The Isle is Full of Noises
By Brian Dillon.
Listen keenly enough to the land and the dead will speak out of it, the dead will move among us.
Outposts
By Rob Doyle.
We were hitchhiking on a freeway on the outskirts of the capital. The situation incited a fearful joy. ‘Cruelty? That’s just like you.’ ‘This is my country, I don’t have to tolerate anyone.’ ‘Natürlich,’ I replied. Cars zoomed past us, a monstrous violence inherent in the world today. We were young and in love and nothing else mattered.
Bloodsports for all
We were asked by Sinéad Gleeson for the Irish Times who we’d pick as Laureate for Irish Fiction, and why. Our thoughts turned first to Groucho Marx (“I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member”), then to Austrian Nestbeschmutzer Thomas Bernhard who hated accepting honours and patronage so much he wrote a book on it – My Prizes.
Traces remain
From brilliant Simon Critchley’s Memory Theatre, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
I drove back to the university the next morning and thought about my dream of the Gothic cathedral as a vast memory theatre. The medieval love of the figurative, the dramatic and rage grotesque was not, then, evidence of either some tortured sexual repression, as we moderns arrogantly assumed but is simply a powerful and vivid aid to recollection. Before the Reformation and the rise of literacy, image rather than print was the privileged means of religious instruction. The seemingly wild imaginings of the Gothic cathedral were simply concrete ways of shaping the entirety of time, from creation to redemption, as an aid to recollection and reflection. In a cathedral, time became space, fixed in location, embodied in stone. It was a vast time capsule. Decline from Gutenberg onwards. Fuck the Reformation.
