Because You Can’t Smell Someone On Skype
This morning, walking down to begin my first 5-day-working-week since before Christmas, I listened to Liam Nolan's new radio documentary Because You Can't Smell Someone On Skype, the story of a couple who met over the internet.
I'm a pretty cynical guy, most of the time. Liam's a friend of mine, and he told me about this marriage soon after it happened in real life. I was pretty cynical about it. I'd met Ciarán, the guy in question, a few times before, and that didn't stop me being cynical, and once a few months ago I met him and Kelly, his new wife, and I thought, sure, they seem happy, for now.
But listening to them tell their own story, this morning, I was blown away. It's a brilliant 15 minutes of life-affirming radio, which I would recommend even to those of you who don't normally go in for that kind of thing, and you can download it now from the RTÉ website. Well done Liam, well done Ciarán and Kelly, and who wants a hug?
11+ /11
Compared to, say, 2010, or any month from the mid-1990s, 2011 was a little disappointing for the human race's output of new music – at least the new music I came across. That said, I have already added Songs of the Week from Gillian Welch, Wild Beasts, Low, Fleet Foxes, PJ Harvey and Elbow, and there have been plenty of albums through the year that have caught my attention, without compelling me to sit down and make up some way to blog about them.
So here's 11 more from 2011.
Home for Christmas
Songs for the Season: Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Phosphorescent, and Commander Venus.
.
Mostly, for me, and, I think, mostly, for a lot of people I know, Christmas isn't about Christ, or mass. Nor is it even about Santa Claus, or rampant consumerism.
It's about home.
But what does 'home' really mean?
Everything Its Own
I will be graduating from my MA in Creative Writing at UCD next Monday, December 5th, and later that evening we will be launching an anthology of work from the group, called Everything Its Own, at the Irish Writers Centre on Parnell Square, at 7pm.
There will be some readings (including me, reading from my story The Angler), and lots of free wine, and all are welcome, so do come along.
Romance / Cynicism
.Today, on The Fiction Desk blog, you can read me (next to a big photo of my face) go on about the thinking behind my story The Romantic (available now on all good online bookshops as part of the All These Little Worlds anthology). Go have a look, if you like – and while you're there I recommend you check out Charles Lambert's post on his own story from the same collection, which is much more interesting.
Occupying [Invisible] Cities
There’s a great article on the NYRB blog today about Occupy Wall Street, Tuesday morning’s eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park, and the chaos that followed. It’s dramatic, and it’s also kind of surreal.
Writer Michael Greenberg (presumably no relation to Mayor Michael Bloomberg) describes a scene as protesters marched back towards Zuccotti Square:
A group of students launched into a rendition of The Star Spangled Banner, to the disgust of an older protester who shouted, “Those bombs bursting in midair created this beast. The Star Spangled Banner is not our song. We will create a new song, a new anthem.” As if to clinch the argument, he added, “Wall Street was built by the Dutch to keep the Native Americans out!” Here, microscopically, were the two sides of Occupy Wall Street: those who believed they were reclaiming an American value that had been lost, and those who believed that there was nothing to reclaim, that an acceptable history did not exist and would have to be created from scratch after a revolution.
Reading this, it reminded me of one of the mythical, metaphorical cities Italo Calvino describes in his book Invisible Cities, which I just finished at lunch time today, but I couldn't remember exactly which one. I flicked back through the pages trying to find it – was it Marozia, with its swallows and rats? No... Or Eusapia, where there are two cities, one for the living, one for the dead? Not quite... I wandered back through these invisible cities, but while many were similar in one way or another to Greenberg’s interpretation of New York, they were all also very different. I got tired.
In the end, it became as if I was looking for the city of Irene, which is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes...
