Hello, world. I’m MacDara Conroy, and this is my blog.

So many books…

[I had intended to post this comment on Markham’s new blog but he seems to be having some technical problems. So it’s going here instead. (I mean, what’s my weblog for if I don’t post on it every now and again?)]

So apparently bloggers like books, eh? What with all the reading and the writing and all, who woulda thunk it?

But enough of my sarcasm. I also share the bookish addiction. It’s not so bad that I can’t walk past a bookshop without being drawn inside by some mysterious magnetic force. But when I do pop into Waterstone’s or Hodges Figgis now and again, more often than not I can’t leave without having bought something. Damn those three for two offers!

As for reading the bloody things? I do tend to go through periods of not reading anything substantial, bar newspapers and magazines (and websites, natch), so the book pile has been growing steadily for some time. But I have been on a bit of a reading buzz lately.

Since my recent jaunt abroad I’ve read and enjoyed The State of Africa by Martin Meredith (highly recommended Markham, if you haven’t read it already); The Quarry by Damon Galgut; The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem; and am trying to make Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures last as long as possible…

I also breezed through Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, which had been sitting in my bag one-quarter read for the last six months, and I’ve just started A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester, on the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which I picked up for virtually nothing over Christmas downstairs at Eason’s.

And there are at least ten other books on the shelf just waiting to be delved into. Provided my current reading buzz lasts, that is. If not, they’ll just have to wait, and make room for the others I’ll undoubtedly add to the pile in the coming months.

(And by the way Markham, The Winding Stair is still open. Or at least it was when I was crossing the Ha’penny Bridge on Monday morning.)

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The War on Words

Philip Pullman writes in last weekend’s Guardian Review on the fate of literature as democratic activity in an increasingly didactic, theocratic world:
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The democracy of reading exists in the to-and-fro between reader and text, when each is free to engage honestly with the other. The democracy of politics needs the same freedom and honesty in the public realm: freedom from lies and distortions about other candidates, honesty about one’s own actions and programmes and sources of information. It’s difficult. It’s strenuous. The sort of effort it takes was never very common, but it seems to be rarer now than it was. It is quite easy for democracies to forget how to read.

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Does that last sentence unsettle you as much as it does me?

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André Brink in Profile

Last weekend’s Guardian Review has a revealing profile on renowned Afrikaans author André Brink, who “since 1994 and the first democratic elections … has tried to write the kind of novel which, while not in any way agitprop or crude, tries to give that sense of the new historical movement” in South Africa.
In his own words, Brink is a little more straightforward in his assessment of his own place and responsibility as a writer:
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Writing is a little like heaven and hell, you can’t do without either. Initially I started writing because I wanted to get to grips with things that had happened to me and around me. And it’s the same now. I know I will never get there completely, but that’s a good thing too because I would then probably stop writing.

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Brink’s latest book, Before I Forget, will be published next month. I’ve already added it to my wishlist.

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Bloomsday Notes

So today was the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, the day on which the events of James Joyce’s Ulysses take place. And it completely passed me by, as I had other, more pressing matters at hand.
But I feel that I’ve already done my bit, and more than others. Regular readers will recall my personal challenge to read the book in question late last year (I wrote about it here, here, here and here) and to my surprise, I actually enjoyed the experience, which has since given me a smug sense of superiority over literature-phobic philistines and pompous academics alike.
And if I can do it, you can do it too! Starting today, you can subscribe to Ulysses: One Page Every Day, an RSS feed of the text in its entirety as sourced from the Project Gutenberg collection. (Thanks to Matt Webb for the linkage.)
Isn’t that a wonderful use of technology? Maybe one day, RSS will become the de facto format for reading more difficult works.

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Page 23, Sentence 5

“She was shocked and said, ‘What can I do to kill him?'”
[from The Child with a Moon on his Chest by SM Guma, as featured in The New Century of South African Short Stories, ed. Michael Chapman; AD Donker, Johannesburg & Cape Town, 2004]
(c/o sippey.typepad.com; plus an interesting autopsy of the meme in question)

