Author Archive for Colm Page 2 of 15

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Things you find when you’re moving

Published
by
Colm
on 31 May, 2010
in Foreign parts and Misc.
. 6 Comments

Seems drawing badass celestial bodies is a thing I do when I’m drinking. I see two problems here: one, my knowledge of astronomy is fairly limited and thus already running almost dry; two, I can’t guarantee Drunk Colm won’t eventually think rubbish puns about white dwarves are the way forward. So over to you: suggest something else I can doodle. Something that gets a bad press and needs an image overhaul. Something that will benefit from a good ol’ bitta tipsy PR. And please note that you will be paying for the necessary Art Juice. I’ll be right over here.

(Context for the upper half: a bar in Berlin, an ill-thought-out game of Guess Who1. Bonus points: German tries to correct my spelling, realises I was right in the first place. WhuPOW.)

  1. First two questions: “Are they German?” “Can’t remember.” “Do they have a beard?” “Not sure. ” It went uphill after that though, I promise. [↩]

A Brief History of the Last Three Years of Lost

Published
by
Colm
on 25 May, 2010
in Films & TV
. 5 Comments

1. During season 3, Viewing Public complains that show is going nowhere, stops watching in droves.

2. To appease Viewing Public, Producers commit to set timetable for resolution of show, up pace.

3. In order to facilitate (2) above, Producers start resolving the most thematically important subplots, more or less abandon the rest.

4. Show ends. Viewing Public complains about subplots not being resolved.

***

Years later, the Dessert-Eating Public becomes enraged at their inability to both have and eat cake. A global spate of bakery-directed arson ensues. Cuse and Lindelof appear to call for sanity. JJ Abrams appears to fling the idea for Super Clovereightfield II at someone and collect a fat paycheck. Colm eats a Mr Freeze, maintains that it is both “delicious” and “refreshing”. Paul Daniels is pronounced World President, resolves to crack down on pastry vandalism. Everyone is confused. It was all a dream. Or was it? No. But you could be forgiven for thinking so.

Ha ha, screw you everyone

Published
by
Colm
on 13 May, 2010
in Books (and the like)
. 3 Comments

I am tired of “new writing” and of “powerful new novelists.” I am tired of today’s new people; I am tired of their lives, of their tastes, their reading, their language, their singing, their sedatives and their psychiatrists, their houses, their furniture, and their faces.

(via Bookslut)

That’s magnificent. It’s from Margaret Anderson, who I’d never heard of until this morning because I’m rubbish. She founded and ran an influential avant-garde literary magazine, which at one point was at one point the subject of a good ol’-fashioned book-burnin’ after they published the first few chapters of Ulysses. Another time, Anderson published a completely blank issue of the magazine, on the basis that nobody was writing anything worth a damn. What a champion.

… so but anyway, now you may fearlessly shout at passers-by about how tiresome and annoying their faces are, safe in the knowledge that you come from a fine pedigree. And isn’t that all we ever really wanted.

On imagination and, you know, whatever

Published
by
Colm
on 13 April, 2010
in Books (and the like), Films & TV and Writing
. 16 Comments

David Foster Wallace, in an interview with Larry McCaffery, 1993:

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.

Discuss.

Why It’s Kind of Troubling if This Doesn’t Represent a Wilful Misinterpretation of What The First Person Said

Published
by
Colm
on 8 April, 2010
in Fun with words
. 13 Comments

[A short discursion on a stranger's nethers, in two parts]

“Look on the bright side, you get your hole, you have 2 great kids, and you gt to pass of the door-knocking sales-scum to CL. Win-win, really.”

“Christ, could you refrain from referring to CL as a fucking hole? I know you think it’s jokey and cute, but it isn’t. It’s just a way to insult women.”

I.

“Getting your hole” is an idiom meaning “having sexual intercourse on a regular basis”. The hole in question could be a vagina or an anus–here, in context, it’s pretty clear that it’s a vagina. To a woman you might say “getting the length” or “getting your fill”1. So the direct meaning of the phrase, let’s say, is “having more or less unrestricted access to a vagina, subject to the ongoing approval of the person of whose body said vagina is a part”.

II.

So “hole” in this case refers specifically and solely to the vagina–i.e. to the organ, not the person. But now, look at the switcheroo happening between the two quoted comments: the second takes it as read that “hole” is referring to the person. In other words, the second commenter is speaking as if the vagina constitutes the entirety of the person’s being. Which, if I may offer a humble opinion here, is treading some pretty dodgy ontological ground, enlightened-outlook-wise.

