The Jerk

Doubled up, gut struck
I, a right angle to the shelter floor, gasp
your big hands soothe some other dumb animal
or worry another girl’s threads

Above me unseen the planes smile,
salt and wine pour down
anxious shell-pink throats.

In the air we were together still
and as the wing takes a fall
I squeeze, two,
three,
four
and release

Irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in uncreative moments. In creative moments try to make use of it as one more means of grasping life. Cleanly used, it too is clean, and one need not be ashamed of it; and if you feel you are getting too familiar with it, if you fear this growing intimacy with it, then turn to great and serious objects, before which it becomes small and helpless. Seek the depth of things: thither irony never descends- and when you come thus close to the edge of greatness, test out at the same time whether this ironic attitude springs from a necessity of your nature. For under the influence of serious things either it will fall from you (if it is something fortuitous) or else it will (if it really innately belongs to you) strengthen into a stern instrument and take its place in the series of tools with which you will have to shape your art.

- Letter Two, Viareggio, April 5th 1903, Rainer Maria Rilke

29th July, Waterford

I was eating soup in Waterford, soup which tasted stubbornly like regulation Soup and little else. It was in the Tower Hotel, where I used to go after skiving off supervised study in Leaving Cert year. I would leave school and walk to the hotel and have a coffee, use their Wifi, and create a painstakingly false  portrayal of myself on MySpace. It was convenient, pleasant that I could make a partially truthful sketch of myself by listing films and books.

I sort of love the Soup-flavoured soup; the innocent ignorance of the inept service (smiling back at you as though you are a friend when you try to signal for milk).
In Dublin, the hip thing to do is create an atmosphere of nostalgic homeliness. Kitsch chequered tablecloths, light bulbs without shades, disparate cutlery and plates; all trying to tell us we are in a home; well, I never lived anywhere so carefully designed.
I wish that companies taking my money and giving me things in return would stop trying to convince me that they love me.

I used to go the Tower and order one coffee and sit there for four hours, ogling boys and myself on the internet. Other people on the internet were interesting, but nobody was more interesting than myself. I would look at my own photos, trying to grasp what other people might think when they looked at them.
One of the waiters loved when I and my friend Maebh would go there. We were in a band together at the time. I was seventeen! I thought I was important. I was nothing! The waiter bizarrely revered us. He once asked Maebh if  ”the actress” (me) was coming along that day. Another day he asked me if I was “on the MyFace”. I said yes, and giggled about it later. I wish I didn’t think of myself as so far above this guy. I am now a waitress.
I was never rude to him, I hope, but now that I wait tables it’s painfully clear when teenagers come in and believe they are a world away from me.

I guess they are though. When I was seventeen I was not self-conscious in the way I am now. I thought I would write a great novel. I wasn’t afraid to say so to anyone who asked what I what I would do with my life. I can’t imagine saying that to anyone now. The cliché of a young woman who wants to write and has nothing much to show for it is so prevalent I can’t even fully admit to myself that that is what I want. The basic necessities of being an adult force you to to negate your previously held (and almost certainly delusional) beliefs; paying rent and bills, in reality, haven’t made an interesting woman out of me.
Contrary to earlier hopes, working in a bank didn’t actually help T.S. Eliot to be a good writer. He was probably just good.

Yesterday was the launch of the Tall Ships Festival in Wateford. For the opening ceremony, a project was curated by the city council. Eventually titled “Come The Sails”, it was a collaboration between five composers and five poets, of which I was one, to make a new choral work. I was in daunting company; all of the poets are “real” poets who publish collections and speak in colleges and own houses and dogs and so on. I am a crumb-bum waitress whose main aim in life appears to be shirking all non-vital responsibilities.

