Baron Carrickfergus?

Baron Carrickfergus in his Irish Guards uniform

So I'm watching the Royal Wedding on the BBC and they announce that Prince William's official titles will be the Duke of Cambridge and Baron Carrickfergus (impressively someone has written the entire wikipedia page about this in the last twenty minutes). This is pretty surprising to me. I was born and grew up in Carrickfergus and I had no idea that there was a vacant Baron Carrickfergus title lying around, apparently in the gift of the Queen. The Barony has been in abeyance since the nineteenth century and how and why the Queen resurrected such an obscure title is a bit of a mystery. Her Maj though has really gone and scuppered my plans...What am I going to call myself now when I get ennobled for my services to blogging?

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And thank you again Big Pond for slowing down my internet service as punishment for exceeding my bandwith. These two paragraphs have taken the entire wedding to save and I've missed spotting a lot of eccentric hats as a result.

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Talk to you all again in five days...

The Ending Of Falling Glass

I've had an unusual amount of correspondence about the ending of my novel Falling Glass. I wouldn't say complaints as such but there have been quite a few people who have written and emailed me asking for a definite answer as to what I think happened at the very end. I don't normally like to dissect my own books or over analyse them, but just this once I felt I should clear up one or two issues about the ending. If you haven't read the book and you don't like spoilers you should stop reading right now.

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Ok if you're still with me I assume you've read the book or you don't mind the old spoiler or two...The first thing I'd like to make clear is that there will not be a sequel to Falling Glass. It's a standalone novel. We won't be seeing Killian ever again. The second thing I'd like to make clear is that this is the final appearance of Michael Forsythe. We won't be seeing him again either. With that in mind you should appreciate that the ending of Falling Glass is not supposed to be a cliff hanger. The story will not be continued in a subsequent book. It ends there for both characters.
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Ahh, that's all very well but what actually happens??!!! you want to know. Well the answer to that question is that I don't actually know. It's a little bit like Schrodinger's Cat: which exists in the quantum state both alive and dead until Professor Schrodinger opens the box. Michael Forsythe and Killian come from two different schools of thought and two different approaches to life. Killian uses words as weapons, Michael is no dummy but he is the embodiment of action. For Michael "the hand is the cutting edge of the mind" but for Killian resorting to violence is almost always a failure of method. Inevitably when these two characters meet we're going to want to know which philosophy triumphs. But of course there's no definitive answer. It's a question that's come up again and again throughout history and it has never been adequately resolved. What I prefer to do is push the characters into the final confrontation and leave them there in that strange quantum entangled world where neither one is the winner or the loser. I'm afraid that if you want a definitive answer as to what happens at the end of Falling Glass then you are going to have to pick a side for yourself. As for me, well, I choose not to.
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Hope that helps.

The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters

I am not opposed to the slow burn horror story. Two of my favourite films Alien and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining were all about gradually ratcheting up the tension in an atmosphere of intense claustrophobia. For some reason I'm not such a huge fan of ghost, vampire and horror novels but I know many people love those books. I think the last ghost story I read before The Little Stranger was The Turn of the Screw. The last vampire novel I read was Let The Right One In which I enjoyed.
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I do like Sarah Waters, though, I thought her novel Fingersmith was great. . .which is a lot of build up before saying that finishing this book was a real effort. The Little Stranger is so slow burn that you aren't pages ahead of the narrator, you are entire chapters, and really it doesn't get into third gear until the last fifth.
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It's set in a run down country house in England just after World War 2 in a rather dull and only mildly dysfunctional family who have lost a child. A doctor begins visiting the house and it's through his eyes that we see the events unfold. You don't really need to know much else but actually there isn't much else. I'm not entirely sure what attracted Sarah Waters to this material as it's all pretty thin beer. It's a very English version of The Shining complete with tea parties and vicars. It might have made a great short story or novella but I'm not sure it works at all as a novel.

