To all those countless readers confronted with a blank page when trying to access the blog over the past few days, I offer apologies with all the sincerity of an Irish Rail station announcer. "Server issues" is the catch-all excuse this time. Posting will resume as normal this week.

Meanwhile, to cheer up Irish-based readers this crisp February morning, the Irish Independent offers us this feel-good update, this amusing little tale, and this heartwarming story.

An LA Times article about bookshops in San Francisco being driven out of business by climbing rents and online competition got me to thinking about the state of the bookshop trade in my hometown, Dublin.

Despite all the touristic guff about this being a writers' town, the situation isn't particularly good. It's not that bookshops are going out of business (although some likable dingy second-hand stores (remember Dandelion Books, anyone?) have disappeared). It's just that the ones that do get by don't seem to take their core business very seriously.

This struck home the other week, when I visited the Dawson Street branch of Waterstone's with a store voucher. It had been a while since my last visit, so the fact that around a third of store is now a café was new to me.

With a reported markup of 7,000 percent on the transformation of coffee bean to artistically presented latte, it's clearly far more lucrative to flog java than books. But looking around the space that was left over for those awkward, space-consuming volumes, I began to get the impression that the bookstore was now actually an adjunct to the café rather than the other way around. 

With around a third of the display space having vanished, the range of content available must shrink. And room in the lifeboats is given over to only the newest and the most popular.

Time and again, a particular title I had in mind was not available. And what was infuriating was what was being offered instead. For example, not a single book by Thomas Bernhard was on the shelves, but in the space that could have been occupied by Concrete or Frost (newly translated by Michael Hoffman), there were several copies of bloody Captain Corelli's Mandolin, by bloody Louis de Bernières.

Waterstone's is not alone--both Eason's and Hodges Figgis on the same street have similar café "facilities" and mainstream-only selections of books.

Although city planners love the idea of bookshops, with their role of "enhancing" the urban fabric, the contemporary bibliophile usually finds them a pretty poor resource. (Anyway, the best bookshop--in terms of range, at least--in Dublin is probably the Borders out in Blanchardstown, an exurb outlet that hardly fits in with the New Urbanist vision of the compact city.) 

In the age of the so-called "Long Tail," a bricks-and-mortar establishment has to be fairly vast to satiate a consumer whose appetite has been supersized by research on the Web.  The sprawling Powell's City of Books in Portland and the five-floor Waterstone's in the old Simpsons building in London are the only two stores I can recall with the shelves to meet the more recherché of requests.

In Dublin shops, however, I end up going to the "Information Desk" almost certain that I won't be going out the door with the title I'm about to ask about.

So, if rents and the predations of e-commerce do drive out bookstores from pricey central Dublin, would I care?  Yes--for the obvious reason that browsing in the flesh is a more immediate and enjoyable experience than online searching.  Sometimes even, a fortuitous discovery can be made with a glance that could never be replicated by clicking hyperlinks.

But if trends continue, I will end up regretting the loss of little more than a handful of tarted-up cafeterias.

Ongoing server hiccups have interfered with my normally impeccable posting schedule, meaning that I'm only now getting around to commenting on a programme entitled "The Conspiracy Files," shown on BBC2 last Sunday. The show addressed the burgeoning mini-industry of 9/11 conspiracy theories, which all appear rooted in the inability to accept that 19 fundamentalist wackos could bring a superpower temporarily to its knees. It is, in a sense, more comforting to believe that the carnage was orchestrated from a command centre located in a block across from the World Trade Centre, which was subsequently demolished by a controlled explosion to hide the "evidence." It seems a government that is monstrously cynical is easier to believe in than one that is all-too-fallible.   

A resource available to the 9/11 conspiracists not available to the earlier generation of Kennedy assassination connoisseurs is, of course, the Web, which is to rumour and the cockeyed what the black rat was to the bubonic plague. In particular, one film, Loose Change, has coursed through the vectors provided by YouTube to disseminate the credos of the 9/11 conspiracy canon to a massive audience. With a lulling ambient soundtrack, some superficially plausible CGI "reconstructions", and the narrator's Savonarola-style self-belief, the documentary has the power to make a substantial part of its audience, weaned on Jerry Bruckheimer paranoid fantasies, drop their chillums with horror at the mendacity of the military-industrial complex.

