Finding the write stuff in Listowel
YOU never forget your first, as the old saying goes. Back in the late 1990s, I found myself in Listowel on the June bank holiday weekend without any definite plan in mind. Pitching up by chance into the literary extravaganza that is Listowel Writers’ Week, I discovered an unpolished jewel of wit and wisdom that lures me back at regular intervals to this day.
This year’s festival offers its usual wide array of international talent, including Richard Ford, Alan Cumming and Emma Donoghue.
Of course, on my first visit in 1996, those iconic legends of the town were still with us – Bryan MacMahon and John B Keane. Both heroes of mine, imagine my amazement to find myself one special evening in the company of these two magical wordsmiths as they jousted and expounded in a cosy pub corner on the unique language and people of north Kerry. “The language that we use here is a love child of Irish and English, a kind of spate tongue spoken with speed, colour and depth,” opined John B. “Hereabouts, we regularly allow ourselves extreme overstatement and maximum melodrama en route to achieving the most dramatic effect.”
Bryan recalled the grumbling farmer reluctantly paying the barman for a poor lunch of bacon: “Yerra, boy, there wasn’t as much lean in it that you could draw with one stroke of a red biro.”
John B responded with the classic of another farmer bargaining down the price of a donkey rail of turf: “Sure, a blackbird would bring home more in his beak.”
Or what about the man slow to pay his bog labourers for his expected pound of flesh: “Ye didn’t cut enough, lads, to make smoke for benediction.”
Best of all was the individual giving instructions for his funeral to the local undertaker: “Screw down the lid as soon as you get me. If they didn’t come to admire me when I was worth looking at, I don’t want them gawking at me when I can’t see what they’re thinking about.”
This weekend I’ll again ramble and roam around the familiar precincts of Listowel, dipping in and out with pleasure on literary conversation and presentation.
And all the while I’ll be remembering that first visit years ago in the company of those masters of the art.
World-class liar
IRELAND has been no stranger to financial crooks, conmen and swindlers in recent times, many of whom still proudly walk our streets with nary a glance backward to the trail of human destruction in their wake. But even the worst of our sharks and shysters are in the ha’penny place compared to Bernie Madoff.
Having cheated investors out of €65bn in one of history’s greatest Ponzi schemes, he was sentenced in 2009 to 150 years in jail. For anyone keen to fathom the kind of brain it took to wilfully defraud millions from even children’s charities and cancer foundations, ‘Wizard of Lies’ on Sky Atlantic this Thursday may offer a few clues.
Robert De Niro (left) plays Madoff, complete with startling physical resemblance, while Michelle Pfeiffer takes the role of his wife Ruth. “I certainly wouldn’t invest in the stock market,” Madoff revealed in a recent prison interview. “I never believed in it. Most people lose money because of the emotional difficulty involved.” Cold comfort to the thousands of pensioners reduced to penury as a result of his uncaring and relentless fraud.
Currently residing at the Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, North Carolina, Madoff earns $10 a week as a cleaner, and shares an 8ft x 10ft cell with another inmate. Sounds about right for America’s most reviled swindler.
Get a handle on ‘Ulysses’
EVER taken a stab at ‘Ulysses’? If, like me, you failed miserably to master Joyce’s iconic text after just 20 pages, help may be at hand. Students at Boston College have engineered a virtual reality game based on the book to make it more accessible for modern audiences.
‘Joystick’ is enjoyed by strapping on a VR headpiece, earphones and a gaming controller which enable users to interact with Joyce’s 1922 masterpiece though audio, music and text. Due for release just before Bloomsday on June 16, it might just save the blushes of us types too dim-witted to grasp the ramblings of Leopold, Molly and Buck. Can’t wait to hear how the Yanks handle the line: “The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotum-tightening sea.”
Sgt Pepper turns 50
SORRY if this makes you feel old, but ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ was released 50 years ago this week. At a time when The Beatles were losing popularity, it was the album that changed everything. ‘Time’ magazine deemed it “a historic departure in the progress of music”, and ‘Rolling Stone’ lauded it as “the closest Western civilisation has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815”. The name of the album was supposedly inspired by a police officer assigned to the band’s entourage during a 1966 tour of Canada – one Sergeant Randy Pepper. As to the most controversial song, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ – it was not a reference to LSD, but took inspiration from a nursery school painting by John Lennon’s three-year old son Julian. Lucy O’Connell was one of his classmates. So there.