Why Ireland Failed

Seems obvious now. Some damning stats from Michael Lewis's piece in Vanity Fair:

More than a fifth of the Irish workforce was employed building houses. The Irish construction industry had swollen to become nearly a quarter of the country’s G.D.P.—compared with less than 10 percent in a normal economy—and Ireland was building half as many new houses a year as the United Kingdom, which had almost 15 times as many people to house. Since 1994 the average price for a Dublin home had risen more than 500 percent. In parts of the city, rents had fallen to less than 1 percent of the purchase price—that is, you could rent a million-dollar home for less than $833 a month. The investment returns on Irish land were ridiculously low: it made no sense for capital to flow into Ireland to develop more of it. Irish home prices implied an economic growth rate that would leave Ireland, in 25 years, three times as rich as the United States. (“A price/earning ratio above Google’s,” as Kelly put it.) Where would this growth come from?

Theme Songs

I was watching The Office and Modern Family tonight and I noticed how short the opening theme music was. The Office used to have a longer theme but now its about twenty seconds, Modern Family always begins with a cold opening and then a theme of about ten seconds. It made me think wistfully back to the days when theme music was about a minute long:


but could be much longer...each episode of The Prisoner began with a THREE minute opening title:


and of course music in the 70's was, well, very 1970's:


this was a seventies show I loved set in the crazy future times of 1980: (Nick Drake's sister is one of the girls in the purple wigs)


my all time favourite might be this:


or this:

True Grit, The Dog Of The South, Masters Of Atlantis

I went on a Charles Portis reading binge last week tackling three of his novels. I had read Dog of the South before but I remembered nothing of it. Seana Graham sent me Masters of Atlantis from her bookshop in Santa Cruz, California so I thought I'd tackle that one first. It was actually my least favourite of the three but still funny. Its the story of a not so secret society and its growth from World War I to the 1970's, it read a bit like a pastiche of Thomas Pynchon's V and it was hard to get a handle on the novel with no strong central character to guide you through the story. But I still laughed quite a bit and at one point the action shifted to Colorado and for me that counts for something.  

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Next I tackled True Grit as an audiobook. It was read by best selling author Donna Tartt who has a lovely Southern accent and reads very well. I had seen both film versions so there weren't many surprises in the tale, but still I enjoyed the novel and I really loved Tartt's excellent narration and her fine afterword where she talks about what True Grit meant to her and her family. I haven't heard of an author reading someone else's book before - maybe this will be the start of a new trend. Salman Rushdie could narrate John LeCarre...or perhaps not.

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Finally I reread Dog of the South which was as hilarious as I remembered it. It's the story of a man who pursues his wife and her lover down through Mexico and into Belize in a misguided attempt to get her (and his car) back. It's an episodic adventure and frequently absurd, but what keeps you on the path is the first person narrator who is somewhat unreliable and a bit of a lovable nut. Perhaps I'll tackle Charles Portis's Norwood next which seems to be in a similar vein to this one.

How To Drink Absinthe

Always been curious about this...

The Irish Connection To Game Of Thrones

I was pretty excited to learn that the brand new HBO series Game of Thrones was largely filmed in Northern Ireland. Until the last decade or so no films were made in Ulster because production companies couldn't get the insurance to do so. All those cheesy movies about the Troubles were usually filmed in Manchester, but all that has changed since the Good Friday Agreement and the influx of Hollywood money has been part of the peace dividend.

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The interiors for Game of Thrones were shot at Paint Hall studios in the Belfast docklands but I was even more interested to learn that many of the exterior shots were filmed in rural Northern Ireland. Filming locations included Carncastle, Shane's Castle, Magheramorne and Tollymore Forest. Carncastle is a wild mountainscape overlooking the Atlantic, it's an area I know extremely well having camped and hiked there. Shane's Castle is a working castle still inhabited by a minor member of the royal family - I've visited Shane's Castle on several occasions. Tollymore Forest I've been to hundreds of times. I even made a Super 8 swordfighting movie there with my little brother. (Hopefully the production values for Game of Thrones are slightly better.) Magheramorne is maybe the most surprising filming location for me. My dad was from Magheramorne and its basically just a village with barely more than a dozen houses in it. I assume they filmed not in Magheramorne village itself but in the abandoned quarry nearby which juts into Larne Lough in pretty spectacular fashion. 

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If Game of Thrones is a hit maybe HBO will do more of George RR Martin's books and perhaps they'll use Carrickfergus Castle next time (above). I literally was born and grew up a stone's throw from Carrick Castle which is the best preserved Norman structure in Ireland. The keep is over 800 years old and the outer walls date from the thirteenth century. It's an amazing place. When I was a kid I was in the local archery club and once a week we would set up the targets in the middle ward and shoot our composite bows in there - yes it was as cool as it sounds. 

