On Monday night RTE broadcast an unusual documentary, perhaps the hoity-toity term “sound collage” might be more appropriate, that ostensibly addresses my father’s latest business project. However, it’s far more than that, as my Dad, with his indefatigable storytelling skills, covers such issues as the etymology of the word “gnatting,” Singapore dance girls, the cabling […]

They say that supposedly “idle” time is vital to creative people. Although it might appear that the “artist” is slumped on the couch, the remote control in one paw and a mug of cooling tea in the other, this apparent inactivity is actually masking the delicate gestation of an aesthetic concept.This rather self-serving concept (you […]

I thought the story that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle about “the Compact”–“About 50 teachers, engineers, executives and other professionals in the Bay Area have made a vow to not buy anything new in 2006 — except food, health and safety items and underwear.”–introduced a commendable idea. Until I reached the following paragraphs: “The […]

I may return to my increasing involuted reflections on the writings on David Foster Wallace at a later stage, but events, as they say, have intervened. The increasingly bizarre and sinister protests over the putatively anti-Islamic cartoons that appeared in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten have already generated a few clich�s, which are being readily embraced […]

Two stories from Oblivion reveal David Foster Wallace�s debt to Jorge Luis Borges* most clearly. The first, �Another Pioneer,� which indirectly recounts the story of the influence of a child prodigy/deity on the mindset of a nameless Palaeolithic tribe living in an Amazonian rainforest, borrows the quintessential Borgesian technique of using a framing or distancing […]

Blogger Ellis Sharp delivers a pretty devastating critique of John Banville’s radio play, Todtnauberg, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 last week as part of the Holocaust commemorations. I was listening to it on the laptop while engaged in the distinctly low-tech and unelevating task of doing the washing-up. But with dialogue along the lines of […]

The reliably dyspeptic Joseph Epstein recently penned an article with the upbeat rubric, Are Newspapers Doomed? Although eulogies for printed news dailies have been appearing fairly regularly since the advent of radio, Epstein�s article is interesting in the way it remorselessly analyses newspapers’ flailing attempt to attract young readers with a bourgeoning range of �lifestyle� […]

In my last post I promised I would detail some of the more evident flaws in Tony Judt�s otherwise impressive achievement, Postwar. First, and perhaps it is just chauvinistic chippiness, but I wondered whether Albania having more index entries than Ireland is significant in what it reveals about the mindset of English-born academics of a […]

Over the Christmas break I succeeded in getting through Tony Judt�s monumental (878 pages) Postwar, which, incidentally, was chosen by the editors of the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year that�s just ended. The sheer scope of the book�tackling the history of Europe from 1945 right up to […]