According to her op-ed piece in the Guardian, Lionel Shriver--author of We Need To Talk About Kevin (see interview in ThreeMonkeysOnline)--lived in Belfast for 12 years. She uses this background as a platform for her views on the "stupidity of the Troubles." She makes some reasonable if not massively original points--for example, Irish people like to pontificate about U.S. problems but get snotty when outsiders respond by pointing out that Ireland, North or South, is not entirely perfect. She's also relevant when she compares the peaceful strategy of civil disobedience to gain Civil Rights in the American South with the IRA's bloody campaign waged ostensibly to gain the same rights. (I'm pretty sure, however, that when Malcolm X said "by any means necessary" he wasn't thinking of linking arms and chanting "we shall overcome.")

But where Shriver loses me is when lapses into the usual whinging Micks stereotype deployed by those hostile to the Nationalist agenda.

She writes:
"By the 1980s, Ulster Catholics had the finest public housing in Europe, and the highest number of leisure centres per capita in the UK, while working-class Protestant enclaves were still ailing."

The first statement is hard to swallow--the public housing stock in Northern Ireland is probably of a better quality than that of the Republic's (big deal), but the best in Europe? The second comment is just fatuous--if I were a proper journalist I would try to hunt down how often this pseudo statistic is trotted out in attempt to undermine the reasons for discontent in Ulster.

It's used so often it makes you ask if there was a comparison chart created in some Whitehall backroom--with one axis of the graph labelled "IRA attacks" and the other "Number of step aerobic classes in NI."

Soon after the fall of Baghdad or maybe it was around the time President Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln with the banner "Mission Accomplished" looming over the flight deck, I listened to a BBC World Service progamme on the state of the World after the Second Gulf War. Although the commentators were divided between the usual camps of pro- and anti-American, all were agreed that the United States was unchallenged in every sphere that matters--economically, financially, and even culturally.

More than two years on, with the insurgency in Iraq claiming gut-wrenching numbers of U.S. military deaths, America's position at the top of the pile now longer seems so secure. Militarily pressed, and in hock to Asian creditors, commentators are more likely to reach for historian Paul Kennedy's concept of imperial overstretch than for lofty notions of "Pax Americana."

With the United States' dominance looking a bit wobbly, the flavour of the moment is, of course, China. This is supposedly China's century, and according to the strapline of this Economist article, "Beijing, not Washington, increasingly takes the decisions that affect workers, companies, financial markets and economies everywhere."

But given China's vastness, what are the real conditions in the hinterland, behind the shiny skyscrapers sprouting in the booming coastal cities? There's a disturbing article in Newsweek (August 8 edition--can't find it online as yet) that is part of growing stream of news about rural unrest, rising crime, and environmental degradation in the interior. The Newsweek piece treats the issues of peasants being driven off the land by encroaching development and ending up in the new slums, on the periphery of the new golden cities:

"According to China's State Statistics Bureau, the nation lost 8.6 million hectares of farmland between 1986 and 2003...In 2003, the latest period with available figures, China's cropland shrank by 2 percent...Wang Chungguang, a Chinese government sociologist, estimates that 50 million farmers have lost their land to development in the past decade, a number he expects to rise to more than 100 million in the next decade."

What will be the fate of these landless peasants, funneling into China's "166 cities with populations above 1 million?"

It might not be pretty. According to scholars it could lead to "Latin Americanization": "A semi-permanent have-not class might engage in constant and economically costly low-level war with the entitled minority."

Meanwhile, the sand dunes 70 kilometers from the Chinese capital are encroaching by about 20 kilometers a year (read about it here).

Don't call it "The Chinese Century" just yet.

In keeping with my less-than-frenetic pace of blogging during the summer months (I have a life, you know), I'm just getting around to drawing your attention to an interesting piece in last Sunday's New York Times on "The Xbox Auteurs".

The article describes how a bunch of call-center employees, who also happen to be Halo fanatics, "hijacked" the game and used it to make movies--basically by not really playing the game and adding voice-overs. In so-called "machinima" the normally ruthless killing machines that roam the digitized worlds take a break from slaughtering everything in sight, preferring to bicker, complain, and bemoan the meaningless of their lives. (The article states that the exploits of these slacker grunts are particularly popular with U.S. troops in Iraq.).

But can video games become the vehicle for genuine art? Well, if the nearly 90 years since Marcel Duchamp scribbled on a urinal has taught us anything, if you call it art then it is.

