Art Kavanagh

I’m already having second thoughts about automatically crossposting from Micro․blog to LinkedIn. I’m afraid it might make me more reticent about what I post to MB. I need to think some more about what to do about my LinkedIn profile.

TIL that the site of the former, much missed, AMT kiosk at Heuston is now occupied by a Caffè Nero Express. That’s a lot better than nothing and will have to do. Significant delays to Heuston trains following incident ☕️

Now that I’ve retired and don’t expect to be looking for work again, I’ve been thinking about how I use LinkedIn. For the past few years, I’ve been using it mainly to post links to my newsletter, Talk about books. To start with, I’m going to try automatic crossposting from Micro․blog

Today’s Talk about books post is about the short stories of Shirley Hazzard, particularly those from her first collection, Cliffs of Fall, and the ones that weren’t collected before the Collected Stories (2020)📖 Trying to keep the poetry separate

Shirley Hazzard published her first collection of short stories, Cliffs of Fall in 1963 and her second, People in Glass Houses in 1967, with the first of her four novels appearing between the two in 1966. There were no further collections of short stories during her lifetime but she published individual short stories, mainly in The New Yorker, up to 1984, when “Forgiving” appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal. She died in 2016 and her Collected Stories, edited by Brigitta Olubas, was published by Virago in 2020.

What was a dead judge doing in the courthouse anyway?

I want to make a kind of “author index” of the writers I’ve been writing about in my newsletter, Talk about books. I suppose the obvious way would be to create a Category for each author and use them as tags, but it seems unwieldy. I’d love to hear any better suggestions. Front matter … maybe?

I used to work beside Old Street roundabout from 1988 to 1991 inclusive, haven’t been back for at least 25 years. Amazed to think that the “jumbotron” is still there. What a mess ☹️ And yet it seems appropriate somehow. That’ll teach us to get ideas above our tube station.

While I was reading this fascinating Guardian “long read” on my phone, the page automatically reloaded twice, each time losing me my place. Do news sites not actually want people to read what they publish?

I’m shocked to read that drummer Martin France has died, aged 60. I know his work from the trio with John Taylor and Palle Danielsson. I had just been listening to their first album (Angel of the Presence) before I read about his death 🎶

My latest post in Talk about books is about two novels from the early 2010s dealing with rural Ireland in the wake of the economic crash a few years earlier: Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart and Belinda McKeon’s Solace 📖

About a week ago, I posted on my personal site my second look at Caoilinn Hughes’s second novel, The Wild Laughter (2020). It’s a novel that I’ve found myself coming back to, though not because I particularly like it. At first it came as a shock: not at all what I had been expecting after her first novel and the short stories. My impulse was to dismiss it, but how could I then account for its enthusiastic critical reception?

On a third reading of Caoilinn Hughes’s second novel 📖, I’m still confused as to what’s going on in the court case at the end. So is the first-person narrator: Further remarks about Caoilinn Hughes’s The Wild Laughter

I’m watching a YouTube video of an interview with automatically generated subtitles. In the space of a minute, it has rendered “dreaming” as “streaming” and “themes” as “teams”. So offputting and distracting. If people are going to bother with this crap, couldn’t they at least correct it?

My resistance to the idea that I’m going to have to read (and buy, though not necessarily in that order) Bridget Hourican’s bio of James Clarence Mangan 📖 has now almost completely crumbled.

Here’s an unusually informative story on Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM). Nice to have confirmation that others have similar experiences to mine, and that I’m not just imagining it. Sadie Dingfelder in The Guardian

Claire Kilroy published her fifth novel, Soldier Sailor, last year and it caused a stir. The three previous novels look like an unusually varied bunch but what they have in common (Faustian bargains, for a start) may come as a surprise. Deal with the devil 📖

Claire Kilroy’s fifth novel, Soldier Sailor (2023) has made a huge impression on its readers. I’m not one of them yet, though I certainly intend to read it before too long. Another book of hers that I haven’t yet read is her first, All Summer (2003) — though again I’ll emphasize the “yet”. I have read the three novels in between, Tenderwire (2006), All Names Have Been Changed (2009) and The Devil I Know (2012), and my first impression of them was that they’re a very varied body of work.

The latest post from Talk about books is about Melissa Bank’s two books 📖. They look like collections of “linked short stories”, but the links are deeper and the stories or episodes more tightly integrated into an artistic wholeness than that might imply.

Keith Ridgway and the publishers of A Shock (2021) are very clear that the book is a novel, not a collection of “linked short stories”. In an Irish Times interview with John Self, Ridgway said: I’m going to get people insisting that this is a short story collection, and it’s absolutely not, it’s a novel. It’s a polyptych, one of those altar pieces made of panels. You can take one of the panels away but they only really work together.

If it’s anything, journalism is the war of facts against narrative. Conspiracists swallow the narrative and ignore the facts.

Helen Lewis, commenting on the New Yorker piece about RFK Jr

The Corporation’s durability is remarkable. Already half a millennium old when Shakespeare arrived in London, its supporters see the survival of its rights and institutions as crucial to its modern success.

They can’t be literally the same supporters, can they? The Goose and the Golden Egg

Hi @manton, I thought I’d have another go at crossposting to BlueSky, having given it a miss for a few months. It still doesn’t seem to work. Any idea why? It’s not a big deal for me, so no urgency, but it’s nice to be able to post proper links there occasionally. Thanks.

When I started my newsletter, I used to write my posts every second Wednesday. As they got longer and I got older and tireder, I’d start my posts every second Wednesday. Today, I’ve taken advantage of the Irish bank holiday to get 950 words ahead of myself, so I might finish on Wednesday 😎