New Voice

To my mind, Biomass has long been hailed as a standard bearer for the renewable energy world. Allowing the comprehensive destruction of dead materials with an output made up of distributable energy, its use in our high-energy-demand world is both logical and consistent – and indeed comprehensive. Though not specifically a carbon free scheme (roughly one half of the burnt matter contains carbon) it sits well as a renewable energy source. Its problems, as is irritatingly the case with so many renewables, lies in the amount of energy needed to complete the manufacturing process: in the case of Biomass – far too much to warrant significant use. Be that as it may, in a world floundering in the impact of too much carbon, technology is needed to find alternatives to the burning of fossil fuels, and hopefully, to burn a source clean and free of pollutants. A goal I feel is vitally important over the next twenty years. (continue reading…)

The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world…
       (J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come)

Martin Amis has said that it took him a while to get the hang of the, now departed, J.G. Ballard. I confess that I’m still not quite there yet. His ideas, his motivation, his obsessions and his preoccupations – I get. It’s the delivery mechanism for these ideas - his writing, his prose, his narrative structure, the stories he creates to contain these prescient, exciting ideas, that I don’t get. The prose, for me, is cumbersome and awkward, the dialogoue is awful and the stories weak and flimsy. That said, though, the work is compelling and this is because of the ideas communicated. (continue reading…)

If we required proof of the scrawny parochialism of the Irish, and its slightly better fed parent, the British, publishling industries, we need look no further than the absence of the works of Lydia Davis from our bookshops. 

One of the most strenuous, inventive and celebrated of contemporary American writers, she is currently, it would seem, without a publisher on this side of the English-speaking world.  And we need her.  Her relentless probing into the human predicament, through innovative literary forms could only be welcomed by those of us growing tired of being subjected to the adoring praise showered on those accomplished advocates of the “good read”, now plying their trade so successfully in these islands.

Seated at my desk in the cold of an Irish May. My thoughts forever dwell on our mercurial weather. I am the average soul in that fashion, blunderingly confused by the masses of wintry air, falling endlessly at my window. It makes no difference what time it is; nor what window I peer through, for that matter. Always the rain. Living in Ireland brings that gloomy weather system as often and assuredly as it issues tall pints resting on a bar top, or clasping hands pinching a morning breakfast roll. Recent years have proved even more waterful: the summers of 2007 and 2008 were a period of record rainfall. Whole months whispered by in a cloudy haze, scatterings of tight sunshine piercing mournful days for bare minutes at a time. Thus is the sprawling weather of the new globe. (continue reading…)

The subject of today’s sermon, brethren, is last night’s programming on BBC 4 – a selection of doucmentaries on selected, British poets. Incidentally, BBC 4 is, increasingly, becoming a good reason to stay in on Saturday nights (well, that, the recession and a god-awful hangover from the night before). Anyway,  we had Paxman on Wilfred Owen, the most interesting part of which was an opportunity to view drafts of poems, complete with Sassoon’s suggestions. This documentary, though, put me in mind, not only of Owen and his brilliant poetry and tragic, ironic life and death, but of Owen as portrayed by Pat Barker in the exceptional Regeneration trilogy. (continue reading…)