Archive for the 'The Journal' Category

Announcing the Some Blind Alleys Essay Grant

SBA

Published on January 12, 2012 in The Journal.

Some Blind Alleys is offering a financial grant of €2,500 to one author for the purpose of continuing work in the field of autobiography. The grant recipient will be announced in April.

Eligibility
There were eight eligible applicants for the grant award. To be eligible, an author must have published an original essay on Some Blind Alleys during 2011 and not have already published a book. To confirm that eligibility, each author had to apply in writing for the grant. The application comprises the essay published on Some Blind Alleys and an author’s statement with proposal for future work. Readers of Some Blind Alleys will have a vote, which they can access on the SBA Facebook page.

Finalists
The finalists for the Essay Grant are:

Adrian Duncan
Chicken Lane: a walk through Stoneybatter (PDF)

Tom Mathew
That time I scattered ashes in India, under the impression that life had meaning (PDF)

Ryan Van Runkle
A sojourn in central Europe (PDF)

Karl Whitney
Open space: walking the boundaries of Tallaght (PDF)

Judges
Seven judges have donated their time to participate. They are:
Kevin Barry, author of City of Bohane
Belinda McKeon, author of Solace
Claire Kilroy, author of All Names Have Been Changed
Carlo Gébler, author of The Dead Eight
Philip O Ceallaigh, author of The Pleasant Light of Day
Molly McCloskey, author of Circles Around the Sun
Keith Ridgway, author of The Long Falling
There will also be a public vote

Each judge will rank the four pieces from one to four, and the total amount will be tallied to determine the winner. The public vote will be weighted the same as one judge’s vote. In the event of a tie, Brendan Barrington, editor of the Dublin Review, will choose the winner.

The public vote will open soon. If you would like to vote, please read all the essays.

The announcement will take place in April, with festivities and drinks.

Farewell… but first…

SBA

Published on January 8, 2012 in The Journal.

Dear Friends,

Some Blind Alleys has been publishing, on and off, fine new writing from Ireland and elsewhere since late 2008. We’ve been running unique and demanding creative writing courses – literature courses for aspiring writers – since early 2009. And all the while we’ve held lectures, readings, competitions, and so on – involving some of Ireland’s most crucial new voices – and even some of its sages. As of today, Some Blind Alleys has ceased publication of its online literary journal. Events will still be organized, and creative writing courses will still be offered, so please don’t remove us from your bookmarks.

It has been an enjoyable and successful year. Thanks to the invaluable assistance of the Irish Arts Council, Some Blind Alleys has paid out roughly €5,000 among twenty writers – from established writers, newcomers, and quite a few writers in between. These works, and many more, remain in the Archive, and you can download the PDFs for posterity.

Some Blind Alleys, when first conceived in late 2008, had a few goals: to pay writers; to draw attention to new and exciting work being done in the field of autobiography; and to introduce many of the young writers in Ireland doing this exciting work to a broader reading public. Generally all these goals fell under the broader mission of helping to shake up – and perhaps, if all went well, briefly electrify – the ongoing discussion about the nature and aim of contemporary literature in Ireland.

In its latest incarnation, as an Arts Council-funded publication, Some Blind Alleys’s broader mission – for me as editor, anyway – had transformed from one of confrontation to one of facilitation: simply to publish quality writing by talented and committed writers. As before, the focus was the essay.

As I stated from the very beginning, Some Blind Alleys was never pursuing institutional status, and wouldn’t be around very long. It was an unlikely, short-term experiment that, by virtue of its fine content, became something worth maintaining. Four years, however, feels like enough. Therefore Some Blind Alleys has not applied for new funding from the Arts Council.

It has been a pleasure not only to work closely with all contributors but to pay them for their work, and for this ability I cannot overstate my gratitude toward the Arts Council, in particular Sarah Bannan, Head of Literature. I also want to thank everyone who has, over the years, taken the time to stop by and read us. Since 2008, Some Blind Alleys has received a lot of voluntary help, as well as the vital public support of Irish authors and publishers who have participated in launches, readings, competitions, and lectures. Their participation is profoundly appreciated. Special thanks also goes to the Some Blind Alleys advisory board: Dublin Review editor Brendan Barrington, Rough Magic Executive Producer Diego Fasciati, author Carlo Gébler, and independent arts advisor Enid Reid Whyte.

But before we go… In a few days, there will be an announcement regarding a sizeable financial grant for one new essayist. We’ve got a formidable panel of judges and four terribly good finalists (eligibility for the grant requires that the author have published an essay on Some Blind Alleys in 2011, and not have a book published). And SBA readers will get a vote. I expect some sort of party will be thrown in April to announce the winners, and to say farewell to the journal. More on all this very soon.

Greg Baxter
Editor, Founder, Some Blind Alleys

Chicken Lane: a walk through Stoneybatter

Adrian Duncan

Published on December 6, 2011 in The Journal.