Take the "work" of Brady Condon. The blurb for his "Suicide Solution" reads:

"Suicide Solution is DVD documentation collected over the last year of committing suicide in over 50 first and third person shooter games. The title is a reference to the 1981 song of the same name by Ozzy Osbourne that was blamed for the suicide of an American teenager in 1984. Through the angst ridden logic of teen existentialism, the work offers a repetitive meditation on the act of taking one's own life in a contemporary culture intertwined with interactive screen based entertainment."

See? Through the alchemy of artistic blurb-speak, the actions of bored or frustrated gamers are transformed into a "meditation."

The extract available online is a little creepy, however.

If you live in Ireland or Britain and are planning your TV viewing this evening, I recommend that rather than looking at Ricky Gervais's rather flat Extras, you catch ex-CIA Robert Baer's programme The Cult of the Suicide Bomber on Channel 4. Last week's programme lucidly explained how suicide bombing evolved during the Israeli occupation of Lebanon not as just as a product of religious fundamentalism (some Socialist groups without Islamic ties had their own cadres of suicide bombers, including women) but as the most effective strategy when engaged in asymmetric warfare. Baer himself is like a character from the pages of a Robert Stone novel: urbane, apparently fluent in Arabic, and seemingly unruffled by the hatred directed at the country he has served.

There are not a lot of laughs in Baer's programme, but then again, there's not too many in Gervais's either.

It's the 10th anniversary of that squib of a musical revolution, Britpop. The Guardian has an interview with some of the players from the time and it includes this rather precious exchange:

"The underbelly of it was all quite sinister to me, despite how it might have seemed on the outside - champagne with Tony Blair and all that," he [Graham Coxon, formerly of Blur] says. "Grim resentments and backstabbing. That was when things were getting bitter."

He thinks for a moment. "What's that thing - the line about all the great minds being destroyed? I forget the quote ... "

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness" - that one by Allen Ginsberg?

"That's it. And you did, really, in the 1990s. You saw a lot of great minds just get ... fucked."

Yeah, Britpop, it was hell...

David McWilliams is one of the best columnists working in Irish journalism (admittedly the competition isn't that intense). In today's Sunday Business Post, he examines the reasons behind the potentially worrying rise in Germany of the Linkspartei, the ramshackle populist coalition led by the former head of the East German Communists Gregor Gysi and Chancellor Schröder's former Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine. (Lafontaine's putative hard-left principles hasn't prevented him from penning a lucrative column for the right-wing tabloid Bild.)

In a short amount of space, McWilliams ties together the emergence of this organization, the tradition of anti-Americanism in Germany, the rise of China, and the impact of globalization.

Although I don't think developments are as worrying as McWilliams suggests (a possible Fourth Reich??), the argument is worth reading.

For what it's worth, I think Gerhard Schröder might just stay Chancellor after the next election. He's more personally popular than his rival Angela Merkel and he's making a comeback in the polls. The growth of the Linkspartei and the lead held by the Christian Democrats allows him to position the SPD in the middle, as the sane alternative to the bash-the-foreigners Commies and the Thatcherite policies (which aren't really) espoused by Merkel. The German electorate is said to be nervous this year--perhaps they'll give the devil they know another chance.

Private Eye magazine honours the venerable English tradition of being suspicious of anything that has a whiff of intellectualism by having a section known as "Pseuds Corner"--a ragbag of postmodern blurbs, art catalog bumf, and Sunday columnists' posturing. You used to get a tenner sterling if they printed your suggestion. I think the following would have a chance at publication. It's from an interview with the appropriately named Alessandro Porco, who has published a collection, The Jill Kelly Poems named in honor of a famous (well, famous among a certain demographic) porn "actress."

The winning snippet would be:

"PM[Interviewer]: Is it Jill Kelly as a woman, a porn actress, a representative of an ideal or an industry that you speak of in your work? Or is it simply an ode to an "anal queen", as is suggested?

AP [Porco]: Think of "Jill Kelly" less as a person and more as representative of a social space with its own native discourse, terms like "dirt-box" and "titty-bop" or phrases like "twiddle my twat" and "driving the Hershey highway" as part of its citizenry; but this exceptional space simultaneously allows for Gertrude Stein, the Renaissance, sound poetry, the practice of revisionist History, balladeering, and philology. And, in this sense, it's a much more evolved locus -- the kind of place I want to be, in fact, and the kind of place I want my readers to be, to experience, if only temporarily. (It's easy to think of "Jill Kelly" as such, especially if one keeps in mind that her name itself is linguistic construct, a false signifier, a compound product of the performer's two favourite characters from Charlie's Angels.)"

