Another Autumn

It's the most photogenic time of the year in Quebec and through many Autumns I've tried to capture it; the twist in this year's photo is that little (no longer so little) Philou is dressed in colours that almost exactly matched the landscape.

Recent Readings

If you only like novels with a strong plot then move along, there's nothing like that to be seen here.  But I really enjoyed all of these books in the past months, and a week in Cuba meant I'd a lot of extra reading time.

A trilogy by Rachel Cusk: Outline, Transit, Kudos
The three novels are an exploration of the theme given in each title, in the context of relationships forming, changing and ending. Our viewpoint is that of a mother of 2 children, a writer living in England who has gone through a bitter divorce. We hear very little about her directly; instead she relates her conversations with her students, other authors, ex-lovers, strangers on a plane, all told in her own voice and vocabulary, which to my ear echoes Virginia Woolf (of whom more below). Her character emerges at the boundaries of these interactions.

Now that might sound a bit stiff and dull, but what makes the novels work so well is the quality of that authors voice and the depth of the conversations - Cusk brings our attention to the minute details of our interactions with others and dives deep for nuggets of insight. Or as one of the character says:

Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.

I was hooked from the very first page and read the three books one after another, though they won't be everyone's cup of earl grey. 

Albert Camus: L'Étranger
Kamel Daoud: Meursault, contre-enquête
There's nothing I can say about L'Étranger, one of the most renowned books of the 20th century, that hasn't already been said. I enjoyed it and improved my French too. The novel by Daoud is a riposte to it, centred on "l'arabe" who is murdered by the eponymous "l'étranger" Meursault . In Camus' work we learn nothing about this victim, not even his name; he is irrelevant to Meursault and to Camus, and his murder is meaningless. In Daoud's novel we learn that he was named Moussa, and that the lives of his mother and brother were changed forever by his murder. The killing is then put in to context of pre-independence Algeria and how the "pieds noirs" were viewed at that time. Then we enter a mirror image of the Camus story where one of the pied noir, a Frenchman, is murdered by Moussa's brother in an act of revenge that is also meaningless. It's an innovative and enjoyable read, though my level of French is insufficient for me to have an opinion on how well-written it is.

Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
I've read and re-read this book many times, sometimes just dipping in for a few pages at a time. It's so rich and wise and the prose is so beautiful I'll never be finished with it.

Mr O'Reilly

Mr. O'Reilly was old. I was 10, and for as long as I could remember he'd always been the same: black bushy hair and eyebrows and moustache, a well worn black suit and waistcoat, his pipe with which he constantly fiddled as he leaned on the garden gate outside his terraced house, watching the traffic on our busy road. He smelled of tobacco. From four houses away I could smell it, not unpleasant in itself, but for me a warning: Mr O'Reilly is out.

For he had a gruff manner, as though continually affronted by what he saw from his observation post at the end of his little overgrown garden. And he'd a loud and gravelly voice to complement his imposing dark figure and mannerisms. On my daily errand to buy the final edition of the Evening Herald, I had to pass him. Each time the blood would be pounding in my ears. Could I sneak by quickly without him talking to me?

'The state of that car it should be put off the feckin road!'

Oh no. Should I pretend I hadn't heard him, or just smile back, or what? Oh God!

'What?', he'd bark.

"You're right Mr O'Reilly", I'd stammer.

'Huh', he'd retort, severely unimpressed with my limp response.

I'd continue on up the road, turning right to cross at the traffic lights, taking Sally's bridge over the Grand Canal and on down to Kelly's newsagent, all the while fretting over my return journey and how to avoid Mr. O'Reilly.

But there was no avoiding Mr. O'Reilly.

'The Guards should do something about it but they're feckin useless.'

Oh no. He'd mentioned the Guards. What should I reply? Didn't Mam say one of his sons was arrested by the Guards? Is that the fella that was always coming home roaring drunk from the pub, or one of the other rough looking ones?

'What did ye say?' he'd shout.

'Eh, you're right Mr. O'Reilly', I'd offer.

'Huh'.

I tried various tactics. Instead of walking past him up to the traffic lights I'd cross the road outside my house; I'd often be standing at the edge of the road for an eternity, waiting for a gap in the traffic, feeling his eyes boring into my back. I'd take our little dog with me, so that I could take her off the leash at the traffic lights on the way back and race with her past Mr O'Reilly before he could say anything; he'd watch me the whole way, as I kept my eyes facing forward to avoid his gaze. He knew what I was doing.