It's interesting to note that much of the finger-pointing seems to revolve around what should have been the results of the attacks rather than the actual aftermath. In particular, there has been ongoing debate about the size of the hole in the Pentagon's outer wall (the so-called "E-Ring") left by the impact of American Airlines Flight 77 hitting it at an estimated 400 mph. Its relative smallness, people claim, suggest a cruise missile rather than an aircraft fuselage. But one wonders what platonic ideal of "plane-shaped hole" did the blackened gap fall short of in the febrile imaginations of the Loose Change auteurs. Perhaps, these Gen-Y filmmakers expected a perfect silhouette, like something out of Hanna-Barbera cartoons when Tom has a door slammed on him by Jerry? And can their disappointment at the paucity of plane debris be triggered by half-forgotten memories of the gate-fold sleeve of their older brother's copy of Licensed to Ill ?

Such glib pop-culture references only hint at the larger disappointments that might be fuelling the conspiracy theories around 9/11. Even in the hours following the attacks, it became a commonplace to claim that the televised images were like "something out of a movie." But the aesthetics of the blockbuster failed to carry over to the aftermath--the crash-site of United 93, the scene outside the Pentagon, even the stumps of the Twin Towers did not match the scale our imaginations had assigned to them.  They somehow lacked the Ozymandian stature we expect from the ruins of a great endeavour. And so, just as the conspiracies provide a perverse comfort by conjuring up Government in Old Testament guise--malign but omnipotent--they also reveal a kind of eschatological anxiety. The children of the movies have seen our world destroyed a hundred times--we can accept the apocalypse, even guiltily savour it, but we want the smouldering ruins to have grandeur. For example, the blackened patch of grass that constitutes the crash site of United 93, from the sky no more impressive than the charred remains of a bonfire, is an uncomfortable reminder of the totality of loss.  Simply put, after a modern catastrophe, there's not much left. This spectre of absolute erasure--which hangs over our apparently indestructible civilization--might the ghost that the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are really attempting to exorcise.

From today's Indo:

TAOISEACH Bertie Ahern said yesterday that "aggressive secularism" had no place in modern pluralist Ireland.

Mr Ahern was inaugurating a Church-State forum which he described as representing "a new and important strand in the civic and political culture of the State".
[...]
"There is a form of aggressive secularism which would have the State and state institutions ignore the importance of this religious dimension," the Taoiseach said.

"Such illiberal voices would diminish our democracy. They would deny a crucial dimension of the dignity of every person and their rights to live out their spiritual code within a framework of lawful practice, which is respectful of the dignity and rights of all citizens."

"It would be a betrayal of the best traditions of Irish Republicanism to create such an environment," he said.

But what prompted this suspiciously coherent attack on the godless? Did Ahern recently hurl Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell across the room? Maybe he got car-sick from reading Richard Dawkins's latest opus while being chauffeured to a Londis opening.

Or perhaps Paddy the Plasterer mentioned something over a few jars in Fagan's about Leo Strauss's belief in the role of religion in imposing order on the polity.

Over at The Sigla Blog, Sinéad Gleeson gives Sophia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette a brief but unambiguous mauling ("overblown, dull.")

Although I'm not that pushed to defend this glossy confection, I found its languorous depiction of Versailles as a sort of John Hughesesque high school mildly diverting. My indulgence might have been prompted by watching it on a drizzly Sunday afternoon (I refuse to pay late fees for Saturday's DVD rentals), a time when critical faculties are susceptible to any old tat on the box...

One, suitable ekphratic observation did drift into my near-vacant noggin while gazing at ditzy aristos reduced to ants as they floated up and down Les Cent-Marches: With a filmmaker whose visuals seem so intertwined with, even subservient to, their soundtrack, a neat (glib?) way of pin-pointing the nebulous sense of dissatisfaction Coppola's films engender is to compare Marie-Antoinette with a pop song missing its chorus. You wait for the whole thing to catch fire. In vain.