Aiden O Reilly
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Encounters with books

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Writers’ Workbench at IWC

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A 6-week course workshop starting Thursday Feb 6th

Enhance your creative/critiquing skillset and knock your writing into shape.
This course takes a hands-on approach covering:
Creativity,
Dialogue & description
Finding your voice,
Style, Structure/plot,
Editing

Practicing editing techniques will be a crucial component and some of the mechanics of dialogue, description, and POV will be covered.  The course is suitable for those who have attempted some writing and for those in need of a new approach. Participants will be expected to complete two pieces of fiction or creative non-fiction.

At the Irish Writers Centre on Parnell Square

Bookings via the IWC website: https://irishwriterscentre.ie/collections/spring-2020/products/the-writers-workbench-with-aiden-oreilly-2020

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Irish Times classics revisited

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I see Rob Doyle has a regular column in the Irish Times where he introduces his best-loved books.

Doyle is the author of Here Are the Young Men and the short story collection this is the ritual – link is to to a few notes I made on it. His fictions generally zoom in on the anxieties, manias and apostates of these strange days we live in.

Here’s a list of the columns so far. There are a couple of my own favourites in there too.
And below is how he introduces the series

I read for delight and fascination, even when these demand a toll, opening old wounds or inflicting new ones. The books I’m going to recommend are eclectic. What they’ve got in common, aside from the fact that they were written prior to the 21st century, is that they have all made this human lifespan I find myself undergoing deeper, stranger, grander, and full of amazement.

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Winter Papers

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The Winter Pages is a hard-back annual compendium of new essays & fiction by (mainly) Irish writers. It’s beautifully produced and edited by the Olivia Smith and Kevin Barry team. On reading through it I can see there was a lot of thought put into what pieces were best suitable; there are common themes and concerns, the pieces ‘talk to each other’. My own essay, which I thought was a bit unusual when I submitted it, finds a natural place alongside pieces by Jan Carson and Wendy Erskine.

The volume is clearly intended be a Christmas Annual for book lovers – something to browse through when evenings are drawing in.

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Noel Duffy’s poetry collection

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On Light & Carbon
Noel Duffy

Noel Duffy

There was a time in my teenage years when I read lots of popular science books: Carl Sagan, Jacob Bronowski, Arthur Koestler, Douglas Hofstadter, the Tell me Why book series and others. The emphasis in these books was on how science opens up new ways of understanding. I grew up in the belief science was a human concern – and I don’t mean in terms of the impact of technology. I mean I expected that discoveries about human nature and about the nature of the universe would change people’s way of thinking.

Noel Duffy trained as a physicist and shares this view that scientific discoveries are an integral part of intellectual life. There is no border between the “two cultures”. His poems grasp imagery from space exploration, chemistry, astronomy, the pioneering days of science, but also ancient history, art, and philosophy.

If this perspective is uncommon it’s largely because of how universities operate, how people have to specialize in life.

Duffy’s poems resonate with me and revive that once-familiar image of man as a creature driven by the pursuit of knowledge and search for essential truths. The very first poem, Earthrise, is about an astronaut returning from one of the Apollo missions.

In the name
of science I had ascended
higher than
the mountain tops through all the shades
of day until there was only
night left

Several of the poems juxtapose the intellectual passion with the mundane, the domestic, and the chaotic. They bear witness to a world fast losing an appreciation for Mind/Spirit/Intellect – and do so in surprising and intriguing ways. We meet a professor ‘in sloppy collegiate tweed’ pressing a tea-bag against the side of the cup, who then squeezes past ‘a sharp-tongued student holding court / on Derrida and the deconstruction of art’
(No prizes for guessing what the poet thinks of postmodern philosophy.)
Another poem looks at the invention of the microscope a kind of counterpart poem to Earthrise which begins the book. This time the new worlds opened up to human sight are the infinitesimally small. Duffy makes an imaginative leap:

“But in this I saw not just matter alone, but another light also
that penetrates further to the very notion of order,
beneath the base of the world and all we perceive

Duffy’s poems, by and large, are not in the business of highlighting the absurdity of existence, fragility of reason, fragmented identity. Instead his poems reach out to a broader understanding of what it is to be human. Broader in the sense of including thirst for knowledge, encounters with the transcendent, and also in an expanded grasp of time and location.

It was the late 70s, time of cutbacks
and strikes, the dole queue never far
from mind. One morning on a picket line,
my dad got talking to a labourer from the depot
who had read The Illiad and was a respected
amateur antiquarian.

The sequence of poems which includes the lines above is a powerful and illuminating part of the collection. It’s composed of memories of his father and the labourer from the depot, called PJ. This PJ is a lover of wisdom and artist. The poems in this section convey a thirst for knowledge and understanding, for the Logos of the Greeks. It is a real thirst, there among the other impulses and desires of daily life of ordinary people (i.e. working class).

Here’s another few opening lines that are as good as any to illustrate Duffy’s clarity and sense of place.

