Meet Me In The Morning, 56th and Wabasha (Updated!)

But let's not make it tomorrow morning and how about instead of 56th and Wabasha we try 83 Botanic Avenue, Belfast? Ok? What's at 83 Botanic I hear you ask? Why, No Alibis bookshop of course. I just got the good word from those fine people at Serpents Tail that I'll be there on Wednesday July 8 at 6:30 pm for the British and Irish launch of Fifty Grand. No Alibis is one of the great bookshops of the world, but there's a big problem reading there these days. Dave Torrans. Mr Torrans, NA's host with the most, has now become more famous than a good number of his guest readers because of the success of the brilliant new Colin Bateman novel Mystery Man. MM is being turned into a TV film by the BBC and is a Richard and Judy Book Club pick (for American readers think Regis and Kelly, but Richard as Kelly). The book begins in No Alibis and much of the early going is centred around the shop. Further spoilers would, er, spoil it but I found it to be absolutely hilarious. Already famous from his appearances on BBC radio Torrans is on the verge of superstardom and when he plays a version of himself in the film, he'll be impossible. But please, if you are going to come to the reading, say hi to me too. I'll be the jetlagged one that isn't bald.
...
Want another reason to come? Ok. I'll be giving away the annotated American galley of Fifty Grand that I used for the final copyedit. Oh, and there were will be free drink.

The Valleys of the Assassins

For those of us who remember 1989, 2009 in Iran is eerily reminiscent. The only question is whether it's going to be the Velvet Revolution of late 1989 which freed Eastern Europe from Communism or whether its going to be June 1989 when the Chinese government crushed a pro democracy movement in Beijing by murdering hundreds of students in Tianamen Square. I don't know which way Iran is going to go, but this has clearly become a huge story. Andrew Sullivan has been posting live twitter feeds from Tehran and raw photo images from the AP and Getty. The BBC is starting to cover this a bit more (their Farsi service, apparently has been excellent) and CNN has now woken up to the enormity of these events. I am not a political blogger, it's not my bag at all, and if I was to blog about things which are of interest to me willy nilly then there would be a lot of tedious posts here about rugby, baseball and beer. I like the discipline of keeping this blog vaguely in the realm of the arts, especially books and films, so in the spirit of that, I'd like to briefly mention two more Iranian books that I've read that might give you an insight into Persian culture and identity: First, Shahrnush Parsipur's lovely collection of stories Women Without Men (nice nod to Hemingway in the title) and second Freya Stark's monumental The Valleys of the Assassins where the indomitable Miss Stark sets out to find the Old Man of the Mountains and the cult of assassins in 1930's Persia. Parsipur is a miniaturist whose observations on Iranian life and identity are precise and eloquent. Freya Stark (1893 - 1993!) is one of the greatest travel writers of all time, undaunted by threats of delay, disease and death, she went wherever she wanted and did exactly as she pleased right up to the end of her long life - they just don't make 'em like that anymore, more's the pity. (BTW the reason this post is green comes from a twitter idea in Iran, to show solidarity with the Green Revolution.)

Persepolis

In 1999 in the basement of a mosque in Cairo I was a little surprised to find the tomb of the last Shah of Iran. There were no other tourists, no pilgrims, no angry vandals - the Shah had been forgotten about. It was a little bit like this today too with the election in Iran. If you have been following the events taking place in Tehran then you probably haven't been watching BBC World, CNN, MSNBC or, God save us, Fox. MSNBC has been telling us about America's toughest prisons, the BBC seems obssessed by Ronaldo, CNN loves the story of the pretty American girl in Italy accused of murder and Fox believes the biggest challenge facing the globe is how Miss California can get her title back. I suspect the news divisions of these networks go to their holiday homes on Saturday and Sunday, because my read of the situation in Iran is that something pretty extraordinary happened over the weekend. Was an election stolen? Was there a military coup? I don't really know but it certainly merits further investigation. I do know that there is an entire generation of sophisticated, intelligent, disillusioned Iranians out there and I know this because of two brilliant books: Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azir Nafisi and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.
...