Still, you've got to at least half-admire anyone who succeeds in getting the phrases "titty-bop" and "native discourse" in the same sentence.

Link via Rake's Progress.

Cindy Sheehan, mother of the US Army Specialist killed in Iraq last year and currently camped outside President Bush's Crawford retreat demanding a face-to-face meeting. Yes, it's Christopher "The Hitch" Hitchens in Slate dismissing the woman's efforts to get "some more face-time with our chief executive."

Of course, Hitchens manages to season his hatchet job with some tangential erudition--thereby stressing the gap between his diamond-sharp ratiocination and Sheehan's sometimes unfocused accusations ("sinister piffle" in the words of CH)--and even name drops Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII's meet-up in Canossa.

While it's not unreasonable to question Sheenan's statements, it does seem slightly eerie how astutely the attack dogs have been sicced on her--as if the right-wing bloggers shared a gestalt brain à la The Midwich Cuckoos. (The Drudge Report has been particularly indefatigable in rubbishing the woman.) And just as the consciousness-raising exercise among the Support-Our-Troops bumpersticker brigade seems like an orchestrated counter-attack, there's a whiff of covering all the bases by getting Hitchens to wade in and lend a bit of "Oggsford" class to the mugging.

(Or four items I saw on the web today and decided to link to in lieu of writing something interesting.)

1. A new €3,000-a-night luxury hotel, which will replace useless trees and stuff.

2. An RTE drama whose contemporary "cred" resides in the fact that its characters don't go to mass and "spend their weekends drinking and doing e." (The six-part Pure Mule from RTE this autumn. )

3. Or, for that matter, glossy brochures that mess up basic grammar (again from the RTE schedule PDF):

"FAIR CITY
Ireland’s favourite home-produced drama continues it’s [sic] four times a week run throughout Autumn [why the cap?] with more dramatic and realistic plots effecting [sic] the daily lives of the inhabitants of Dublin’s Carraigstown."

And isn't the soap(referred to as "Fairly Shitty" in this home) already rather dramatic (i.e. implausible and not realistic) as it is? So how's it going to ratchet up the tension? With the arrival of the Cosa Nostra amongst the local crims?

4. A new novel from Bret Easton Ellis. Not really specific to Ireland, but we still don't need it...

Walter Kirn is one of those critics whose writing is usually better than the stuff he's reviewing. He shares James Wood's knack for the pithy putdown (Wood on John Updike: "It seems to be easier for John Updike to stifle a yawn than to refrain from writing a book.") but not the latter's propensity to view all contemporary literature through the lens of an unyielding aesthetic. (Wood seems to think that the novel has become alienated from its 19th-century roots, swapping a focus on character for a DeLillo-esque obsession with info. He might have a point but I don't think that novels such as Monica Ali's plodding Brick Lane, which Wood praised highly, are the way forward.)

In contrast, Kirn seems to be more amenable to whatever mutations contemporary culture might inflict on the modern novel. Perhaps this is the pragmatism of the working novelist--whatever works is OK--showing through. (Wood has also published a novel--acceptable but not outstanding, I've heard--but it seems more a diversion in the Edmund Wilson mode than the first budding of a second career.)

This doesn't mean that Kirn can't get the knife out when it's required. Take this devastating summation of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the latest novel from Jonathan Safran Foer--literature's answer to Jake Gyllenhaal (the current master of the whole sensitive man-boy shtick):

"Once they've cracked open this overstuffed fortune cookie and pondered the symmetries, allusions and truths on the tightly coiled strip of paper, it will dawn on some readers that today's neo-experimental novels are not necessarily any better suited to get inside, or around, today's realities than your average Hardy Boys mystery. The avant-garde tool kit, developed way back when to disassemble established attitudes and cut through rusty sentiments, has now become the best means, it seems, for restoring them and propping them up. No traditional story could put forward the tritenesses that Foer reshuffles, folds, cuts into strips, seals in seven separate envelopes and then, astonishingly, makes whole, causing the audience to ooh and aah over notions that used to make it groan."

Rarely has a critical shiving been performed so entertainingly.

Anyway, Kirn is a "guest blogger" (my, how this "genre" is maturing) over at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. It's interesting to see how a "real writer" still tries to maintain decorum in the geek playpen that is the Web.

