Late last week I received Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Beach and hope to post a review on the main Three Monkeys site in due course. When I was reflecting on how much I like Murakami's work, I tried to remember what it was about my first encounter with his writing--reading the incredible Wind-up Bird Chronicle in 1999--that so struck me. I discovered that when I tried to rifle through my memory for what the book was actually about, I could retrieve only a few disconnected episodes--the protagonist cooking pasta while listening to opera (is that accurate?), the protagonist then sitting at the bottom of a well for days, some exchanges with a wise-cracking teenage girl, a Russian secret policeman being skinned in Manchuria, and that's about it.

The story as a whole--its direction, the state of relationships with the characters, and how it ends now remain lost in the fog. The website Complete Review reported that one of the reasons that the plotting of the book may seem somewhat opaque to Occidental readers is that the American publishers demanded an abridged translation (see here for more). You could claim that Murakami's work is peculiarly oneiric, and, like a dream, its substance dissolves almost as soon as you surface in the 'real' world. Yet I wonder if this example of literary amnesia is actually a widespread trait, shared among diverse books that apparently engulfed our attention at the time.

On the 20th anniversary of the publication in the West of Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being, author John Banville fessed up to a similar vagueness about the actual content:

'...I realised that, true to its title, the book had floated out of my mind like a hot-air balloon come adrift from its tethers. I managed to retrieve a few fragments - the naked woman in the bowler hat whom we all remember, the death of a pet dog, a lavatory seat compared to a white water lily rising out of the bathroom floor, and the fact that Nietzsche's name appears in the first line on the first page - but of the characters I retained nothing at all, not even their names.'

I can think of similar landmark books of which I retain only vestigial memories: A Hundred Years of Solitude (the ascension of the girl into heaven--classic magical realism), Gravity's Rainbow (Slothrop transformed into a Pig--an antic stolen by Salman Rushdie in Midnight's Children, although I suppose Pynchon wasn't the first creator to turn his characters into swine), or The Tin Drum (the rotting horse's head on the beach and, of course, the tin drum-dwarf combo).

Rather than being an indicator that these works are perhaps not all they're cut out to be (as Banville suggests), the inability to recall such books in great detail might actually be one of the most compelling signs of their greatness. They lodge one or two brilliant images in your mind, and then, like Banville's hot-air balloon, float away, evading boring captivity.

I have my doubts about Gravity's Rainbow, however.

It's gone too far, and somehow this exploding cult needs to be reined in. I'm talking about the way supporting football clubs, in particular those in the English Premiership, is becoming less a hobby and more a means by which people are beginning to identify themselves. The hysterical coverage of the game is one of the main propellants for this trend. For example, the recent encounter between Arsenal and Manchester United was presented as a showdown almost equal in tension to the Cuban Missile Crisis, with managers Wenger and Ferguson standing in for Kennedy and Khrushchev in this game of brinkmanship. Meanwhile the nuclear option was epitomised by that surly prima donna, Roy 'Keano' Keane, with his promises of all-out retaliation if the enemy makes a pre-emptive strike on the battlefield.

And with Sky Sports News having to pad out a 24/7 schedule with rumour and speculation, it's hardly surprising that desperate reporters became amateur Freudians, as they probed the managers' mental armature for signs of potential weakness.

All of the above could be dismissed as mere commercial hype if its culture of belligerence and language of warfare weren't seeping into the wider society. This (literally) hit home when a friend of mine, a zealous Manchester United fan, was engaged in an "altercation" with some Arsenal "supporters" after the aforementioned match. He was presumably chosen because his yelps of triumph grated on their nerves. Thankfully, it wasn't that serious--he received what might termed in the Irish vernacular as "a right box"--but the fact that punches were thrown outside a Dublin bar because of a football match in London bewilders me. First, sheer geography means that an Irish supporters' choice of team will always be somewhat arbitrary (although there are few fans of teams occupying the lower rungs of the Premiership). It's not as though these fans grew up in the shadow of the stadium, with the chants ringing through their childhood years*. Distance doesn't appear to cool their ardour, however.

Second, following the Sky 'Revolution', the major football clubs operate according to the same logic as other public companies, answerable directly to their shareholders. So the fanbase exists merely as a resource to be exploited--which makes some of the supporters' ovine worship of the corporations' expensive assets all the sadder. It also makes the rivalry between club supporters almost inexplicably beside the point--it's like, say, someone who buys their petrol from BP getting into a fight with a Vodaphone customer because the COO of the former made a disparaging remark about the latter. That's pretty much sums up the Wenger-Ferguson rivalry--a pantomime animosity that veils the financial cogs whirring behind all the talk of passion and loyalty to the club.

