Here's an olla podrida of links to book-related articles--gleaned from many man-hours of meticulous surfing--which I thought were worth sharing:

Starting on a note of unrelenting gravitas, we have Fintan O'Toole's appreciation of John Banville's latest novel, The Sea, in Prospect. There may not be a lot of yucks in O'Toole's writing but he's still one of the best critics we have.

Also from Prospect, a magazine I've actually just come across but seems pretty good, is an article that attempts to present Christopher Hitchens as something more than a martini-addled defender of Rummy & Co. According to David Herman, "Despite his US citizenship, Christopher Hitchens should be considered the finest English critic of his generation—of the literary, not just political, type".

If one belligerent Hitchens were not enough for the world, the Guardian presented a slightly ill-tempered public "reconciliation" between brothers Peter and Christopher at the Hay Festival. One thing that struck me, in the light of C. Hitchens hissing 'You're a real thug, aren't you?' at George Galloway after their spat in Washington, was the way he reacted to a complaint from the audience:

"Female audience member: Excuse me. I'm not usually awkward at all but I'm sitting here and we're asked not to smoke. And I don't like being in a room where smoking is going on.

CH: Well you don't have to stay darling, do you? I'm working here and I'm your guest, OK? And this is what I'm like; nobody has to like it.

IK: Would you just stub that one out?

CH: No. I cleared it with the festival a long time ago. They let me do it.

FAM: We should all be allowed to smoke then.

CH: Fair enough. I wouldn't object. It might get pretty nasty though. I have a privileged position here, I'm not just one of the audience, so it would be horrible if everyone was like me. This is my last of five gigs, I've worked very hard for the festival. I'm going from here to Heathrow airport. If anyone doesn't like it they can kiss my ass."

Charming, darling...

Another indefatigable smoker, M. Houellebecq, wrote a book on H.P. Lovecraft before his novels brought him both fame and notoriety. As we await with some trepidation Houellebecq's next major work (will he live that long?), a translation of this early study has been released to fill the gap.

After reading an extract in the Guardian Review, I won't be rushing out to buy this slim volume (150 pages with the dubious supplement of an introduction by pulpmeister Stephen "I Don't Even Remember Writing the Tommyknockers " King). This might be down to Houellebecq's misanthropy as a stylistic device starting to wear thin with me or that such writing in a non-fiction context is not that enlightening. Perhaps it's simply down to the fact that I have no interest whatsoever in H.P Lovecraft. However, one passage from the extract did catch me eye:

"Few beings have ever been so impregnated, pierced to the core, by the conviction of the absolute futility of human aspiration. The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles."

So, assuming the translation is accurate, it seems he had the title for his breakthrough novel (called Atomised for some reason here but faithfully translated as The Elementary Particles in the U.S.) years before he began writing it.

There's also major question mark over whether we'll be seeing any more novels from Thomas Pynchon. He's no spring chicken. But considering that most people haven't finished Gravity's Rainbow yet that mightn't be such an issue. Bookforum has a special section on Pynchon, which features authors such as Don DeLillo, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Richard Powers respectfully discussing the influence TP has had on them. There's also a good essay from editor Gerald Howard on the story behind the publication of Gravity's Rainbow (whose working title, we are informed, was Mindless Pleasures). In particular, I enjoyed his account of rereading the book more than 30 years after its appearance. It has the tone of somebody who's ordered something adventurous from the menu and is now proclaiming, to a sceptical table, that yes, this gelatinous bean-curd stew really is delicious!

"My first reaction: Jesus, this is a tough book. The prose was gorgeous, with a density of allusion and implication and hyperalertness that almost no one writing today would even attempt, let alone pull off. If you did not pay maximum attention and, paradoxically, avoid, Keats-like, an "irritable reaching after fact," you were going to be lost. And as a fifty-four-year-old with responsibilities rather than a feckless twenty-two-year-old luftmensch, I had stuff to do that confined my reading to the 10 PM –midnight slot. I'd stumble off to bed, my brainwaves commandeered by Pynchon's insinuating narrative voice, to a night of uneasy dreams that fed off some of the most disturbing latent content modern fiction can provide. It was a strange six weeks, and I had the sense that I was leading a kind of secret life in my own Zone."

