The Great European Competition Hurdles - and they're off!

Ah, now, look, that's cheating. The Irish Government have robbed me of victory in the The Great Irish Bank Collapse Sweepstakes. And I'd put my last eleven euro on the favourite!

Here's the Irish Times, talking about the Irish Government's meeting in the early hours of Tuesday morning:

"The option of allowing one particular bank to fail and then moving to nationalise it was seriously considered, but it was decided that legislation to protect the entire banking system would have a better prospect of achieving long-term stability."

I'm pretty damn sure the bank was... well, I'm saying nothing. No point making things worse for them. (But, in one of those crazy coincidences no doubt, I got a huge number of hits over the past 48 hours from people who'd googled: anglo irish bank collapse.)

Incidentally, Anglo Irish shares soared 67% immediately after the announcement of the Irish Government scheme.

I'm still not entirely sure how a government as small as ours can "guarantee" the debts of a banking system as big as ours. As a number of helpful commentators have pointed out, the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, and finance minister, Brian Lenihan, have just promised to back liabilities that are ten times greater than our national debt. And, though the two Brians have postponed the Great Irish Bank Collapse Sweepstakes, they still have the EU Competition Hurdles ahead of them. (The job of running Ireland is a veritable pentathlon lately.) The British (and others) are furious at this move, as it gives Irish banks a huge competitive advantage, and could suck money out of fragile English banks. (AIB have a big presence in the English business sector, Anglo Irish do a lot of UK property loans etc.)

And the English, Dutch, Belgians and Danes all own banks in Ireland (Ulster Bank, ACC Bank, IIB Bank, and the amusingly named National Irish Bank- it's Danish), which will not be covered by this scheme, so they're afraid they'll lose all their depositors to Allied Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland, and - God help us - Anglo Irish Bank. There's now a strange, competitive, nationalist element to bank bailouts in Europe, as each government bailout or promise destabilises the banks of its neighbours. We need a unified EU response. And in a pig's hole will we get one, not till a few really big banks go under. Try getting twenty-two finance ministers to fly to Brussels this week, when they're all up till 5am every night, fire-fighting the collapse of their own national banks.

Of course, national banks have grown to become European banks, all over Europe. Many countries now face the problem of trying to save banks that are bigger than the country that, technically, controls and regulates them. The Financial Times has a beautiful overview of this. You'll see from it that both AIB and Bank of Ireland have liabilities that are almost exactly the same size as Ireland's entire GDP...

Well, on a lighter and more entertaining note, Momus has written a wonderful piece on the pleasures of having nothing. He did me the great honour of including some video of me in this intriguing meditation on Brecht, Wilde, and the end of the world as seen from Berlin.

We've been through all this before. It's not so bad. Nicht so schlimm...

"There is no money in this town! The whole economy has broken down! Oh, where is the telephone, is here no telephone, oh sir, goddamit, no!" - Brecht

Update on 2008-10-01 13:39 by Julian Gough

...And here's the latest on the Great European Competition Hurdles, from the Irish Times twenty minutes ago. Will Brian Lenihan even make it over the first hurdle?

Choice quotes:

The European Commission (EC) today confirmed that Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes is in contact with the Government and will examine under state aid laws the move to guarantee all deposits in Irish banks.

“It [the Commission] will look at any state aid involved as a a matter of urgency. It expects notification from the national authorities and will take decision under the state aid rules soon afterwards.”

And yes the British are very annoyed:

British banks compete with Irish banks both in Britain and in Ireland and have voiced fears they could lose out competitively to Irish banks that enjoy the full guarantee.

The Irish pledge on Tuesday to underwrite the country's banking system triggered a flood of cash from British businesses to Irish banks, a senior Irish stockbroker said.

"We just want the Irish government to look quite closely at the arrangements they are putting in place to make sure they comply with EU competition law," the British government spokesman said. He added Britain was in contact with Irish authorities at a high level over the issue.

The Great Irish Bank Collapse Sweepstakes - and they're off!

Well, it's not the end of the world, but it's going to feel like it for quite a while. The US government bail-out plan was voted down by Congress a few hours ago. If the plan had been passed, it would have given the illusion that things were going to be OK. (Things would not have been OK.)

Now, we won't even have the comforting illusion.

An an Irishman with my fortune (eleven euro) in an Irish bank account, I have a keen interest in the future of the Irish banking system. The main question seems to me to be, in what order will they fail? I reckon it's going to be a photo-finish for first place between Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Life and Permanent. (Though will dark horse Irish Nationwide Building Society make a late surge for the line?) After that, who knows. But they're all banjaxed.

