Krapp's Last Tape: It's a date!

It's probably my favourite piece by Beckett, and I still remember how moved I was by John Hurt's performance at The Gate Theatre in Dublin in 2001.

 Photograph: Anthony Woods/Gate Theatre digital archive/University of Galway

The story of the play is of a 69-year-old man making his annual recording of his thoughts on his birthday, laughing cynically at the recording of his 39-year-old self, and then losing his cynicism as his thoughts move back and forth between his old self and his current self. One of the many challenges for the solitary actor on stage is to convince in the younger recording while responding to it as the older Krapp. Hurt did that brilliantly. 

But what if a recording were made when an actor was actually thirty-nine, so that he could play the piece when he was sixty-nine? The actor would be responding to his own reality, as well as that of the character he was playing.

That's the idea behind a project by Art Over Borders, where the actor Samuel West made the recording in 2006, and the actor Richard Dormer in 2008. And a limited number of (very) early-bird tickets went on sale last Sunday, Beckett's 120th birthday, for West's performance in 2036.

I bought two. So, if we're not all tempting fate to an outrageous degree, Martine and I will be in Dublin on Saturday, March 22nd, 2036, to see West's performance. I'm looking forward to it!

Am I an award-winning writer?

Well a few months ago I wondered here if I should call myself a writer at all. Then I found out that I was an award-winning writer: I won the 2025 Cúirt New Writing Fiction Prize.

www.cuirt.ie

When I first began writing short stories just four years ago I devoured many collections in order to understand the form and appreciate its subtleties. One of the collections I most enjoyed was Dance Move by the outstanding Belfast writer Wendy Erskine, so I was completely gobsmacked when in her capacity as the prize's judge she wrote this about my winning story Deconstruction:

Complex relationship with a lightness of touch, I loved this story with its brilliantly judged dialogue. Who knew that an IKEA furniture forum could be mined for such gold?

I was floating on air after reading that and receiving her congratulations on BlueSky.

So there I was in Galway last week, reading my story at the Cúirt festival in the company of six brilliant writers. 

I'm still floating on air.

The impact of the unexpected: Elisabeth Brauss

I've seen a lot of really good classical concerts recently. Marc-André Hamelin playing Gershwin's Rhapsody Blue with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra was as good as you'd expect it to be. Shostakovich's 8th symphony with the same orchestra was excellent too.

Last Wednesday I saw a pianist I'd never heard of before playing at a half-full Salle Bourgie. I don't know why my wife bought the tickets, and she couldn't really remember either, but it seemed like a pleasant way of spending a Wednesday evening. Elisabeth Brauss was young, twenty-nine according to the notes, but she looked much younger. The program included works by Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, and Prokofiev. She came out on stage, all smiles, paused for a moment and began to play.

Holy crap.

There was a palpable moment in the hall when everyone came to the same realisation - something special is happening here. Her playing was mesmerising, a scarcely believable combination of energy, lyricism, and precision, with each of those attributes turned up to maximum. And unlike some other artists I've seen recently, the pianist herself seemed to be enjoying every moment of the performance. The audience was so caught up in it that they stopped coughing (!) and the silence between each movement was total, charged with anticipation, almost radioactive. Montreal audiences are always pretty generous with their standing ovations, but the enthusiasm in this one was off the scale. It was the concert of the season for me.

I'm really looking forward to seeing Elisabeth Brauss in concert again, but next time I'll have expectations. This was a one off, the sort of thing that can only happen in a live performance where you have no preconceptions of what you're about to see. 

Anyway, you had to be there, I guess. But here's a video of her playing at the Wigmore Hall in 2022.

Skye Consort with Emma Björling at Le Rucher Boltonnois

I love folk music, especially the traditional music that's rooted in the places where I've lived: Ireland, Sweden, and Quebec. So, when Martine described the band that was playing in the town next to our chalet, well, we just had to be there.