But the poor fans still don't seem to get it. While the upper echelons of the club executives secretly mock their cash cows (think of the Newcastle United executives caught on film sneering at the lumpenproletariat that comprise the Toon Army), the paying hordes lap up the preheated rhetoric and add their own ugly spin. For example, alongside the glossy paraphernalia and pricey kit that constitutes official merchandise, there is a grey market of fan-generated unauthorised products, the spirit of which centres not so much on love for one's club as on a simmering hostility towards its opponents. For example, a Man U fan might want to buy an anti-Scouser T-shirt with the hilarious slogan "Kill All Dippers" (obviously Man U fans, unlike their supposedly larcenous Merseyside opponents, are possessed of a righteous work ethic.) Wearing such a T-shirt, a fan can mingle with his fellow supporters (well, he wouldn't want to be in the visitors' stand) and launch into a heartwarming ditty along the lines of:

Build a bonfire
Build a bonfire
Put the Scousers on the top
Put Man City in the middle
Then burn the fucking lot"

Afterwards, wrenched from the oceanic consciousness of the baying mob, a sheepish individual might try to rationalise this absurd taunting as harmless 'banter'. I suppose in the run-up to, say, the Yugoslav civil war Bosnian Serbs engaged in similar light-hearted 'banter' about their Muslim neighbours. Before you start accusing me of 'political correctness gone mad', I'm not suggesting hate-filled terrace chants will lead to civil war in the North-West of England, but it might cause someone to get a knife in the gut at a railway station on the way home.

Liverpool manager Bill Shankley famously quipped "Football is not a matter of life and death. It's more important than that." Unfortunately the humour underpinning that quote is lost on some people. For them--God help us--it's simply a statement of fact.

*Of course supporting a club through consumer choice rather than geographic imperative is a phenomenon not just confined to Ireland. Manchester United is sometimes mocked for having a large number of fans in London. But even the nickname for this group--the so-called Cockney Reds--is not quite accurate as it fails to acknowledge the large slice of the pie accounted for by middle-class supporters.

I might have given Colm Tóibín’s novel, The Master, a bit of an uncalled-for kicking the other day, but I have to admit that his waspish criticism is very much worth reading. He seems to have a gift for showering his subjects with faint praise. Or lauding their achievements while demurring on one or two points—mildly bringing up caveats that actually make the whole enterprise seem a bit dubious. For example, reviewing Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty in the New York Review of Books, Tóibín remarks that

…the author of The Swimming-Pool Library and The Folding Star has not given up his ambitions to have an old-fashioned plotline, with the tabloid press and lovers discovered and much else. I do not wish to give this plot away; it would have been better, I think, had the author done so, to the deserving poor perhaps

In other words, the novel’s almost perfect but the plot’s an absolute shambles. Which is bit like saying the car drives like a dream although the missing steering wheel is a slight issue.

Likewise, Tóibín slides the stiletto in with a smile with his review of Christopher Hitchens’s book of selected journalism, Love, Poverty, and War in the New York Times’ Sunday Book Review. Hitchens, whose choice of enemies can be idiosyncratic (Kissinger is a war criminal, whereas Rummy and co seem to be defensible), famously has a grudge against Mother Teresa of Calcutta (or Kolkota as we must probably soon start calling the city thanks to nationalistic BJP). Tóibín neatly swots away Hitchens’ campaign with the quip: 'In Hitchens's assaults on Mother Teresa, it was apparent that the storm had merely found its teacup.'

This is good, but not quite as good as a jibe made by Christopher Ricks at the expense of TS Eliot, recounted in a profile that appeared in the Guardian Review.

…one review did prompt TS Eliot to bring in the lawyers when Ricks said Eliot's clearing Wyndham Lewis of having fascist sympathies was like the pot calling the kettle white.

On a pedantic note, in a review in Saturday’s Irish Times of ‘The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy’ by Conor O’Cleary, the following appeared: ‘…that despite its liberal reputation, the Times is sometimes a shrill for American foreign policy…’ It’s not shrill, it’s shill. These things irrationally irk me--sad, I know. But I wonder if a sub-editor on the deeply flawed New York Times would let that pass?

Koren Zailckas has written a memoir, Smashed, about her drinking experiences and her eventual renunciation of the bottle. The only surprising thing is that Zalickas penned this tale at the tender age of 23--in other words, she's somehow managed to cram the whole cycle of tentative experimentation, excess, and clear-eyed abstinence into less than a decade. Perhaps it's my stereotypically Irish reaction, but it's difficult to make your jaw drop when you hear that she sometimes got very drunk at student parties. What's next? A memoir by a supermarket shelf stacker that reveals that the job occasionally involved arranging displays of detergent boxes?