Every Irish bank is massively over-exposed to Irish and UK residential and commercial property, and to Irish developers who can no longer service their vast loans. The Irish banks have been keeping their developers afloat artificially for the past year, in the hope things would miraculously turn around. Things haven't, they won't for years, and soon all the bad debts will have to appear on the books, dragging both banks and developers under. If the Germans and Swiss find the books of the Irish banks too revolting, and can't bring themselves to purchase the wreckage, then the Irish government (with some very irritated help from the European Central Bank) will have to recapitalise the entire banking sector. All this will have to be done during a global financial crisis. It's going to be comically awful, like having to change your tyre in the middle of a demolition derby.

I lived through the Irish property boom of the past decade with ever-mounting incredulity. It really was the most extraordinary case of mass delusion since everybody drank Kool-Aid in Jonestown. And if you want cast-iron evidence that I'm not pretending to be wise after the fact, here I am on Irish television, in May of 2007, saying exactly that, to the stony silence of the studio audience, all of whom had just bought an investment property the day before, and would be buying another one the day after.

(Oh yeah. banks and hedge funds and other financial institutions will also be imploding across America and around the world after this, but I'm so bored with the USA, I thought I'd talk about Ireland for a change... Ah heck, one more US prediction: good, old-fashioned, retro, Depression-era bank runs in America, starting tomorrow.)

Mugger's Remorse. (Or why I shouldn't have kicked James Wood.)

(James Wood teaching in Harvard, shortly before being kicked in the knee from behind)



My short essay on David Foster Wallace has appeared in Prospect, under the title The Rest is Silence.

The first two responses I received were both from James Wood, one of the three finest literary critics of the age (and currently top book bloke at the New Yorker). His first email started, “You have a lot of gall…”

I couldn’t really disagree. I took a wild swipe at him out of nowhere, late in the article. This is partly the result of the extreme overcompression that all my essays undergo as I write them. I try to jam about a book’s worth of ideas into the single page available, and so a long, nuanced sequence of subtle, gossamer-delicate thoughts gets reduced to a blow from a brick in a sock.

Though I do disagree with some of James Wood’s notions, I don’t disagree nearly as strongly as is implied by my rude and unfair sentence. (In fact, having reread it, I’m thinking of writing a letter to Prospect complaining about myself.)

(James Wood’s second email, an hour later, was a fine, dignified and reasonable restatement of his position on David Foster Wallace. Such a civilised response to being mugged reflects very well on the man. I look forward to arguing with him properly sometime. If he’ll ever speak to me again.)

Other interesting reactions to The Rest Is Silence are appearing on the blogs. Some thoughtful stuff on suicide and universities over at Inside Higher Education.

The pro-guns, pro-liberty blog  The Smallest Minority has suggested that a line from my piece ("If it has an off-button, it is not oppression"), should be put on T-shirts. A splendid idea.

And over on Prospect’s First Drafts blog, I am accused of fascism, and told to hang myself.


As ever, I agree with everyone. Many fine points, splendidly expressed. I shall go away, brood upon them, and reform my character.

Waving a magic wand at a car crash

So there's a bailout plan. Whoop-de-do.

It addresses a symptom - the liquidity crisis.

It doesn't solve the problem. The banks are insolvent.

Eat my naked shorts

I know some of you drop in here sometimes for guidance on the future of the world economy. (Hiya Ben, hiya Henry... Hey! Alan! Good to see ya.) You'll notice I have been keeping quiet lately, as the whole thing blows up. This is because I don't want to spook the markets. One incautiously chosen word from me right now, and we could all be learning to skin rabbits.

However, I laughed my ass off last week at the US Fed/Treasury announcement that they had a trillion dollar plan that would save the world, and I laughed even harder when global stock markets leaped 10% in response. What we have here is a huge omelette trodden into the carpet. The fact that a man has burst into the room and announced that he is going to turn the omelette back into twelve fresh eggs does not mean he is, in fact, going to do it.

The mainstream media coverage of the financial crisis continues to be wretched. Most newspapers failed to note that half of the 10% rally last week wasn't driven by suddenly happy investors buying stocks they wanted, it was driven by desperate hedge funds forced to buy the very stocks they specifically didn't want, or risk going to jail. (Because, to get technical, they had to cover their short positions, the day after naked shorts were banned overnight. Does anyone really want an explanation of that? Doesn't it sound much more fun if you don't know?)