I don't know when he stopped being there. I remember one evening much later, back for a visit after a couple of years abroad, I passed him at his gate without either of us speaking. He looked frail, probably didn't recognise me.

He's not there anymore. It's not the same place without him. 

Mr O'Reilly was here

Tender...

Jim Harrison's "Bridge" is one of the poems I learned off by heart a few years ago. His description of the sea reminds of the times I spent camping in Co. Wexford as a little boy with my family, stormy dark nights when the wind tore at the tent, the rain machine-gunned the canvas, and the sea thundered a baseline to the cacophony. 

Sometimes the sea roars and howls like 

the animal it is, a continent wide and alive.

What beauty in this the darkest music 

over which you can hear the lightest music of human 

behavior, the tender connection between men and galaxies.

from Bridge by Jim Harrison 

Under a wide and starry night sky I too have felt a connection with the galaxies that sprawl to a horizon a billion light-years away. But the word "tender" intervenes like a note from a different key, intimate and melancholy in the midst of a grand symphony. I don't really understand precisely why the connection might be tender, but I do love the music created by that surprising little phrase.

Reading in bed late one night last week, I heard the same note when that word "tender" showed up in a very different piece.

Comme si cette grande colère m'avait purgé du mal, vidé d'espoir, devant cette nuit chargée de signes et d'étoiles, je m'ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde.

from L'étranger by Albert Camus 

Merseault, the eponymous "l'étranger" (best translated as "outsider") of Camus' masterpiece, is expressing the opposite emotion, the stars opening his eyes to the "tender" indifference of the world, rather than its connection with him. But the effect is similar, a note of intimacy and melancholy is struck in this tumultuous last movement of the novel.

I wonder if this resonance only sounds for me or if Harrison deliberately planted it there?  

Ireland is boilin'

This week in Ireland we have the hottest weather in 42 years. The roads are melting (literally) and we're running out of water (literally). In short, as the woman at the checkout in Supervalu said to me, it's boilin' outside (metaphorically). The TV news shows pictures of beaches filled with Irish sunbathers turning the colour of, yes, boiled lobsters.

But when Mam and I went for a walk in Newcastle Co. Wicklow we found the beach deserted, with a deliciously cool breeze coming off the Irish sea.

We walked a few 100 metres beside the railway lane and passed this forlorn abandoned cottage, slumped in the heat, under dazzling blue skies stretching westwards to the Wicklow mountains

I rather like this heated up Ireland, especially because I know it'll be cold and wet again soon enough.

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack

I'm delighted to see this novel get the recognition it merits: Solar Bones by Mike McCormack has just won the International Dublin literary award. I read it last year on the back of a strong review in the Irish Times, and it's one of the very few books which I've turned around and read again as soon as I finished it (Austerlitz by W.G.Sebald being the only other in recent times).

The recent reviews and indeed the blurb on the back of the paperback all give the reader a piece of information about the novel's main character and narrator which in my opinion you would be better off not knowing. I read it on my Kindle and didn't have this information, so I found the first half of the book a bit disorienting and eerie - it was wonderful!

I’ve lived in for nearly twenty-five years and raised a family, this house outside the village of Louisburgh in the county of Mayo on the west coast of Ireland, the village in which I can trace my seed and breed back to a time when it was nothing more than a ramshackle river crossing of a few smoky homesteads clustered around a forge and a log bridge, a sod-and-stone hamlet not yet gathered to a proper plan nor licensed to hold a fair, my line traceable to the gloomy prehistory in which a tenacious clan of farmers and fishermen kept their grip on a small patch of land
   through hail and gale
   hell and high water
men with bellies and short tempers, half of whom went to their graves with pains in their chests before they were sixty, good singers many of them

The other thing you'll hear in any review is that the book is written as one long sentence, which is factually true but misleading. There is a lot of punctuation, just no full stops, and there are obvious pauses and changes of perspective. The quality of the writing is of an uncommonly high standard in its tone and lyricism. It's not a difficult read, quite the contrary it's extremely engaging but demanding of your full attention.