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I haven't seen Game of Thrones yet (I have read the books) so if anyone has seen a preview copy or the actual show I'd love to read your review in the comments below.

The Blair Brothers

Quite a few years ago I watched a documentary on PBS about a pair of slightly eccentric English brothers who spent two decades travelling around Indonesia in the 1970's and 1980's. They brought film cameras and sound recording equipment intending only to make one short documentary about a trip on a Bugis pirate ship to the Spice Islands. They ended up building a house in Bali, travelling everywhere, shooting hundreds of hours of film, without ever bothering to edit it. The film cans lay rusting in their Bali house for years. Finally it was edited and a four part documentary culled from the footage. The documentary was produced by Ringo Starr and in a part 5 that was made 10 years later Mick Jagger makes an appearance. Weird. Anyway now the whole thing is on YouTube: Part 1 of part 1 below. Hope you like it as much as I did. 

The War For Late Night - Bill Carter

The War For Late Night is a solid piece of reporting of a kind that you don't see much any more. Carter is an unshowy, unhistrionic writer who assembles his facts, checks them and spins them into a compelling narrative. He's done a lot of research and interviewed almost all the key players in the drama of how Jay Leno lost, regained, lost and regained The Tonight Show on NBC. 

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The basic tale is well known. Jay didn't want to go but was forced out because NBC were afraid of losing Conan O'Brien, the dauphin. Terrified that Leno was going to go to Fox or ABC, NBC came up with a silly plan to put a Jay Leno show on in primetime, soon after Conan would take over The Tonight Show. Conan debuted on The Tonight Show and his ratings were weak, Leno's show debuted in primetime and his ratings were a disaster. The NBC affiliates revolted, wanting Leno off the air, but to fire him would cost NBC a fortune so they decided to put on a mini Jay Leno show at 11.30 and push Conan's Tonight Show back to 12.00. Conan refused because he said it "would spoil the tradition of The Tonight Show starting at 11.30" and left NBC with a settlement of 40 million dollars or thereabouts. Leno got The Tonight Show back and although his ratings are lower than they were when before he left he is currently back to beating Letterman in the ratings. Conan went to the TBS network where his show gets a tiny but devoted audience.
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A lot of this is inside baseball and there are few surprises in the story (but there is one big one) and libel laws being what they are Carter has to be careful what he says at all times; so often it's necessary to read between the lines. What I got from the book were the following impressions: 1.) Jay Leno is a hardworking automaton driven by strange inner demons and with seemingly no outside life apart from The Tonight Show or doing up to 160 Vegas shows a year; he has no kids, never takes vacations, spends all of his time with his classic cars or writing lame, dated, middle America friendly jokes. 2.) David Letterman is a surly misanthrope with few friends, blinding rages, and an acidic but often funny sense of humour. 3.) Conan O'Brien (and this is the surprise) is actually a bit of an eejit who takes himself very seriously, has an enormous sense of entitlement and weirdly is almost the villain of the piece. Before I read the book I (and surely everyone else in America) thought Conan was hard done by and that Leno was the jerk: Conan is easy to like because he's young and hip and Leno is easy to dislike because he's old, old fashioned and less edgy than Letterman or Conan. But actually as Jerry Seinfeld points out in the book Conan was the one who threw the hissy fit and refused to compromise, Seinfeld says that all Conan's talk about the traditions of The Tonight Show were high falutin nonsense, arguing that actually its just a stupid TV chat show that's had half a dozen hosts and many time periods and starting times over the years. Seinfeld argues that Conan should have realised that his ratings were horrible and accepted the deal to move to 12.00 without kicking up a fuss. It's an interesting thesis and contra to the Zeitgeist which I always like.
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Patrick Crawley of USC rates and analyses all 7 late night hosts, here. His winner is Conan and like everyone else he despises Leno.

10 Novels For Men

Men don’t buy novels anymore. They’ve pretty much stopped buying magazines and they don’t go to the cinema in as big numbers as they used to. What do they do? The answer is that nobody knows. Advertisers don’t know. TV programmers don’t know. Publishers certainly don’t know. Probably they’re playing Halo online, watching Louis CK videos on YouTube and googling for free pornography, but we can’t be certain.

