This first post to the Threemonkeysonline blog, which aims to give writers based in Ireland, Italy, and Spain a platform for their opinions, miscellaneous musings, and favourite links, is concerned with events unfolding in New York as it becomes increasingly apparent that President Bush has a good chance of staying in the White House after next January. (Honestly, if someone gave you a 100 euros tomorrow to bet on the outcome, who would you back?)

To continue the betting conceit, the usually insufferably smug Timothy Garton Ash is pretty much on the money when he remarks in The Guardian that those hoping for a Kerry victory "...feel like a punter whose life savings have been invested in a bet on a single boxer in a single bout. All we can do is cheer our lungs out from the ringside."

Unfortunately, Kerry doesn't strike me as the Rocky Balboa type.

I think the only thing that might swing the election in the Democrats favour is that Bush is such a polarising figure that even the "secret Republicans" might find it hard to cast a ballot for him. In the nineteen-eighties there were plenty of people in the US and Britain who said the right things about social justice and inequality, but once they were alone in the polling booth they guiltily put a tick beside the names of Reagan and Thatcher's MPs. They wanted someone "responsible" in charge. Yet Bush evokes such visceral dislike in those with even a vague left-of-centre viewpoint that it makes secret hypocrisy on election day less likely.

Do the words "clutching" and "straws" come to mind?

If the publicity photographs are anything to go by, Roddy Doyle has gone from looking like a trendy-"I want you kids to write about what you know"-teacher to his present incarnation as a faintly smiling Tibetan monk.

Promoting not just one, but two books: a children's story and the next novel in the "Henry Smart" trilogy: "Oh Play That Thing," Doyle is doing his usual job of dispelling any illusions British journalists might have about Ireland.

"It's a big con job," he says [in The Guardian]. "We have sold the myth of Dublin as a sexy place incredibly well; because it's a dreary little dump most of the time. Try getting a pint at one in the morning and you'll find just how raving it actually is."

I'm not sure how sexiness is tied up with getting a beer in the early hours, but the man obviously needs to venture out a little more. By one AM our binge-drinking nation is just getting its second wind.

For those that are interested, Doyle will be "in conversation" with Joseph O'Connor at a special event in Dublin's Vicar Street tomorrow [on 9 September]. It's 10 euro to get in--a bit steep considering there'll be a stack of hard copies beside the stage which members of the audience will doubtless have the �opportunity� to purchase at the end of the interview.

The other night I succumbed to one of those blank trawls of the channels that take approximately 25 minutes now that I've shelled out for NTL's digital service. In between blurred clips of Hitler barking on the History Channel* and wildlife mating/killing each other on National Geographic, I came across the usual nostalgiafest on VH1, covering the 1980s.

U2's "A Sort of Homecoming" came on. I've always affected an eyes-raised-to-heaven distaste for U2's stadium rock, with Bono on stage in Topeka, Kansas, sweating for all of humanity's sins. But I have to admit that while watching the video (footage of the band travelling through a supine Western Europe—and what a strange, exotic territory that seemed in 1984 to us Irish trying not to fall off the edge of the world), I was moved against my will by the song’s irony-free grandiosity. Through mentally gritted teeth I muttered, "This is a bloody great song."

I'm worried such epiphanies indicate the blunting of any critical faculties I might still possess, that this head-bobbing acquiescence to the music denounced in my youth--even if I disliked it more on the grounds on principal than on actual aesthetic revulsion (it's not like U2 occupy the same circle of hell reserved for, say, Phil Collins)--might be a signpost on the downhill road to middle-age.

But I know things will have gotten out of hand when I find myself dabbing my eyes during a Dido video.

*This makes me think of the cartoon in The Spectator: a couple are watching TV and the caption is "I don't know why they get so worked up having the British National Party on the programme. Hitler's on the telly every night."

Ireland's perennial entry in the Mr. Gravitas competition, John Banville, will be giving a reading at the Irish Writers' Centre tomorrow (16 September).

Although I've read, I think, four of his novels I'm somewhat on the fence about Banville (obviously I have to have read 10 novels by an author before I can come to a decision). Sure, the prose, as reviewers never cease pointing out, is well-honed, Nabokovian in its richness, etc. But it seems he lacks something pretty essential for a novelist, the ability to tell a story--or at least distract us from the lack of one. It's as if Banville is rather embarrassed by this vulgar chore, so that his essentially static, observational books are occasionally bumped along by melodramatic incidents (often criminal acts). Also his minor characters are invariably caricatures, their sweaty faces described with icy loathing.