Adult thought … should measure itself more honestly against
the darkness and difficulty of human life and without
losing sight of the irrational roots of this life.
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

I live on St. Mary’s Terrace, Stoneybatter. It is more a square than a terrace and there are twelve houses in it. My girlfriend and I live with our dog Gypsy in No. 2. Our house, which we rent, was built about a hundred years ago. It is constructed with artisan brick, has a pitched roof and timber first floor with two upstairs bedrooms. The rear bedroom is used as a study. We dismantled the bed and lifted the mattress up so that it leans against the wall, and I sit at my desk, in this room, which has good light, every day, reading and writing. The other bedroom faces out onto the square, and at night Niamh likes to leave the window open. The fresh air is nice, but the surrounding area is quite noisy: dogs barking, distant helicopters, horses pounding stable doors, sirens, cars, shouting… so I ram two dirty old earplugs into my ears.

The walls on either side of our house are shared with neighbours. On the right hand side, No. 1, there live between two and eight noisy Georgians and a parrot, and on the other side, No. 3, there lives a doctor, whom I hear taking showers at what seem like odd hours of the day. I know this because I can hear her electric shower erupt and roar each time. The people who live in house numbers 4 to 8 are a relatively unknown to me. I used to meet the family from No. 6 in the grounds of the church up the road, in the middle of the day, when I was throwing a ball to our dog, Gypsy, and sucking on a takeout coffee.

To the rear of these church grounds there is a very high brick wall, on the other side of which there is Arbour Hill prison, mostly full of white-collar criminals and pederasts. The grounds of the church are very well kept. Two gardeners work there; one spends much of his day retelling his history of the place to whomever walks by, and the other is simple. The latter is very fond of Gypsy, and she of he. Along the wall to the side, which separates the prisoners from the church grounds, there is an enclosure of beautifully mown grass, in which you can find an old military graveyard. There are hundreds of large old headstones and tombs. Some are upright and self-supporting. Others lean back against the surrounding wall. Many have sunk into the soil. Often, a small, plump, balding man of about forty rolls up and parks his bicycle against the small upstand wall that runs to one side of the enclosure. He takes a tennis ball out from between the wheel spokes, then a tennis racket, which sticks like a tail out of the spring-loaded catch at the back of his bike, and he begins to play tennis up against the prison wall. It is the gentlest game of tennis in the world.

Continue reading ‘Chicken Lane: a walk through Stoneybatter’

A sojourn in central Europe

Ryan Van Runkle

Published on November 16, 2011 in The Journal.

1
Czesław Miłosz said: “If you discuss political things, your entire soul should be in them.” Miłosz was referring to a book by a central European compatriot, a political treatise he happened to be reviewing at the time. Miłosz hated the book. Miłosz would do things like that – he would use the word hate. In this case he hated the book because it dealt with politics bloodlessly – and Miłosz had no respect for it. “If you discuss political things your entire soul should be in them.” SOLITUDE, SOLIDARITY, REVOLUTION.

Czesław Miłosz: A centenary celebration was the title of the talk – it took place at Trinity College Dublin. Naturally, I was intoxicated. It was a good talk, and the panel included another Polish writer, Adam Zagajewski. For Zagajewski, Miłosz was controlled by two belief systems: on the one hand, he subscribed to a leftist perspective on social issues; on the other, he was intensely religious. Heaney was also on the panel, and he spoke with customary class. For Heaney, Miłosz’s writing was a way to gain power over the negative forces in his life. Controlling and purifying darkness was important for Miłosz. He hated nihilism.

A few weeks after I attended the Miłosz talk I travelled to Krakow (where Miłosz died), and Warsaw (the big city where Miłosz cut his teeth), and finally Berlin (which has nothing to do with Miłosz but is a fun place). I went with my girlfriend, Vanora. Vanora’s a teacher and the school year was over. I had quit my job the week before, so my work year was also over.

Continue reading ‘A sojourn in central Europe’

The victim: Romania, the Holocaust, and the literature of a country in crisis

Philip Ó Ceallaigh

Published on October 25, 2011 in The Journal.

I
In 2007, when my first book was published in translation in Romanian, I was interviewed by the Bucharest daily Cotidianul. I answered the usual questions about how I had come to live in Romania, what my influences were, and so on. I was surprised a couple of days later to see my face on the cover of the paper above the words – “Philip Ó Ceallaigh: ‘Romanians believe the lie that they are victims of history.’”

My girlfriend phoned to tell me the interview was on the internet, and comments were coming in. She sounded alarmed.

I got online, and there they were, piling up by the minute. Almost all the comments were hostile, and some went so far as to suggest that I should be located and beaten up.

I had touched a nerve, and not only by suggesting that Romanians were not victims of history. Asked about Romanian literature, I remarked that I had been impressed by an interwar writer called Mihail Sebastian, not realizing that Sebastian had been the subject of a polemic in Romania since the publication in 1996 of his wartime journals, which revealed much about the involvement of the country’s intellectual class in the rise of Romanian fascism.