The idea behind the project was that there would be separate movements created by each collaborating pair of poet and composer, coming together to make one cohesive piece. Each movement was to be loosely based on a different period in Waterford’s history. The time I was working around was the initial foundation of civilisation in Waterford. I found the idea of writing about it quite frightening at first. My poetry is almost exclusively of an intimate and confessional style, and I had no experience in writing either for commission or about historical events. I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to write anything I felt was truthful and also relevant to the brief, which indeed turns out to have been the case.
The way I went about it was necessarily to shrink the idea down to a relatable, individual experience. It seemed impossible for me to grasp such a vast event in any useful way, so I instead imagined the experience of moving to a completely new place, not really knowing what lay in store, from the perspective of one woman. I had read that the reason for the relocation was the over-population of their native Scandinavia so I tried to capture some of that sense of displacement.
The end result is a bit feeble and bloodless in my opinion and I wish I had longer to flesh it out, but all the same I’m delighted to have been part of it. It was incredibly moving hearing the choir of about two hundred singing words I wrote, particularly Waterford people (and especially OLD people whose every inane action has the mysterious ability to induce my tears).
I was also genuinely surprised and delighted to be associated with such renowned and brilliant poets; Michael Coady, Mark Roper, John Ennis, and Peter Sirr.
My contribution is below, and the work in its entirety will be screened on Nationwide this Sunday.

 ”Child of mine, soft of eye, 
traveller on this earth-
we are nowhere and nothing is us
and so ease again to water’s push.

A steady beat in your milk thin skin
welcomes each wave as it pounds,
the whole world turning to greet 
the salt swept in your fists.

Sharp vowels split the quiet sky 
as the river tides us in;
two more animals we
and you are this land’s first son”

It has been absolutely ages since I have done a gig. This is largely due to my own inertia and bad “networking” skills. Except social networking, I am very good at that. I run the so-no streets.
I  have never really sought out a gig, and I’m not sure what the etiquette is for doing so. That’s mainly an excuse for my own laziness though. In any case, I’m going to be a guest at this on Friday the 24th of June:
 The Silly Beggar Comedy Event is run by these guys: www.sillybeggar.com, Mark Baldwin, Sean Fitzgerald and Brian Maher, who, as well as their brilliant stand-up, make hilarious cartoons. They are great people. Only a week ago I fed them some meatballs and we all played with my kittens. Beat that!
Also at this gig are the brilliant Eleanor Tiernan and Ronan Grace. It is completely free too, so please do come along.

Two days after the gig I turn 21. It is insane how much I really don’t want to be an adult but I will accept the hand-drawn cards and cake and most especially your sincere good wishes, thank you.  As my birthday gift my beloved Vati (pictured below)

Mam and Dad

is helping to fund my trip to Edinburgh. I am going over to the Fringe between the 6th and 11th of August, again the guest of Silly Beggar, who will be there for three weeks: Silly Beggar Edinburgh Fringe

I am just so bloody excited about it.

When is a person not a person?
Sinking in the centre of this room
you are something pre-historic,
the angles of your arm implausible and wild,
mouth open and catching-
what becomes of the spaces
which once were yours,
where your leg once fattened,
and dangled, delirious, from bed?

When is a person not a person?
Hunting in books returned
for pencil mark or stain,
some clue to indicate
your absence was for good
or was a joke,
and we would be safe,
Don’t joke like that again I’d say,
catching my breath,
we two, our pockets empty
and the whole world before us

I’ve just begun rereading Lucky Jim. It is so funny and great.

“Their foreign policy might, I agree, have been a good deal worse, with the exception of their spectacular inability to pour water on troubled oil.” Bertrand looked quickly around the group, then went on: “But their home policy…soak the rich…I mean…” He seemed to be hesitating. “Well, it is that, pure and simple, isn’t it? I’m just asking for information, that’s all. I mean that’s what it seems to be don’t we all agree? I take it that it is just that and no more, isn’t it? Or am I wrong?”
Pretending not to notice Margaret’s warning frown and Carol’s expectant grin, Dixon said quietly: “Well, what’s wrong with it, even if it is that and no more? If one man’s got ten buns and another’s got two and a bun has to be given up by one of them, then surely you take it from the man with ten buns.”
Bertrand and his girl were looking at each other with identical expressions, shaking their heads, smiling, raising their eyebrows, sighing. It was as if Dixon had just said that he didn’t know anything about art, but he knew what he liked. “But we don’t think anybody need give up a bun, Mr Dixon,” the girl said. “That’s the whole point.”
”Hardly the whole point, I should have thought,” Dixon said at the moment when Margaret said “Don’t let’s get involved in a set-to about…” and Bertrand said “The whole point of this is that the rich…”
It was Bertrand who won the little contest. “The point is that the rich play an essential part in modern society,” he said, his voice baying a little more noticeably. “More than ever in days like these. That’s all; I’m not going to bore you with stock platitudes about their having kept the arts going and so on. The very fact that they are stock platitudes proves my case. And I happen to like the arts, you sam.”
The last word, a version of ‘see’, was Bertrand’s own coinage. It arose as follows: the vowel sound became distorted into a short ‘a’, as if he were going to say ‘sat’. This brought his lips some way apart and the effect of their rapid closure was to end the syllable with a light but audible ‘m’. After working this out, Dixon could think of little to say, and contented himself with “You do”, which he tried to make knowing and sceptical.
It seemed to encourage Bertrand. “Yes, I do,” he said even more loudly, so that all his listeners looked quickly at him. “And shall I tell you what else I happen to like? Rich people. I take pride in the contemporary unpopularity of that statement. And why do I like them? Because they’re charming, because they’re generous, because they’ve learnt to appreciate things I happen to like myself, because their houses are full of beautiful things. That’s why I like them and that’s why I don’t want them soaked. All right?”