Things had gone wrong. I was a young man
lost, my mind struggling with the impossible
questions. I travelled alone by train to a place
by the sea where tall houses lined the seafront,
tall windows taking in the prospect.

Duffy tends to keep his language and rhythms pellucid, the knottiness and twists of these poems are in the meanings and situations presented. Some of these poems are close to flash fiction – I don’t mean this detracts from them in any way.

Nietzsche and others viewed creativity as emerging from a Dionysian/Apollonian dialect. The Dionysian represents the visceral life-force, passions, intoxication. The Apollonian represents the search for truth, overcoming one’s nature, light rather than heat, construction not destruction, a grasp of the extended self rather than immersion in the moment.

Duffy’s poetry is Apollonian, refreshingly so. Rooted in his own life (including intellectual life), and not driven by what the news headlines proclaim are the pressing issues of the day.

I’ll leave off with this verse from a poem called “The Older Artist” (presumably not a hugely successful one).

As I looked at one piece he came
and stood beside me in silence for a time,
then turned to me and gripped my arm fiercely,
saying, ‘Somehow it all matters. It has to.
It fucking has to, doesn’t it?’

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The Irreal Reader

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Knut Hamsun
Fiction & essays from The Cafe Irreal

This review first appeared in The Short Review

The Cafe Irreal is a quarterly webzine that presents a kind of fantastic fiction infrequently published in English.

… in an irreal story, the unreal is continually juxtaposed against the real such that the reader can never find a ‘point of rest’ because he or she is never certain which ‘reality’ he or she is in.

-– appended essay by one of the editors, G.S. Evans

For the Irreal imagination, both the accidental and universal symbol refer to the source of bewildering, destabilizing trauma.

-– appended essay by Dean Swinford

For those new to this type of fiction, reading this collection will require a re-boot of the brain. Gone are the familiar toeholds of character and plot. Gone too is any claim for the piece to be descriptive or symbolic.

What’s left is the experience the piece is designed to evoke. That experience may include anxiety, bafflement, awe, a sense of beauty similar to how we perceive a sculpture or music, and maybe even frustration. Reading these fictions is akin to a stroll through a gallery of modern art. The viewer steeped in realist portrayals may take a moment to adjust, to “get” what’s going on. And to push the art gallery a step further, there will inevitably be those who give up on some pieces impatiently.

Given the heterogeneous nature of the anthology, it might give an idea of what to expect if I describe a couple of the more accessible pieces. Jose Chaves’ All I Misunderstood as a Man makes Complete Sense as a Parrot begins:

I am enjoying a cup of coffee with friends at a small café, when the conversation turns gray with politics. Suddenly, they are no longer friends, but large green parrots …

This piece has an obvious metaphorical meaning. It has a pleasingly transparent structure, and yet is rich enough to bear being re-read several times.

Bob Thurber’s Shuteye is a domestic scene written in standard snappy prose. But the second sentence is: “Donna had my heart on the table and a steak knife in her hand.” The story invites a reading as an allegory. Yet the severance from realism is so stark that it resists any easy interpretation. An anxiety remains; there is arguably a direct interaction with the unconscious mind. Many other pieces share this characteristic of being like a probe planted deep in the psyche. They lodge in memory and keep surfacing, grasping for meanings.

Kevin Sexton’s The Spindler is an intense tale of an encounter with a skinny, spider-like stranger who inspires revulsion in the narrator. Anyone who has ever had nightmares of chasing someone, or being chased, will tap in to the energy this story unleashes. The spindler and the loathing he arouses have the force of a symbol, but one which is personal and not universal.

Anything I might venture to say about the definition or workings of the irreal is pre-empted by the thirteen theoretical texts that constitute the last sixty-four pages of the book. Such a large number of critical essays (mostly) dedicated to a self-definition of the genre is unprecedented. Imagine if a love story was appended with several psychological articles on the nature of romantic attachment. There is a precedent — however not in fiction. Modern art often leans on the associated theoretical perspective; the audience has come to expect the sheets of paper pinned alongside the works.

The perceived need for these appended essays is another indication of just how far from ordinary fiction these irreal pieces roam. The phenomenology of the act of reading – the way one’s eye scans the sentences and constructs a narrative – is put in question. It’s an invigorating experience. The best pieces have a character of ‘thingness’ about them, in that they can be read again and again from different perspectives.

One of my favourites, Richard Kostelanetz’ Openings, is a list of purported opening sentences of stories. It makes for such fascinating reading I have to resist the urge to keep quoting the best ones.

The irreal as a method may be more familiar to readers in regions beyond the English-speaking world. Central Europe has its Kafka and Schulz and Danilo Kis. South America has Borges and García Márquez. As explained in the essays, the editors of this collection were impatient with the staid realism of American letters, and set up an internet journal to seek out and publish non-realist genres. The Café Irreal has been running since 1998. It is partially based in Prague, and their list of leading writers through the years is impressively international. Such a project would not have been possible before the era of the internet. The editors’ assessment of this project as of 2013 however is not positive.

