll Be Gone is going to be taken up with a locked room mystery. I've never written a locked room mystery before but I've read several over the years and designing one has been an extremely enjoyable intellectual exercise. And rest assured that I'm not the kind of bastard who will cheat you with a supernatural solution or who won't give you enough information to solve the puzzle for yourselves. I certainly won't insult your intelligence and lie to you (the unforgivable sin of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo's locked room portion.)
...
You can read the first 6 chapters of In The Morning I'll Be Gone, here and if my publishers allow it I'll try and get the first 100 pages or so up on this blog in the next couple of months. The first 6 chapters don't quite get you into the locked room problem, they merely show you Duffy in the shit and starting to climb out again but like I say I'll try to add to the story in the next few months. You can get the first two volumes of the, ahem, award winning, Duffy series on Amazon, Audible, Book Depository or at all reputable book shops. This may be the last (Duffy) book I ever write so hopefully you'll enjoy this swansong if it is the swansong...
Saturday, 20 July 2013
As you know I can't get a review of my Sean Duffy novels in the US press for love nor money (admittedly I haven't actually tried love or money...yet) but at least all the British, Irish and Australian newspapers are reviewing me. This latest review was from last Sunday's Australian newspaper and was written by the multi-talented Graeme Blundell who you non Aussies might still recognise as Natalie Portman's father in Star Wars......
I Hear The Sirens In The Street
Adrian McKinty
Reviewed by Graeme Blundell The Australian July 14 2013
The first book in McKinty's Sean Duffy series, The Cold Cold Ground, found Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy newly promoted and posted to Carrickfergus CID in Northern Ireland in 1981 at the height of the Troubles. Now living in Melbourne, Northern Irish born McKinty took us inside the sectarian violence of the period as Duffy, a Catholic cop trusted by no one in a Protestant town, struggled with two different cases: one was Northern Ireland's first possible serial killer who was possibly preying on homosexuals and the second was the mysterious suicide of a young woman that looked a lot murder. Now in the new novel Duffy has got a man's headless body in a suitcase dumped in an abandoned factory. Army helicopters are still flying low over the lough, sirens are wailing in County Down and the distant thump thump in the background is the sound of mortars or explosions. McKinty is seriously brilliant, his flair for language matched by his remarkable feel for place, appetite for redemptive violence and gravely cool appreciation of characters who reject conformity. There are echoes of Dennis Lehane, Joseph Wambaugh, Eoin McNamee and even Raymond Chandler but McKinty is resolutely his own hard man.
Thursday, 18 July 2013
For years I've been single handedly peddling the concept that my hometown, Carrickfergus, is the centre of the universe, with admittedly, limited success. What I particularly like are the literary connections which are surprisingly rich in so small a place. Famously Louis MacNeice lived in Carrickfergus and wrote about it more than once. He brought WH Auden to the town to stay with him but what he thought is not recorded. Jonathan Swift lived in Carrickfergus (at Kilroot) where he wrote A Tale of a Tub (and possibly plotted Gulliver). Anthony Trollope lived in Whiteabbey near Carrickfergus where he wrote The Warden. William Congreve lived in Carrickfergus as a boy. Charlotte Riddel - best selling Victorian pot boiler novelist - was from Carrick. William Orr, United Irishman and poet, (with a famous poet brother) lived and was, er, hanged in Carrickfergus. Currently the best selling science fiction writer Ian McDonald lives not a million miles away from Carrick, science fiction writer David Logan lives in Carrickfergus and for his sins Carrick is the first thing Colin Bateman sees from his chateau when his butler opens the curtain windows every morning. Several episodes of Game of Thrones have been shot at Red Hall in Carrickfergus (but none yet at Carrick castle which is a bit odd as its the best preserved castle in all of Ireland!) My favourite Irish female poet, Sinead Morrissey, lives just up the road from Carrick. And speaking of poets I've just found this letter (below) from Philip Larkin to Monica Jones talking about his lonely visit to Carrick in 1950 when - who knows - he could have seen my mum and dad out for a walk around the harbour. Larkin is on fine miserable form thoughout...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
.jpg)
