Archive for the 'Column 2' Category

On the butchery of fingernails


published in Column 2
on February 9, 2010
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Fingernail

The nail on the back of my right thumb has an imperfection that I find very cool. It is a defined brown-maroon stripe running parallel to the left side of my nail. I don’t specifically remember what I did to cause it. I have a memory of biting my nail to such a degree that I was able to peel it back. I pulled the nail; it looked and felt like a wood shaving, all the way down to the cuticle. When I tore the nail away with my teeth, blood started to swell in perfect red globules. I remember endorphin-rich, comfortable pain. But I chewed my fingernails a lot when I was younger, and variants of this butchery happened more than once. There is a joy in trying to see how far you can push toward the destruction of your fingers. Today, my nail is perfect, except for this stripe, which grows fainter every year.

If you look at the surface of any of your nails, you’ll notice three distinct parts, each with their own colour. At the bottom, it is pale pink. This part is the factory. It is where blood and tissue is turned into the protective shield that is the nail. It is curved, and flexes upwards into the next part of the nail. That part is a darker pink, and with the curve of the pale part, the entire effect is that of an expanding sky with an intrusive glare of sunlight. At the top of the nail is the end, the white ridge.

I like to think of this part like a young man who leaves home. It is still connected, and will leave after a long growth period. I think everyone attaches random associations such as these to little things in their lives. I remember a carpet in my parent’s house that had a red, black and yellow floral pattern. I always used to walk on the yellow part as the red was lava. The black part was my army, holding back the lava. Every child did this. I don’t know if people stop doing this as they get older. I haven’t stopped completely, although I can’t think of another example. I want to remember all of the things I conjured when I was a child and to still have that optimism that comes from trying to avoid lava. These associations are metaphysical proofs of one’s own individuality, of knowing that noone else thinks the same way.

On my nail, my blood stripe runs through all three parts.

-Pete Harpur

Nevan Lahart, RHA Gallery 1


published in Column 2
on February 2, 2010
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Nevan Lahart’s A Lively Start to a Dead End is currently on show at the RHA Gallery 1. It is a large, wild installation that dominates the entire gallery space. He sent a non-press release to publicise the show: it contains none of the formulaic art-speak that accompanies many contemporary Irish art exhibitions. He even lists things you will not find in his exhibition: “understanding, meaning or a new lifestyle choice.”

Upon entering the gallery you are confronted by a hearse, made of refuse sacks, with a large dent in its side. The hearse sits alongside a packing-tape-and-cardboard sculpture of a headless, upturned horse; both of these are outside a large structure called the Church of Naivety.

Other things outside the church include a crazed papier-mâché-and-timber sculpture of a man/automaton rewriting a skewed version of Josef Beuys’s doctrine on a blackboard. Beside him sits a scaled-down modernist house, made of foam board and perspex – it is full of cornflakes.

To the rear corner of the gallery, a large, deformed, puss coloured, Sponge-Bob-type tumour stands, giving everyone the thumbs up. It is arresting and very amusing.

Inside the Church of Naivety, a small hut has been built. Around it are strewn things like: a crutch with a brush on the end of it, a number of empty milk cartons strung together with twine, a ream of canvases tied together. A cardboard photocopier punts out copies of ten, three, and one euro notes.

One wall of the church houses a number of Lahart’s paintings with subject matter ranging from a skip filled with coffins to a street lamp, with knowingly absurd and pithy titles like Bury Me with My Playstation and Ghandi Re-incarnated as a Streetlamp.

There is a keen knowledge of art history in this work, but it looks too much like work shown in the Palais du Tokyo in 2002 – which gives the work a jaded, dated feel, at odds with the edginess a non-press release implies.

Two walls of the church are made of massive, transparent sheets of tarpaulin, which are drawn onto with marker pen. The drawings are technically excellent. One of the drawings features Rembrandt, young and old. Another image features Mary Harney making some comment about the PPP, and Bertie Ahern performing seppuku.

One image features a collection of priests holding infants on their laps. The priests are a sinister bunch issuing cartoon-word truisms and excuses. It is a large, clunking, pseudo-political cartoon. The idea that this show is one massive snub to “the authorities” (be they authorities in art, politics, culture, et cetera) is utterly clear – too clear – and this piece extols a fashionable stance on a topic far more inherently shocking than the image itself.