Both books are memoirs by women who grew up in post Revolution Iran. Reading Lolita is a very interesting attempt to carve out a cultural identity in an extremely oppressive environment. Persepolis is an account of a girl's migration from Iran to France told in comic book form. Persepolis is a little better known than Lolita because it was turned into a film in 2007 - the film's not bad but I still prefer the book, which is haunting, moving and beautiful and one of the best things I read in 2006. If you want an inkling of what might be happening on the streets of Tehran at the moment switch off "America's Toughest Prisons" and have a gander at either of these two wonderful books instead.

The McGintys and the McKintys

The Hollywood director known as McG has never really been on my radar screen. He's directed four films: two Charlies Angels flicks, a sports movie and the most recent Terminator. I havent seen any of them. In fact the only thing of his that I have seen is a video for the Offspring, which was pretty funny. I did know that his real name was McGinty and it irritated me that he called himself McG. McGinty is a bit of a joke name in Ireland because of the famous comic song Paddy McGinty's Goat - Paddy McGinty's is also the name of several "Irish" pubs throughout the world whose fraudulent Oirishness of toothless old men, flat caps and overturned rowing boats is a total embarrassment. McG, I thought, was running from this name and heritage by giving himself a Hollywood appellation - this however turns out to be a mistake, more on that in a minute.
...

First though my brush with the McGintys. For much of my life people I don't know have called me McGinty instead of McKinty probably because there are quite a few McGintys in the world and relatively few McKintys. McKinty and McGinty however are not a different spelling of the same name. I found this little primer online: The surname McKinty appears to be of medieval Irish origin and is originally recorded as a variant of MacEntee, whose derivation is from the Gaelic 'Mac an tSaoi' translated as 'the son of the scholar', (the Irish word saoi is used to denote a scholar or poet). The MacEntees are noted in the Chancery Rolls, Fiants, Hearth, Money and other 16th and 17th century records and seem to have lived mostly in the Counties Monaghan and Armagh. McGinty, and MacEntee are unrelated as the former is a Donegal surname and does not appear in the 1659 census or the Elizabethan Fiants. The first recorded spelling of the McKinty name is by Patrick McKinty in a January 1794 document in Carnmoney, County Antrim. Thus we are separate, but equal, tribes of Micks.

...
Back to McG the director. His real name is Joe McGinty but this is what he says about the name McG: "It is easy to hate a guy called McG. It seems like a window into his [Hollywood] sense of self-importance. [But this is sheer] lunacy because it's just short for McGinty. My name is Joseph McGinty Nichol. My mother's maiden name is McGinty. My uncle is Joe, my grandfather was Joe. I was called McG since the day I was born because we were broke and there were three Joes living in the house. There's no Hollywood, 'I think I'll give myself a nickname' bull. It just is. [In fact] I would be a sell-out punk if I ever rolled over and said, 'Well, ok, call me Joe.'"

...

I'm willing to cut the guy a break, anyone who survives working with the intense Christian Bale and the intense/insane Crispin Glover (right) is probably a fine human being. Still not everyone's got the memo. On Friday I heard Mark Kermode, the BBC film critic, go off on McG, criticising his film making and, at some length, his name. Kermode obviously still labours under the misapprehension that 'McG' is a Hollywood concoction, though I'm not sure he would understand McG's explanation, as to get it you would need to have an appreciation of working class Irish life and Kermode of course (like a ridiculously high proportion of the BBC's on air talent) went to an elite private school. Anyway Kermode's one to talk. . . His real name? Mark Fairey.

