On the subject of observing and being observed, I must mention the long, grim gander I took at myself in the bathroom mirror this morning. Usually these days I do not dally before my reflection any longer than is necessary. There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but […]
The cosy world of the Irish blogosphere seems all aflutter (see here, here, and here, for example) over the actions of Irish Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, who seems to have a gift for pouring Tabasco sauce over the stigmata of right-thinking Ireland. McDowell appears to have basically scuppered the recently established Centre for Public […]
Several weeks (months?) ago, I claimed that David McWilliams was consistently one of the best columnists working in the Irish print arena. Well, now he�s starting to grate a bit. Perhaps it�s a function of his heightened profile recently as he frantically plugs his new book (�The Pope�s Children�) in the run-up to Christmas. His […]
The view from Gdańsk is not pretty. As Pinter accepts his Nobel prize, Poland slips further into the absurd and the vulgar. Here is a random selection, from memory, so apologies for any small inaccuracies: Charges of defamation against a journalist were, after lengthy consideration and great tax-payer funded expense, finally dropped. The charges were […]
Thanks to the eager eyes of one of my loyal readers, I have updated my previous posting. As many people will know, the Irish Minister for Justice is not, as I wrote earlier, Malcolm McDowell but, of course, Michael McDowell. Perhaps the unconscious change of forename is linked to memories of A Clockwork Orange, which […]
I caught Harold Pinter’s Nobel lecture on television today. All in all, a perplexing performance. It began promisingly with Pinter describing the origins, in a phrase and an image, of two of his great plays, The Homecoming and Old Times. Then, with a few perfunctory comments about the nature of lies in modern politics, he […]
I caught Oliver Hirschbiegel�s chilling film, Downfall last night on Channel 4�s latest offshoot, More4. If it weren�t for the fact that the picture was actually released in 2004, it would definitely be a contender for my picture of the year. What was disturbing about the movie was not so much the scenes of Berliners […]
With apologies to the Harper�s Index, here are some factoids that caught my eye during recent reading, online & offline, presented in the form of figures:8: Average age, in years, of cars in Germany (Source: �In Germany, a Puzzling Prescription for Economic Health,� New York Times )40,000,000,: Approximate population of France during the Second World […]
In the alternative reality presented in The Plot Against America, the relocation of America�s Jewish population�including the narrator�s family�under the Homestead 42 scheme is seen one of the final steps in cementing the Lindbergh Administration�s totalitarian tendencies. But this fictional act of state coercion pales in comparison with the real Executive Order 9066, which Roosevelt […]
OK, first off, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is an entertaining work, its ‘counterfactual’ premise evoking for me those yellow-jacketed Gollancz sci-fi novels that I borrowed from the local library before I dutifully moved on to ‘proper’ literature. In fact, the alternative history that Roth limns in this novel -that Charles Lindbergh’s successful Republican […]