Hmm..it seems like I'm getting off the fence. However, Banville gives very good lit crit--his reviews in the Irish Times (along with Eileen Battersby's) are always worth checking out. Here he is discussing the Joyce industry with Michael Silverblatt on KCRWM.

From yesterday's Washington Post:

"Florida neurologist Marc Swerdloff was taken aback when one of his patients with advanced dementia voted in the 2000 presidential election. The man thought it was 1942 and Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. The patient's wife revealed that she had escorted her husband into the booth.

"I said 'Did he pick?' and she said 'No, I picked for him,' " Swerdloff said. "I felt bad. She essentially voted twice" in the Florida election, which gave George W. Bush a 537-vote victory and the White House."

According to the article, Florida alone has estimated 455,000 patients with Alzheimer's, most of whom will vote in higher numbers than the general population.

BTW, in the last post I used the phrase "somewhat on the fence". This could give the impression of chronic indecision, of not even being committed enough to get on the fence. But this reminds me of whenever a Mormon or Jehovah's Witness approaches me and asks whether I believe in God, I'm always inclined to answer that I'm not even sure if I'm an agnostic.

The other day a friend of mine described a book as Rabelaisian. Taking the opportunity to be a smart-arse, I asked whether he had actually read Rabelais. He quickly assured me he had read Gargantua and Pantagruel, but was suggestively non-specific about how it ended.

It's something we rarely challenge: bandying eponymic references about, usually in an effort to pep up a bland observation. For example, how many writers who have described unwise or just plain stupid actions as "quixotic" have actually ploughed through Cervantes' "comic novel" (the nine pages I read failed to make the corners of my mouth turn upward). Can they truly understand the conceptual heft of this adjective unless they've suffered for it?

It's a major question and perhaps, like Pat Kenny's interviewing style, no one will ever find an adequate response to it.

This heightened awareness of literary etiquette prevents me from acclaiming Vanity Fair journalist James Wolcott as a modern day H.L. Mencken (because, no, I haven't read him either). Nevertheless, Wolcott's barbs should elicit a wince of recognition with anyone familiar with some of the grotesques that populate the U.S. media (The dire Ann Coulter is brilliantly dismissed as "the Toxic Toothpick").

Now you can read Wolcott for free, without subsidising VF's Dominic-Dunne's-murders-of-the-rich-and-famous crapola that is, I guess, 90% read in the waiting rooms of dental hygienists.

The ManBooker shortlist is unusual this year, at least for me, in that there’s more than one title listed that I could be bothered to buy.

Actually, I’ve already consumed one of those that made the cut, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, which was praised to the sky when it was released earlier this year. Although I enjoyed this arch piece of work, I was never under the impression, as some critics apparently were, that it was a masterpiece.

Nick Guest, a diffident young gay man from the provinces arrived in the metropolis, is, I assume, meant to be admired for his aesthetic sensitivity, but his appreciation of the finer things in life, from Chopin nocturnes to the accommodating bodies of dark-skinned catering staff, seemed more like discerning connoisseurship than any drunken surrender to “beauty”. Perhaps this distancing effect arose because the novel’s characterisations didn’t quite live up to the standards of the prose. (The caricatured figure of the Tory MP, Gerald Fedden, for example, although marginally amusing, seemed more like a figure that had wandered in from an ITV sit-com than a Henry James novel.)

Another Jamesian homage, Colm Tóibín’s The Master has likewise received blanket acclaim and seems worth checking out. (Despite the fact that David Mitchell’s Calvinoesque Cloud Atlas is the bookies’ favourite, I think Tóibín could win.)

But the nominee that caught my eye was Gerard Woodward, author of I’ll Go to Bed at Noon. According to the bio, Woodward’s first novel, August, focused “on his mother’s increasing dependency on glue.”

More news if I get my hands on either of Woodward's novels.

In an attempt to create my own rickety bridge between the "Two Cultures" described by CP Snow, I occasionally try to bring my liberal arts-trained mind to grapple with science.