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In my local Borders they have a "Guy Lit." section which contains thrillers by ex SAS men, alternative histories where the Nazis win the war and Nick Hornby novels...Is there a middle ground between the SS jackboot and the lime green Converse high top? Yes, I think so. Here’s my list of 10 novels for men who don’t normally like to read novels. Each one has the advantage of giving you a passport into a genre or an author that will keep you going for a while.


10. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler. It’s raining in Bay City (Santa Monica) and the slick streets are thick with ironic private eyes - the most poetic and interesting of them is a guy called Philip Marlowe.
9. Use of Weapons - Iain Banks. A crazy, violent space opera set in Banks’s Culture universe. A dude called Zakalwe is a major league bad ass with a power suit and a big gun. Havoc ensues pretty much all the time. At one point he gets his head chopped off by a bunch of insane cannibals. He survives.
8. In Dubious Battle - John Steinbeck. Commie agents in 30's California get the living shite knocked out of them as they lay the groundwork for revolution. This is a book to make Glenn Beck keek his whips and cry into his pillow. Nobody reads this anymore. Shame because its awesome.
8. A Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemingway. A romantic (but in a manly Hemingwayesque way) American ambulance driver falls in love with war and then a nurse. He falls out of love with the former when he quickly sees how bloody horrible WWI actually is. All the way through you're thinking, this isn't going to end well...Unlike For Whom The Bell Tolls no one gets called "my little rabbit".
7. The Code of the Woosters - PG Wodehouse. Zen master Jeeves keeps his upper lip intact even in the most trying of circumstances. You think Snoop Dogg’s laid back? Jeeves would out limbo that mother any day of the week were he so vulgar as to engage in any kind of stick based contest.
6. The Ipcress File - Len Deighton. Harry Palmer is a spy, a gourmand, he counts his coppers, lives in a flat, flies to America and watches an H bomb test (they couldnt afford to put that bit in the movie).
5. The Cold Six Thousand - James Ellroy. It’s basically the Wizard of Oz retold with J Edgar Hoover as the Wicked Witch of the East and with Dorothy blowing her brains out at the end.
4. Her Last Call To Louis MacNeice - Ken Bruen. You know those Irish tourist board ads featuring sandy beaches, jolly times in pubs, pints of Guinness with shamrocks on them? Well Ken Bruen doesn’t write about any of that bollocks. He writes about smart crooks who know that there are many many uses for a good ten pound hammer.
3. Moby Dick - They’ve taken a three year passage on board a leaky nineteenth century whaling ship with a mad captain, dangerous harpoonists and the heavy hand of fate hanging over them. Let’s see the Sea Shepherds try their water hoses on these bad boys.
2. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller. Its WW2 through the eyes of Captain Yossarian a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who has become the bombardier on a B17. He has to laugh otherwise he will cry and cry. Ou sont les Snowdens d'antan?
1. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy. Gun battles and horrific slaughter in the old west and Mexico. You'll try and get the wedding party massacre out of your head for the rest of your life. You wont succeed. McCarthy’s masterpiece.

In The Beginning Was The Word

Irish Presbyterianism must be one of the starkest religious faiths in the world. The pews are wood, there are no statues of saints or Madonnas, there is no incense, you don't kneel, there are no ecstatic visions, there are no earnest young people with guitars, you won't find a cross in any Irish Presbyterian church and there are certainly no moving/disturbing depictions of Jesus in the midst of his passion. Services can initially seem pretty dull. Psalms are sung (psalmody) followed by eighteenth century hymns and a solemn sermon, but then you get the Biblical exegesis and for me as a kid this is where things picked up. The Minister and sometimes the Elders read and analysed the King James Bible and the King James has some of most beautiful language and arresting imagery anywhere in English literature. I was thinking about this as I read Christopher Hitchens's latest piece in Vanity Fair which is a loving look at the KJB. No this isn't a deathbed conversion from the world's most famous atheist, it's an appreciation of what someone once called "the only worthwhile thing ever done by a committee." The prose of the KJB is so wonderful and rich and sturdy it has never been bettered. Even today novelists like Cormac McCarthy are largely in its thrall. I for one have no time at all for any of these modern translations and so called improvements. I mean can this be improved upon?

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil: For thou art with me;

Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies;

Thou annointest my head with oil; My cup runneth over.

I have always liked what George Bernard Shaw puts in the ironic mouth of Henry Higgins: "Remember [Eliza] that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon."

