Review of Guys and Dolls from Stomp Tokyo

Still online here Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando are both icons of natural cool, so it comes as a surprise that their one appearance in the same movie is so (relatively) little known and less celebrated. The received wisdom is that the spirit of the musical (adapted from Damon Runyon's short stories) was lost, and that Frank and Marlon lacked "chemistry", perhaps because they detested each other (Sinatra couldn't stomach Marlon's multiple takes - literally so in the cheesecake sequence; while Marlon said of Frank "he's the type of guy that once he gets to heaven he'll give God a hard time for making him bald." These points are valid, but nevertheless Guys and Dolls is a loveable, big shaggy dog of a movie. The film opens with a rather stylised dance sequence in a strangely deserted Times Square. Assorted dancers represent the feckless (but loveable) characters of Times Square as they do their various things: gambling on horses, pilfering the odd watch or wallet, avoiding the NYPD and the like - all in a very feckless (but loveable) way. In other words, very much pre-Rudy Giuliani. We are introduced in short order to Nicely Nicely and Benny, among the most amiable henchmen in motion picture history, whose boss is none other than Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra), proprietor of what is celebrated in song as "the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York." Unfortunately for Nathan, the NYPD, in the stern form of Lieutenant Brannigan (Robert Keith, a spectacularly glacial presence in an otherwise sunny film) are breathing hot down his neck. Nathan also has to contend with his fiancée Adelaide (Vivian Blaine), possibly the most dizzy piece of vanilla to be projected at twenty-four frames per second, who has ambitions for Nathan to become an unspecified "normal businessman". In the face of these twin threats, Nathan is reluctant to abandon the game, after all: "I have been running that crap game ever since I was a juvenile delinquent" and more pertinently there's a lot of very big money in town. One of the most endearing features of Guys and Dolls, incidentally, is the precise, formal way the various feckless (but loveable) low lives who inhabit the film speak. No one ever says "It's" or "I've" or "I don't"; it is constantly "It is" "I have" and "I do not" which gives a strangely courtly air to proceedings. Early on Nicely Nicely asks "If it can be told, where did you collect this fine bundle of lettuce?" which is typical of the how the characters speak - politeness and slang mixing in the same breath. Nathan finds himself needing $1000 to be in a position to hold the game, at which stage we encounter Skye Masterson (Marlon Brando), the highest roller of them all. Nathan tries to engage Skye in an all too transparent sucker bet for the $1000, which fails. At this juncture Skye holds forth on the fair sex, lecturing the soon-to-be-ex-bachelor Nathan that "The companionship of a doll is a pleasant thing even for a time running into months, but for a close relationship that can last us through all the years of our life, no doll can take the place of aces back to back." Just as two cops who hate each other will, as part perhaps of an undiscovered Law of Physics, become best friends, with this speech Brando might as well have tattooed "I'M GETTING MARRIED IN THIS FILM" on his forehead. And one of the major pleasures of Guys and Dolls is having your expectations fulfilled, and the wit and style with which it happens. Nathan sees his chance and bets Skye $1000 that he can't take any doll he cares to name to Havana with him the next day. The doll in question is Sergeant Sarah Brown of the Save-a-Soul Mission, a particularly unsuccessful evangelist (despite being played by the ever-radiant Jean Simmons) Sarah Brown is constantly buttoning and unbuttoning her blouse button, particularly in the presence of Marlon Brando, a habit that the greatest minds in psychoanalysis would fail to decipher. Skye manifests himself at the mission to insinuate himself into the good Sergeant's good books, despite her best efforts to repel the self-proclaimed "unhappy sinner." Skye demonstrates his superior knowledge of scripture, since "I would imagine there's only one thing that's been in as many hotel rooms as I have - the Gideon Bible." The rest of the plot of Guys and Dolls is at this stage probably eminently predictable to the average moviegoer. It isn't perfect - some of the dancing sequences are a trifle stagebound and at two and a half hours, there are occasional longeurs. And Brando and Sinatra do lack a certain naturalness together that we see in Brando's scenes with Simmons and Sinatra's with Blaine. The sets are cheap and cheesy, but this is part of the whole charm of the piece - a Technicolor never-never land of fast talking guys and their dolls.