Just when you thought they were gone, the novelists-from-the-eighties-who-the-critics
-couldn't-kill are back in force.
First, we had Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park, now the writer that Ellis fondly refers to as "The Jayster" is back, with "The Good Life."

Jay McInerney's first novel in more than six years deals with 'story of Luke, who is late for a breakfast meeting at the World Trade Center that Tuesday morning, as well as those of several characters first seen in Mr. McInerney's 1992 novel, "Brightness Falls."'

The entertainment quotient of McInerney's novels seems to be inversely proportional to how "deep" they try to be. His first book, "Bright Lights, Big City" didn't aspire to be The Great American novel, and, as a consequence, was extremely entertaining. By the time "Brightness Falls" arrived, McInerney was playing at being the voice of his generation, or at least that part of a generation who are famous novelists and date models. The gap between McInerney's pretensions to universality and the narrow concerns of his own demographic more often generated bathos than pathos (Can anyone outside a narrow slice of New York City's bourgeoisie actually stomach reading hundreds of pages on the marital travails of those coining it in the financial industries?)

Given this dissonance, the prospect of the Jayster tackling the monument that is the memory of 911 does not inspire confidence.

Occasionally my friends mock me. There are plenty of reasons why they do so but one among many is that I sometimes make pronouncements on a book without having gone to the bother of actually reading the thing. It's not that I haven't done some research--I might have read the opinions of quite a few critics before voicing my own. Of course, in the eyes of many, relying on critics to inform you about the value of something is actually more risible than basing your opinion on absolute ignorance.

But critics can save you time and effort.

For example, I've always thought that the novels of John Irving were pretty awful without subjecting myself to the experience of reading them. Reviews of his work have usually tipped me off that his latest breezeblock should not be approached. And on the evidence of a profile of the author on BBC4 I saw the other night, I'm not going to rush out to buy his latest 800-pager. First, there was his statement that he doesn't consider himself an artist, rather a "craftsman." This faux humility made me think of the character of Gwyn Barry (no relation) from Martin Amis's The Information. Barry, who is both talentless and a bestselling writer, goes to trouble of proving his kinship with the anonymous artisan by installing a carpentry workshop, complete with fake homemade furniture, in his west London mansion. If you're going to be ego-maniacal enough to push your writing into the public sphere (and particularly if you're as prolix as Irving), you should at least be honest and admit that what you're doing has nothing in common with building a wardrobe.

In addition, when Irving namechecks Charles Dickens as a model you know you should be suspicious. Here's a rule of thumb: Bad novelists with pretensions always claim Dickens as their hero.

But most importantly (I won't get into Irving's sweaty Papa Hemingway obsession with wrestling), there is Irving's prose style, which is, based on the extracts he read on the programme, execrable. He read from A Prayer for Owen Meany, which features the gimmick whereby the protagonist's distinctive voice is rendered by using ALL CAPS. This strikes me as the textual equivalent to running your fingernails down a blackboard. But one clanger struck my ear like the blast from an airhorn--Irving writes of Meany's grandmother describing the young boy as looking like "an embryonic fox". Faced with this phrase, which would be pounced on in a freshman creative writing class ("How many unborn foxes has the woman seen, exactly?), all you can do is cry, Meany-like, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU ON ABOUT?

OK, picking on John Irving and now Sebastian Faulks might get me accused of shooting fish in the proverbial. But I couldn't let this go. There's a profile of the popular novelist in the last Observer-- the strapline caught my attention:

"He's the Balzac of Holland Park, a 'must-read' novelist who seems happiest writing about turn-of-the-century France, women and soldiers. Now, with his latest book, he's turned his attention to madness and psychiatry. Kate Kellaway reveals why there's nothing 'straightforward' about Sebastian Faulks."

Now I know that journalism relies on dodgy comparisons to position possibly unfamiliar figures in the readers' minds. But does Faulks deserve the comparison to Balzac just because a) he writes supposedly "19th-century novels" (i.e. novels driven by a strong plot) and b) some of his books are set in France?

I recently finished a novel by Balzac, in fact the first I've read, called The Wild Ass's Skin (The dodgy title is based on a pun that makes sense in the original French). Yet even in translation, the prose seemed fluid, even cinematic--more vivid certainly than Faulks's serviceable prose. And there's nothing stolid or cosy about the plot of Balzac's novel--rather it's a fever dream in which the pretty repellent protagonist sells his soul in exchange for having his ever whim fulfilled for an ever-shrinking scrap of donkey hide.