And one wonders at what point during her brief debauchery did she realise there might be a book in it?

More about the baby boozehound's exploits at Salon.

Many of you might have come across the remarkable 2.5 gigapixel photo (see here) created by the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research that allows you to zoom right up to the modern office and retail parks that hedge the historic core of Delft. Now, according to an article from Wired, a former Cold War researcher is working on 4 gigapixel pics. Several of the images--taken using Kodak film rather than with a digital camera--are available at the Gigapxl Project's website, and the resolution is uncanny. For example, if you look at the first, panoramic image of the Balboa Reflecting Pool, try finding the ant-sized figures at the left. Then scroll down and see how much detail of the two people has been captured.

Let's hope they were supposed to be together that day.

From Friday's Breaking News section of Ireland.com

16:26 Plans to shoot Lassie in Ireland announced

Friday's Irish Times's article on Irish bloggers (which inexplicably failed to namecheck yours truly) took the community to task for focusing on international matters--frequently US foreign policy--at the expense of native issues. (See Gavin's Blog for extensive extracts from the piece).

I sometimes do feel a tad guilty for failing to address the burning issues at home, but when my fingers hover over the keyboard to churn out some metacommentary on, say, Kevin "Bastard" Myers, my will to live starts to drain away.

The failure of Irish bloggers to address one of the main turbines of news--politics--might be because if you're not part of one of the dynasties that populate the Dáil, the Irish parliamentary system often seems little more than a glorified county council. Thanks to the clientist system fostered by the high ratio of representatives to the electorate and multiseat constituencies, the average TD is more concerned about getting, say, a new road into (or keeping an incineration plant out of) her or his constituency than implementing any particular ideological principle. Of course, all politics is local, but to chronicle all the strings pulled by our politicians and public figures (check out this sweet deal, for example) could require a pettiness equal to the puppeteers'.

In contrast, the reasons for the interest in the actions of US politicians is obvious. Their decisions have global ramifications. To illustrate the gulf between the two political arenas, let's briefly remind ourselves of why two politicians, one American, the other Irish, should have resigned on at least two occasions. Donald Rumsfeld should have gone when it became clear that, despite warnings from the military, he had not allocated enough troops to control post-Saddam Iraq. And following the revelations of torture in Iraq, Rumsfeld's departure would have signalled that the Bush Administration acknowledged the seriousness of what had happened. (Rumsfeld claimed that he offered to resign twice--but this candour should be taken with a pinch of salt.)

Now we have our own answer to Rummy--the whey-faced Martin Cullen*. Anyone with a sense of shame would have walked after blowing over €50 million on a cockeyed electronic voting system. (It was particularly galling to hear Cullen label those who questioned the system's security as troublemakers). But not only did Cullen stay, but Taoiseach Bertie** actually promoted him for his incompetence. Now Cullen is facing a raft of investigations after he appointed a campaign worker, Monica Leech (with whom he also went to a Malaysian resort at taxpayers' expense), as a PR consultant. She was also far less experienced and more expensive than other bidders for the contract. After one report cleared Cullen, his leader stated that his minister had done nothing wrong and then went on to say that he would ensure that no minister could do anything like it again. An ambivalent signal to say the least. Yet Cullen still fails to do the honourable thing.

Rumsfeld and Cullen. The difference between the effects of their mistakes is the difference between tragedy and farce. Which case would you bother to write about? And which would merely make you raise your eyes to heaven?

*You might think contrasting a Minister for Transport with a Defense Secretary is a case of comparing apples with oranges. But if we dragged the Irish Minister of Defence, 'Corporal' Willie O'Dea, we would hardly add gravity to this assessment.

**Whenever my compatriots band on about the US leader's mangling of the language, the words "stones", "glasshouses", and "throw" come to mind.

More depressing news from the sometimes shameless realm of Irish public life: RTE has just reported that "The Standards in Public Office Commission has decided not to investigate the awarding of contracts by Minister Martin Cullen to PR consultant Monica Leech."

I wonder just how ethically dubious a Minister's actions have to be for this toothless quango to bother investigating them? (See below for my diatribe on the Leech issue). Anybody with a functioning brain stem recognises that the appointment of Monica Leech as Cullen's PR stinks to high heaven.

I also note that one of the Commission's members is Emily O'Reilly, who received plenty of plaudits from bien pensant columnists for her self-promoting lecture on declining moral values in Ireland (see my previous entry on my take on her lecture). How she can continue to occupy the moral high ground (where she seems so comfortable) while giving someone like Cullen a pass is beyond me. But as with Cullen, I'm sure she'll have no problems staying on.