The staid, realist orthodoxy of American letters that most of us were seeking to shake now seems more entrenched than ever, aided by the growing number of MFA programs in creative writing, most of which use realism (especially in the form of personal narrative) as the template for ‘fine writing.’

Many of the fictions in this collection are short: flash fiction in fact. I would argue that flash fiction, or short short stories, are a natural preserve of irreal techniques, in the English-speaking world at least. The irreal is not as uncommon as the editors seem to conclude. In novels – English-language novels – however it is indeed rare. The essays point out what we are missing by remaining within ‘the cult of experience’ to use Rahv’s expression. They argue that the restrictive definition of fine writing, in the USA at least, is no coincidence, but ties in with a disinclination toward the intangible and impractical typical of American culture in general.

Intriguingly, the essays also look at uses of the irreal in other arts: in the visual arts and in music. Irrealism and Ambient Music by Garrett Rowlan was a revelation to me, and I’ve spent several hours browsing through the tracks he references.

This collection is a fascinating mind-stretcher, a door open to an entirely new gallery. Perhaps it is best read in brief forays. It is a book of international significance and influence much greater than the limited media attention would suggest.

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4chan /pol/

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4chan

I was reading some of Angela Nagle‘s essays online, and reviews of her book Kill All Normies. She’s a fascinating and incisive writer, and in this book she takes a hard look at online cultures, social movements emerging online, the herd mentality in online interactions. She points out that the liberal left has drifted to become prudish, easily offended, anti-free speech and even anti-intellectual. The locus of irreverent, subversive, and playful thinking is now the alt-right, or apolitical online spaces of dubious reputation.
The book has generated a storm of debate.

So I hopped it over to 4chan, and specifically the /pol/ section, which declares it is intended for politically incorrect discussions.

Read on

    I found a thread with the OP (Original Post):
    Philosophers that grounded your thinking

    A timelog on the posts indicated the thread had been running for 3 hours and 35 minutes. (A thread is the original posts + the sequence of responses to it.) The responses were generally short and to the point. The names mentioned were:

    Descartes
    100% Skeptic
    Dugin
    Thomas Hobbes
    Cesare Beccaria
    The Lord Jesus Christ
    The Bogdanovs
    Yuudkowsky
    Ligotti
    Mishima
    Gnosticism
    Stirner
    Nietzsche
    Charles Darwin
    St. Benedict von Nurcia
    José Ortega y Gasset.
    Montaigne
    Calvin (image of portrait posted, but not named)
    and the comment “The real irony is to have your entire life work ridiculed and associated with a certain particular comment, made by someone using your portrait as an avatar on a porn site, three centuries and a half after your death.”

    This thread appeared in amongst the vilest cesspit-level racist and misogynistic threads before it and after it. It’s impossible to know to what extent an individual poster believes in the material he/she posts. It’s equally impossible to know if the responders to the philosophical thread are the same people posting in the other threads.

    But judging by the names so casually dropped, there are a lot of well-read and independent thinkers lurking on these boards. Meanwhile the typical Sunday newspaper essays are declining in quality to become clickbait opinion pieces.
    The world is getting stranger.

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Selected Posts

  • Stinging Fly Wheldon essay
    2017-07-24
  • Backstory of a book
    2019-02-22
  • My story in Litro magazine
    2017-01-08
  • The Blocks by Karl Parkinson
    2016-10-02
  • Iron Towns by Anthony Cartwright
    2016-10-02
  • London Trip
    2016-09-05
  • Honest Ulsterman interview
    2016-02-29
  • Irish Examiner review
    2015-03-30
  • Greetings, Hero launch Hodges Figgis
    2014-11-21

Selected pages

  • Debut book
  • Events, readings, etc.
  • Launched by Kevin Barry
  • Publications

Crucial

  • . .
  • Asylum books
  • Buy the book at Kennys
  • Daniel Seery
  • David Mohan
  • Djelloul Marbrook
  • Gorse magazine
  • Slava Nesterov Artist
  • The Penny Dreadful
  • The road to publication
  • The Short Review
  • The Short Review
  • Unthology

Other links

  • . .
  • Karl Parkinson's The Blocks
  • Unthology 4 review
  • Wandering minstrel Larry Beau

What I'm up to

  • Buy the book at Kennys
  • Examiner review
  • Irish Times / Ashley Stokes
  • Irish Times Q+A Irish Times Q+A
  • The road to publication

Recent posts

  • Writers’ Workbench at IWC
  • Irish Times classics revisited
  • Backstory of a book
  • Writers’ Workbench course with Keegan & myself Writers’ Workbench course with Keegan & myself
  • Winter Papers
  • Noel Duffy’s poetry collection Noel Duffy’s poetry collection

Quotation

The Tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction
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