Emma Björling is a folk singer from Östersund and, amongst many other projects, she performs with the Montreal-based folk group Skye Consort. The venue was Le Rucher Boltonnois, a cosy little hall serving craft beers that we've visited four or five times now. They played a variety of songs from each of their traditions, singing in Swedish, French, and English (with some spicy Norwegian and Danish for good measure). They call their genre 'transatlantic chamber folk', a genre with only one member. Their performance was outstanding.

Each of the musicians is a virtuoso of their instrument. Simon Alexandre, also a classical violinist in the Orchestre Philharmonique de Quebec, played a nyckelharpa, a medieval Swedish instrument somewhat like a violin with keys. I'd heard it before on recordings but never live. The harmonic resonances it produced were just gorgeous.

Although she could sing in French, Björling apologised between songs saying that she couldn't really speak in French. But, she said, speaking in English was a fair compromise as we couldn't understand her Swedish songs. I was about to put my hand up to say there was at least one audience member who appreciated her Swedish - but quickly thought better of it!

The band has two albums and lots of performances available on YouTube. Here's the Swedish song that began their concert last Saturday evening.

2024 Reading List

2024 was a good reading year. I suspect 2025 will be even better, as I'll be diving into fiction to avoid reading any news about you-know-who.

The highlights of my 2024 reading year would have to include these four books:

• Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon, his first novel, which I read on the basis of a review in The Guardian. The idea is brilliant, a story of a war in ancient Greece made real and relevant by the present tense narration of two characters with funny Dublin accents. It's truly glorious from beginning to end. 
  
  
• The 19th century Russian short stories collected and analysed by George Saunders under the title A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. The stories are really good, but my appreciation of them was doubled by Saunders' explanations. This is such an enjoyable read, but also so insightful for an aspiring writer. 

 

• A memoir that was assigned in a writing craft class, Splinters by Leslie Jamison. It's fair to say that I wasn't looking forward to reading yet another divorce memoir, but Jamison's writing is sharp, insightful, and often extremely witty in an understated and subtle way, a pleasure to read.
  
  
• Orbital. It's wonderful, but sure everybody knows that already. 
  
  

I was a bit disappointed by Mike McCormack's This Plague of Souls. I was so looking forward to it as Solar Bones is one of my all-time favourite novels, but it didn't quite land for me. It felt unfinished. McCormack has said that these books are part of a triptych, with Solar Bones as the centre-piece, so maybe this will all come together in the end when the third novel is published.

I was quite underwhelmed by Sally Rooney's Normal People, just as I was underwhelmed in the past by Beautiful World, Where Are You. I'm ready to accept it's my fault, not Rooney's, but I've given it a good go now so Intermezzo is not in my plans.

Here's the complete list of what I read in 2024:

Fiction

Amis, Martin: The Zone of Interest

Arikha, Alba: Two Hours

Barry, Kevin: That Old Country Music

Boyne, John: Water

Cusk, Rachel: Transit (2nd reading)

Dutton, John B: 2084

Ephron, Nora: Heartburn

Ferrell Carolyn: Dear Miss Metropolitan

Fosse, Jon: A Shining

Harvey, Samantha: Orbital

Keegan, Claire: Foster (2nd reading)

Lennon, Ferdia: Glorious Exploits

McCann, Colum: Thirteen Ways of Looking

McCormack, Mike: Solar Bones (3rd reading)

McCormack, Mike: This Plague of Souls

McLiam Wilson, Robert: Eureka Street

Mitchell, David: Slade House

Murray, Paul: The Bee Sting

Richler, Mordecai: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

Rooney, Sally: Normal People

Saunders, George (editor): A Swim in a Pond in the Rain - stories by Chekov, Tolstoy et al

Thúy, Kim: Ru (en Français)

Non-fiction

Balinska, Maria: The Bagel

Cohen, Richard: How to Write like Tolstoy

Dyer, Geoff: The Last Days of Roger Federer

Ho Davies, Peter: The Art of Revision - The Last Word

Jamison, Leslie: Splinters

Olen Butler, Robert: From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

Poetry

Mandelstam, Osip: Stolen Air

Pinsky, Robert: Proverbs of Limbo

Roeser, Dana: All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts

Eternal Orlando

This production at La Maison Symphonique was an 'adaptation' of Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando into a performance that combined spoken word with pieces of classical music played by the Orchestre Métropolitain. I put 'adaptation' in inverted commas because beyond the basic outline of the story of the time-travelling and gender-shifting Orlando there wasn't that much left of Woolf's novel. Firstly, the text was changed into a series of dialogues and speeches in French that were more inspired by the novel that translated from it. Secondly, the story was altered to incorporate other pieces by Woolf, such as her famous essay on the historical treatment of women artists A Room of One's Own. But most annoyingly for me, the adaptation incorporated elements of Woolf's own life. 