I think of your clean skin
shuddering beneath my losing hands

the inviolable sleep I believed we shared,
waking only to share water, and mutter dull dreams,

firm December evenings filled with hours undercover;
recipes I copied carefully
and re-read, selecting each part with joy,
to think of you eating it

but also in a new empty house,
something frozen between us,
sitting chairless and poor and absolutely full.

All these I strip slowly and try to rewrite,
the size of your wreckage almost laughable.

This is my last ever contribution to the University Times advice column which I wrote with my beloved Lukey (who caused quite a stir with his review of the palace here: ?p=1839). Thanks to Big Man Tom Lowe, editor of UT and man about town for allowing us to write this truly meaningless nonsense in his newspaper- and congratulations to Tom and all at UT on winning Student Newspaper of the Year at the Smedia awards this week.

“My girlfriend wants me to go to New York with her this summer; my friends are all going InterRailing. Which should I choose?”

What I imagine InterRailing to look like

New York! The Big Apple! Gotham! The World’s Most Exciting All Year Round Vacation Centre! I’ve never been to New York, but try this fun game: when somebody who has been there shites on about how vibrant and exciting it is, see how many clichés you can sneak in to conversation before they twig.
“Oh you were staying in Williamsburg? I’ve heard you can get burritos at any hour of the night in that area…why, it almost sounds like the city that never sleeps!”
“Really, you had an unpaid internship at Vice? You made it! And the thing is, if you can make it there, you really can make it anywhere.”

But, turning to your dilemma- I have to tell you that if you want to hang on to her, you’re more or less obliged to go with your girlfriend on this one. If you choose The Lads she will never let it go, reminding you of it mid-coitus and using it to extract expensive jewellery from you in that shrewish way women have. New York is also almost certainly a more interesting place to spend a few months than the fabled Irish bars and hostels of InterRailing.
How and ever, if you do choose thusly, your mates will ply you with stories of their elaborate and fictional sexual conquests, their legendary ability to drink a load of pints with the goddamn lads, that brilliant time Bobby shat in his shoe etc. So really you must decide what is more important to you- your girlfriend (who could be a total bitch for all I know, or a massive ride who tells great jokes), or planting your seed in the befuddled drunks of Europe with da boys. Either way, you haven’t got a lot to complain about have you? Go away and come back to me with a real problem like pregnancy.

I had a nice run of things recently.
A few weeks ago I hosted a special edition of Voicebox because its founding father Cian Hallinan was busy sorting through his warehouse of ideas. I got round three boys who dump their funnies and brilliant animations here:

http://www.sillybeggar.com/

They are Mark Baldwin, Sean Fitzgerald and Brian Marr. They are not only brilliant comedians but lovely friends, who are partial to sleeping four-in-my-bed because they live in huts out by the airport and can’t find their way home after a few pints of rice wine.
After a scary hour when it was just us and 3 of my friends in the audience, the room filled up a bit and it ended up being a really enjoyable evening.

Happily the boyos have now got their own night in Twisted Pepper, the first of which falls this Friday, the 26th of March. They have, out of a reluctant sense of duty, returned the favour and have asked me to guest at it. I am excited about it.

