New Voice

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)

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…)

We at New Voice like a good essay, and so welcomed Declan Kiberd’s essay in the Irish Times yesterday. In fact, in the ‘Weekend’ section of the IT yesterday we were treated, not only to Kiberd, but an interview with Banville and a review of Brian Dillon’s new book about hypochondria and creativity. If the book is as enjoyable, well written and interesting as the piece in the ‘Guardian Review’ the Saturday before last, it is certainly worth buying.
Back to Professor Kiberd. His essay was a riff on a theme those of us fortunate enough to have taken English in UCD over the last ten years or so will recognise. (continue reading…)

You are encouraged to take your time, to relax, to make yourself at home:
“The store has lots of fully furnished roomsets. You can try out everything, sit on the chairs, lie on the beds and let your imagination create your new home.”

Yes, I have been at the Ballard again, however, although it could well be, the lines above are not from a J.G. Ballard story. This is not a sales pitch from a store in Vermillion Sands. This is a quote from Ikea’s Irish website. (continue reading…)

This week’s effort is a long one, think of it as a double week, following last week’s absence, due to the logistical difficulty of managing a couple of weekend trips to Kerry, the first of which led to a chance encounter with a book, to which I will return.
Firstly, since the autumn I have been wondering how John Gray has not been jumping up and down screaming I told you so, from the rooftops. John Banville, in a review of Gray’s recently published selection of essays, also wondered about this. Gray, no doubt is too busy being appalled and shocked by the stubborn insistence of some to persist with the concept of the free market and global Amercian democracy, to gloat.
Gray is a thinker who has been proved correct – his analysis of the trends of contemporary governments, pre and post September 11 is very accurate, as is his dispassionate, detached analysis of contemporary thought. Fukuyama, for one, must surely have squirmed if and when he read Gray’s incredulous dismantling of his ‘end of history’ pronouncement. His assessment of the likely consequences of the various forms of utopian evangelicism – be it religious, humanistic or scientific and especially economic evangelicism (though all combine to form Gray’s overarching theory) has been almost eerily prophetic. Apologies for the cliché here, but read False Dawn, or Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern – I promise that you will find his predicitions, though they are not presented as such, they are presented as clear, obvious inevitable facts, prophetic, eerily so. (continue reading…)

In my last post I mentioned Lars Von Triers, and the hostility his films provoke. Bryan Appleyard, in last week’s Sunday Times, went on at length about how provoked he was by Antichrist. What quite provoked Appleyard’s hostility was a little difficult to pinpoint – he didn’t like the explicit violence, the nastiness, and he wasn’t sure whether or not it should have been given its 18 uncut rating, as he isn’t quite sure about the whole rating thing. But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t the violence that left him “insensate with rage,” although he spent quite a bit of the article talking about the violence and nastiness. (continue reading…)

…on a Monday, this week. I thought, when I started to write, that I was done with work, and I am, for the moment, in a moment. I thought that I had done work to the death, but its relationship to literature is fertile ground for discussion – since I’ve started writing about it people have been mentioning books that deal with work, or writers known for their relationship with work, especially with means-to-end work. Someone mentioned Flann O’Brien, like myself a civil servant, and a man whose literary output would put one to shame. That he had time to squeeze in so much writing – the journalism and ficiton – between work and prodigious boozing (although he was a civil servant at a time when you could combine the working and the boozing, saving some time at least) is amazing and admirable. (continue reading…)

The E-Street band are, so they say, the hardest working band in the world. And it is with their songs fresh in the mind after watching their performance in Glastonbury last night (on TV) that my thoughts turn once again to work. The E-Street band and their Boss like to associate themselves with the idea of work, and of the working class – they put in the graft, nightly, with hugely energetic, prolonged performances in order to give us, the punters, value for money. (continue reading…)

This week’s sermon will be a short one, a digression really as I take a break from my work themed posts to digest some of the reading material on the theme that has been recommended (and loaned) to me. I do want to make one further work-related point, though. The routine of work is one of the most maligned aspects of how we spend our days. Routine, developing one, and committing to it, however, is also a vital part of the writer’s process. (continue reading…)