No wonder those shorted stocks (banks, financials) all fell on Monday by as much as they rose on Friday, as the hedge funds, having done their legal duty and dodged jailtime, dumped them all again. This market is a joke.

Sheesh, if I start talking about this I'll talk all night. (And I've a novel to finish writing, so... back to my book.)

(Oh, and the very nice photo of eggshells was taken by Linda Alstead, whose website mixes cooking and photography - together at last! She used a Canon PowerShot G3 1/2s f/8.0 at 23.0mm, photo-fans... this means you, Phil, I know you love it when I talk dirty...)

Writing about David Foster Wallace. Reading about David Foster Wallace. Thinking about David Foster Wallace.

I've spent the last few days writing a piece on David Foster Wallace for Prospect magazine. It should be out next week, in their October issue. I'm happy with the piece. "Happy" has a fairly specialised meaning in this case, one writers will understand: I was depressed and anxious writing it, as I tried to understand, empathise with, and explain, a depressed and anxious writer who'd just killed himself. But I was also exhilarated and, yeah, happy, because the piece turned out the way I'd hoped it would: it expressed crisply and well some things I'd been vaguely thinking, loosely feeling. So I felt much better after it. Well, writing is weird. It fixes broken things. And the process is not sentimental.

The credit for that last photo of David Foster Wallace, by the way (and the two I'm using to illustrate this post): It was taken by Steve Rhodes, at a reading organised by the San Franciso independent bookshop, Booksmith, held at All Saints Church in 2006.

Out of interest, I googled, and found a couple of accounts of that reading on literary blogs. One of them is by a blogger trying to interview David Foster Wallace after the reading, even though Wallace has clearly and repeatedly said to the guy, before and after the reading, through his agent, his publicist, and face to face, that he is uncomfortable with that and would prefer not to. The guy keeps asking... it's just excruciating.

The other is by a blogger who fancies David Foster Wallace something rotten, though she has never met him. She dresses up for the reading (slit skirt, best bra, because "you never know"). And then she slags him off in her blog after the reading, ostensibly because she asked him a question and found his answer tedious. (Though she's really slagging him, you get the feeling, because he didn't look up from the lectern half way through the reading, recognise how special she was, throw his book aside, rush up to her, kneel, and propose).

Both bloggers can see the world very intensely from their own point of view, but they can't see how they must be coming across to Wallace at all. They don't seem aware that, though this moment is new and unique and important to them, for him it is yet another in a long series of almost identically unpleasant encounters with needy strangers. It's totally understandable (God, I have done worse), but the lack of empathy, on both sides, is also totally heartbreaking. They know his soul, because they've read his book (which is just his soul in code), and so they feel he is their soulmate. But he doesn't know their soul, because he hasn't read their book, and so he feels assaulted.

And both these people are obviously very nice, otherwise sensitive people, trying to make a real connection to someone they admire enormously, and the harder they try the more they fail, and now he’s dead and they never connected and it’s all intensely sad.

David Foster Wallace has committed suicide.

David Foster Wallace is dead. He appears to have hung himself in his home in California, aged 46.

If you've never heard of him or read his stuff, nothing to see here, move on. But on the small, strange, planet (or, more accurately, asteroid) inhabited by novelists doing their best to re-invent the novel, this is the death of Kurt Cobain. You are going to be reading agonised analyses of who he was, how he died, and why he mattered, in every books section of every newspaper, on every major anniversary of his death, for the rest of your lives.

Well, OK, not for the rest of your lives, because newspapers won't have book sections in another six months. But you get the gist.

I liked some of his stuff very much. The last of his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (in his short story collection called, ah, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men) is extraordinarily moving, effective, and technically tricksy. It is, I think, one of the greatest short stories of the past couple of decades. In it, Wallace tells a story of a man telling an unnamed listener a story about a woman telling him a story about a man raping her. All those frames within frames should push the pain far, far away, but they don't, they pull it closer. The story is post-modern and emotionally direct at the same time, and that's really hard to do. It is magnificent and you should read it.

But mostly I disagreed with David Foster Wallace, with his attitude to his style (comedy) and his content ( America). I had just finished writing a long essay about comedy and the American novel when I heard of his death. So the last thing I wrote about him while he was alive was negative, which seems very sad now, today, because the only reason I included him was because I thought he was important, and good, but could be even better.

What I would have liked was a long conversation with him, a few emails over a few months perhaps, wrestling with the big, fun, important stuff that nobody off our tiny asteroid cares about.