  1. Though the latter is maybe a bit redolent of that musty old nonsense about passivity/receptivity and the psychosexual/social implications thereof, which let’s side-step that whole barrel of worms for now. [↩]

Get Shoes. Wear Shoes. Walk

Published
by
Colm
on 30 March, 2010
in Misc.
. 6 Comments

Sometimes you have to ask yourself: how committed am I to the buckle doctrine? “Sometimes,” in this particular case, meaning one hour and three shops in. But cowboy up son, because that’s weakness talking. The buckle doctrine exists for your own good and you know it. It exists because, what, you’re gonna walk around in plain black loafers like some schmuck? You’re gonna settle for laces? Get the fuck outta here.

Wildly veering linguistic register aside, you do need some kind of trademark. Stick with your bog-standard thirty-quid Dunnes effort time after time and it starts to seep into your brain way worse than any tie or shirtsleeve; you’ll be walking The Man’s walk in no time. Did they put up with that shit in the eighteenth century? No sir, they did not. A man’s gait was his own. And do you know why? Buckles, my friend. Buckles.

The only problem is the price. The b-s D-e, as alluded to above, is cheap. Character is not. Especially for a man such as myself, who hesitates to exceed an annual outlay of fifty of your earth Euro in sheathing any given body part. I exceeded it most grievously this time – presumably due to inflation, since what I ended up getting is an ever-so-slightly-updated version of the shoes I’ve been wearing since Maastricht. But these are the shakes, and there’s no point complaining. All you can do is find a way to balance the scales, whether by cheaping out on runners or  persisting in wearing jeans made out of holes. No matter how much your mother gets onto you about it. That’s right, wussbuckets: I am exactly as cool as you think I am.

Machine language

Published
by
Colm
on 10 February, 2010
in Fun with words
. 5 Comments

Which of these looks right to you:

I have to go; somewhere there is a crime happening.

or

I have to go: somewhere there is a crime happening.

To me, the semicolon seems like “I have to go. Tangentially, somewhere there is a crime happening,” whereas the colon is much more authoritative: “I have to go AND HERE IS WHY”. You could of course make them two independent clauses, but let’s not lose all decorum here.

I don’t know if Robocop even cares about grammar. It seems like he should. I mean, the Terminator can get away with being all curt and barky1 because it doesn’t ever have much it needs to communicate, but Robocop is an officer of the law. You know? He can’t afford to be ambiguous.

  1. and pronouncing “neural” as if it has four syllables [↩]

JD Salinger is dead

Published
by
Colm
on 29 January, 2010
in Books (and the like) and Writing
. 7 Comments

I speculate that the coverage for this is going to boil down to I Liked Catcher In The Rye/I Did Not Like Catcher In The Rye. So a few thoughts here on why a) you’re wrong not to like it and b) JD Salinger was way more important than one book.

The standard view on Catcher is that it’s some mopey teen wandering around being angsty. This polarises people: his worldview resonates with an awful lot of readers, particularly adolescents, but everyone else just wishes he’d cowboy up. The debate never seems to go deeper than that, which is a crying shame, because there’s way more going on in the novel.

Firstly, Holden’s mopiness isn’t just Gawd-no-one-understands-me angst. There’s a line near the start where he says1 “Sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen”. Holden was thirteen when his brother Allie died; his brother, whom he adored, placed at the absolute centre of his universe. Allie’s death destroys Holden and, though he never confronts it head on, the entire novel details his attempts to come to terms with it.

Secondly, despite what many people seem to think, we’re not supposed to see Holden as a role model. Arrested development is not something to aspire to. All-encompassing cynicism is not something to aspire to. If there’s a how-are-we-to-live message in Salinger’s writing, it’s that no matter how hard it might be, the best thing we can do is find a way to get outside ourselves, stop acting like everything is about us, and keep moving forward. There’s an excellent distillation of this in the second part of Franny & Zooey. Or, more conveniently, you could read this speech by David Foster Wallace, who was heavily inspired by Salinger.

At the risk of turning into a wild-eyed evangelist, I think it’s a tragedy that Holden Caulfield is the only one of Salinger’s narrative voices that most people are familiar with. He’s dour and self-absorbed and I can see why you might not like him, whereas Salinger’s writing as a whole is characterised by a genuine warmth and humour that most writers couldn’t even approach. His short stories are phenomenal (see for instance the title story in For Esme, With Love & Squalor). He can do this thing where, in about four or five words, he describes a gesture or facial expression so perfectly that a character’s entire history, state of mind and motivations are dumped directly into your brain.