Now, doesn't the above account just make you want to race off and fish out that fat paperback with its wacky tales of coprophagia, Poisson distributions, and giant Adenoids invading London?

I'm still pondering the possible implications of a report from a group of researchers from the University of Utah (see here and here) that suggests that the high intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews may be connected to their history of persecution.

Crudely stated, the premise goes something like this: European Jews' exclusion from the ranks of the nobility and many sections of society drove them into banking, moneylending, and tax-farming--occupations that required an unusual degree of mental acumen. This incentive to intelligence, combined with genetic isolation caused by very high levels of intermarriage, created the circumstances that favoured the spread of genes that enhance intelligence. Unfortunately, according to the Utah team, the very factors that promote the growth and interconnection of brain cells are also the very symptoms that characterize the diseases to which this ethnic group are prone. (The price of intelligence, if the researchers are right, is very high. For example, Tay-Sachs disease, particularly associated with Jews from Eastern Europe affects the nerve cells of children, often rendering them blind, deaf, and unable to swallow. Source: Wikipedia)

The jury is still out on the findings. The case for the Ashkenazim being exceptional seems persuasive. As an ethnic group, their contribution to civilization is undeniable. The Economist's article is headed by a montage of Freud, Einstein, and Mahler. And according to the NYT report, "Ashkenazi Jews make up 3 percent of the American population but won 27 percent of its Nobel prizes, and account for more than half of world chess champions."

But such achievements might better be explained by social circumstances than inherited intelligence, a case of nurture rather than nature. One can't help thinking about the novels of Philip Roth, in which Jewish nebbishes compensate for their lack of sporting prowess with academic overachievement (and bedding Amazonian shikses--but maybe that's just Roth). The anomaly of "the Swede," the sporting demi-god from the narrator's childhood in Roth's American Pastoral, is an emblematic exception that half-proves the rule.

The suggestion that certain diseases might be genetic markers for intelligence is even more disputed.

And what if such claims become accepted in the scientific mainstream? From the NYT article: "It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is," said Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, noting that it argues for an inherited difference in intelligence between groups."

So, if we come to believe that a group involved in cerebral, sedentary work over the centuries is genetically predisposed to intelligence, what does it say about peoples involved in backbreaking, mind-numbing labour throughout the ages? Those of us from Ireland, whose efforts to trace their lineage would probably peter out in the obscurity of the peasantry, would really like to know....

I've just been listening to Damon Albarn on the radio (listen here) criticize the lineup at the Live8 concerts for being "Anglo-Saxon": far too white and middle-class. Of course, Albarn, who has somehow transcended the limitations of his own skin pigmentation and social-economic status, will be staging his own, far cooler event: "Flight 5056." This will involve artists playing African music in different pods of the London Eye. There's a touch of the Nathan Barleys about the whole event, but, I thought, at least it's slightly less grim than being crammed into a stadium field with 50,000 people holding lighters aloft as Coldplay* portentously unravel their latest platinum-selling dirge.

*Here's a compelling summation of why Coldplay is "the most insufferable band of the decade."

Bloodaxe Books were kind enough to send me a copy of J.H. Prynne's massive Poems, which weighs in at 590 pages and covers work spanning from 1968 up to 2004.

A fellow of Gonville & Caius (that's pronounced Keys riff-raff) College, Prynne is a somewhat controversial figure, I gather, in that vanishingly small circle of people who hold firm views on the state of contemporary poetry. For his supporters, Prynne is a unique voice, an unabashed advocate of the Modernist ethos that sees nothing wrong in making readers work before allowing them to arrive at some (usually provisional) meaning.

(Whether jumping through the hoops High Modernist art holds up is still quite as demanding in an age when you chuck esoterica from, say, The Waste Land into the Google search box and get an instant gloss is a question I will leave for a (far later) day.)