Postmodern Culchies. University Observer 1998

From 1998, mirrored here and I think more than a little prophetic. the ag way is the only way Only the most blinkered Hot Press subscriber who still believes that they're radically redefining Irish society by not going to Mass of a Sunday can fail to see that the old jackeen/culchie divide, characterised in the past as thrusting, hip modern Young Ireland versus backward, unhip Old Ireland, has disappeared. If it ever really existed in the first place. Instead today we have a new class of culchies or boggers or "country folk" or whatever animalistic metaphor you prefer yourself who are as well-informed, as well-dressed, as articulate and as capable as anyone from within the Pale (this won't sound like a Public Service anti-discrimination ad for much longer) Like the cocky young buck I am, I have tarred this apparently new class with the epithet Postmodern Culchies, and they are everywhere you go; on the streets, in the bars, biding their time. They are the nation underground, under-represented in the media (including the national media) but their time will come; blessed are the young men and women of from Tipp and Clare and Laois and Longford for theirs is the Kingdom of Dublin. Postmodernism is the most fertile source of academic waffle since Aristotle; it has given a grateful world such completely incomprehensible and basically useless concepts as "deconstruction", "intertextuality" and indeed "postmodernism" itself. For self-styled cultural commentators bankrupt of particularly original ideas (like, eh, me) postmodern is a handy label to attach to anything in order to create the impression that one is saying something really radical. All this is helped by the fact that essentially no-one understands what postmodernism means, and therefore anything remotely contemporary can be tagged "postmodern." The Simpsons is "a postmodern look at family values and late Twentieth Century culture." Titanic is "a postmodern revival of the romantic Hollywood epic." Tony Blair and New Labour are "a postmodern approach to politics after the death of ideology" Adrian Langan is "a postmodern approach to the death of Radical Student Politics" The only coherent link of the varying uses of "postmodern" in what could be termed the pretentious press (as opposed to the popular press) is as a term meaning both new and old, opposed to "modern" because of the conviction that nothing really meaningful can be said about our times. Postmodern Culchies is a perfect term because the essential meaningless of the word "postmodern" as commonly used suits the fact that the Culchies were always dead cool. But why "post" modern? That other cliché, the Information Revolution, means that new fashions and new styles in popular culture can reach every part of the Western World (for want of a better term) Now Clonlara in the County of Clare can be as "with it" as California. This of course means that in many respects we are becoming increasingly homogenised, cultural colonies of the USA or part of some beige EuroCulture. But there's a flipside to that coin as de Niro said to Pacino in Heat. The Postmodern Culchie may have all Radiohead's albums and be perfectly MTV- (il)literate, but they have a strong culture of their own. The GAA, for example, has become increasingly wise to the value of media exposure. 1996 and 1997 were the years when Gaelic Football and (especially) hurling became, especially in counties like Wexford and Clare, "trendy" to use a rather 80s term. Yes, hurling has followed comedy and landscape gardening and become another media cliché, "the new rock'n'roll." With its blend of a very traditional ethos and a very professional ethos; widespread corporate sponsorship, the ambitious new Croke Park (that favourite target for whingers everywhere) and the roots in a few lads kicking an auld ball around a field, the GAA could really be termed postmodern. No longer is the GAA a kind of social embarrassment; the new stadium and the new support reflect a newfound confidence and maturity. Irish Dancing and Traditional Music have never been healthier. Or is it really so newfound? The GAA was right from the start a very self-confident organisation (quite possibly too much so) Indeed all this "new confidence" allegedly brought to us by that other Great Cliché, the C***** T**** has always been there. (By the way, please please please SHOOT anyone who ever uses the phrase C***** T**** again, or what's worse extensions of the metaphor, involving cubs and stripes and the like) Only the ageing Mullahs of Hot Press, the likes of unreconstructed Dub bigot George Byrne, can still cling to the cultural assumptions of the not too distant past. So who exactly can be a Postmodern Culchie? Let me give you an example. I was born and educated in South County Dublin. I am a Postmodern Culchie. How postmodern can you get? Like Texas, it is more a state of mind than anything else; a self-confidence in who you are that transcends fickle fashion and the residual snobbery of D4 types. The one thing that Trinity College needs is a Faculty of Agricultural Science; there we could see fine upstanding examples of Irish manhood and fine portions of Gaelic womanhood display Postmodern Culchiehood in all its glory. In the Science Block in UCD I once saw a piece of graffiti which read "The Ag Way is the Only Way" You could call it the Tao of Ag. And what better philosophy to live your life by?

