"He Capered Before Them Down Towards The Forty-foot Hole, Fluttering His Winglike Hands, Leaping Nimbly..."

Beer In The Snooker Club

This is one of my favourite novels, and the edition pictured above boasts the only decent cover I’ve seen of this (admittedly infrequently published) work. I picked it up in a second hand bookshop in Limerick about five years ago, and with retrospect it probably should have cost more than €3, especially considering the rarity of the old Penguin edition. Perhaps its value will rise again with its reissue in December by Serpent’s Tail, complete with a new introduction by Diana Athill, in whose house the author lived and committed suicide in in 1969.

This novel triggered my interest in the now all-but-disappeared Egyptian Coptic elite. Leaders in society in the pre-Nasser area, the Copts, like the Greeks before them, were caught between worlds – the world of aristocratic Europe to which they aspired, with its country clubs and communication through French, and the dramatically unequal society in which they lived, where priests’ palaces adjoined slums and the fellaheen (peasants) laboured for a subsistence lifestyle while the elite held hunting parties on the land they tilled. It was inevitable that dramatic change would come, but the Copts had an extraordinarily ancient Christian heritage, almost unique in the area, that ran the risk of being lost forever after Nasser’s rise to power.

The author (a distant relative of former UN Secretary Boutros-Boutros Ghali) came from this rarefied world, and like his alter ego, the character Ram, entertained Marxist ideals before the disillusionment of experience and the ugly reality of post-revolution Egypt caused him to retreat into cynicism. The story covers the experiences of Ram and his avowedly Communist friend Font as they move from Cairo to London, full of romantic dreams of living an artist’s life in the East End, but are disillusioned by casual racism and their upper-middle class hosts’ lack of loyalty. When they return to Cairo, Nasser has taken power but the socialist revolution is far from the dream Font imagined, with a Jewish friend beaten half to death by soldiers and Ram’s excursions into amateur spying revealing endemic levels of prisoner torture.

But it’s more than just political disillusionment that stalks the characters. Ram particularly finds himself becoming more and more detached from any authentic sense of self as the novel progresses. A lifetime of floating between categories – West and East, European and Egyptian, socialist and playboy – as well as the tragedy of a failed love affair, leads him to separate his psyche in two, vividly described in the following passage from the novel:

‘That moment….was the very beginning – the first time in my life that I had felt myself cleave into two entities, the one participating and the other watching and judging.’

The cataclysm of that cleavage is what causes Ram to descend into cynicism and accept so many things that he had once found intolerable. I’ve never read any book that better encapsulates what it must feel like to be caught between two cultures, with no clear sense of belonging to either. Not only does it achieve this, it’s also funny, sympathetic and full of vividly drawn characters that encapsulate the two cities it memorialises. I hope its reissue brings it the widespread attention it deserves.

New fic: Under his carpet

Under his carpet: Linda Eastman McCartney reflects on the ups and downs her marriage to Paul in a series of snapshots between 1968 and 1990. Chapter 1 of 5 posted.

Plinda fans/Paul superfans dni (JOKING! No sugarcoating, but not a hatchet job on either. Most of it is based on fact, but plenty is invented - speculative fiction an' all that.)

While not shying away from the darker sides of the marriage, this story is primarily intended as a character study about flawed individuals, none of whom are villains. It also explores the tension between visually appearing liberated, as many Boomer women did, and the reality of their domestic lives. A tension which is still relevant today.

"You must take up your well-shaped oar and go on a journey until you come where there are men living who know nothing of the sea, and who eat food that is not mixed with salt, who never have known ships whose cheeks are painted purple, who never have known-well-shaped oars, which act for ships as wings do. And I will tell you a very clear proof, and you cannot miss it. When, as you walk, some other wayfarer happens to meet you, and says you carry a winnow-fan on your bright shoulder, then you must plant your well-shaped oar in the ground, and render ceremonious sacrifice to the lord Poseidon, one ram and one bull, and a mounter of sows, a boar pig, and make your way home again and render holy hecatombs to the immortal gods who hold the wide heaven, all of them in order. Death will come to you from the sea, in some altogether unwarlike way, and it will end you in the ebbing time of a sleek old age. Your people about you will be prosperous. All this is true that I tell you.” The Odyssey

Cor Klaasen

Record sleeves for the Mercier Catholic Record Club, designed by Cor Klaasen

Cor Klaasen was a Dutch designer who worked in Irish advertising throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s, but is best remembered for the covers he designed for numerous Irish books and records, including school books for Fallons and sleeves for the Mercier Catholic Record Collection, the original incarnation (pardon the pun) of Mercier Press. A brief exhibition of his work, held as part of Dublin Design Week, is on show in Adifferentkettleoffishaltogether, a small gallery on Ormond Quay, until next Wednesday 10th November. It’s worth a visit, both to appreciate Klaasen’s clean, clever design and to get a feel of some of vibrancy that existed in Irish art and design between the 50s and the 70s.