(I think this erratic urge was initially prompted by that thought experiment that tries to envision how you would get on if you were sent back in time a thousand years. Many people like to think they could become fabulously rich by astonishing the toothless yokels with "magical" modern inventions.

Yet if you try to specify what gadget you would actually unveil, things get a bit harder. Stuff like light bulbs are out because the engineering/electrical infrastructure doesn't exist. Even something as mundane as a bicycle would presumably require machine tools and a level of precision not available to your time-travelling self.

In my case, the problem would be compounded by ignorance of first principles. Not only am I pretty vague about the mysterious operation of electricity (electrons being pushed around, yeah?) but I'd even have a hard time putting together a bike's gearing. In other words, I'd be next to useless, with little to offer my fellow plebs except gentle advice about the need to wash a bit more and some unwelcome facts--and I'm not sure a garbled explanation of Darwinism or the Copernican System would go down well with a population not adverse to witch burning.)

The book I'm currently reading would be unlikely to win you many friends in 1000 AD. It has the hubristic title of "Consciousness Explained," and it's written by the polymathic Daniel C. Dennett. As is usual with many well-written non-fiction books, I find myself nodding in agreement at its most outlandish propositions. This is perhaps a legacy of reading too many novels--my disbelief can be suspended at the drop of a hat. It's only when I attempt to explain to someone else what (I think) Dennett means by his "Multiple Drafts model" or heterophenomelogy (which has nothing to do with straight phenomenologists) that I realise that what seemed entirely lucid on the page is no longer so transparently obvious. (Indeed, if my understanding of the latter theory is half right, there is no real difference between understanding a concept and being able to verbalise it to a third party).

Still, it's a hard not to be beguiled by a book that uses a cartoon strip to debunk Cartesian dualism. Even children sense something odd when the ectoplasmic Casper the Friendly Ghost is both able to float through walls and pick up real objects. It seems the Cartesian idea of the ethereal mind is trying to pull off the same trick: if the mind is "the ghost in the machine" of the brain then how come it's able to interact with the physical world via the electrical input fired by the five senses?

Is it just me or are the supposedly "glib" analogies usually the most illuminating?

Faced with a situation in which beheadings are being streamed over the Internet and satellite television covers the collateral damage caused by "precision" bombing, the most improbable connections between technology and terror start to make sense.

My example: last week I was working through an interesting title called "Object Thinking" by David West. West is a proponent of Extreme Programming (XP), an approach to software development that eschews the traditional structured approach in favour of "emergent design" based on such techniques as stories, test-driven coding, constant refactoring, and pair programming.

West believes that OOP (object-oriented programming) is essential to successful XP because it breaks down complex problems into components that are autonomous and structured according to the task they've been assigned. A good analogy is how the complex work of regulating traffic is achieved: traffic lights are self-contained objects (or a system of objects) that are fairly dumb and do not require knowledge of other objects in the system (cars, for example) in order for them to carry out their task effectively. They work in other words.

West also insists that the object model can be applied outside of programming, to any endeavour that requires innovative and rapid solutions--indeed, one of the key thinkers in the area is Christopher Alexander, an architect whose "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" addressed city planning.

Now on Sunday night BBC screened a docu-drama called "Dirty War," about the detonation in central London of a bomb packed with radioactive material. In one scene an anti-terrorist agent uses a whiteboard to explain to his colleague (and the audience) how al-Qaeda organizes an attack. He explains that each cell has a single task (logistics, reconnaissance, or attack) and no cell is aware of the existence of any others. This provides them with flexibility and the plan with a good chance of being implemented even if some of the cells are compromised.

All this seems like a text book implementation of West's and others' point that "distributed cooperation and communication must replace hierarchical centralized control as an organizational paradigm." Of course, that al-Qaeda have instinctually mastered such techniques (I'm not suggesting they've even heard of West or any of the books he mentioned!) only adds to the paradox of the fundamentalist terrorist group, in which cell phones, hotmail accounts, and heavenly paradise for those engaged in "martyrdom operations" can coexist.

This raises the disturbing prospect that the Left's alternative to the War on Terror--improving education and raising living standards in Islamic countries--may have the unforeseen side effects. Objectively such a programme would be a Good Thing, but might it also produce more jihadists with MBAs?