Ok, wild-eyed evangelist. Breathe.

Right now I’m going to read over these two letters a few times (the latter being some of the best writing advice ever dispensed). Then I’m going to go home and read the books again. Then I’m going to wait for all the manuscripts he’s finished since he retired from publishing to surface. And then… I don’t know what I’ll do.

  1. I’ve no copy to hand, so I’m quoting from memory. [↩]

Compulsion

Published
by
Colm
on 27 January, 2010
in Books (and the like)
. 11 Comments

There’s something like my weight in books sitting at the end of my bed these days. I’m not counting shelves, you understand – only the bags of just-bought unreads. Some people seem to feel like this would be a daunting prospect, as if reading is something you have to push yourself into. Which, I don’t know. I spend minutes at a time just smelling books. I build them into a fort around me, laughing like a maniac the whole time. If I could swim through the things Scrooge McDuck-style, you’d better believe I wouldn’t be here talking to you people.


Because it’s funnier in Dutch, that’s why.

The catalyst for all this was the €100 of book tokens I got for Christmas. I was going to save them til my in-tray had diminished a bit, but on my first day back in work I went for lunch and – oh hello, I appear to have wandered near Hodges Figgis. You know they’re gonna have some sweet deals, might as well check those out.

I ended up buying seven books by accident. Which is to say, I didn’t specifically intend to buy seven books. I just kind of fugued. Also, the cashier was pretty.1

So ok, that’s gonna keep me going for a while. However, and for reasons outside my control, I happened to end up in Waterstones a few days later. Now, the thing about Waterstones is they have those 3-for-2 deals which, obviously, you’d be a fool not to take advantage. Not only that but there’s a best-of-the-decade table. I don’t want to spell things out for you, but let’s just say I woke up hours later with a brutal hangover and Random House’s number tattooed on my chest.

That should have been the end of it. But no: one morning the following week I forgot to put a book in my pocket on my way out the door. The whole way in on the bus I was just staring into space. Have you ever noticed what other people sound like? What they smell like? It was a nightmare. What the hell was I going to do on the way home? Gnaw my own arm off? Clearly, an emergency fix was needed. So into Hodges Figgis at lunchtime – Garrison Keillor, you say? And only €4? Job’s a good un. But on the other hand, if I find another book for €6 that means I’ll get a stamp on the ould loyalty card, and that’s just sensible.

It goes on in this vein. I’m going to trail off now, because I’m giving myself the vapours and my bank account can’t withstand another blackout. And because there’s a book of EU tax legislation here that I haven’t put to bed yet, and man do I want to see how that turns out.

  1. A fun game in bookshops is to try get the cashiers to check you out. I think I caught her attention with the Pynchon, but on reflection Rape: A Love Story wasn’t my smoothest move. [↩]

All the ducks are

Published
by
Colm
on 15 December, 2009
in Misc.
. 5 Comments

Today I saw a dude trying to feed some ducks. Trying, because seagulls are like ninjas. There were two ducks sitting right in the middle of the canal, no other birds in sight, and the instant the first bit of bread hit the water it was grabbed by a seagull who’d swooped in out of nowhere. I reckon ducks are used to this, because they didn’t put up much of a fight, and within minutes they’d been shunted over to the banks. At first, to his credit, Dude tried to manoeuvre a few scraps through the storm, but eventually he gave up in favour of tricking the gulls into some slick-ass aeronautics. I’m pretty sure they were doing barrel-rolls at one point.

What was interesting was how the system evolved. Dumping bread in the water is well and fine for your laid-back duck-type scenario, but it’s way less than efficient when what you’re feeding is essentially a scale model of a Mongolian horde. As time went on the gulls formed into a basic rubgy line-out configuration while Dude fired the bread directly at them in mid-air. I don’t know if you know how ludicrous it looks when twenty-odd birds are doing a kind of asynchronous low-gravity pogo-hop off the surface of a canal, but I’ll clue you in: pretty damn ludicrous.

There was one sorry bastard in the middle of all this, jumping at all the wrong times and giving off an adorable impression of birdy panic. As I stood up to leave, he finally pulled together enough sense to huff his way out of the crowd, and our hero tossed a scrap his way. And then, with the most beautiful comic timing I’ve ever seen in the animal kingdom… a duck got it.

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