As exhibition co-ordinator, Niall McCormack (who also maintains the excellent site about vintage Irish book covers, www.hitone.ie) said at a talk he gave as part of OFFSHOOT last night, we assume that 50s Ireland was all ‘Angela’s Ashes and people whipping each other’, but while Ireland was nowhere near as advanced as other European countries in art and design, there was still a number of talented, enthusiastic people who did their best to shake up the stifling social conservatism that dominated in all cultural fields for so long.

I thought McCormack was perhaps a little too dismissive about the Catholic Church’s cultural influence in this period during his talk, because the Klaasen exhibition shows that though it was largely responsible for the lack of innovative cultural activity in the country at the time, there was a surprisingly strong forward-thinking element within the Church at the time too, who provided Klaasen with a substantial portion of his employment. Some of the record sleeves he designed for Mercier are astonishingly radical, like one where the almost cartoonishly dull title ‘Building a new moral theology’ read by Rev. Albert Johnson, belies the surreal black-lined Christ-head, complete with long red spikes extending from his stylised crown of thorns. It certainly wasn’t John Charles McQuaid and his ilk who were OK-ing this and other striking cover designs.

Klaasen worked in a simple, classic style, occasionally branching out into 60s-style cartoon but overall you get the feeling he preferred the clean lines of the De Stijl style he would have grown up with in Amsterdam. One highlight is a cover for a religious book entitled ‘The Methods of Dogmatic Theology’ by Walter Kaspar, which is a plain black background broken by a simple white circle enclosing the text of the title. Smaller white bubbles extend from the large circle, but not so much so as to break the tranquil cleanness of the design. His more detailed images are successful too, particularly the abstract covers of the various schoolbooks he designed for Fallons, many of which were carved out directly on his printing surface without the aid of a pencil drawing.

He could turn his hand to political material too, evidenced by his cover for a book on the UVF, published in 1973 by Torc Press, in which a row of grotesque-looking paramilitaries, printed in lines so thick as to be almost unintelligible, line the bottom of a plain red cover, with the word UVF rendered in jarring black-lined orange above. He incorporates the symbolic orange of the Unionist paramilitaries against what would normally be a clashing red tone, perhaps to imply the blood that was on the hands of the people suggested by the images below. The grimaces of the terrorists evoke the grotesque leers of George Grosz’s villains, an artist that Klaasen admired and often imitated.

It’s easy in the 21st century to dismiss mid-20th century Ireland as a place of unmitigated drear and uncreativity, so it’s a good thing for exhibitions like this to display the often-forgotten figures who played a role in bucking that trend. I would recommend catching this exhibition before it finishes, it can be viewed in the gallery from 11am-5pm daily between now and next Wednesday.

Gotta work it out

An interesting report in Saturday’s Irish Times examined the phenomenon of Irish graduates’ unwillingness to work at low-skilled jobs, and how the gap is being plugged by foreign workers. The overall impression was that many in Ireland would prefer not to work at low-skilled jobs when they receive the equivalent money from the dole, as many of the foreign interviewees noted. The information  was presented neutrally, and could be interpreted in any way, but the response of one of the interviewees indicated what response is expected from the public. Andrew, a postgraduate economics student, commented ‘Personally, I didn’t study for five years to work in McDonald’s’, and at the interview’s end requested that his last name not be printed. When asked why, he said: ‘I don’t want to be portrayed as a student stereotype who’d prefer to bum around rather than work.’ A later interviewee stated: ‘I’d rather be cleaning toilets than on the dole,’ indicating what is likely to be the commonest media and public reaction to the piece – that people should always work, in whatever jobs are available, rather than take social welfare.