And then!

I met Maeve Higgins, Ireland’s Amelia Earhart but funnier (probably-how can we be sure?), during the summer at a Voicebox she guested at. She has been very kind and supportive and helpful to me, and asked me this month to participate in her Enlightenment Night.

Enlightenment Night takes place in the quite perfect Workman’s club on the quays, and is an adapted version of Josie Long’s London event “Lost Treasures of the Black Heart” (with Josie’s permission obv). It involves about two hours of short lectures/sketches/presentations given by an assortment of guests (some comedians, some not) on the subject of their choice.

I tried to think of “proper” subjects which I could talk about, initially. However, I quickly realised that most things I know anything much about are depressing (The eugenics scandal of Alberta,  Canada, 1928-1972 anyone?). Maeve was eager to point out that the presentations didn’t need to be funny, but I was pretty sure I wanted mine to be at least a little bit funny, because I have no real life skills or knowledge.
So I ended up selecting a topic which I and the general public never tire of : ME. My talk was on “Various Popular Culture Media with which I Have Tried to Seduce the Opposite Sex (Aged 13-18)”
Here it is now:

“So what I’m discussing here is a time before I had the ability to hold a conversation or to get blind drunk. And what do we, as a species, do before we are able to get drunk and trick people into coming home with us by promising them more drink?
We show off our calculated album and film choices, in the hope that you will eventually get to that stage where you’re just slightly holding hands under a blanket, both of you staring straight ahead at the Estonian psychodrama you are pretending to enjoy.

My first attempt was at 13 when I was into this 16 year old guy who would write The White Stripes all over his books and schoolbag and his jeans. Now, I am twenty years old. There are only four years in the difference there, that’s not much. Imagine I came here to the Workman’s club tonight and sat around writing band names on my pants, and men would find that attractive.
It was a more innocent time. Incidentally, and this will illustrate the almost complete lack of interest I now have in music, earlier when I was trying to think of bands I could could hypothetically be writing on my theoretical pants, I could only think of The Strokes and Arctic Monkeys, and that’s true, and that will illustrate how hip I am.
Anyway, I decided that if I could show him that I liked The White Stripes too- and I did, I think. I think- he would fall in love with me.
Now at the time I lived in Waterford. I’m sure if I grew up in Dublin, I could have just strolled into George’s Arcade and bought a White Stripes t-shirt and then had a cheeky bit of cocaine with my urbane teen pals. But this was Waterford.
We had a square which, without irony, we called Red Square, because it used to have some red bricks, seemingly oblivious to the embarrassing comparisons we may have been inviting with, you know, the Red Square.
So what I did was, I went to one of the print-your-own-tshirt places, where you get a picture of your dad having a really good laugh at his birthday party put on a shirt and then you…give it to him for his next birthday or something, I’m not really sure how it works.
And I got this picture put on a tshirt:

and I wore it incessantly until the boy saw me in it and he said “Oh, cool, where did you get your t-shirt?”
And I said, thinking this to be a better, more dedicated way than merely buying it in a shop,
“Oh, no big deal-” (look around with self satisfied air) “got it made up in… Snap Printing,” (shrug with winning insouciance)

But no, he didn’t like that.
The next thing with him was the NME. He loved the NME right, so what I would do was stand next to him in the shop as he flicked through it, and I would read it too, and I would sort of- well sort of make noises at it.
When I was writing this I had to stop for ten minutes and scream into my pillow because the memory is so painful.
But yes, I used to read it and go “Oh. Ohh!” in reaction to what I was reading and raise my eyebrows at the boy, and make gestures of interest or bemusement in that week’s Bloc Party EP or whatever. I had a field day, noise-wise, when The Libertines split up.
“OhhhhHHHH!” I said, pointing it out to him.
“I fucking hate The Libertines,” he said and walked off, and that was the end of that big romance.