It's increasingly common to approach art through the artist's biography and while that can be illuminating it also feels reductive, especially for women artists. So Woolf is always the lesbian who killed herself (and Syliva Plath is always the wronged wife, who killed herself). These are very one-dimensional ways of approaching their art. The final scene of this production showed the Orlando / Woolf character filling her pockets with stones, preparing to walk into the river Ouse. I'd rather engage with her art without always thinking about this, then think of her as the brilliant and original author who created Orlando, To the Lighthouse, and especially, Mrs. Dalloway. 

But the music was beautiful. 

The highlight of the evening for me was the concluding piece, the Canadian premiere of a cello concerto by Nathalie Joachim (who was in the audience) with Seth Parker Woods the soloist. The concerto was spectacular in the first movements, and then incredibly moving in the final movement. I'll be looking out for a recording. The playing by Woods was brilliant and charismatic, inspiring the orchestra and audience. His clothes made quite the statement, apparently inspired by the Black Dandyism movement. He looked like a rock star compared to the sombre orchestra musicians. I hope to hear and see him again.

Seth Parker Woods
(screengrab from YouTube)

Nerfed

It's almost five years since the first lockdown of the pandemic. Five years!

I was lucky, privileged, and got through it easier than so many, though it was a challenging time for my sons. No school, no organized sports, no interaction with their friends, and too much time in front of phones and gaming consoles. The youngest had just turned twelve and I struggled for ideas to get him out of the house and moving. 

One part of the solution was Pokémon Go.

The tables were turned: he was the master, me the student. We walked on every blade of grass in Girouard park and along every boulevard, chemin, and ruelle of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, hunting the little critters. The game design was brilliant: the more you walked, the better the Pokémon you found, walk further and the Pokémon you'd caught became stronger (known in the lingo of the app as 'training').

Over time I became even more absorbed by the game than he did (I'm now a level 40 Pokémon trainer, just sayin'), but it's still "one of our things" that we share. Back in the day, the strongest Pokémon for battling other trainers was a Galarian Stunfish and I caught a beautiful three-star example in 2021. I walked 1250 kilometers with it, most of them with my son beside me.

Last week my Stunfish finally powered up to its maximum value, a CP of 2474, and I was proud to show it to him. But strangely, it kept getting defeated easily in trainer battles. He did a quick check on a fan webpage.

'It's been nerfed,' he said, laughing. 

'What does that mean?'

'It was too strong in battles, so they weakened it. It used to rank 5 out of 5, but now, you won't believe it Dad, it's 0 out of 5.' He laughed again. This was clearly hilarious for anyone who hadn't walked his Stunfish for 1250 kilometers. 

'That was a lot of bloody walking for nothing,' I said.

'Those were good times Dad,' he said, smiling. 'Besides, you'll probably get a blog post out if it.'

A nerfed Galarian Stunfisk

Am I a writer?

In the Canada Writes Facebook group there was a debate recently about the definition of a writer, and there were opposing views. 'Anyone who writes,' said one group. 'Au contraire,' said the second group. 'That's an "aspiring writer". A writer is someone whose writing has appeared in a publication that has an editor, selection criteria, and other quality controls.' (i.e. self-publishing doesn't count).

Why do I care?  

Well, I'm not a software development leader anymore (so I no longer have much use for my LinkedIn account).

But I've had five stories published by reputable literary magazines, with a sixth one on the way. And I've been paid real money for some of this writing (though if I divided the fee by the time I spent on the piece the hourly rate would be hilariously small!)