Hotel George, a short story I wrote in 1999

I think I tried to get this published, but didn't. hotel george My first summer job was in Videodrome, which was apparently Ireland's first video rental, but had singularly failed to capitalise on this advantage and had let first Xtravision and now Chartbuster corner the market. The staff consisted entirely of other students and occasionally the boss, a haunted woman with an infinite sadness in her manner. This was only a few months before Videodrome went bust. Generally there were two working the evening shift, two too many considering the usual business. Mostly I worked with a guy called Dermot, a couple of years older than me. One evening we got talking about our boss and Dermot started talking about his various part time jobs over the years and the bosses he had there. And Dermot told me about "the nicest boss I ever had", his boss when he worked in a grocers in Sligo town, where he was from. "He was called George, and the people called him Hotel George. He worked from 5 in the am to 10 in the p.m., and he lived above the shop, where he had a bed and a bathroom and a radio and some books, all second-hand - no TV or video or anything more elaborate. On Sundays he would go to Mass in the morning and go visiting in the afternoon. He was in his middle fifties, and wasn't married - all the young ones coming in would tease him like, so when are we getting married Mr. George and the like. No one knew his surname. He would just smile at all this - he was so quiet, so laid back, but you knew he enjoyed his life." "His thing was this: to save up his money for a year or more even, and then travel to a really really expensive hotel, for no more than a week, sometimes less, sometimes just a night. He usually went to a hotel in Ireland, in the North sometimes. We all used to slag him about the orgies he must be getting up to, but all he said was that it was nice to be treated like royalty every once in a while." The story of Hotel George became one of those memories not quite forgotten, but lying dormant under our consciousness. Sometimes passing a fancy hotel, whatever chain of thought I was following would come round to a frugal grocer in Sligo Town, possibly living the high life just in there. Generally I never thought about him. Until I came to Boston. It was just coming to the end of August, which in the J1 routine is the time you quit your tedious, menial job and see America. So I left Chicago and spent a few days hanging around Boston being a tourist, lounging about on the couch in my friends' apartment. They were still working as furniture movers, and hinted that if I wanted a wee bit of extra money there was always a need for an extra pair of hands. Then one morning I awoke on the couch to find myself confronted by an unfamiliar figure with something of a lean and hungry look. "Will you work, will you young fella?" he asked in a high West Cork accent "Ah, good man yourself," he said without giving me time to answer or indeed form a coherent thought. In the truck my friends explained the situation - there was something of a crisis in the moving company. It was the busiest time of year, with students moving into new accommodation, and with leases expiring on September 1st, so it was all hands on deck. And they also had a big job - a mansion in a place called Quincy, which was a good distance away. I would go to Quincy in one truck with Mick, as my waker was called, trying to round up more workers en route, while the rest of the moving firm did the student jobs in the other truck, and if possible come out to Quincy to help. I would be well rewarded for my labour - indeed the boss said if I abandoned my plan to travel on to New York two days later, I could make upwards of $600 - well in excess of what I made in a week in Chicago. Barely awake, I assented, and the other truck motored merrily away. Mick had parked the truck at something of an awkward angle, and my first job would be to back it up. So off I went, waving away frantically and then making a stop sign even more frantically, for the truck was headed straight for a streetside sign. The very middles of back of the truck hit the sign, sending it flying. The truck stopped and Mick ran out. He regarded the stray sign with rather more nonchalance than I felt the situation deserved. The sign was neatly cut off just above the base. Back in the truck Mick began to introduce himself. He had been in Boston for three weeks, before which he had never driven a truck before. The conversation drifted around the Cork hurling team and football and America and the physical characteristics of young women passing by and somehow turned to prison. "Have you ever been in prison?" asked Mick "I'm afraid I never had the pleasure." "I remember the Legion threw me in prison once" "What legion?" "The French Foreign Legion. I turned up five minutes late after leave. Then they threw me in solitary. Only a hole in the ground and a canvas sack. Here, young fella, " and now he threw me a map "find the way to Quincy." I was