And now that won't happen. I thought about not printing my recent thoughts on David Foster Wallace, because they aren't positive, and it seems so mean to say something harsh about a guy who has just tied something around his neck to cut off the air to his brain because being conscious has come to hurt too much.

But he's dead, it won't hurt him. And if there is truth in it, then better to say it.

The essay is several thousand words long, I'll spare you. But this is the bit that mentions David Foster Wallace. Bear in mind that for every vice I mention here, he had a bigger virtue. He cared, he tried, he died. We can't do more than that.

"Meanwhile, much American writing is still comic. But something has gone terribly wrong with it.

Potentially great comic writers like George Saunders and David Foster Wallace use comedy as their weapon of choice. But they have been unplugged from electric, living America by lives spent inside the university, first learning, then teaching. (The immensely influential George Saunders is a tremendously talented writer who, at 49, has never left school, and never written a novel.)  Disconnected, they have, like so many academics, become obsessed with the white whale (or pink elephant) of the authentic.

Thus they spend much of their time attacking forms of language of which they disapprove (advertising, television, military jargon, corporate PR) This is literary criticism disguised as literature. These are grenade attacks on a theme park. Frequently, and disturbingly, they put this dead language in the mouths of aggressively outlined “ordinary Americans” foolish figures without college degrees and therefore without self-awareness. Bums. Thus they end up mocking those below them, not those above. The gun is pointed in the wrong direction. Shooting at the bums, they have become the Establishment.

In the absence of suffering, in the absence of a subject, American literary novelists again and again waste their power attacking America’s debased, overwhelming, industrial pop-culture. They attack it with the energy appropriate to attacking fascism, or communism, or death. But that pop culture (bad TV, bad movies, ads, bad pop songs) is a snivelling, ingratiating whimpering billion dollar cur. It has to be chosen in order to be consumed: so it flashes its tits and laughs at your jokes and replays your prejudices and smiles smiles smiles. It isn’t worthy of satire, because it cannot use force to oppress. If it has an off-button, it is not oppression. Attacking it is unworthy, empty, meaningless. It is like beating up prostitutes."

Well, at the last, he found a moment that was unironic and authentic.

I wish he hadn't feared America so much. But then again, if we were able to ask him, he would probably say America killed him.

Let's Nationalise All the Mortgages in America Overnight, And See What Happens

More financial fun. From today's Financial Times:

"The US government on Sunday seized control of the troubled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage groups in what could become the world’s biggest financial bail-out."

I've just one comment on this, for now. The US government doesn't really know what it is doing, its public statements are confused, contradictory, and not nearly as reassuring as it thinks, and this action will have huge unintended consequences, some pretty disastrous, for the American financial and housing markets. (With whiplash effects as far away as China.)

The rules are being torn up, but they're not being replaced with anything coherent.

More banks and other financial institutions will fail in the aftermath of this (and not just the ones left holding huge, worthless chunks of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).

The Long Night of the Museums in Berlin

Tonight was the 23rd Long Night of the Museums, here in Berlin. I came home in the early hours of the morning with a couple of sixty-million-year-old shark's teeth, bought off a palaeontologist in the Natural History Museum for a euro.

What a great city. Of course, Lange Nacht der Museen has been so successful that cities all over the world now do it. But it started in Berlin.

If you're ever here when it's on, check it out. Well over a hundred museums stay open till 2am, and put on special events (including prehistoric shark's tooth jumble sales). One ticket gets you in to everything, and fleets of buses will take you around any of ten nicely designed routes. It starts with a party, at 6pm in the Lustgarten (er, no, it just means Pleasure Garden...) and ends, as does everything in Berlin, with a bangin' techno party, near the Brandenberg Gate.

Most of Berlin's immense, world class museums of art, culture, history and science take part. But so do the smaller museums, including the Hemp Museum, (Hanfmuseum), the Gay Museum (Schwules Museum) and the Garlic Museum (Knoblauchhaus... no I haven't got the German names mixed up. Knoblauch means garlic in German. Though, yes, the English-speaking world is crying out for a gay nightclub called Knoblauchhaus).

There's a little history here, and this year's program in German here...

And if you can't make it to Berlin, at least check out the great 1996 coding of the Hemp Museum website. Only The Man ever updates code.

So, um... Bloomberg for McCain's VP slot?

Well, Obama didn't listen to me. Maybe McCain will.