The opening of the novel is pure poetry. In fact as I re-read it now it causes another poem to echo in my mind.

the bell
  the bell as
  hearing the bell as
    hearing the bell as standing here
    the bell being heard standing here
    hearing it ring out through the grey light of this
    morning, noon or night
    god knows
    this grey day standing here and
    listening to this bell in the middle of the day,
 the middle of the day bell, the Angelus bell in the middle of the day

The sounds and repetitions in those opening lines reminds me of the last poem written by Samuel Beckett "What is the word" 

folly –
folly for to –
for to –
what is the word –
folly from this –
all this –
folly from all this –
given –
folly given all this –
seeing –
folly seeing all this –
this –
what is the word –
this this –
this this here –

Hmm, has anyone else noticed this echo?

"Dad, you're like a kid in a toy shop!"

And he was right, my middle son, I was indeed like a kid in a toy shop. We were at the Canadian Grand Prix, walking around the track towards the exit after the second Formula 1 practice as my son had had enough for the day, but I'd stopped to watch the Formula Ford 1600's, my face pressed up against the fencing to get a better view of those spindly little cars. Forty-five (and more) years ago in Dublin the simple FF 1600 class was the showpiece of the Phoenix Park motor races - we could only dream of seeing F1 cars. Then it was my own Dad who was the kid in the toy shop and who couldn't leave until the last race was won - by which time I'd be bursting to take a pee and would have to run for a slash behind a tree. Bit of a Dublin tradition that, luckily there are a lot of trees in the Phoenix Park and hopefully by now some toilets too!

Things are a bit more sophisticated in Montreal in 2018: decent though expensive food, clean toilets (sinks! soap!), and the F1 cars are spectacular. I also played with the shutter speed of my camera in a reasonably successful attempt to get blur-free picture of the cars as they ripped past us.

Memories are made of days like these.

I am another you

I am He, He is me,

if You only knew

He is another you

         - Dylan Olsen

"I am another you" is a documentary about 22 year old Dylan Olsen, living on streets in Florida, a situation he has apparently chosen and is content with. Dylan is articulate and charismatic. Passers-by often engage and help him, in contrast with the treatment of other indigents. The Chinese documentary-maker Nanfu Wang is fascinated by Dylan and by his absolute freedom, a contrast with her experiences growing up in a repressive China. However all is not as it seems.

I loved this documentary when I first saw it on PBS, sitting in solitude in a business hotel on a recent trip to Ottawa. I watched it again last Friday with my family - it's available on Amazon Prime - and it sparked several dinner conversations between us. It's a story of freedom, of the implications that can come from simple decisions, and of mental illness. My eldest son pointed out that it's also a story of how fathers and sons relate to each other and, worryingly, that's true too.

I hope for the best for Dylan wherever he is now but, typically, I fear for the worst.

Five went to Baie-Saint-Paul

I took this selfie of us in the afternoon sunshine beside the bay.

Baie-Saint-Paul, November 2017

Biography of a song: Miss Otis Regrets

Cole Porter wrote Miss Otis Regrets in 1934 as a humorous parody of those mournful old folk songs about young girls who've been tricked by an immoral man into "losing their virtue". In the song the eponymous Miss Otis is seduced and defiled, then shoots her seducer dead, is arrested, dragged off by an angry mob, and hanged, all within a single day! The twist in Porter's tale is that Miss Otis is not a poor young girl but a society lady, and it's a butler who communicates her regrets that, due to the unforeseen circumstances of having been hanged, she will be unable to lunch with Madam today.

This clip from the 1946 movie "Night & Day" is the song as Porter wrote it, with Madam clearly not enjoying the bawdy humour.

The song took on a life that Porter could not have imagined. It's been sung as a genuine cowboy ballad (by Lonnie Donegan), as a jazz standard (Ella Fitzgerald), as a tragic torch song (Linda Rondstadt), as an Irish folk song (The Pogues) and as a German cabaret tear-jerker (Marlene Dietrich ... seriously!). Even Édith Piaf has had a go. I listened to more than 20 versions of it on Tidal yesterday, drawing a line only when it came to the Brazilian orchestra doing a Bossa Nova rendition.

It seems to be a song that is infinitely malleable, a precious metal that can be endlessly re-worked into a delicate new bijou. The melody is catchy, the lyrics are striking, but it's the repetition of "Madam" that lends a strange quality to it and allow singers to make it their own, through sideways glances that can be witty, coy, plaintive, heart-rending and more.

Here are the four recordings that I most enjoyed, with my absolute favourite being the one Kirsty MacColl did on the BBC's New Year's Eve show in 1995, accompanied by an army band with bagpipes and drums.

• Ella Fitzgerald
• Édith Piaf
• Marlene Dietrich - who changed the lyrics but the nasty man still gets killed!
• Kirsty: