New Voice

Vietnam. A word that still to this day means many things to many different people. Travellers etch across its landscape throughout the year wandering its myriad paths and villages, soaking up its cultured cities. Its people are famous for their relaxed personalities and interesting take on life. But for several thousand Vietnam War veterans, this beautiful country remains a nightmare of ferocious memories, strange drug-addled flashbacks, and the emotions of fear and loss. Recently, I was picking through a history of America in the Twentieth Century and spent some time looking at this infamous war. One of the recommended readings, I was informed, was Michael Herr’s Dispatches. Herr wrote for Esquire Magazine during the late sixties and spent two years embedded with the US forces in Vietnam. A number of years following his return Herr wrote this book as a memoir of his time in the country and a scathing overview of the human catastrophe of the conflict. I was surprised, and deeply enlivened to the book before I even began reading, to find that Herr had co-wrote Full Metal Jacket – and indeed the crisp dialogue of that film is referenced significantly in the reality of his account of the war. He went further by writing much of the voiceover in Apocalypse Now – thus acquiring a central role in the two greatest Vietnam War movies. (continue reading…)

A World of Computers

Networking is a significant impediment on my life. I have been offline for what seems an age, in reality a shocking three and half weeks. Often the issue, when I am down and out from the interweb, is the catastrophic nastiness that is wireless networking devices. LAN is just so much more logical. Anyway, Happy New Year to one and all: may they be technologically flawless.

Before Christmas I was nattering on about the German soldier, which was jumping up all over my radar due to their involvement in Afghanistan. Similarly, there is a deal of talk these days about the return of the Russian to the forefront of international relations. Given this, I thought I might look at an aspect of Russian history that has always stood out to my mind. (continue reading…)

Towards the end of his follow-up to The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer Simon Gray mentions going to see a film called  Look at Me, “the idiotic title of the French film Comme une image”.  He goes on to describe this “freak of a film, full of intelligent and civilized people behaving to each other as such people frequently behave to each other, egocentrically, thoughtlessly, narcissistically, with mainly accidental but sometimes deliberate cruelty, all of them perfectly observed in their smallest reactions…”.  I’ve seen the film in question, and he’s right, and justly celebrates the “everyday sort of treachery” that forms the basis for a “marvellously painful moment” in the film.  (continue reading…)

First of all, Secular Sundays would like to wish everyone a happy new year and all that. We dip a toe into 2010 with trepidation, here at New Voice. We can’t say we are all that optimistic, politically or economically speaking. Literature, however, is another matter, and we are prepapred to plunge into the literary waters of 2010 with the wild abandon of the Christmas Day lunatics at the forty foot, promised, as we are, new work from DeLillo and Amis. Following on from the glut of work by heavy hitters the like of Roth, Auster and Banville (though we didn’t like the Banville at all) and Carver and McGahern, released at the end of 2009, we can’t really complain, although we’d love something new from Cormac McCarthy – if anyone has heard anything on this front they might let us know. We had a moment of panic a few weeks ago when we noticed (I’m not sure why I’m sticking with the ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, the stout I’m consuming, perhaps) a headline announcing his auctioning of his typewriter for charity. Apparently somone bought him a new one, though, for a fiver or something, so hopefully we will get something before long. In the meantime, we must make do with the film version of The Road, which we await, again, with some trepidation.
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The team at New Voice would like to wish our readers all the best for the Christmas, and we hope that there was some decent literature under the tree, or at least a book voucher or two. I would also like to announce the arrival of the newest voice on the team – Ruadhán Tomás Farrelly – nearly two weeks old and already showing clear signs of being a literary genius.

I am too full of turkey, and there are too many unopened bottles of Tyskie in the fridge, (not to mention the fact of a new baby demanding attention) for me to spend too much time typing this week. In fact, I just want to alert readers to some Christmas TV – the excellent Orson Welles season on BBC 4 continues this evening and ‘The Dead’, John Huston’s fabulous rendering of, arguably, the complete (perfect?) short story is on RTÉ tomorrow evening. As Fintan O’Toole wrote last week in the Irish Times, it is impossible now to read ‘The Dead’ and imagine Gabriel as anyone other than the magnificent Donal McCann.