By November the US election will be about the economy. Several more huge financial institutions will have gone under, been sold for monkey-nuts, or bailed out by the Fed. The housing market will not have recovered. The credit crunch will not have ended. No domestic US business will be expanding, investing, or hiring. (Bar bankruptcy specialists. And Wal-Mart, as the middle classes go downmarket). No one will care about the foreign policy credentials of Obama's running mate.

McCain has admitted he knows nothing about economics. So pick Bloomberg, he won New York as a Republican for God's sake...

Of course, he won't.

Writers shouldn't have opinions about anything, least of all politics, so I won't express a preference in this race. I like both McCain and Obama a great deal, as human beings. They are both remarkable, in their very different ways. But, from a satirist's point of view, I think a McCain presidency has more going for it. I would dearly love to see an economics novice, in his seventies, who can't even remember how many houses he owns, dealing with the worst economic crisis, and housing market meltdown, in US history. McCain said it best, in the Wall Street Journal in November 2005: “I’m going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.”

And if he gets to be President in November 2008, boy will he be educated.

As the Wall Street Journal said of him (at the end of that same in-depth interview on his economic policies):

"I come away believing that if I'm ever in a knife fight or in a foxhole, there is no one I'd rather have next to me than John McCain. Whether he's someone who should be steering the rudders of the American economy is a different issue altogether."

Bloomberg for Vice President?

I'll warn you in advance, this is the least informed blog posting I've ever made. I just feel like making a wild, long-odds bet, is all...

I've been watching the mighty brain of the US media pull a muscle try to guess who Obama's going to pick to run as his running chum. Biden? Hmmm. I'd be amazed. Bayh? Nah. Kaine? Well, maybe, but I doubt it. It's too flagged: Kaine looks like a nice guy who's doing Obama a favour, by drawing the press off the scent.

This whole thing, "I'm thinking... I'm checking them out... I'm deciding soon... I've decided! The day before I announce it!"  feels like a circus to entertain the media. I wouldn't be surprised if Obama had decided months ago, last year even.

So I put my novelist's hat on, imagined I was Obama and thought it through. And I was strangely drawn to Michael Bloomberg, for a bunch of reasons. He's a former Republican (can't get more bi-partisan than that). He's rock solid on economics (can't get more important than that). He has run a big company (Bloomberg), and a big chunk of American real estate (New York), both very, very successfully.

And in 2001, in the most Republican borough of New York (Staten Island), he sucked up 75% of the vote. Holy guacamole. That means he can hoover up Democrats and Republicans together like almost no politician ever.

If I was Obama, I'd pick Bloomberg and I would pound the economy as the only issue in this campaign. Forget Iraq, forget foreign policy, forget the outside world. Keep it firmly focused on the economy, and use Bloomberg to take McCain apart.

But that would just be me, I guess.

Warning! Wet Paint! Flying Spanners! Falling Pianos!

Regular visitors will notice that I'm doing some painting and decorating on the website this week. I'm also moving some of the furniture around, so you might bump into, or trip over, a few things, if you're wandering around the site. ("Yuk, I've stepped in a poem.") My apologies for any inconveniences...

Explanation: I run this website all on my lonesome ownsome, using a lovely, simple interface from Squarespace.

And Squarespace have just brought out Version 5 of their... thingy, service, interface, whatever you call it. Which has some fun new features, and has made some old stuff easier to do, thus my slightly distracted look, as I poke around in far off corners of the site, finding spiderwebs and the crust of a sandwich, remembering that plumbing job I meant to do last year... Hey look! There's those photos from Burning Man I never added comments to! Which reminds me, I must scan and upload  those paper photos I found in the attic in Galway last month...

Where was I? Oh yeah, I was going to say, if you have any suggestions, please make them. I'll be up a ladder, faffing around with the site for weeks, so join in, help me make it better.

Some questions I'm wrestling with myself are: what colour should the hypertext links be? What colour scheme in general? Should the navigation bar be on the left, or the right, of the screen? What links should be in the top (horizontal) navigation bar?

And on a more macro scale, what do you like (if anything) about this site? What else would you like to see? Or see more of? Or less of? What brilliant things are other people doing on their sites that I should nick? What crushingly stupid thing does this site do that I've never noticed? What is the meaning of life?

Be nice, be nasty, be honest, I won't mind.

Meanwhile, there's a nice mention of this blog in the Irish Times this week, halfway through an article about the noble 99, high king of icecreams. It quotes from my piece on the Lisbon Treaty, and from some of your comments.

The Little Tree That Could! (Meaningless Statistics)

 
I am a great fan of the meaningless statistic. The New York Times seem to be a great fan of them, too. It certainly prints a lot of them.

