Monthly Archive for September, 2009

New magazine throws giant party Oct 1 at the Bernard Shaw


published in From the Editor
on September 30, 2009
.

Oh Francis Bash

Oh, Francis, a magazine about fashion, art, music, is throwing a party tomorrow night at the Bernard Shaw. The magazine looks good, and has variety. I can get the first issue, printed in January 2009, online, and I enjoyed everything but the poetry.

Here’s how they describe themselves:

Oh, Francis is a cultural orgy of fashion, art, music and fun. With the magazine we aim to inspire, rather than cast judgment. We won’t tell you what’s hot and what’s not. We’d much rather you made up your own mind. Along with the written word Oh, Francis is bursting with art, photography, fashion, food and illustration. We provide a platform for young and budding artists, creators and writers, showing off all the stuff that doesn’t get enough showing off of at all at all.

You should go to parties of magazines that throw words around like orgy, in case one breaks out.

Here is what they did for the Fringe Festival, which is commendable and sounds like a lot of work for what is presumably a pretty small staff: they produced a magazine every day for twelve days.

You can buy copies online or here:

Dublin:
Road Records, Fade Street
Circus, Powerscourt Townhouse
Winding Stair, Ormond Quay

Cork:
Plugd Records, Washington Street

Anyway, we’re invited to their party – the Oh! Fringe Wrap Party. I cannot attend. But they’re looking for contributors, and we’re looking for contributors.

Speaking of, if anybody from Oh Francis reads this, you’re invited to our party on the 16th.

The Banner Competition now has a €500 prize attached to it


published in From the Editor
on September 28, 2009
.

Now you can win 500 euro

About a week ago, I decided to add a cash prize of €500 to the Some Blind Alleys Banner Competition (and move the deadline to November 10). This came after a discussion with a few people who said they knew designers who thought the work seemed like fun, but were too busy to work for nothing.

Also – and more importantly – a friend mentioned that to ask designers to contribute work for nothing – even in a contest that gave winners exposure on the site – could be seen as wanting “free branding.”

Initially there were two reasons I did not include a cash prize. The first is that, after the writing competition, I’ll be broke. I’m not poor-mouthing; a lot of people are broke. And the contest money is not mine anyway – it’s the last of the money dozens of people generously donated many months ago. So I guess I am already broke.

It turns out that money spent on giving back to writers goes much further than investment in site redesign – and a redesign had been my original plan. People seem to like the layout of Some Blind Alleys, which is Lo-Fi and easy to read, and a redesign would have been a waste of money, since SBA has evolved and expanded every month.

And the second reason is that I thought putting the name of the banner artist and a link to her website was payment enough: this was a miscalculation. Aspiring writers work for free, because in an industry where so little money exists, exposure goes a long way. I get the feeling that, for designers, money goes further than exposure. I regret this miscalculation and hope €500 is an adequate prize for the winning banner (and buttons).

New banners bring something visually fresh to the site on a regular basis without any fancy design work – and a contest for banners involves designers and visual artists more directly in the community that is, I’m told, gradually gathering around this site. If SBA becomes a place for writing only, or for writing with the odd piece of visual art thrown in every month, it will stagnate.

Take all the lit journals in America. They represent, with a dozen or so exceptions, an unreadable literary swampland. Why? It’s the literary greenhouse effect: writing without an audience; without an awareness of death that exists beyond the flimsy bubble of congratulation and publishing.

You are going to die. Do you really want to write an 8,000-word story about an unhappy couple in the suburbs who don’t want to go to a christening? Surely if you glanced over your shoulder and saw death, you’d think of something else to say, or be so terrified that this passed for a story in your imagination in the first place that you will give up writing for a year in order to study Tolstoy.

An audience is a funny thing. The wrong audience can ruin you. An example is a poorly run MA or MFA in Creative Writing (I’m not saying there aren’t good ones or even exceptional ones; I’m talking about the bad ones – like the one I attended ten years ago). Tutors without imagination cannot inspire talented writers to learn – they can only inadvertently make them desperate to publish so that they don’t end up with the same fate.

Readings, writing groups, open-mic events, book festivals: these are not healthy audiences. A healthy audience suspects you as a fraud, or has no innate interest in you.