The next one then, when I was fourteen, was another older gent. This one was eighteen, and he wore a waistcoat and a bowler hat, which at the time I tragically mistook for a personality. And I was obsessed with him. I used to sit for literally hours on end in Red Square- no, NOT the one in Moscow, we’ve already been through that, keep up- and wait for this guy to pass.
So one day I was sitting in The Book Centre, which was THE place to pretend to enjoy taking your coffee black, and I was reading a Stephen King novel. And waistcoat man was the type of person who loved talking about Kierkegaard and Tolstoy and I knew that if he found out I liked Stephen King and the E! channel and Grazia he wouldn’t fall in love with me. What I did was, I leapt up from my table and frantically looked around for a book which would make me look better, and I inexplicably landed on this:

Yes, that is The Prince by Machiavelli.
Is there anything more attractive than a sweaty fourteen year old girl pretending to read a 16th century Italian political treatise?
Apparently not to this moron, who walked over and asked me to go watch a film in his house. Slack-jawed and still reeling from the idea that the ends may, in fact, justify the means, I agreed and we went to Xtra Vision .
I knew I had to choose something weird and sort of unpopular, to convince him I was worthy of his time and the time of his collection of unusual hats. I chose 70′s cult classic Harold and Maude, thinking, oh its whimsy and darkness will make him think I am whimsical and dark and interesting and all that. Which, in a way, it did.

He certainly turned to look at me with new eyes during the sweaty post-coital scene between 70 year old Maude and 20 year old Harold. And the feelings of intense discomfort which filled the room as Harold simulated cunnilingus on a wooden sculpture really helped us be open and honest with each other, I felt.
The film ended and he half heartedly put his hand up my jumper and I shoved him off and that was that, for my second big romance.

Then I was fifteen. And I started making mixtapes. Pretty much every mixtape I made for a boy featured Bright Eyes, which I seem to have thought would communicate that intoxicating mixture of insecurity and overwhelming need which men find so attractive. I made one for a boy with the brilliant name of Shane Fox. He had just broken up with a girl named Martha. He made me a tape in reciprocation which featured a beautiful Leadbelly song called Blue Tail Fly.
Now, years after the fact I would learn that Blue Tail Fly is a song written by a slave, lamenting the tragic death of his master, and the lyrics are as follows:

Jimmy crack corn, and I don’t care,
Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care,
Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care,
Master’s gone away

However, and this is absolutely true, when I listened to the tape, and for many years after, I believed the lyrics to be as follows:

Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care,
Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care,
Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care,
Martha’s gone away

“What an insensitive man!” I thought to myself. “Making me a tape about his ex girlfriend. How rude. I will have no more to do with you, excellently titled though you are,”  *(1)

Then I was sixteen and with that came dance music. I memorably turned a spare Daft Punk ticket into a brief relationship with an English man who wore espadrilles. That story makes me sound like an inept user of prostitutes, but there are several legal technicalities which prevent that from being the case.

When I was seventeen I fell in love with somebody wonderful, and we would go to see arthouse films every week, many of which were, in retrospect just foreign versions of Richard Curtis films, but it made us feel good and superior anyway.
Until we watched a film called Frozenland. And Frozenland is one of these films sort of like Magnolia, where it shows apparently unrelated people being affected by each other’s decisions. Except in Frozenland it’s just a series of unbelievably depressing and brutal murders and rapes which lead to more murders and rapes and misery, and by the time we left the cinema we couldn’t really look each other in the eye and just went home separately and cried ourselves to sleep and wailed about the frailty of the human condition out the window.
I was beginning to lose faith in the ability of popular culture to get me my bit.

But then something magical happened. I turned eighteen, which was good in itself because I could get my drank on yo. But also I joined a band.
That’s me, smoking like an absolute legend.
Did it matter that I had received a C in Junior Cert music, owing to my total inability to write or understand music? It did not. Did it matter that I had absolutely no skills whatsoever? It did not.
I was in a band, and the men who saw us play were frequently drunk, and so I did. I finally did get my bit. Popular culture had come through for me.”

That was longer than I thought it would be SORRY YALL.

In other news, the next Voicebox is on April 1st, a Friday. The brilliant Enda Muldoon is the guest but more importantly come along and judge ME. ME! ME! ME!

*(1) This was a lie I told to the audience. I did have more to do with him, and went out with him, despite believing him to have made me a tape about his ex-girlfriend. Why did I lie to you, precious audience? Perhaps to mislead you in regard to how much self-respect I had when I was fifteen, which was outstandingly little.