To his critics, Prynne is an arch-obscurantist, threading together almost arbitrary jargon to weave the Emperor's new clothes. The combative Don Patterson has this to say, more about Prynne's admirers than the poet himself it has to be admitted:

"we have the avant-garde so desperate for transcendence they see it everywhere: they are fatally in the grip of an adolescent sublime, where absolutely anything will blow your mind, as your mind, in its state of recrudescent virginity, is permanently desperate to be blown. The Norwich phone book or a set of log tables would serve them as well as their Prynne, in whom they seem able to detect as many shades of mindblowing confusion as Buddhists do the absolute."

You can perhaps start to make up your mind about what camp you might choose to join by reading an online presentation of "Rich in Vitamin C" with an accompanying commentary by John Kinsella. Whether Kinsella's comments help elucidate Prynne's work is open to question. I will venture my own tentative and amateur remarks within the next few weeks on the electronic pages of Three Monkeys Online. I need time with this book. Indeed, as Prynne warns his students in some occasionally hilarious advice, adopting the tones of a stern 1950s governess at dinnertime, "Collections of poems that are intricate and demanding cannot be gobbled up all at once."

From a profile of Haruki Murakami*:

"He follows a strict regimen. Going to bed around 9 p.m. - he never dreams, he said - he wakes up without an alarm clock around 4 a.m. He immediately turns on his Macintosh and writes until 11 a.m., producing every day 4,000 characters, or the equivalent of two to three pages in English."

Yes, I've also found the hours between 4 and 7 in the morning to be my most productive.

* Or Murakami Haruki as the Complete Review insists.

From the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award site:

"The winner was announced by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Councillor Michael Conaghan in City Hall, Dublin on Wednesday 15th June.

In their comments on the novel the judges said "The Known World begins with the death, at the age of 31, of Henry Townsend, a black farmer in Manchester County, the largest county in antebellum Virginia. Among the property bequeathed to his widow are 13 women, 11 men and 9 children - for Henry, once a slave, was an owner of slaves himsel...[sic]Edward P. Jones has created a richly imagined novel, in which a multitude of moral contradictions are revealed and explored.

The winner will be presented with a specially commissioned piece of Waterford Crystal and the prize money at a presentation dinner on Wednesday 15th."

By the way, that prize, which comes across in the press release as a mere bonus on top of the "specially commissioned piece of Waterford Crystal" is a pretty nifty €100,000--and because the work is in English Jones does not have to share it with a translator. Jones has already won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize with this novel, for which he received the relatively miserly amount of $10,000. However, while most half-serious readers have heard of the Pulitzer, IMPAC continues to hand out buckets of cash in semi-obscurity. But one only has to look at the award's dull-as-ditchwater website to gather that the administrators lack much in the way of media savvy.

Occasionally I use this blog as a platform to plug the efforts of the rest of my family to convert the rest of the world to the joys of StikAx system. I won't recap what this neat little gadget actually does, because a London-based animator has produced a very slick movie that will do a far better job.

Have a look at it here.

A Guardian story discusses the possibility that the tax-free status for artists might be dropped because it is being 'taken advantage of' by millionaire writers and pop-stars. Among the high-profile artists availing of the tax exemption by living (at least part of the year) in Ireland are DBC Pierre, Michel Houellebecq, Alan Warner, Elvis Costello and...

"Irvine Welsh: The Scottish author of Trainspotting lives in the fashionable Dublin suburb of Ranelagh while his partner studies at University College Dublin. He has vowed to live a more "bourgeois" and "pipe and slippers" life in Ireland."

I'm disappointed I left the 'neighbourhood' before we had a chance to meet in say, Morton's supermarket. I dream that had I stayed I could have edged up to him while he dallied over whether to indulge and go for the Venison sausages. I would have hissed something really cutting, like...er...'Maribou Stork Nightmares? You were coasting even then, no?'

By the way, in the quote above for the adjective 'fashionable' read 'massively overpriced.'

Then again, that could be applied to almost all of the capital's suburbs, fashionable or otherwise.

Then the The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection might be for you!

However if you take advantage of this Amazon deal (You save $5,327.75!), you might want to put up a few extra shelves first:

"...the 1,082 titles in the Penguin Classics Complete Library total nearly half a million pages--laid end to end they would hit the 52-mile mark. Approximately 700 pounds in weight, the titles would tower 828 feet if you stacked them atop each other--almost as tall as the Empire State Building."