more curious about what exactly he had done that got him thrown in solitary by the French Foreign Legion, but this new task threw me. After all, I was only familiar with the nice, touristy, historic parts of Boston, and the New England aquarium. Much consulting of indexes later, I deduced we had headed exactly the wrong way out of Boston, and then when we were on the right way, I worked out the right exit to take only after we passed it two miles before. As well as asking for directions, we also shouted at any passers-by who looked Irish passing by "Do you want a few hours work there at all?" Surprisingly enough, we received no takers on that front. Finally we reached our destination and my furniture moving career began in earnest. As work it was actually quite enjoyable. I enjoyed physical work, probably because I never had to do it usual. The problem was time. With only two of us, and a seemingly infinite amount of tables, chairs, couches and other paraphernalia, it took three hours to load the truck, and even then we had twice as much again left to move. Thus we had to take our first load to its destination, an equally salubrious suburb not all that far away it turned out, after we had managed to drive back into Boston again. Twice. Another four hours to unload, which was far harder since it involved going up steps. It was now eleven hours since I had received my unusual wake up call, ten and a half since I had eaten anything. I started to plead imminent departure to New York, but Mick's response was "Ah no, young fella, sure just a couple more hours and the lads will be out to help me, and then you can go." Fifteen hours of continuous moving, driving and sweating later, the lads arrived. The boss gave me two hundred dollars for my 18 hours of actual work (we weren't paid for driving) and, to encourage me to stay a while longer, 60 dollars in advance for a few hours more work, and told me what a good worker I was, and how much money I could make in those few days. This charm offensive was doomed to failure, since at this stage I felt like I had been kidnapped by a strange ex-Legionnaire with a definite tendency for road rage - and who, indeed, had been driving his truck without sleeping for at least twenty-six hours - and only lack of willpower and lack of assertiveness and greed was now preventing me from just walking away. I rehearsed assertive, angry voices in my head, imagined myself saying "No money and no plamás will stop me getting on that bus for New York.", standing up to the men who had subjugated my will. Six more hours later, after completing a student move, I was let go at last, with none of my speeches ever spoken. Mick shook my hand, and wished me luck with genuine emotion. I was sorry for some of the less charitable things I had though about him while he had sped around in no particular direction, shouting obscenities at motorists and various passers-by. I was free and naturally had a certain nostalgia for my captivity. Now it was too late for me to go to New York, and in the tumult of the thirty plus that had just passed, my friends had also moved, as their sublet had expired overnight, and I didn't know where they had gone. Thus I had to trudge around Boston, with my worldly possessions on my back, sweaty, unshaven, and alone. The first place I passed was the Boston Meridien Hotel, with the Stars and Stripes and the French Tricolour and the Union Jack waving above the entrance. Why not just see how much a single room is, can't be much more than a hundred bucks. 245 dollars before tax for a Queen size bed, 265 dollars before taxes for a King size bed. I asked the receptionist (more than a hint of a French accent and an expansive, beatific beauty) to factor in the taxes. 300 plus for the king, 280 odd for the queen. Oh well. I picked up my bags, a chunky sports bag and a black garbage bag that carried all the assorted material goods I'd acquired in the states, and walked out. I passed a corporate type at the entrance, made eye contact (doubtless he was looking at my bloodstained T-shirt and general air of dishevelled grandeur), and cracked 'Well, I'm off to the Holiday Inn." A pretty lame witticism, but the guy looked at me as if I'd confessed to some dreadful, sociopathic crime. A block or so away, I realised that I could certainly afford a Queen Size room. But wouldn't it be an awful waste of money, since I could surely find a fabulous hotel for under a hundred? Then all of a sudden I wanted to show the suit at the hotel entrance and I wanted to show the boss and I wanted to show Mick that here was a man for who money wasn't everything or even anything and I wanted one magnificent stupid extravagant gesture. And hadn't I made enough money to do me in Chicago? And hadn't I enough books and CDs and clothes and God knows what else to do me, all too many bundled into that black garbage bag which I had lugged around Chicago and Boston on buses and subways and who knows what streets. It would mean that financially I would be just where I was 48 hours before, except with