The truly great meaningless statistic gives you the very precise, scientific-sounding parts of a real statistic, but the journalist leaves out one vital parameter, so that what's left has no meaning at all.

Here is a gem, from today's New York Times:

"The Center for Urban Forest Research estimates that each tree removes 1.5 pounds of pollutants from the air."

Wow! One point five pounds! They didn't even round it up, or down, to the nearest pound! That is so precise! Er, one point five pounds of pollutants every second? Every day? Every year? Over the course of the tree's life? Which might be what, two hundred years? Five hundred years?

And while we're at it, how big is this urban tree, the one that removes one point five pounds of pollutants from the air every second? Or every five hundred years... Is it a six-inch high bonsai tree in a pot on a window sill? Is it a six- foot sapling on a new housing estate? Is it a hundred foot high oak, in the centre of Central Park?

And what pollutants is this mighty oak, or pot plant,  removing with such astonishing speed, or sloth? A pollutant is just a chemical you don't approve of, in a place you don't want it. (Water in your glass is fine. Water in your petrol tank is a pollutant.) Carbon dioxide, for example, is now considered by many to be a greenhouse gas that will destroy the world. So are they counting carbon dioxide as a pollutant? Because trees do little else but remove carbon dioxide from the air. A lettuce could remove one point five pounds of CO2 from the air without even trying very hard. So a hundred foot tree that took five hundred years to do so would be pretty unimpressive. Or do they mean pollutants like lead? A bonsai tree that removed a pound and a half of lead from the air every second would be pretty damn impressive. I'd pay to watch that.

"The Center for Urban Forest Research estimates that each tree removes 1.5 pounds of pollutants from the air."

Jesus Christ.

Jude: Level 1 is the Book on One in Ireland this week, again...

I just discovered that Jude: Level 1 will be (again!) the Book on One, on RTE Radio 1, each night this week (Monday August 11th till Friday August 15th 2008). Each episode will start at 11.45pm, local Irish time (which is, in fact, UK Daylight Saving Time... which is one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time... and an hour behind Berlin time... which is Central European Time... you still with me? An hour ahead of me? Or behind?), and will run for 15 minutes. RTE Radio 1 streams live, so you should be able to catch it anywhere. (Here's how to listen... I've never been able to make it work, but you might have better luck.)

Incidentally, I found out my book was being broadcast across Ireland next week by reading the news in the Galway Advertiser. Jeeez, nobody tells me anything.

Jude was the Book on One in April, so this is quite a quick repeat. I didn't do the adaptation, which is by the producer, Aidan Stanley. Conor Lovett is marvellous as Jude.

Reading (and singing) in Charlie Byrne's tomorrow...

I'll be reading (and singing) in Charlie Byrne's bookshop (in Galway) tomorrow, Tuesday August 5th, at 6pm or so. Vinny asked me to do something in Charlie's while I'm in Galway, and you don't say no to Vinny.

I reckon I'll read from the Galway section of Jude: Level 1, chat a bit, read a few poems, and then sing two or three Toasted Heretic songs, with Declan Collins fingering an acoustic guitar in a manner so sensuous that three-quarters of the women and a quarter of the men in the audience will be distracted entirely from the songs by the thought "If he can do that to a guitar, what could he do to my... wow..."

Séamus Brennan, 1948 - 2008

(Photo: Michael D. Higgins, Julian Gough, and the late Séamus Brennan, at the NUIG Alumni Awards Gala Banquet, on March 1st 2008. Photo by Aengus McMahon.)

The funeral of Séamus Brennan, the Fianna Fáil politician and former government minister, was held yesterday. Given that there's hardly a page of Jude: Level 1 that doesn't feature a prominent member of Fianna Fáil inciting vast crowds into a homicidal xenophobic frenzy, taking bribes from property developers, or using an illegally held firearm to try and kill a defenceless orphan, it's only fair to say that Séamus Brennan was one of the good guys. He stood up to Charlie Haughey when that was a dangerous thing to do, and he tried to clean up a corrupt and scandal-banjaxed Fianna Fáil when the task seemed impossible.