I've been meaning to post this for a number of days but the humdrum business of looking for a new job occasionally gets in the way of the far more important task of blogging.

A friend of mine, Joe Skelly, a reservist, is currently stationed in the Civil-Military Operations Center, Baquba, Iraq. As anybody who has even cursorily followed events in that country will know, Baquba, while not quite Falluja or Mosul, is far from a soft posting. Well, Joe has written an article that appeared in last Sunday's Independent. The main thrust of Joe's argument is that recent elections in Iraq, signalling the emergence of a democratic sovereign nation, has parallels with Ireland's own struggle in the early 20th century. Although it's forcefully put, I can't accept this premise. The crucial difference (it seems to me) is that whereas the fight for independence in Ireland was spearheaded by home-grown leaders, "democracy" in Iraq is being imposed by outside forces. This seems to be paradox that is stretching the credibility of the American project in Iraq: can you both override a country's sovereignty while simultaneously establishing it as an independent democracy?

Regardless of what I think of Joe's stance (in fact, we cordially disagree on just about every political matter), I'm compelled to admire the fact that he's willing to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. He's the polar opposite to the "chicken hawks" in Washington who waffle about making sacrifices for freedom while pulling strings to ensure that they never had to hunker down in a foxhole* If Iraq does somehow emerge from the dark reign of Saddam and the turmoil that has followed his fall with something approaching a functioning civil society, it will be due to the actions of people such as Joe.

But it's possible that now that the elections have been deemed a success, the Bush Administration is starting to lose interest in hanging around for the long haul. Social Security and Iran now seem to be the flavour of the month in Washington. It's not that surprising. Anybody hear much recently about that place...whatsitcalled...Afghanistan?

*I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."--Dick Cheney, to the Washington Post, via Slate.

Headline from the RTE website:

Bono included on Nobel Prize list?

I suppose that the Northern Bank robbery and the subsequent investigation into money laundering has become such a major crisis for Sinn Féin for three reasons. First, and probably least important, was the sheer size of the haul. That was guaranteed to generate headlines. Second, now that the armed struggle is over/suspended, the traditional rationale for armed robbery--given the state of undeclared war, "raids" were considered a legitimate way of funding operations--has evaporated. Third, and perhaps most significant, is that now that Sinn Féin is no longer a negligible force in the Republic's politics, people in the South are actually waking up to the dubious characters and actions behind such shiny-happy representatives as recently elected MEP Mary-Lou McDonald. (On the other hand, the five "26 County TDs" (as described by the SF website) strike me as a rather truculent bunch.)

The partition mentality is far from a Unionist trait. While it might have been OK for the elected representatives in the North to have alleged connections to bank robbers and kneecappers, moral concern in the South only seems to have bubbled up as SF began making inroads in traditional party fiefdoms. The belief among our political class that what's good enough for the North doesn't quite make the grade for the South was implicitly expressed on today's Morning Ireland. In an interview, the leader of Fine Gael, Enda "Inda" Kenny--Bertie Ahern's greatest asset--stated:

"This is no longer just a Northern story. The people of Ireland are now talking about this."

Dear old Jeffrey Donaldson MP couldn't have made the distinction between the North and Ireland any clearer.

I hope to add a lenghthyish post later on this week--I've just finished Emmanuel Todd's After the Empire, which I found interesting and infuriating in equal measure. I'll explain why in due course--let's say Thursday?

But I'm currently writing up a few reviews for the main site, which should also appear this week.

Well, after I put the boot into Enda Kenny on Friday, the guy goes and proves himself to be a regular hero, pulling a woman from a minibus just before the vehicle rolled down an embankment. And he declines to make a big deal about it. See here for the story.

The new issue of ThreeMonkeysOnline is available just a click away. Plenty of substantial pieces, including interviews with Jim Crace, author of titles such as Quarantine, Being Dead and Six; Asne Seierstad, author of The Bookseller of Kabul and A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal; and Andrew Loog Oldham, the music svengali who "managed" the Rolling Stones when they were still a great band.

For what it's worth I've chipped in reviews of Haruki Murakami's new novel, Kafka on the Shore, and the film Kinsey. For those with ADD, my grades would be as follows:

Kafka on the Shore(C-) (Disappointing--read The Wind-up Bird Chronicle if you've never encountered this writer before.)

Kinsey (A). (It's about sex and scientific research, both presented intelligently. A film proudly out of step with its times.)

All the above is free--what have you done to deserve such bounties?

PS. Still working on my discussion/rant on Todd's After the Empire. It will, I assure you, appear soon. Control your impatience!