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You can read the Hitchens piece in Vanity Fair, here.
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But you know, even the word has its limits...if you want to know how to really get people back into the churches take a look at this:

A Solitary Man

In the movie Stepmom, a strangely lucky Ed Harris has divorced Susan Sarandon and is marrying new wife Julia Roberts. Old wife gets cancer and realises that she has to teach the new young wife how to look after her kids. It gets better - the old wife dies, saving Harris alimony and the kids now love the younger model just as much as the older one. As Hollywood screenwriter fantasies go Stepmom's got to be up near the top. Clearly it was also the fantasy of the divorced, bitter producers and the money men too. The Michael Douglas film A Solitary Man shares much of the same territory. An aging lothario has numerous affairs but all the women in his life still love him because he's so charming or something. His ex wife AGAIN is Susan Sarandon, his daughter is Jenna from the office and his current girlfriend that he cheats on is Mary Louise Parker. For some cockamamie reason he has to take his girlfriend's hot daughter on her college visit. (Parker does the fakest I hab a bab cold acting I've ever seen in a film.) Of course we all know what is going to happen on this trip. Unfortunately it isn't going to be like the time Tony Soprano took his daughter on a college visit. Its just going to be Douglas copping off with the teenage girl. (The screenwriters are careful to inform us that she is 18...so, you know, that's ok then.)

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These male wish fulfillment fantasy flicks are such an embarrassment to the gender, I wonder that everyone involved in them doesn't permanently hang their head in shame. Where the hell is bell hooks when we need her? Or Pauline Kael? They wouldnt stand for this nonsense. I couldn't watch the final act of the film, but I imagine Michael Douglas learns some kind of "lesson" at the very end. The French were making films like this thirty years ago. They've moved on. They've gotten more sophisticated. Hell, America was making films like this thirty years ago, but things have gone backwards. Now we're in a world where an emotionally retarded, adolescent film like Inception is able to stand out from the even more ridiculously crappy comic book adaptations surrounding it. Batman, Ironman, Spiderman, Sideburnsman (sorry Wolverine) cant stand any of them.
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Roger Ebert gave A Solitary Man three and a half stars. What did he like about the film? The forced, move-the-plot-along dialogue, the absurdity of the whole set up, Michael Douglas's creepy line readings? I don't know. I wish the old pervs who greenlighted and bank rolled and positively reviewed these movies would all just move to Thailand and be done with it....

Some Spinetingler Linkage

I'm the one not wearing the hat

There's a brand new review of Falling Glass in Spinetingler Magazine, here.

And there's also a pretty lengthy extract from Falling Glass in Spinetingler, aqui.

And finally there's a little piece I did about how and why I came to write Falling Glass in Spinetingler, here.

Hans Rosling On The Greatest Invention Ever

An illuminating talk by the marvellous Hans Rosling from the latest TED conference.

Interviewing Myself



He was close, real close. I couldn't see him yet, but I could feel him. . .
 as if the boat were being sucked upriver and the water was flowing back into
the jungle. Whatever was going to happen, it wasn't gonna be
the way they called it back in Nha Trang.

Normally when I have a book out I do a couple of blog interviews but since no one's asked this time around I thought I'd take a step down that narcissistic trail to insanity and interview myself:

Q. Hi, Adrian how are you doing?

A. Great. I'm working my way through a four pack of Ruddles County and Dog The Bounty Hunter is on the tube trawling through my old haunts in Denver in his not-exactly-covert fleet of black Escalades.

Q. Ok great glad you're focused...all right first question. With which fictional character do you most identify?

A. What a terrific question and of course I'm immediately tempted to name an obscure character from Robert Musil's two thousand page epic The Man Without Qualities just to prove that I've read and appreciated the book, but actually I have thought long and hard about this and I have a better answer: the goldfish in The Cat In The Hat. He's a very sensible goldfish and he wants to put a stop to the cat's shenanigans. I like that and I completely identify with his timidity and jaded killjoyism.

