Really interesting interview with Patrick McCabe about his most recent novel. This part fascinated me:
That said, the characters who represent the ways of the old valley are also shape-changing murderers, which lends a degree of satire to any wistful depictions of a lost Ireland.
If you look at some of the old cowboy songs that started out as kind of campfire ballads, they are absolutely scatological and profane. The tension is when you yearn for something that wasn?t there in the first place – some lost paradise. But just as ‘auld’ Ireland fetishists are lampooned, so too is modern life. Here is Temple Bar, ‘the epicentre of Dublin’s hedonistic empire, a playground exclusively populated by louche adolescent Euro-ramblers and indigenous chemical-fuelled youths vertiginously wading in the currents of an ever-expanding opalescent ocean, shorn of history and oblivious of religion.’
I read the passage back to McCabe. “Slouchers,” he smiles. I say he must really loathe Dublin, but he shakes his head. “It’s only harsh in the context of the character. In fact, I like it.”
His comments on Temple Bar are so right on. “louche adolescent Euro-ramblers” indeed – and ‘stag parties’ – with wasted guys vomiting on the sidewalk, and acting like complete assholes. It apparently became such a problem that the Irish tourist board actually addressed it … trying to discourage huge tourist trips to “visit” Temple Bar.
That whole “lost Ireland” thing reminded me of my conversation with Eamon in the echoey Ice Bar in Dublin. I wrote about it a couple years ago – I thought that maybe some Irish people would be mad at me for writing such a piece … but funnily enough, the Irish Examiner ended up writing about it – and using it as a launching-off spot … to talk about the changes (some of them unpleasant) going on in Ireland. I still get emails about the piece I wrote – mostly from Irish people, and not one of them has been hostile. I certainly didn’t mean it in a hostile way, or in a “oh, where is the green land of leprechauns I have fantasized about?” – that kind of Irish-American bull shit, the kind of person who would prefer to see Ireland remain impoverished, so that the fantasy won’t be disturbed about the “auld country”. I meant the piece in a purely observational way … and I include myself in that. I am not perfect, or impartial. There was a part of me that was very put off by Seamus, and what I saw at the Ice Bar. That’s the part of me that doesn’t want anything to change.
Wow. I love your piece on The Ice Bar.” So well written–and layered, too, of course. How you very subtly weigh your ambivalence about the “old” versus the “new” Ireland, pitting it against the claim that the current boom, “like all booms,” will end, restoring a kind of balance to the country that’s certainly missing from a place like that bar (and the Temple Bar area in general). Of course, this leaves me wondering whether in fact once changes like the ones you’ve so excellently described and captured (especially through dialogue–Seamus is priceless!) make the restoration of balance possible– even after the allegedly fated collapse of the boom. In other words, is the “new” Ireland doing a kind of irreversible damage to the country’s assumed capacity to get a better “hold” of itself in the future? But perhaps this is the kind of existential question that any living entity, cultural or otherwise, necessarily poses: “Am I ever the same person/movement/country/frog that I was yesterday or the day before that, or the day before that, or…?” Which is another way of saying that your piece is loaded and provocative, dropping us into a very specific scene while also transcending it, moving things at the same time onto a truly unviersal plane. Awesome!
Jon – as always, your comments are so helpful and thought-provoking. I think the questions you ask are questions that Ireland is really struggling with right now. And would it be irreversible? Is that just a byproduct of modernization? You can feel it in the air. At the same time that I think it’s wonderful that they now can STAY in Ireland and flourish as opposed to having to move … what is being lost? If it’s friendliness, and hospitality – then that perhaps IS too great a price to pay.
It was cool, though – to meet Seamus and feel all bummed out about it and then, in the next 20 minutes, to meet Eamon. So I guess there will always be those materialistic people who really internalize materialism to the degree that that is all they care about … and then there will be those who just won’t go there. Their personalities remain intact.
The Gathering – Anne Enright
I finished The Gathering this weekend (my mother did, too) – and while I am truly inspired by her writing (she’s the kind of writer that makes me BURN to pick up my pencil, and try again) – I found…