Jean-Paul Sartre was born 100 years ago today. His reputation has taken a bit of a battering since his death in 1980--his wilful blindness* to the atrocities perpetrated by Stalin is perhaps the biggest black mark against him. But don't be put off by the stereotypical image of the bug-eyed monstre sacr� wreathed in cigarette smoke at a table outside Les Deux Magots. His work, or at least his fiction, really does stand up to the test of time.

The trilogy, Les Chemins de la Libert� (Roads to Freedom) definitely merits its place on anyone's 'shelf of honour.' The first novel in the sequence, The Age of Reason, is probably the most accessible. Unfolding over an eventful 24-hours, it revolves around the efforts made by Matthieu Delarue, a somewhat feckless 30-something lecturer in philosophy, to procure 4,000 francs to pay for his girlfriend's illegal abortion.

As the premise suggests, Delarue isn't a particularly pleasant character and neither are the other characters who populate Sartre's dense canvas. There's Marcelle, Delarue's passive-aggressive mistress; Daniel, a homosexual filled with self-loathing; a young student, Boris, who worships Delarue and commits petty crime to 'test' himself; Brunet, a communist who believes people are expendable to the cause; and Ivich, Boris's troubled sister who is both Matthieu's student and potential lover.

Despite the fact that all of these characters are in thrall to their diverse miseries, the novel nevertheless sweeps us up in their fates. This is partly because the novel, unfolding in that claustrophobic timeframe, imparts a sense of febrile urgency to events, as if every decision made at every moment represents a judgement on character.

Moreover, Sartre never succumbs to the glibness of amorality or nihilism. Unlike, say, Michel Houellebecq's figures, who believe (or at least pretend to believe) that morality is just another Judeo-Christian sham, Sartre's actors continually wrestle with the ethical implications of their actions, good or bad. They might be unhappy, but they are never bored (and neither is the reader). Which, I suppose, is one of the more positive consequences of Sartre's famously gloomy dictum: 'Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.'

*Unfortunately, Sartre's blindness was a literal fact for the last seven years of his life.

It seems that my vice of watching Living TV to catch CSI (not so much CSI: Miami or CSI:NY--these franchisees lack the ineffable appeal of the original Las Vegas series) is at least shared by J.G. Ballard (in his article in the Guardian Review)

In his attempt to explain, "given that there are no interesting characters, no car chases or shoot-outs, no violently stirred emotions and no dramatic action, why is the C.S.I. series so riveting?" Ballard reveals that when not chronicling the transformation of Rotary Club members into blood-smeared anarchists, he spends a fair amount of time in front of the box.

For example, he tells us that:
"Watched with the sound down, episodes of Starsky and Hutch resembled instructional films on valet parking."

and

"The identification of car and hero reached its apotheosis in the 1970s series Vegas[!], where the playboy private eye played by the affable Robert Urich..."

and
"This [CSI's] reticence contrasts favourably with the demented profligacy of The Bill."

So what explanation does Ballard offer for the programme's appeal? A typically "Ballardian" one, but, once you think about it, not wholly implausible:

"I suspect that the cadavers waiting their turn on the tables are surrogates for ourselves, the viewers. The real crime the C.S.I. team is investigating, weighing every tear, every drop of blood, every smear of semen, is the crime of being alive. I fear that we watch, entranced, because we feel an almost holy pity for ourselves and the oblivion patiently waiting for us."

The phrase "escapist entertainment" is dying on my lips.

This week my blog has been about as fresh as RTE's summer schedule. In my defense, an interview that John Banville graciously agreed to do should be appearing ASAP on the main Three Monkeys Online site.

In the meantime, I offer up links to these two interesting, meaty articles, both of which make rather startling claims. Jared Diamond, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, boldly identifies the worst mistake in human history. You'll be surprised what it is.

Meanwhile in the New York Review of Books Orlando Figes reviews Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century, which contains the following sentence: "Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish."

Oy vey!