Q. What novel in the last year have you absolutely loved?
A. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. And although this is off topic, I commend Ruddles County to anyone who likes an older country style Midlands English beer. Its not hoppy or strong and there's a faint urine odour but somehow it all works. It's very hard to explain. It goes well with crackers and stilton too.
Q. Er...Ok. What novel in the last year have you absolutely hated?
A. The alleged comic novel that won the Booker Prize whose name escapes me at the moment. Look, I don't want to offend you but these questions suck. How about some good questions like what's my favourite shade of green or my favourite prime number or something.
Q. What is your favourite shade of green?
A. Great question. I've also thought long and hard about this one. I do like Irish Racing Green and a bright Kelly Green and even a slightly murky Seagreen, but I think my favourite shade of green is the dark dark dark green of the uniforms of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
Q. What's the highest prime number you can think of?
A. Off hand? Uhm, 2^43112609-1?
Q. If there's a heaven what would you like to hear God say at the Pearly Gates?
A. You stole that one from James Lipton didn't you?
Q. Well, yeah...but even so...go on.
A. God would say: "You were right about Battlestar Galactica, Adrian, Season 4 was terrible and the guilty people have been punished."  
Q. And what would you say to God?
A. "Yo, Adonai, now that Liz Taylor and JG Ballard have both passed on is there any chance of seeing some kind of live action version of Crash? That would be frikkin awesome."
Q. That's what you'd say to God?

A. Not good? Sorry that's just the first thing I thought of and Dog the Bounty hunter just brought down his perp who once again is not the dangerous felon we had been promised but a just a meek dude in a vest who forgot his court date.  

Q. What do you think of what many people are calling the Celtic New Wave in crime fiction? 

A. Wait I have a better question for God, "The Marie Celeste...whats the story with that? That sucker's been puzzling me since I was 8." 

Q. Ok maybe we can leave that to one side for the moment. E books, will they save or kill publishing?
A. Nazi E Boats almost cost us dear on D Day. I should know I had an Airfix model of one. Fearsome looking machines.
Q. E books.
A. Or you know what I would ask God? I'd ask her how Qatar got to host the 2022 World Cup. How did that happen exactly? And for this answer I want her to assume the form of Christina Hendricks while she explains it.
Q. Ok, this is clearly not going anywhere, thank you Adrian McKinty.
A. Anytime Adrian, anytime.

25 Novels To Read Before You Die

I know I'm belatedly jumping on a popular meme, but I suppose it's better late than never...
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Anyway, here's my list (right) of the 25 novels I think you should read before you die. Of course its just a snapshot of what I'm thinking at the moment and at least for me these things change all the time. (Next month I imagine it'd be a totally different list). One rule I gave myself was limiting my choices to 1 novel per author. I was also a little bit reluctant to include stuff that I've just recently read. I think The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell is a modern classic, but will I think that a year from now? I don't know...My final rule was not to include books that I think everyone has already read in school "To Kill A Mockingbird", "Things Fall Apart", "Catcher in the Rye" etc. (Maybe this is a bit of a naive belief, but one lives in hope). I do appreciate this is largely a Western Anglophone list but that's the culture I grew up in and you are certainly free to make a list of your own.
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So why should you read these 25 novels? Well, it won't make you a better man (or woman), it won't always be fun (parts of Ulysses do drag), but I think it will enrich your experience of life on this little planet of ours... 

Irish Poem Of The Month: April

Desertmartin
by Tom Paulin

This is a far-off place in the North of Ireland called Desertmartin.


Desertmartin

At noon, in the dead centre of a faith,
Between Draperstown and Magherafelt,
This bitter village shows the flag
in a baked absolute September light.
Here the Word has withered to a few
Parched certainties, and the charred stubble
Tightens like a black belt, a crop of Bibles.


Because this is the territory of the Law
I drive across it with a powerless knowledge -
The owl of Minerva in a hired car.
A Jock squaddy glances down the street
And grins, happy and expendable,
Like a brass cartridge. He is a useful thing,
Almost at home, and yet not quite, not quite.


It’s a limed nest, this place, I see a plain
Presbyterian grace sour, then harden,
As a free strenuous spirit changes
To a servile defiance that whines and shrieks
For the bondage of the letter: it shouts
For the Big Man to lead his wee people
To a clean white prison, their scorched tomorrow.


Masculine Islam, the rule of the Just,
Egyptian sand dunes and geometry,
A theology of rifle-butts and executions:
These are the places where the spirit dies.
And now, in Desertmartin’s sandy light,
I see a culture of twigs and bird-shit
Waving a gaudy flag it loves and curses.