Finally, some words from James Joyce to end 2009 – chosen, from ‘The Dead’, for absolutely no reason other than their simplicity and beauty:

The patting at once grew louder in encouragement and then ceased altogether. Gabriel leaned his ten trembling fingers on the tablecloth and smiled nervously at the company. Meeting a row of upturned faces he raised his eyes to the chandelier. The piano was playing a waltz tune and he could hear the skirts sweeping against the drawing-room door. People, perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music. The air was pure there. In the distance lay the park where the trees were weighted with snow. The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres. (Dubliners, Triad/Grafton p230)

I wrote, in the first of these posts on Carver, that I would address the question that Eileen Battersby was moved to ask, upon her reading of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and Beginners, side by side – why Carver allowed Lish to cut the book in the way that he did, why he didn’t fight for the original version of the book. It is a somewhat naïve question, and there are a number of answers, or a number of aspects to the answer. One I have addressed – some of the cuts worked. There is, or should be, nothing unusual in this, it does not mean that the author is not as good as we thought he was, it just means that the editor is doing his job. (continue reading…)

Reading the Carver and Lish versions side by side proves an exercise as irritating as it is interesting: one wonders at how Lish could possibly justify what is best described, solely on the comparative textual evidence supplied here, as a slash and burn approach to editing. (Eileen Battersby, ‘Raymond Carver in his Own Words’ Irish Times, Sat Oct 31 2009) (continue reading…)

The above is an interesting line quoted by Hitler in the second or third year of the Second World War. Memorable for its brevity, yet comprehensively encapsulating the reality of the German fighting machine. Hitler threw it out during the planning stages for Operation Barbarossa, when clamped up spartanly in the forested fortress of the Wolfsschanze, the eponymous Wolfs Lair. In a way it is a throwaway line, consistent to the megalomaniac Furher’s distorted faith in German dominance. But the fact of the matter is the German soldier was considered the finest of the war. This is in almost every respect: courage, order, imagination, alacrity and probably most of all counter attacking initiative. This final one is sufficiently exemplified by the Battle of the Bulge, following several months of consistent allied pressure, and having clearly lost the war, they almost completed a rout, bizarrely; it said a great deal about the Wehrmacht. Of course, they did not complete this rout, nor win the war. It’s somewhat unsettling to consider but baring the tremendous over extension of Barbarossa it might have been a different war following the D Day landings of June ’44. (continue reading…)

One hundred and fifty years, exactly yesterday, since the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and I finish off the final words to peer, literally awestruck, at the breadth of Darwin’s thesis: there really are no words to sufficiently define the extent to which this work captures the utter power of nature. There are many things you can say about Darwin’s argument, not least that it was controversial, but I don’t think that the controversy really explores the vision within the story he unwinds. And I do mean this; above all else this book is to my mind a story: one that encapsulates the entire planet, her life forms, and their coexistence together. I read around the work to ensure I understood the period in which the book was written (being a ludicrously involved history buff, this was straight-forward) which I would highly recommend, as it gives a comprehensive context. Many sciences were still newly burgeoning fields during this period, including biology, however, the understanding in the physical sciences was high – so much so that many believed Darwin’s ultimate theory was a century or so later than it should have been. I’m not converted to this view, I think that this theory is novel in every way imaginable; indeed, its consistent opposition (slight, but there) over the past 150 years is representative of its ingenuity. (continue reading…)

Regular visitors to NewVoiceBlog (and our site stats tell us that there are at least some of you out there) will have noticed, I hope, the absence of Secular Sundays over the last few weeks. This was as a result of a very busy wife needing more-or-less constant access to the laptop. The time, though, was not spent idling, or at least not all of it, but was spent trying to keep up with the spate of new books released by some of the big guns – Auster, Roth and Banville being three and a fourth, for me the biggest, albeit dead, gun, Ray Carver. (continue reading…)