Art Kavanagh

I found two Virago paperbacks, Jamaica Inn and Frenchman’s Creek respectively, in the Castlebar Oxfam shop yesterday, at €2 each. I’ve been meaning to read more du Maurier so this is opportune.

I’ve been expecting this for almost a decade: Martial Solal has died aged 97. He was never one of my favourite jazz pianists but an extraordinary improviser. He didn’t rehearse but practiced exercises incessantly. I saw him live twice: once solo, once with the Moutin twins 🎹 🎶

I noticed only recently that Alboran Trio released their 3rd album in 2020. Their first two are from ACT in 2006 and 2008. I’ve ordered Islands from an Italian site at €23 (inc €8 postage). Could have got it from iTunes store for €9 but I’ve gone back to buying CDs where available 🎶 🎹

The latest post from Talk about books is about Paul Auster’s 1989 novel, Moon Palace. Children (and parents) of coincidence: Paul Auster, Moon Palace 📖

Like Auster’s immediately succeeding novel, Moon Palace (1989) is about chance, contingency and possible coincidences. But its interest for me is quite different: it’s a novel that has absent or missing fathers at its heart.

Is John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960) having a bit of a moment on Substack? Two posts in the last 3 days, by Sarah Ditum and Adam Roberts, discuss the novel, and Cecily Carver mentioned it back in October. Perhaps Updike is coming back into style 📚

I wanted to see the new Brad Mehldau trio in Nancy in October but didn’t get my act together. And now that very concert has turned up on RTE’s website! Rossy’s drumming lends itself to a more contemplative style. Some Mehldau compositions I hadn’t heard before and a return to earlier repertoire 🎶🎹

I just accidentally discovered the maximum size of a note in Tot (⚠️ Mac App Store link). Each note is limited to 100,000 characters.

Just finished Belinda McKeon’s Tender 📚. I’ll be rereading it and writing something about it in Talk about books in the next few months. This post is just to try out @manton’s new feature: adding the cover image to book posts.

The current Talk about books post is about Iris Murdoch’s 1973 novel, The Black Prince. I make a highly tendentious and unsupported suggestion a few paragraphs from the end, secure in the belief that hardly anyone will read that far 📖

Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince, the narrative of a man imprisoned for murder who has previously had a sexual relationship with a much younger female character, owes something to an earlier novel. It repays the debt with interest.

Sarah Ditum on Kirsty McColl in The Critic. Not long before she was killed, McColl recorded some of the songs written by Phil Chevron for his never-to-be-produced musical about a fictional Irish-American boxer. I’ve been listening to those. Get the CD, not the download (she’s on the bonus tracks) 🎶

It seems that Books at One might be in difficulty, according to this subscriber-only story in The Irish Times. That would be a shame.

This morning I started to write a post responding to Anil Dash’s “Don’t call it a Substack” from a few days ago. I got to about 400 words but decided (not for the first time) that this is not the kind of thing I want to write about any more. I’m fed up with reading opinions, particularly my own.

I don’t know why I don’t keep the orientation lock on my phone all the time. I almost never want to view it in landscape 🤷‍♂️

But yolked [sic] together like this, they’re each diminished.

Rachel Cooke is not impressed by Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz. She makes it sound a bit addled, I must admit 📚

Today’s post from Talk about books is about Claire Keegan’s second collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields. It marks the end of the fourth year of Talk about books’s existence 📖

Claire Keegan’s second collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields, is shorter, tighter and more mature than her first. Also, it seems to me that the strongest stories are concentrated in the first half of the book.

My Bluesky feed 🦋 is full of people promoting “starter packs” for topics I’m not interested in. (I don’t mean yours!) Even where I am interested, I wouldn’t want to follow a lot of people all banging on about the same subject. I keep telling myself it’ll pass soon.

Farewell to Roy Haynes. Sad, of course, but he had reached a good age 🎶

Fred Kaplan has written a novel and it sounds intriguing: Ethan Iverson’s Transitional Technology 📚

I’m getting really fed up of Substack’s RSS feeds; they really ought to fix them.

My post on Grotius and the minimalist theory of natural law, which has been getting far more hits than any other post on my personal site, has just dropped off the bottom of the recent posts list, so I thought I might as well give it a little boost.

Just posted on my personal site: Wigs on the green: The resignation of Hugh O’Flaherty from the Irish Supreme Court. I’m still annoyed about a 25-year-old Irish legal scandal. I was reminded by reading Ruadhán Mac Cormaic’s book, The Supreme Court (2016) 📖

In the past Lammy has called Trump a ‘woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath’.

David Lammy has been fighting for his job. Gosh, I wonder why Lammy would have said something like that?