I met Séamus Brennan, for the first and only time, earlier this year. We were both receiving awards from NUIG (or University College Galway, as it was when we were there, back in the early Middle Ages). My award was for my contribution of the term "Ardcrony ballocks" to Irish literature. His was for his contribution to Irish politics, which was considerable. As Ireland's Minister for Transport in the early 1990s, he had broken the (state-owned) Aer Lingus monopoly on flights to Britain, and thus freed a tiny and struggling Irish airline called Ryanair to survive, then thrive. (The young, and the non-Irish, cursing at the 3 euros they've just paid for a small bottle of water on their 1 euro Ryanair flight, will not be aware that air travel out of Ireland, until Séamus Brennan's reforms, was far, far too expensive for 90% of the Irish population. Which was the only reason there was anyone left in Ireland by the early 1990s... My generation had to emigrate by bus.) Later, he was a highly regarded Minister for Social and Family Affairs. When I met him, this year, he was Minster for Arts, Sport and Tourism (the ever-mutating ministry which appears in Jude: Level 1, thinly disguised as the Ministry for Beef, Culture, and the Islands).

The NUIG Alumni Awards ceremony was a black tie affair, Gala Ball and all, and my noble punk spirit was seething after the third round of photographs, "Stand there", "Sit there", "Hold the award a little higher."

I said to Séamus Brennan (who was patiently cooperating, changing seats when asked, standing up, sitting down), you must get awfully sick of these events, I'd imagine this must be astoundingly boring for you. No, actually, he said. Politicians are always handing these things out, but we never get to keep one. In fact, I think this is the first award I've ever received. And it's a great feeling, it's a great honour.

He was so pleased, and humble, and as a result dignified, that I felt like a spoilt little shitehawk for not accepting the award more graciously. So I amended my attitude, and my mood improved enormously, and I had a great night, with my beloved and my family, feasting and dancing and generally knocking seven kinds of crack out of it.

I also talked quite a bit that night with Séamus Brennan, and with the blessed Michael D. Higgins, another former Minister for the Arts, and former recipient of an NUIG Alumni Award (and a former lecturer of mine, in sociology, who used to put the Labour Party's noble redistributionist policies into action by buying me coffee and buns in the canteen after lectures, when I was seventeen and staaaarving). We talked about everything from Beckett to Braveheart, and Séamus Brennan came across as a gentle, thoughtful man, at peace with himself. The shoptalk of two Ministers for the Arts gives a very entertaining insight into the peculiar mix of glamour and grind in the job. At one point, Séamus passed on Mel Gibson's best wishes (from a party the week before) to Michael D. (Michael D. Higgins had, as Minister, helped Mel shoot Braveheart here in Ireland by loaning him, among other things, the Irish Army.) I also heard some very entertaining stories about paperwork and three-foot-high piles of receipts (which reflected very well on Mel Gibson, and less well on some of our much smaller, native Irish film makers.) A mighty night.

Séamus Brennan was diagnosed with cancer a year ago, so he must have known he was dying that night. (Or dying a little faster than the rest of us, as Beckett would probably point out.) He still managed to bring something to the party.

I liked him a lot. May he rest in peace.

Me Waffling On Today

Forgot to mention, I'll be talking about the short story, and the BBC National Short Story Award, on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, later today (Friday July 4th 2008) at the maythesweetlordhelpus hour of 7.20 in the morning. (There's a seven-twenty in the MORNING as well? Who knew?)

Totally forgot to mention it in time for anyone to actually tune in, sorry. This is not because I'm blasé, it's because I'm totally untogether (and find it hard to believe anyone would be interested in my opinion of the short story).

 I will be talking for about ten seconds, probably, so you missed nuthin'.

Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam

There's an enjoyable discussion of spam poetry going on, over at the Guardian Books blog.  I just posted a contribution there, so I may as well repeat it here...

I'm a fan of spam. I like the way that, beset by predators, predatory itself, it evolves with furious speed. I like to have a dip into my spam box every couple of weeks to see the new trends evolving (like the recent "What a stupid face you have" / "You look so stupid in this photo" variations.)

Ben Myers is right on both points, it's a stunning resource for poets, but to make good poetry out of it you have to be a very good editor. Alive to nuance and resonance. I've been playing with spam poems for years. (Not just spam: this week, I wrote two poems I'm very pleased with, constructed entirely from the legal disclaimers on poetry websites.)

By using spam, and other internet debris, poets can essentially outsource free association. But the best comment on the perils of the method comes from W.H. Auden, in a letter to the poet Frank O'Hara, long before the internet:

“I think you (and John {Ashbery} too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic nonlogical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.”
-W. H. Auden

If your ear/nose/throat/soul (add to/delete as appropriate) are alive to authentic nonlogical relations, then spam and all the other digital junk of the internet are your friend. They can jolt you out of the deep groove of habit. The first and hardest step in surprising and delighting others is surprising and delighting yourself.