So today, this nineteenth of November in the year twenty twenty-four, I'm putting a stake in the ground: I am a writer.

You can find my writing at my new website, www.LaurenceWrites.com. I'll continue to use this blog for occasional musings and diary entries.

Komorebi

I spent yesterday adjusting the WiFi at our chalet, creating the Dehors Lavigne network for the external cameras and lights. I love faffing with technology, tinkering with settings, running little experiments and checking signal coverage. I suppose it's the equivalent of my dad pottering about in the garden shed for hours. 

Last night Martine and I watched a movie, Perfect Days by Wim Wenders. It's one of the slowest movies I've ever seen, a toilet cleaner going about his daily routine in Tokyo. It's a bit like a short story by Clare Keegan or Raymond Carver in that on the surface nothing much happens but underneath there's all the complexity and bitter-sweetness of life. The movie references the short story The Terrapin by Patricia Highsmith, which is a shorthand way of explaining what's going on in the mind and life of the cleaner's niece i.e. huge parental issues. The cleaner spends his spare time photographing light filtering through trees, and this visual (in black and white) dominates his dreams too - at the end the Japanese word Komorebi is explained. I found an interview with the main actor of the film who gives his interpretation:

There's a fundamental principle at work behind Perfect Days, one which corresponds with its study of simplicity and lack of conflict and drama. "Komorebi" is a Japanese term that loosely refers to "sunlight filtered through trees," something which is certainly filmed frequently in Perfect Days. But the word means much more than that. It connotes a kind of contentment, a peaceful joy that is deeply connected with nature and humanity.

The same idea is also contained in a line in the film which Hirayama and his niece exchange and she repeats like a mantra: Next time is next time. Now is now.

An evening with PJ Harvey

I've been a fan of PJ Harvey for a long time. I saw her in concert in Stockholm in 1993, and then in Dublin in (I think) 2004. Last night I saw her in Laval.

The concert started awkwardly as many people hadn't gotten the message that there was no support band. So in the second song 'Autumn Term', when she gestured to each side of the hall and the spotlight followed her, we just saw hundreds of people wandering around trying to find their seats in the dark. The first part of the concert was taken up with her new album 'I Inside The Old Year Dying' which is even stronger live than the recording - and the recording is poetic and gripping and one of the best albums of the past few years. (I told you I'm a fan.) The second half was a selection of songs from her extensive back catalogue. 'Dress' was thrillingly energetic, 'To Bring You My Love' mesmerising as she totally inhabited the character, and the finale with 'White Chalk' held the audience rapt with its intense wistfulness.

The band was super tight, featuring her long-time collaborator John Parish on guitar and keyboards, and the production was carefully choreographed with the stage set out like a living room, giving it an intimate feel despite the size of the hall. But there was no getting away from the fact that Place Bell is an ice-hockey stadium - the sound was quite muddy where I was sitting, the bass and drums reverberating too loudly off the walls and ceiling. 

Another disappointment was that she finished by repeating 'thank you very much' at least a dozen times, but not a single 'merci beaucoup', which showed a bit of a lack of awareness of her mostly francophone audience. 

Last year she presented much the same show in Paris and this recording of that night is stunning: the sound quality is excellent, and voilà, she remembers the 'merci beaucoup.' 

The Truth and The Reckoning

In Isabelle Picard's podcast series L'autre motié de l'histoire, she interviews the Algonquin Elder and University of Ottawa professor Claudette Commanda, who has problems with the word reconciliation in the phrase Truth and Reconciliation that is used ad nauseum by the Canadian government. Firstly, she says, we skip over the first part, the truth, far too easily. Secondly, the idea of reconciliation as a kind of forgiveness is alien to the cultures of the First Nations. They recognise reparation, not reconciliation. She suggests a hybrid word: reconcili-Action.

In Camille Rankine's poetry podcast series The Glimpse there's an interview with the poet John Murillo who describes how he loves the word 'reckoning' in its sense of evaluation and final judgement. This strikes me as apt for the situation of the First Nations in Canada. We, the colonialists, must discover and confront the truth, and after that there must be a reckoning for and by us.