It seems the only reason for its place in the church is to house a pun on the word “sincerely” – which seems self-congratulatory and suffocating.

Amid this calculated, howling gale of images and grit, there seems to be a fabricated, lone, voice of reason trying to break through. But it cannot – because it only knows how to utter the most prosaic and obvious of things.

There is no doubt as to the considerable physical rigour displayed in this work, this massive self-portrait. There are also some belly laughs to be had. As a disruption of the white cube space, physically, it works well and as a disruption to a sort of state of control, it also works well, conceptually.

However, there seems to be a sort of competent, anarchy-by-numbers feel to it all, which has the accidental effect of unsettling the viewer.

A Lively Start to a Dead End runs until February 27.

-Adrian Duncan

Five words that make your prose more poetic


published in Column 2
on February 1, 2010
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In the meadow

Whilst
Margaret picked blackberries to adorn her tresses whilst…

Amongst
The city was abandoned. Serge searched amongst…

Lest
Drink not the new wine, lest…

Save (meaning except)
There was nobody at the beach, save an old woman…

Amidst
Gertrude and Drake, walking through the meadow, paused amidst…

- Chaz Snowflake

Some sentences that remind me there is no longer any world, only fragments of a shattered universe


published in Column 2
on January 31, 2010
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Sacred and Profane Love

When I was in Vietnam last summer, I found everything very dull. My indifference made me long to go home, to a landscape I’d be emotionally connected to. An understandable desire, but a deceiving one. In truth, I have no sacred spaces, no fixed point in the outside world.

From The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade:

“A profane existence is never found in the pure state. To whatever degree he may have desacralised the world, the man who has made his choice in favour of a profane life never succeeds in completely doing away with religious behaviour. Even the most desacralised existence still preserves traces of a religious valorisation of the world.

Revelation of a sacred space makes it possible to obtain a fixed point and hence to acquire orientation in the chaos of homogeneity, to ‘found the world’ and to live in a real sense. The profane experience, on the contrary, maintains the homogeneity and hence the relativity of space. No true orientation is now possible, for the fixed point no longer enjoys a unique ontological status; it appears and disappears in accordance with the needs of the day. Properly speaking, there is no longer any world, there are only fragments of a shattered universe, an amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutral places in which man moves, governed and driven by the obligations of an existence incorporated into an industrial society.

Yet this experience of profane space still includes values that to some extent recall the nonhomogeneity peculiar to the religious experience of space. There are, for example, privileged places, qualitatively different from all others – a man’s birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in youth. Even or the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the “holy places” of this private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.”

-Gabriela Ailenei

Of Books, No. 2


published in Column 2
on January 27, 2010
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Dark earth

Literature is, for me, a way to evade awareness of death. I see reading and writing as distractions from life and death, or fortifications against the anxiety and unhappiness that accompanies conscious being. Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes from the Underground calls anxiety the disease of being too conscious. La Rochefoucauld wrote: “One can no more look steadily at death than at the sun.” Through literature, I momentarily forget my demise. I can reach out beyond myself, beyond my insignificant existence, and connect with something great – something more profound than my self-importance.

But through the act of reaching beyond myself, I also go inward, where I connect with a profound awareness of death. Boris Pasternak said: “Art has two constants, two unending concerns: it always meditates on death and thus always creates life.” Literature worth reading, often more than once, is whatever puts me in contact with the universality of death. This is literature that makes me feel alive. I die a mini-death; a death of the ego.

They say anxiety is the ego’s incapacity to accept death. As Goethe put it: “As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a poor guest on this dark earth.”

-Deirdre Kelly

Seppuku, or, The art of doing violence to oneself


published in Column 2
on January 25, 2010
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Seppuku

I recently read a book about Noh theatre – Japanese musical drama dating from the fourteenth century. The writer spent the first fifty pages on a history of feudal Japan from the tenth century until 1868. He discussed the importance of art to people in everyday life. For example, as the emperor’s power had been stripped by provincial warlords and feuding clans, the pursuit of art became the sole goal of the royal court.

The most interesting example of Japanese art was seppuku, suicide by ritual disembowelling. It was considered a major work of art, and many kabuki plays have a seppuku scene.