experience of both slave labour and luxury. I turned back to the Meridien. For my money I got a little credit card key and a key to the minibar full use of the swimming pool and gym, and a complimentary shoe shine service. The receptionist asked if I wanted someone to take my luggage up. I knew what this meant - a tip, and in a place like this a rather hefty one. So I carried the old kit bag and the old black plastic sac up the elevator myself. The room was paltrier than I expected, but right now my ambitions centred on the bathroom. The bath was filled and the complimentary toiletries ransacked in a trice. After about half an hour, I suddenly realised I hadn't slept in about forty something hours, and I'd spent most of that time "straight picking" and "twisting" and various other activities in the not especially obscure arcana of the furniture moving trade. But I wanted to get full value for my money. Thus I had to balance the bliss of sleep with the joys I assumed lay elsewhere in the hotel. Out of the bath I perused the cost of the minibar. Three dollars (before taxes) for a Nantucket Nectar, which would be no more than $1.25 a few hundred metres away! Eight dollars (before taxes) for a beer! Then the breakfast options - a wide choice of exotic French names and prices which seemed to be in Francs. The movies in the hotel room would cost, laundry would cost something laughable, room service would cost big time. So this is how the rich live. It was alright for expense account freeloaders, but my money had only bought me entrance to the outer limits of paradise. I accidentally selected a film from the pay per view list messing around with the remote. Go - I wanted to see it anyway. As I watched the movie I fought off fatigue and vague regret. Think how many CDs I could have bought with that money. After the film I forced myself to explore, and remembering the swimming pool, took a pair of shorts. The fitness centre/swimming pool was an hour away from closure, and a lone Chinese woman manned the desk. Chinese massage was offered at a typically prohibitive rate. The Hotel was an "affiliate" of Air France, and I had seen various not exactly unattractive air hostesses around the lobby, which had been more than vaguely in my mind as I had come down here. But I had the facilities all to myself. A jacuzzi. Never been in one of those before. I fiddled with the switch and went in. At first the water was too warm, the motion too vigorous, yet after I while I saw the appeal. And after another while failed to see the appeal. It was boring, just sitting here, at least without the benefit of employees of Air France or any other airline. To the pool then, which seemed cold after the jacuzzi. Only 4 foot deep all over, so no danger of being out of my depth. The time passed pleasantly enough, practising my ungainly strokes, letting the water take the strain off my back, which had suffered all too much. And then a shower and wandering around the hotel, through the corridors and bars, one drink here would make quite a dent in my Chicago money, looking at the expense account people and thinking, if only they knew what I was doing last night. If only they could see the floors I've slept on, if only I had moved furniture from their house, if only they could then see me here, washed and shaved, perhaps not part of the social scene of the Hotel, a Gatsby maybe, mysterious, inscrutable, walking with kings yet keeping the common touch. As I walked through another corridor this delusion fell away. Who was I trying to kid? It was just an expensive mistake, leaving me a lost soul in the paradise of riches. I wandered aimlessly through the hotel corridors, identical deserted floor after identical deserted floor, locked conference suite after locked conference suite. As you can imagine, I tired of this and decide to head to bed; one last wander to the lobby would do me. A few businesspeople were hanging around the lobby, sleek as seals in the New England Aquarium. And there I saw him, wearing a rumpled shirt, talking to the concierge in a soft Southern States accent. It was Hotel George - perhaps not the man himself, but nevertheless him. What difference do a few proper names and four thousand miles make? Here was the humble shopkeeper, hard-working, God-fearing, gentlemanly. With unhurried kindness he cast his eyes over all he surveyed. No one had ever earned the right more. And I too had earned a little slice of this place. Even if only for a night and part of a day, it was still mine. There was no question of a waste of money. And as I went back to my room to finally get some sleep I was overwhelmed by the sheer magic of geography, countless cities and towns and neighbourhoods and boroughs and villages scattered across the globe, each perhaps with a Hotel George or some other character. From Green Bay to Sligo town to Chattanooga to Heath Row to Strasbourg to Corpus Christi to Cordoba to the Bronx to Stillorgan to Haifa to Yokohama, all over the world shy, diligent men and women, working dutifully and dreaming of hotels.