My new essay (on economics as religion), in Prospect magazine

I've roughly fifty subjects I'd like to blog on. Football! Monolines! Street parties! The Irish housing bubble! Popstar poetry! The mysterious Blau Blau Blau movement! How to write for the new attention span! My new life with Will Self's pig! Too many possibilities. Can't decide.

Tell me if any of the above interest you, and it might help me focus on one of the blighters, and get it done.

Meanwhile I have an article, on economics as a religion, in the new issue of Prospect (the wonderful London-based magazine of ideas). The issue also features a round-table discussion of the current global financial crisis. Several of my favourite thinkers on economic matters take part, including the philosophical hedge fund manager George Soros, and the very wise and grave chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, Martin Wolf. After they have thoroughly depressed and demoralised the readership with the awfulness of it all, I provide the light entertainment, in a two-page afterword, "The Sacred Mystery of Capital".

A sample paragraph or three:

"... But religions evolve, and recent events show that capitalism has begun to evolve less in the manner of the Galapagos finches (whose beaks adjusted over millennia to suit the berries of their individual island), and more in the manner of the Incredible Hulk. Incredible Hulk capitalism can expand the muscle of its credit so swiftly that its clothing of real world assets cannot stretch fast enough to contain it. Expansion, explosion, collapse—Incredible Hulk capitalism sprawls, stunned and shrunken again, in the rags of its assets.

Or, returning to our religious analogy, if capitalism was a religion, it would now be a delightfully demented pseudo-scientific cult. Incredible Hulk capitalism is to the capitalism of Adam Smith what Scientology is to the Christianity of Christ. Both modern high finance and Scientology use the language and tools of science to ends that are religious, not scientific. Both meet a need, a yearning which the old forms of religion and capitalism no longer meet. The need for a mysterious power greater than us, in which we can believe. It must be powerful—but it must also be mysterious. And mystery has been vanishing from the world ever faster, ever since Galileo.

We know what the stars are made of, and can compute their course through the heavens for the next 10,000 years. We can explain the storms and floods that were once evidence of the wrath of God. But as the advance of science has removed the divine mystery from much of life, the advance of free market capitalism has put it back. Only modern economics can now provide forces that we don’t understand. And we need that in our lives."

The whole thing is here, if you're interested.
 

Ireland, Ice Cream, and Democracy

I was very pleased to see that Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs columnist of the Financial Times, firmly backs my proposal to unify Europe. (By holding the Lisbon Treaty referendum again, but this time promising Ireland's voters an ice cream if they vote yes.)

Some of those commenting on his fine piece, "An Ice Cream For Ireland", miss the point, and blather on about democracy and subsidiarity and corporate tax rates. I was obliged to join in and steer this important debate back onto the right path, pointing out:

"Yes, this talk of protocols and democracy and referendums and addendums is all very well, but let’s get down to the nitty gritty, or at least the tutti frutti. What flavour of icecream would win over the most Irish voters?

Nothing too exotic, you don’t want Ireland’s voters to feel foreign values are being foisted on them (so pistachio is out). Vanilla would be the Eurocrats’ obvious, offend-nobody choice. But, on reflection, I would vote no to vanilla. Too bland an offering is also suspicious.

My gut feeling is strawberry."

Several people, instantly grasping the simple genius of the idea, made useful suggestions. My  favourite being from David Wilkins:

"May I suggest that the ice cream given to each Irish voter should take the form of a ‘99′? That would remind the Irish that they are voting not just for themselves but also for the 99% of EU citizens who have been denied a vote on the Lisbon treaty. The whole process is, after all, distinctly flakey."

And Shevvers suggested:

"A pint of Guinness would work better than ice cream."

Which is a strong and original idea, but would be open, I fear, to legal challenge after the vote, from the remorseful and hungover voters.

It is not too late to vote for your favourite flavour over on Gideon's blog. Now that's democracy... 

(The fine photos of the leaders of Ireland's three largest political parties, in case you're wondering, are borrowed from Kieran Murphy, of Murphys Ice Cream, who has a wonderfully ice cream-obsessed website, called Ice Cream Ireland. Although, er, he doesn't know they're borrowed yet. It's a bit late to be ringing him in Dingle, at half two in the morning, to ask permission to use these, but I'll ask him tomorrow, honest. I know, it would have been great to get Brian Cowan, but he's not really an ice cream type, now, is he?)

 

(An Taoiseach Brian Cowan, being chased by an ice cream man for not buying an ice cream.)