Publishers appear to assume that once autumn arrives, people cast aside their Dan Browns and J.K.Rowlings, and endeavour to tackle some serious literature. Ireland's leading novelist, John McGahern has written "Memoir", a non-fiction account due out in September of his childhood spent in the fairly grim milieu of the Irish border county, Leitrim, during the 1940s and 50s. (To be honest, even in the supposedly upbeat 00s, Leitrim can offer a fairly melancholy aspect some days.) At the risk of committing literary blasphemy, on the basis of the three novels by McGahern I've read, I've found it difficult, despite the high standard of the writing, to relate to their themes.

Maybe it's because I'm a deracinated product of a contemporary Ireland that has ditched its heritage. Yet on the other hand, when certain themes become so familiar--the church-dominated small town, the emotionally distant father, the parched sexuality of Ireland in the 1950s--it becomes increasingly difficult to accord them the seriousness they deserve. I'm reminded of the Monty Python sketch that parodies DH Lawrence--the son of a working-class London playwright rebels against his father by going up to Yorkshire to become a miner. There is nothing more fatal to a writer's credibility than parody--I don't think DH Lawrence's reputation, nor, for that matter, Ernest Hemingway's, has yet to fully recovered from accurate parodies.

And the tropes of what still remains Ireland's best writing is acutely vulnerable to these subversions. The otherwise excellent television adaptation of McGahern's "Amongst Women," by hewing to a miserabilist atmosphere, inadvertently lurched into self-parody on occasion. And I couldn't help wondering what a comic team blessed with malevolent talent would make of the latest DruidSynge cycle, which was extensively discussed in last weekend's New York Times (in an article suggestively entitled "Nasty, Brutish, and Long").

Perhaps the plays' subject matter can still be revelatory to those outside Ireland, but many of the play's motifs (the coffin in the corner of the room, the minatory sounds of the pounding surf, and the inevitability of maternal keening for the dead fishermen) seem to (some of) us who were obliged to study and attend such works during school and beyond more like cultural checkboxes to be ticked--presented in a formal kind of Hiberno Kabuki that keeps on being staged, impervious to the audience's interest, or lack of it.

At least two of the nominees on the Booker Prize longlist were not even reviewed let alone widely available when the roster was announced. Now Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown and Zadie Smith's On Beauty are getting pre-publication press attention.

John Updike offers some mixed praise for the former in the New Yorker, chiding Rushdie for "verbal hyperactivity" while commending him for "[t]he novel's concluding pages [that] conjure up the sensations of the hunter and the hunted wonderfully well, with, uncharacteristically, understatement, the mark of authority. The climactic ending, in one more cinematic allusion, suggests the most terrifying scene in “The Silence of the Lambs.”'

And there's an extract from Smith's novel in The Daily Telegraph. It's fairly limp stuff--any passage that describes someone's face as having a "sphinx-like expression" has not been through the hands of an editor who can recognize (or who has the clout to purge) clichés.

If the publishing industry in Ireland or Britain seems to make little financial sense, the situation in France looks like a form a commercial suicide. The annual tradition of "la rentrée littéraire" will this year involve the publication in the single month of September of 663 novels, of which about a third will be foreign ones, according to Le Monde.

Most candidates for the canon will get crushed in the stampede--but one author has already become very rich, or should I say even richer, before his book has even hit the shelves. Michel Houellebecq received what is for France the startling advance of almost €1.5 million for his latest book, "The Possibility of an Island." Houellebecq, or rather his publishers, have pissed off much of the French literary establishment by (aside from making a lot of money) permitting only a select group of pro-Houellebecq critics to receive the book in advance of the official release date.*

Among those obviously belonging to the chosen few, a critic from Der Spiegel (In English, link via Arts & Letters Daily) is among the first to tell us what this highly anticipated/hyped work is about. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the favourable treatment accorded the journalist, his verdict on this tale of cloning, neo-humans, and hollow sex is positive (I think):

"His critics -- usually little more than jealous, hate-filled pursuers -- succumb to a fatal misunderstanding: Just because Houellebecq describes, with provocative flatness, a flat, self-destructive world, the result itself isn't flat and hollow. His subject is the modern trash that pervades all elements of life in a pleasure-seeking society, but that doesn't make the novel itself trash."

*He is likely to have further irked the great and the good by failing yesterday to turn up for a French television programme devoted to him. (See here).