Pandemonium in the Sheldonian

Outside Oxford University’s Sheldonian Theatre the thirteen “Emperors’ Heads” have been looking a little less stoical than usual. In the university’s 850 year history there have been many scandals but nothing quite as a juicy as Oxford’s recent attempts to elect a new Professor of Poetry. Nobel laureate Derek Walcott was forced to withdraw his name from consideration when allegations surfaced that he had "sexually harassed" a student, other candidates were driven into the woodwork and finally, after a contentious campaign, the Oxford University Convocation elected Ruth Padel as the new vicar of verse. Ms Padel however didn't last long as it quickly emerged that she was the one who had helped orchestrate the campaign against Walcott; so she tendered her resignation before actually taking up the job. It’s a right old mess and if among the Emperors Heads 68AD is infamously the year of the four Caesars, 2009 may become known as the year of the three poets.

...

I was part of another controversy surrounding the post in 1993 when I went to see the then Professor of Poetry, Seamus Heaney, give a lecture in Sir Christoper Wren's lovely Sheldonian Theatre. Before Seamus could get going a man burst onto the stage angrily "protesting against modern poetry." He droned on incoherently for quite a while before a bunch of us, myself included, could take it no more and we bum rushed the eejit outside. The current scandal has received quite a few more column inches in the press than that ruckus, but no one that I've read has brought up the dirty little secret of the Oxford Professor of Poetry: most of the poets who have had the job are complete rubbish. Take a gander at this list on Wikipedia. Until you get to the 1950's, you are looking at a parade of utter mediocrity. The poets never even considered include Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, Yeats, TS Eliot, Philip Larkin etc. and really it's only in the last few decades that they have started to get half decent writers. I'm quite interested in this now and as a member of the University Convocation I have the right to vote, but I’m not going to because you have to vote in person and I live in Australia; I would however like to suggest someone for the job. Four of the best recent Professors have been Irish or Anglo Irish: C Day Lewis, Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. Micks seem to have the right temperament for public professors of poetry. The bardic tradition in Ireland is at least two thousand years old and among the Celtic kings poets were the most honoured members of the Court. To become a warrior in the Fianna elite you were tested on your ability to fend off multiple spear attacks while reciting, flawlessly, memorised lines of verse. Although his spear repelling skills may be rusty, I think Belfast poet Professor Ciaran Carson is the right man for the job. Multi-lingual, brilliant, a repected award winner, funny, Uillean pipe player - Oxford could do a lot worse...as we have seen.

The Kvetcher in the Rye

JD Salinger surfaced yesterday to stop the release of a novel in Britain and the US which the publishers call "a sequel to Catcher in the Rye." Salinger's lawyers call the book a "rip off pure and simple" and although the publishers are trying to say that the work is more of an homage than a rip off, it looks to me like the book is in violation of every copyright convention out there as it uses characters and situations from Catcher. The author apparently lives in Sweden but goes under the nom de plume John David California, which makes me think that he is in fact Swedish, I don't see an American picking that pen name and very few novelists choose Scandinavia as a good tax haven. The BBC has a bit more on the story here, but what's interesting to me is the fact that JDS is still alive, kicking and angry up in his somewhat isolated (though I drove past it once) home in Vermont. He hasn't published a novel for 57 years and many people wonder what he's been doing all this time. There are two schools of thought. The first is that rather like Harper Lee, he knew he couldn't top himself after Catcher in the Rye so he hasn't written anything. And it is true that he meditates a lot and watches a fair bit of daytime TV. But I prefer the second theory. In her memoir Dream Catcher, JD's daughter Margaret says that Salinger would write every single morning and occasionally he would show her manuscripts of completed novels. Supposedly these manuscripts are in a bank vault in Cornish, Vermont to be published after Salinger's death. Since Catcher is one of the funniest novels I've ever read I'm intrigued and excited by this possibility though of course I do wish Mr Salinger, who is 90 years old, a good few years yet. Tomorrow, incidentally, is D Day and Salinger is a D Day veteran. A platoon sergeant who fought with his troops throughout the Normandy campaign, he took part in the capture of Paris and had a drink with Ernest Hemingway (who had read some of his short stories) in the freshly liberated bar of the Ritz Hotel; I really hope, in a bank vault somewhere, there's a piece JD's written about that.