The problem with this reaction is that it assumes that work – any kind of work – has intrinsic moral value. It can be argued that a job keeps people focused and helps maintain a healthy timetable – but it’s a bit of a jump from that to assert that cleaning toilets and flipping burgers is morally superior to staring at the wall. It seems strange that educated graduates should feel guilty for admitting that they think themselves too good for certain jobs. From an educational and experience point of view, they are too good – yet that is not the assessment they are perceived to be making. Instead, it’s seen as a moral question – do you think yourself too good for work, which in all its forms is inherently good? Such moralising seems to lose sight of the real issue – that a First World economy with a small population such as Ireland cannot provide jobs for its graduates.

It’s over 70 years old, but Bertrand Russell’s In Praise Of Idleness still has highly relevant things to say on this matter. The social rigidity of his England has loosened up somewhat, so it’s not the case anymore that the idle landowners preach the validity of ‘the Slave State’, but his statement that ‘….the necessity of keeping the poor contented…..has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labour, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect’ still rings true. Opinion makers and business people (and it’s not just the usual-suspect loudmouths like Bill Cullen and Michael O’Leary that pass judgement based on their own experience) may have spent the requisite years waiting tables and cleaning toilets, but nobody with aspirations to influence is prepared to make an unskilled job his or her career. The work experience of the currently well-employed does not validate their arguments in favour of the morality of work, because for them, low-skilled work was always a means to an end, while in the current climate it is the only option for the foreseeable future for too many people.

The argument that we are ‘palming off’ our menial jobs on foreigners because we’re too lazy and immoral to do them ourselves doesn’t carry any great weight outside of simplistic moralising. It avoids the key, difficult question – why do we still live in a world where there a yawning chasm between skilled and unskilled work, between the professions and the trades? Carpenters and painters often made big money during the Celtic Tiger, but without the advantages of higher education and connections many of them have come crashing back to square one. Foreign workers from poorer countries tolerate working in monotonous, uninspiring and difficult jobs here because they’ll make more money and enjoy a better quality of life than they do back home. Much is said about certain groups’ unwillingness to go on the dole and it’s implied that this makes them morally better than other groups. Yet surely the fact that trained accountants and lawyers from abroad work in Irish hotels and shops should be seen as a worldwide injustice, rather than a reason to celebrate moral worth?

Too many humans all over the world, even in 2010, still labour endlessly just to survive. Thousands flee the Indian countryside every year to live in the hellish atmosphere of city slums, just for a chance to escape the grind of subsistence living. Those people would consider western fetishising of work insane. Of course, the plight of Indian slum-dwellers and that of European graduates facing into a career making coffee are not the same at all; the latter is still infinitely more fortunate, but it’s objectionable to dismiss today’s graduates’ unhappiness with the current lack of work as expressions of their ‘pampered’ nature. Supposedly ‘pampered’ students often work two or more part-time jobs to put themselves through college, and university in Ireland and England has broadened immensely over the last couple of decades to include a wider cross-section of society than at any time in history. Graduates today are not the Daddy-fleecing sybaritic stereotypes of old.

The budget will probably see a cut in social welfare, which many comfortably employed people will welcome as an ‘incentive’ to get people back to work. The delusion that depriving people of welfare leads to a magic upsurge in employment shows no sign of dying out since the days of Norman ‘Get on your bikes’ Tebbitt. The dole needs some overhaul and savings could certainly be made by limiting the amount given to single people under 25, for example. But debate on unemployment and welfare, in the media and the public echo chamber at least, seems to be short on sense, compassion and practicality, and high on moralising. The government is frantically drawing up a budget which will improve the country’s standing in the eyes of the unelected speculators that control the international financial market, whose morality is rarely questioned, while on the ground easy answers are sought by passing judgement on what isn’t,. nor should ever be, a moral matter.

Ask anyone who works in a menial or low-skilled job, and they will not tell you that they think their work has moral worth. The foreign people interviewed in the Irish Times article had varying opinions on the issue of the Irish and work, but none indicated that they enjoyed the work they have to do to survive. Perhaps Russell summed it up best when he described how a menial worker should describe their work according to the morality of the rich, and added his own response:“’I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man’s noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.’ I have never heard working men say this sort of thing. They consider work, as it should be considered, a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.”

Early Bloomsday.

On Instagram

Veep style tv shows about the Beatles that I want

Veep style tv show about Apple in 1968

Veep style tv show about the staff at the Dakota

eight word horror story

go read the first chapter of my dumb mclennon britpop au hooray