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Jimmy Joyce Ha Ha Ha

Roddy Doyle (who wouldn’t have become a writer if it weren’t for my old primary school principal Noel Kennedy) has courted controversy for his alleged confession at a birthday celebration for James Joyce in New York that he “can’t be bothered” with the work of Ireland’s most fêted literary paragon. Adding insult to injury, this comes in the year of the centenary of Bloomsday, the day on which the events in Ulysses take place. Unsurprisingly, his comments immediately raised the ire of everyone’s favourite Joycean scholar, David Norris:
> “A lot of people now try to make a reputation by attacking Joyce … These are people of medium talent who feel they can attack and challenge a global reputation. A lot of Irish writers of talent have felt threatened by Joyce. I think that’s part of it.”
Obviously Doyle is not the first to have voiced such criticism, even in such a blatantly controversialist manner. (Then again, _any_ criticism of this sort, constructive or not, is usually seen in the negative.) Joyce is after all notoriously difficult to read — though ultimately rewarding for me, I cannot say that Ulysses wasn’t a chore — and because of it he has always had his detractors:
> Begrudgery was nothing new to Joyce. He fled the city, where his books were effectively banned until the 1960s, because of the viciousness of its barstool critics. He famously wrote in 1909: “How sick, sick, sick I am of Dublin! It is the city of failure, of rancour and of unhappiness, I long to be out of it.”
That’s a fair point to make about this fair city; 95 years on, times really haven’t changed and I, too, long to be out of it.
But I digress. Doyle has a fair point of his own to make:
> “If you’re a writer in Dublin and you write a snatch of dialogue, everyone thinks you lifted it from Joyce. The whole idea that he owns language as it is spoken in Dublin is a nonsense. He didn’t invent the Dublin accent. It’s as if you’re encroaching on his area or it’s a given that he’s on your shoulder. It gets on my nerves.”
I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. On one hand, Joyce’s work _is_ better and more rewarding than Doyle gives it credit for (though to be fair, he’s picking on Joycean evangelism and the industry it has encouraged rather than the man himself). On the other, the spectre of Joyce that haunts Irish literature has without doubt put unfair expectations on the shoulders of generations of Irish writers — and Dublin writers in particular — so it’s hard to blame Roddy Doyle for being irked, or irksome, about it. (Even if it was a cheap-shot.)
This leads me to make a proposal from the top of my head: that James Joyce is the Bob Dylan of literature. (I’m sure it’s really vice versa, but for the sake of argument please bear with me.) Joyce, like Dylan, is venerated to such a degree that his fans/worshippers/whatever are often blinded to the existence or worth of anything else, independent of him, in its own right. And some of these people aren’t going to be convinced otherwise, no matter how hard you try.
So in the end of the day, does it really matter? Not really. Joyce will always have his legions of followers, and Doyle, whether he realises it or not, has made his indelible mark on the literary landscape both at home and abroad. Ultimately, all this bother is just passive-aggressive attention seeking, if you ask me.
Whatever the case, if he were alive today, it’s likely that Joyce would be chuckling with glee at the whole spectacle (as viewed from the safe distance of continental Europe, no doubt) and revelling in the plentiful royalties he’d receive by virtue of the massive publicity this year’s events will generate; being respected for your craft is one thing, but you’re kidding yourself if you think there’s nothing more.

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Ulysses Update #3

About an hour ago (and a week before the deadline, too) I completed my personal challenge; I can now hold my head high with pride and declare with the greatest confidence that yes, I _have_ read James Joyce’s Ulysses, and I enjoyed every word of it.
Well, maybe not _every_ word. I did find that I had to concentrate a lot more than how I normally read, but perhaps I was just extra cautious and/or determined to get the most out of the experience, due to its reputation.
But anyway. As I promised at the outset, I have beside me a chilled glass of the finest South African wine (rosé), and I shall henceforth repose to reflect upon my great achievement, having scaled this literary Matterhorn.*
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*I would say ‘literary Everest’, but I think Finnegan’s Wake deserves that title, and that’s a mountain I’m just not ready to climb. Maybe some day…

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Ulysses Update #2

Fifteen days in now, and I’m at page 414. The going was great till about page 365, when the text suddenly morphed into early modern English, but I managed to fight my way through it; I didn’t read English at university, so I consider this quite an achievement on my part.
The most important thing to note at this stage is that I have passed the half-way mark, so am well on course to complete my challenge before the month’s end. And oh yes, for the most part, I’m enjoying it too. I’m sure that Joyce would rather I read simply for the pleasure of it, but as far as I’m concerned it’s either this way or not reading it at all. Sorry, James.