It's not going to be easy, and we're not going to like all of it. But that's how it is with justice. 

Courage

In 1980, abortion was a major topic in Ireland. The public debate was not, as you might have expected, about legalizing it, but on whether the existing ban should be reinforced constitutionally, to the point where there could never be a possibility of allowing it, no matter the consequences for women. The rights of women were a non-issue in that country for old men.

I was a teenager then, attending a Dublin school for boys run by the Christian Brothers, and the ethos of the Catholic Church ran deep in me. Unhappily. I was a fervent anti-abortionist, as were the other thirty or so boys in my class.  Our German teacher was a young woman from the west of Ireland, and one morning she brought a newspaper into the class with an article about abortion and proceeded to debate us. For the next hour she held her ground against us, advocating for a woman's right to choose, in the face of thirty holier-than-thou little pricks. When we couldn't win the argument through logic, we resorted to shouting her down. But though she had tears in her eyes she remained calm, explaining why we were wrong. 

In the Ireland of the 1980s her views would have been considered outrageous, and unacceptable for a teacher. If any of us had told the school principal Brother Kenny about this debate, not only would she have been fired instantly, she would never have been allowed to teach anywhere in Ireland again.

The thirty of us acted like young fools that day, but at least I can say that none of us reported her. Now, more than forty years later, I know very well how wrong I was. Her courage in debating us that morning was remarkable. I've tried many times to find her, to say exactly this and to apologise to her, but I've never been able to locate her.

Ireland changed with the repeal of the 8th amendment to the constitution in 2018. In the long run she won the argument, convincingly and courageously.

Coláiste Caoímhín CBS on Parnell Road in Dublin, the Jewish
cemetery on Aughavanagh Road in the upper left background.
(Photo source unknown). The school was demolished in 1995.

Confession

I have a confession to make. On Saint Patrick's Day, of all days. 

(Deep breath.)

I like cricket.

I like its deep pointlessness. 

I like to fall asleep in the dead of winter knowing that The Ashes is being played in searing Australian sunshine, and that the innings will build while I’m asleep. Or there’ll be a batting collapse, and somewhere in England in the dead of night a journalist is sipping coffee, trying not to wake their young child, typing an over-by-over commentary of what they see on their TV to inform people like me around the world with wit and wisdom. 

And then there are articles, like this one by Robert McLiam Wilson, where a writer says something profoundly important about the world by writing about cricket.

Cricket. Bloody hell. 

2023 Reading list

This should have been my first post of 2023, but here, belatedly, is a list of the books I read in 2023:

Fiction

Companion Piece by Ali Smith

Daydreams of Angels by Heather O’Neill

Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet

Foster by Claire Keegan

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

Look at me by Jennifer Egan

Nirliit by Juliana Léveillé-Trudel (en Français)

Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood

Tenth of December by George Saunders

The Hour after Happy Hour by Mary O’Donoghue

The Singularities by John Banville

The Writer’s Torch ed. by Boumans, et al

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Tiohtiá:ke by Michel Jean (en Français)

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

Poetry

Ariel – The Restored Edition by Syliva Plath

If Some God Shakes Your House by Jennifer Franklin

Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert

Non-fiction

I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jenette McCurdy

Negative Space by Cristín Leach

The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde

It's hard to pick a favourite from this list, but I particularly loved the novels by Paul Harding and Claire Keegan and their completely opposite approaches: the former for the brilliance of his prose in capturing the immediate experience of his characters, and the latter for the deceptive simplicity of her narration and the way it creeps up on you. The non-fiction work by Cristín Leach is wonderfully insightful on the intersection between writing lives and personal lives and I added many quotes from it to my notebook.

See also:

September 2021 - December 2022 reading list

January 2020 - August 2021 reading list

Published!

It doesn't mean much in the world of literature, but it means a lot to me: two of my pieces, Memento Mori and Homing, have been published in the online magazine Sky Island Journal. 

I've been writing fiction and poetry for two and a half years now, and this is motivation for me to keep on writing and to submit more of my pieces for publication. It feels good.