Put a piece of writing in a room with a hundred good visual artists (not people who hang out at Grogan’s talking about art) – who know something of urgency and death and beauty and so on – and you will get an honest opinion. In the same way that a piece of visual art, in a room full of a hundred good writers (repeat above parenthetical), will be massacred if it is shit.

I’ve gone slightly off topic, which was to officially announce that the winner of the Some Blind Alleys Banner Competition will get €500, and the five other winner will get €50. And the deadline is November 10. The Joinery is still judging. Entries should still be sent to editor [ at ] someblindalleys.com. Guidelines here.

A comic about the quest for logical certainty in mathematics


published in From the Editor
on September 27, 2009
.

There are at least three things in the universe

A fictionalized history about Bertrand Russell’s lifelong quest for certain logical truth – which was a bestseller in Greece last year – has been published. It’s a comic book.

The New York Times reviews it in a completely unhelpful way, saying nothing substantive about the book, but making it clear that the reviewer is far more knowledgeable than the author(s), and finishing with a shallow wisecrack. In other words, it is the prototypical New York Times book review.

The book, Logicomix, was written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou, and illustrated by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna.

I have not read it, but I have an interest in philosophy and particularly Bertrand Russell, who is probably the most tragic figure in the history of philosophy.

The characters make for pretty good soap opera material as well – men chasing down, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, mathematical truth.

It is true that Cantor did suffer fits of madness (the magus of infinity died in a mental asylum), as did many other figures in this story. Frege, the consummate logician, ended up a foaming anti-Semite. Kurt Gödel, who proved that no logical system could capture all of mathematics, starved himself to death out of a paranoid fear that people were poisoning his food. Russell maintained his own grip on sanity, but his fear of hereditary madness was borne out when his elder son became schizophrenic and his granddaughter, also schizophrenic, committed suicide by setting herself afire. Russell’s philosophical confidence, however, was shattered by his onetime pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein, who made him realize that he had never really understood what logic was.

That last sentence: imagine that you are the most famous person in your field – the smartest, the most respected, the bestselling, the giant, and then somebody comes along and makes you realize you are an imbecile.

New Dublin Review – Issue 36 – is out


published in From the Editor
on September 26, 2009
.

Dublin Review Issue 36

Issue 36 of the Dublin Review is out – it’s been out for a week or so, but I had to wait for the link. As usual, some good-looking nonfiction:

Adrian Frazier
“A single beautiful poison pill”
The first debate over Yeats’s most disturbing play [essay]

Selina Guinness
“The universal soldier”
Eduardo Rósza-Flores, Michael Dwyer and the mysterious killings in Bolivia [reportage]

Carol Taaffe
“Its form and buttons”
Ireland’s new blasphemy law – and its archaic constitution [essay]

Eibhear Walshe
“No abiding city”
Elizabeth Bowen at loose ends [essay]

I can’t be trusted when it comes to the Dublin Review, because I’m biased. But I liked it – and recognized it as the only literary journal in Ireland worth reading – long before I was biased. You would simply have to have no taste at all, or have a harmful obsession with bad poetry, to argue that anything on this island is comparable.

I never read the stories. And the memoir stuff I usually glance through. But the strength is the essay, and the reportage – the likes of which you can’t get anywhere else, since nobody publishes long non-fiction in print in Ireland by the writers DR can attract.

I like the fact that you find very good writers engaging with something besides themselves. Montaigne wrote about himself, but the self was never his subject. It was merely the unavoidable and flawed medium through which a subject was explored.

I am fascinated, fascinated, fascinated, that so many fiction writers exist, and so little good fiction. I am fascinated that we revere, in our literary purchases, the reproducible, the endless exercise of empty formal innovation, the pathetic man, the helpless woman. The overflow of aspiring fiction writers can only be described as the great inadvertent autobiography of our age – the pathetic rise of a self-obsessed humanity that communicates in two ways: empty jargon by day, and outbursts of hot, wet emotion by night.

The problem is more complex; I am only ranting. What I have seen, as a teacher of writing, is that there is, conscious or not, a belief that fiction is something like a holy act, that it requires the attitude and effort of an artist, not an average man on the street. That it must have sentences, and sentences are exclusive to geniuses.

Writing essays helps begin the process of eradication of this illusion. But few want to write them; too many revere themselves above all subjects. They use subjects to explore themselves.