A performance of seppuku went like this: the subject should steady and clear his mind, showing no fear or cowardice; the overall effect must be elegant and dignified. The subject would kneel and drive his short sword into the hara, just below the belly button, considered his centre of life. He would then draw the blade sideways across the body, opening up the intestines, and finally twisting the blade upwards, to increase the physical shock. However, the body could not be permitted to fall backwards, as this would be extreme inelegance. So before driving the blade home, the subject tucked the long sleeves of his robe under his knees, ensuring that he would fall forward.

In the case of a woman, the womb could not be cut open as it was the source of life, and therefore a woman would take a thin sharp knife, and drive it into her heart with a single clean motion from beneath her lower left rib. Performed correctly, death would almost be instantaneous.

With male suicide, the subject could linger in pain for hours, but he could not reveal his pain, as this, again, would be inelegant. If the pain was too much, it was perfectly honourable to withdraw the blade from the belly and slice open the jugular. If he couldn’t, his appointed second was obliged to behead him with a long sword.

Usually, after the performance was complete, the head would be put in a special box and brought to the person who had ordered it, or was the insulted party. A head-viewing scene is a recurring element of Japanese theatre.

-Mick Halloran

Of Books, No. 1


published in Column 2
on January 22, 2010
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Traffic

When I have a problem that keeps me up at night, I go to a bookshop for the solution. I have yet to encounter a problem that has not been somewhat resolved by something I have read in a book. I am comforted by the idea that no matter what is troubling me, I am not the first person to be troubled by it. I like to search in second-hand bookshops, though I can’t remember anything of significance I ever found in one. I found a bookmark once. Someone had written on it “Na-night, sleep tight, I love you.” I loved it, but I’ve lost it now.

I don’t think I’ll ever like e-books. No one except a student needs to carry around several books at a time. My mood goes up and down with what I’m reading. If I’m reading something I like, I look forward to getting on the bus in the morning. I enjoy bad traffic. I don’t mind if someone is late to meet me.

If I’m not enjoying a book, I never know when to give up. I don’t think I can have one rule for all books. If it’s a trashy book, one or two chapters at the very most, I think. If it’s a highly esteemed book, I try to give it a little more time. I sound like a snob. I have nothing to be snobby about. I tried to write a trashy book once and I failed – very badly. I even made myself wince. It’s so much harder than I thought. It was surprising to learn that physically cringing at love scenes in novels does not mean that I will do a better job at writing love scenes. I put it down to it not being my true vocation.

-Orla McGowan

Charles Dickens by Michael Slater, Yale University Press, 2009


published in Column 2
on January 18, 2010
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Charles Dickens, a new biography by Michael Slater, is the first major biography of the great Victorian novelist in twenty years, since Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens.

Little new information has come to light about Dickens in the intervening period, so Slater covers the same ground as Ackroyd and others.

Slater’s book stands out, however, in the depth of coverage it gives to Dickens’s many and varied literary effusions: not just the great novels but lesser-known shorter works, including his long-neglected journalism, which, in Slater’s biography, is the source of some of Dickens’s most revealing writing,

The Uncommercial Traveller pieces of the 1860s are particularly rich in oblique autobiography.

Slater constructs his biography to a great extent on Dickens’s own words.

Dickens wrote so much in so many fields it is remarkable he had time for anything else, but he lived a full and busy life. He burned with a manic, uncontrollable energy, from the twenty-mile walks through the London night, observing and working out his stories, to his deep involvement in social causes, and a highly successful parallel career as an editor. All this is documented in Dickens’s personal correspondence, generously excerpted by Slater.

The dark side of genius is documented, too. From about the age of forty, Dickens was afflicted by a nameless dissatisfaction and a sense of something missing, as he revealed in his correspondence to lifelong friend John Forster, who was to become his first biographer:

“How strange it is to never be at rest, and never satisfied, and ever trying after something that is never reached, and to be always laden with plot and plan and care and worry; how clear it is that it must be, and that one is driven by an irresistible might until the journey is worked! It is much better to go on and fret, than to stop and fret.”