The polemic came at a particularly awkward moment for Romania, just as it was trying to shake off its communist past. Romanian communism had been a particularly nationalistic phenomenon, with its grand building and engineering projects, an independent line from Moscow, programmes for population expansion that produced a ban on contraception and abortion, and rehashed fascist notions about eugenics that consigned the destitute and the handicapped to incarceration in horrific state institutions.

Continue reading ‘The victim: Romania, the Holocaust, and the literature of a country in crisis’

Of the monstrous and unnatural: thoughts on truth and beauty

Leo Benedictus

Published on October 11, 2011 in The Journal.

In competitive vegetable growing, there are two broad disciplines. The first, and oldest, is a race towards perfection, a contest to produce carrots, say, which approach most closely in their colour, flavour, shape, and so on, the ideal carrot. Growers know they are perpetually moving toward a point they will never reach; all they can offer to the judges, like sinners before God, is the slimness of their failure.

In their imitative striving, growers of this type are busy in a kind of worship for the crop. This implies humility in another way. What they present to an audience is not just a nearly perfect carrot, it is an act of nearly perfect self-concealment. All the grower did – supposedly – was give this vegetable the ideal chance to express itself. As in a landscape garden or a realist novel, the burying of artistry is itself the artistry on show.

The second type of competition is the obverse of the first, and it is more popular with audiences. This is giant vegetable growing. The carrot prized highest here needs no judging; it’s the one that’s heavier or longer than the others. And in the hope of producing it, growers take extraordinary pains. Joe Atherton propped soil-filled drainpipes up against his house for fourteen months in order to unearth the nineteen feet of wispy carrot root that hold the current world length record.

Continue reading ‘Of the monstrous and unnatural: thoughts on truth and beauty’

The verb to be

Brian Collins

Published on September 28, 2011 in The Journal.

Last night I lived in Madrid; tonight I live in Waterford. I have moved back to my mother’s house, a house I have not lived in for a year and a half, and then it was only a short stint. All the times I have lived in my mother’s house over the last decade have been short stints. I never foresee making my decision to move home – it always seems to occur in a moment.

I lie on my bed and look at the things left over from my youth. Some books, a portable television, a Playstation, videos, tapes, CDs, a stereo, and a few shelves filled with knickknacks. There are little replicas around the room of places my brother visited. One is of the Coliseum; another of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. When I opened the wardrobe I noticed two Liverpool football jerseys, the football team I supported as a child. On the wall there is a Taxi Driver poster with a caption stating: “On every street there’s a nobody who dreams of being a somebody. He’s a lonely and forgotten man desperate to prove he’s alive.” On the back of the door there is a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas poster. As soon as I walked into the room it reminded me of someone I knew, not someone I was.

Continue reading ‘The verb to be‘

Coming soon…

Greg Baxter

Published on September 26, 2011 in The Journal.

Some Blind Alleys, the online journal of fine new writing, will shortly begin publishing its autumn content. We’ll be publishing new work once a fortnight, and already we’ve got great essays by people you may have heard of – such as Philip Ó Ceallaigh and Leo Benedictus – and those you may not have – such as Ryan Van Runkle and Brian Collins. We’re eager to find more new voices, and submissions are open.

If you’d like to read content previously published on Some Blind Alleys, please see the Archive, where you can find both online and PDF versions of work published since April 2011.

Thanks to financial assistance from the Arts Council, we can continue to pay authors for their contributions.

You can follow Some Blind Alleys via our free newsletter, or on Facebook or Twitter. As always, there’s a separate column on the site, News, for updates about events, creative writing courses, and other points of interest.

Greg Baxter
Editor, Some Blind Alleys

A brief account of the travails and exploits of a respectable village

Pauric Holleran

Published on September 13, 2011 in The Journal.

Wood savages

Once upon a time there was a village, a very respectable village with straight dirt roads and peaceful farmhands and obedient goats and children. The most respectable man in the village was Stefanos the lodgekeeper. The second-most respectable man in the village was the deposed and supposedly disgraced Baron, who acted very respectably regardless, and went around lazily wagging his finger and puffing on cigarillos.

However, more respectable by far than either of these figures was the Aristocrat Regent, whom nobody in the village had ever seen. The Aristocrat Regent had a terrible curse: his face was hilariously disfigured. It was made up of a braying donkey muzzle on the bottom part and a top half like a frog’s with his eyes perched on each extreme of the forehead.

Continue reading ‘A brief account of the travails and exploits of a respectable village’

My obsession with endstations

Susan Leahy

Published on September 6, 2011 in The Journal.

My obsession with endstations

Two hundred and three of us sat in suits around the table. It was Thursday again. I watched Áron. He caressed his moustache as if he were Dalí. We both doodled. I told him about the Italian general who drove me home in his Jaguar.

“Is he the bald one?” Áron asked.

“Yes,” I said. Áron said the man was married. I shrugged. The general’s suits were impeccable. The chairman spoke on and on. We didn’t listen. Our ambassadors pretended to.

Áron was from Hungary. We sat behind our ambassadors every week in a great hall that had a thousand windows, in the Hofburg in Vienna, for meetings of an international organisation so full of self-importance that nobody realised it was known only to itself.

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