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Ulysses Update #1

Nine days into the Ulysses challenge, and my bookmark rests at page 248. And you know what? I’m actually quite enjoying it.
It’s not nearly as difficult to read as I had been lead to believe. I expected Desolation Angels-style impenetrability, but for the most part the story is quite straightforward. Maybe one needs to be a Dubliner to get the most out of it; local geography seems to be a strong motif, and my mind has been active mapping the routes the characters take through the town to my own knowledge of the city.
And as for the stream-of-consciousness prose? Such passages have cropped up regularly, but they’re not too difficult to read, once my brain slips into the right gear. Think about it: reflect upon your own thought processes — we jump from item to item at the drop of a hat, words and images we encounter make sudden connections with our memories and experiences; it’s all a jumble, but we still manage to make sense of it.
If one absorbs Joyce’s almost lyrical stream-of-consciousness in the same manner as one would one’s own thought processes, the prose doesn’t seem quite so cut-up and alien. Maybe not accessible for the average reader, still, but not nearly as foreboding as some might say.
But anyway. Nine days down, twenty-two to go…

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Ulysses

December is at last upon us. And to mark the occasion (amongst all those other important, life-fulfilling duties I must force myself to perform) I have given myself a challenge — dare I say the mother of _all_ challenges: to read Ulysses by James Joyce, in its entirety, before the year’s end.
That’s right. What with the 100th Anniversary of Bloomsday coming up in a matter of months, my eagerness to be ‘one of the gang’ on the Mike Watt List (the Minutemen were big Joyce fans, dontcha know?), and since the book was sitting there on my shelf already, untouched for well over a year and gradually gathering dust, I decided that no time could be better than the present.
And so, by setting myself a target of approximately 25 pages per day (which is neither too little, nor too large to digest comfortably), and of course accounting for the holidays, I should finish this mammoth endeavour before New Year’s Eve, upon which I shall likely repose with a glass of the finest South African wine to reflect upon my experience.
David Norris would be proud, to be sure.
As it stands, I am currently two days into my personal challenge, my Amazon.co.uk bookmark residing between pages 58 and 59, as Leopold Bloom has repaired to the local butchers on Dorset Street to procure a pork kidney for his breakfast — not _my_ idea of a good breakfast, but how and ever.
(Just for the record, the copy of Ulysses employed for this challenge is the paperback Reader’s Edition, edited by one Danis Rose and published by Picador in 1998, which apparently has been repunctuated — in an _unjoycean_ manner — to make it more, well, readable. Anyone who wishes to point out that I am not only cheating, but cheating _myself_ by reading an edition that has been revised specifically to make it somewhat easier for the average reader to consume is hereby advised to sod off.)
I intend to make irregular updates here to update you, dear reader, on my progress. Will I make it to the end with a new understanding of my fair city? Will I tear out the last of my hair in frustration? Who knows?!? It’s all so exciting!
Footnote: The Dictionary.com Word of the Day for this very post is _arcane_, defined as ‘understood … by only a few.’ Sounds like the average description of James Joyce’s writing, don’t you agree? Once again, coincidence strikes the Textual Repository…

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You Shall Know Our Velocity (Abridged)

Don’t have the time to read Dave Eggers’ latest book, or simply can’t (or can’t be bothered to) get your hands on a copy?

Not to worry – read the digest version instead (from today’s Guardian).

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Iain Banks

I’ve always thought that Iain Banks lives a wonderful life.

I remember some years ago, I was off sick from school and – as per usual whenever I was off sick – watching Channel 4 Schools (now 4Learning). There was some English programme on – that being English the subject, not the language, nor the nation – that profiled different British authors, their lifestyles, and their thoughts about writing. This particular episode featured Iain Banks.

I remember being surprised to learn that Banks only wrote for three months every year, from October to December if I rightly recall, and spent the rest of the year being a slacker (his choice of word, not mine). I immediately thought to myself, that’s what I want to do with my life.

The programme also showed ambiguous dramatised segments from arguably his most famous novel, The Wasp Factory. Quite unsettling indeed, even more so when spliced intermittently with footage of Banks himself whizzing around narrow, winding Scottish country roads on his motorbike.

I never got around to reading The Wasp Factory until late last year, when the days were getting shorter, the nights getting darker and colder. It’s an excellent read, though not for the faint hearted.

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Bloomsday

It just dawned on me that today is Bloomsday. What with all the kerfuffle about the big match today (that I’m not even watching), I suppose it was bound to get overshadowed.

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