Art Kavanagh

Late again, here’s the most recent post from Talk about books, Taking oneself seriously: The three novels of Candia McWilliam. Two years ago, I wrote about her short stories; now, I’ve got around to the novels 📖

I just noticed that someone whose Substack Notes I follow (I get their newsletter by RSS) has posted several Notes that I hadn’t seen, but would have liked to. Meanwhile, Substack’s algorithm serves up endless nonsense about how to write, build your following and cook Instagrammable dishes 😡

I got 8 out of 12 and it said “in the middle of your flop era”, but I thought 8/12 was good, actually. I was pleased with my performance; it wan’t bad at all. What actors said about major movie flops

Sad to hear that Edward Bond has died, though at least he had a long life. I think I only ever saw one of his plays — The Sea 🎭 — in performance, though I saw at least 3 different productions of hugely varying quality; I read (and compulsively reread) many others in Methuen editions.

Substack now has direct messages. It’s not a feature I’m likely to use very much (I sent maybe one every two years on Twitter) but we’ll see.

This year’s choice for One Dublin, One Book is Louise Nealon’s Snowflake 📖. The idea is that as many people as possible should read it during April. I’ve already read and written about it but it’s probably not too early to reread it.

Bernard Kops is dead. He was 97, but it’s still sad. I fondly remember a playwriting workshop he led at the CityLit, early 1990s, and I went with my mother (who was visiting from Ireland) to a performance of Playing Sinatra 🎭 in, my unreliable memory is convinced, Croydon.

I just posted the latest Talk about books. It looks at philosophical materialism in Paradise Lost: Material particulars: Spirit and matter in Milton’s Paradise Lost 📖

Unfortunate BP employee gets fired because she wasn’t sufficiently suspicious of her husband: Insider trading.

I’m always complaining about Google’s search results. It’s great for one thing, though: identifying half-remembered snippets of poetry. Last night, something I was reading made me think of

Sufficed of old the Cytherean girl

I couldn’t remember where it’s from — but Google does

Wayne Robins attempts to shape his 7-month-old grandson’s musical tastes and reminisces about “smoking a j and knocking back a bottle of Thunderbird with Mister Rogers” (or something like that) 🎶

The Critic magazine has a good article on Josephine Tey, two of whose novels have been reissued in Penguin’s Crime & Espionage series. I read and enjoyed The Daughter of Time 📖 years ago, and made an attempt on The Singing Sands in my early teens but was probably too young for it.

I’m again thinking about deleting my Substack account. I moved my newsletter >2 years ago, and I’m still on Substack only for the Notes, which I thought might be a substitute for Twitter, but really aren’t. I’m afraid I’ll regret deleting the account in future, but not getting much from it now.

I use Safari Reader View a lot, particularly on my phone. One thing that I find annoying is that it (often?) doesn’t display the author’s byline. I was two-thirds of the way through this piece about Goodreads before I realized that it was written by Lauren Oyler ☹️

I’ve updated my Talk about books post about William Empson’s reading of Joyce’s Ulysses from Mar 2021 to include page references from the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition. When I originally posted it, I couldn’t find my paperback copy so used two ebook editions 📖

My original Talk about books post in July 2022 about Ted Chiang’s novella/long short story, “Anxiety is the dizzyness of freedom” had no page references because I worked from an ebook/online edition. I just updated the post to add page references from the Picador paperback of Exhalation 📚

John Newell, a County Down man … infiltrated the United Irishmen rebel group in 1796 and helped to imprison 200 members. Newell was paid £2,000 by the authorities and with remarkable hubris boasted about his exploits in a tell-all book. He ended up abducted, shot and secretly buried in County Antrim.

I hope he had time to spend his £2,000 first. Grisly secrets of the ‘disappeared’ of Anglo-Irish war uncovered by research

I’ve just posted in Talk about books: a second visit to Kate Atkinson’s series about an intermittently retired private investigator, looking in particular at the first book, Case Histories 📖, which I hadn’t reread when I wrote the first post.

Hard to believe it’s 25 years since the Pinochet appeals and Lord Hoffman’s extraordinary mistake. Joshua Rozenberg has an excellent recap. As usual, I’m surprised how much detail I’d forgotten.

When you have a useful thing worth money and regularly leave it outdoors, ingenuity and an angle grinder will come for you in the end. You have to see yourself not so much as the bike’s owner as its foster carer, and just hope its next home will appreciate it.

Zoe Williams’s bike has been stolen. It’s an experience I’ve had too often, though I’m relieved to say that the last time was 30 years ago.

The latest Talk about books post is about Bernard MacLaverty’s short stories in Blank Pages and other stories (2021). The vulnerabilities and indignities of age are his great theme in many of these late stories.