Formal invitation to the launch


published in From the Editor
on September 25, 2009
.

See you on the 16th

To send the invitation to friends, download and forward the pdf.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (b. 1938), from “The Fountain House”


published in Plugs
on September 25, 2009
.

Ludmillia PetrushevskayaThere once lived a girl who was killed, then brought back to life. That is, her parents were told that she was dead, but they weren’t allowed to keep her body. (The family had been riding the bus together; the girl was standing up front at the time of the explosion, and her parents were sitting behind her.) The girl was just fifteen, and she was thrown backward by the blast. – Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

The Finalists: Essay


published in From the Editor
on September 25, 2009
.

Is This A Deathmatch or Just Like a Regular One?

The finalists for the essay category of the Some Blind Alleys Writing Competition have been chosen, and the essays have been mailed to Tim Robinson for judging. They are:

Gabriela Ailenei, “Reading Max Blecher”

Helen Chandler, “A month of my life and the writing of John Steinbeck”

Susan Leahy, “My obsession with endstations”

Congratulations to all the finalists, and thanks to all who entered.

Winners in all categories will be announced shortly before the launch on October 16 on the Some Blind Alleys Facebook page.

On a white-bearded man I recognised as God and a six-year-old Queen Mother

Barbara Mogerley
published in Essays
on September 24, 2009
.

On Parrots

I almost died at twenty-six. I developed psittacosis, an infectious disease caused by a bacterium called chlamydophila psittaci, otherwise known as Parrot Fever. Psittacosis is a term applied to any infection that is spread by birds. Humans contract it, not only from parrots, but through nasal discharge from pigeons, sparrows, ducks, hens and gulls. A bird can carry the disease for years and remain healthy, despite infecting others. Psittacosis is highly contagious. A nurse later told me I could have wiped out the whole of Edinburgh. I should have been isolated in the Infectious Disease Unit in Edinburgh Infirmary for the duration of my illness, but I was never admitted to hospital.

Thankfully, I was too ill to leave my cottage, except to visit my doctor. I became so ill, due to delayed diagnosis, a specialist in the Infectious Diseases Unit in Edinburgh told me I was lucky to have survived. He estimated I’d had a one in three chance of survival. I could have told him that; at one stage I felt so ill I wanted to die. I wasn’t scared. I didn’t think beyond that moment. I had no feelings at all.

Continue reading ‘On a white-bearded man I recognised as God and a six-year-old Queen Mother’

You see? You see? He’s not a machine, he’s a man! He’s a man!


published in From the Editor
on September 24, 2009
.

He's a man! He's a man!

While Some Blind Alleys has been busy shortlisting entrants for its writing competition, Some Blind Alleys got shortlisted itself. The Irish Web Awards 2009 has shortlisted us in two categories:

Best Online Publication

&

Best Arts Website

Shortlistees in Best Online Publication include: The Irish Times. As a result, I am now hiring 49 people as full-time staff at Some Blind Alleys. Mostly the work will involve long breakfasts at cafes around the city, and long boozy lunches. And we’ll walk around on our mobile phones demanding that reports be on our desk by no later than five minutes ago.

In the other category, Best Arts Website, I think a few shortlistees had their sites designed by Lightbox. My site was designed by entering the following phrase into Google: “Wordpress plugins why won’t they fucking work?”

Despite the impossible odds, it’s gratifying to get this far. And it’s the content – obviously – that is attracting traffic, and not the special effects – so all contributors are deeply thanked, and urged to keep sending, etc.

Dublin Culture Night is to culture as Christmas is to peace on earth


published in From the Editor
on September 24, 2009
.

Check out my awesome poem

Culture Night is tomorrow. I’m suspicious. Part of the reason is the growing number of organisations that have parasitically attached themselves to it as a publicity scam. If you are not on the programme, you are not part of Culture Night. Another reason is that some of the more established organisations that are part of Culture Night are trotting out some outrageously tedious and murderously uninteresting talks, exhibits, readings, etc, simply because they feel they ought to do something.

Another reason is that the website is impenetrable, unless you already know the right places to go. Alliance Francaise looks all right, and the Hugh Lane, and the Project Arts Centre. The Lighthouse Cinema is showing some short films. The Instituto Cervantes is showing experimental music videos.