It was this that led him to take the rather scandalous course of leaving his wife, the mother of his ten children, in 1858. At this point, he had twelve years left to live. The Dickens of these years is a more shadowy figure, obsessively secretive. We know he was conducting a relationship with an actress less than half his age, and that this continued until his death. Slater records scrupulously all that has survived for posterity about the affair; it is not much.

For the rest, we have only the veiled answers contained in the fiction of this period: the world-weariness of Sidney Carton (A Tale of Two Cities, 1859), the thwarted lust of Bradley Headstone (Our Mutual Friend, 1865) and John Jasper (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1870 – unfinished), as well as the chronic self-distrust of the title character of the 1868 short story “George Silverman’s Explanation.” These remain our best clue to Dickens’s most secret self.

Slater’s book is a comprehensive and diligent account of Dickens’s life, full and fair and clearly-written. Thorough and briskly-paced, at 636 pages it is moderate in length by the standards of other Dickens biographies. It also contains copious illustrations and photographs, some quite unfamiliar.

-Mark Wallace

Five things you should never say to your boyfriend


published in Column 2
on January 17, 2010
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Living hell

You pride yourself on your open, honest relationship. But that doesn’t mean you should blurt out any thought that comes to mind. Sometimes, a comment that seems perfectly harmless to you might be hurtful, awkward or just plain irritating to your boyfriend.

Here are five such comments. Ignore us at your own risk!

1. “Do You Think She’s Pretty?”

When you ask a question like this, your boyfriend knows he can’t win.

If he says “yes,” you’ll probably get jealous and upset. You might even follow up with “Is she prettier than me?” Talk about a loaded question!

Of course, if he says “no” (and she clearly is pretty), you’ll accuse him of being a liar. You’ll wonder what else he’s lying about, even as you assure him you don’t mind if he says “yes.” Pfff… as if you’re that insecure!

Has he managed to convince you that he genuinely doesn’t find her attractive at all? You’ll wonder what his bad taste says about you.

See?

2. “When we’re married/have kids…”

It’s natural to fantasize about wedded bliss and the three kids you and your beau will one day spawn – you’re only human. And sometimes you might even entertain this fantasy very early on in a relationship. But unless you want to scare him away permanently, keep thoughts like these in your head where they belong.

Even if he himself has thought about your happily-ever-after future, he probably doesn’t want to hear it described out loud just yet. Wait until you’re sure you’re on the same page regarding marriage, kids, and the future of your relationship before you start prophesizing. A gut feeling probably isn’t good enough!

3. “Every time I look at you, I feel grief and disappointment.”

Your boyfriend doesn’t want to hear information that might make him think less of himself. And even if he does want to hear it, he really shouldn’t.

Don’t burden him with your expectations and regrets. He used to have dreams too, but now he’s small, vainglorious, and unhappy. He wants to die. You want to die too. You cannot figure out what went wrong, but all that you value is meaningless. You are in a living hell.

4. “My ex did the exact same thing!”

Whether it’s a desirable resemblance (they both always hold the door open) or a less desirable one (neither one showers often enough), your boyfriend never wants to hear that he’s anything like your ex. Ever.

You don’t want him to feel like you’re always comparing the two of them, do you? Think about it: Do you really want him to imagine that he does other things just like your ex? Doubtful. Plus, he might think you’re still hung up on your former flame.

Either way, a comment like this won’t do much for his self-esteem. So the next time you experience boyfriend deja-vu, keep it to yourself.

5. “I’m fine” or “Never mind”

Your face says it all. So does the fact that you haven’t said a word in the past hour. And the way you snapped over the misplaced remote control isn’t hiding anything either. But when he asks if you’re okay, you say you’re fine. At this point, your boyfriend wants to tear his hair out.

Passive-aggressive behavior doesn’t help anyone. First, you miss an opportunity to actually address what’s bothering you. You also bottle up your frustrations and create new problems. By the time you actually try to tackle what’s really bothering you, you’re both too upset about too many things to have a constructive discussion.

-Sally Appletree

In conversation with… Schopenhauer


published in Column 2
on January 14, 2010
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Arthur Schopenhauer

QThumbQ: Why do we associate high art with misery? Can’t art be fulfilling, uplifting, idealistic?

arthur-schopenhauerthumbSchopenhauer: The world is a hell of suffering and struggle.

- David Bremen