A pre Euro piece about coins. I am not totally sure where this was for.

I think this was for the University Observer. It was possibly in the 'zine I briefly produced to no fanfare whatsoever in 2000, "The Magazine" 

  "I reflected that there is nothing less material than money, since any coin whatsoever (let us say a coin worth twenty centavos) is, strictly speaking, a repertory of possible futures. Money is abstract, I repeated, money is the future tense. It can be an evening in the suburbs, or music by Brahms; it can be maps, or chess, or coffee; it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold; it is a Proteus more versatile than the one on the isle of Pharos." -Jorge Luis Borges, "The Zahir" As a collection it is paltry - eight not especially rare coins in two small clear plastic bags. It probably could be assembled with about three pounds in the stall on the top floor of the Stephen's Green Centre on Saturdays. Yet it has an evocative quality well beyond its monetary value or quantity. It's my collection of coins from vanished states and regimes. One bag contains currency from the USSR, East Germany, Communist Hungary and (in contravention of the rules) still-extant Red China. In the other bag (for this ideological divide is rigorously stark) is Franco's Spain and Vichy France. The coinage of the Soviet Imperium is replete with stars and hammers and sickles, as you might expect. Another prominent feature is sheaves of wheat and corn, symbolising the alleged plenty Marxism would bring in its wake. The 1991 coin from the CCCP (USSR) is in actual fact identical to one from the Russian Federation a year later, as the Soviet system timidly ceded to a new order. A 20 Kopeck piece from 1967 is more typically upbeat about Soviet technology, as a beam of light illuminates the way forward for a large boat. 1967 was of course the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution and comes complete with a hammer and sickle atop a globe surrounded by the ubiquitous garland of wheat. The contrast between the breezy coins of post-war France with half-naked women scattering around flowers, and the severe coins of Vichy France is striking. Instead of "Republique Francaise" we have "ETAT FRANCAIS", below the image of an axe. Instead of "libertie, egalitie, fraternitie" we have "Travail Famille Patrie" - work, family and fatherland, suitable virtues in Petain's new regime. Once again much foliage is in evidence, this time oak leaves. Obviously totalitarian regimes liked to convey an image of fertility. The shocking thing about Franco's coinage is how recent it is - as recently as the mid-seventies, well within living memory, a fascist regime reigned in Western Europe. "FRANCISCO FRANCO CAUDILLO DE ESPANA POR LA G. DE DIOS" adorns one side with the face of the eponymous caudillo. On the five peseta coin an eagle flies purposefully through the air, clutching the inapt words "Una Grande Libre" in its beak and bearing a matrix of somewhat Medieval symbols on its back. Of course coins have since time immemorial been used by the state to assert its power and cement its iconography in the mind of the people. Coins are vital sources of information about the leaders of the past - the Romans in particular included quite detailed portraits of their leaders which have bequeathed us much valuable information about their appearance. The coins of the USA are of course rich in the symbolism of government - the presence of Presidents adds to the imperial mystique of the role. Suffragette Susan B Anthony is the sole woman represented on US currency, a prim and rather proper presence on the resurgent dollar coin. The rest of the coins feature a cavalcade of dead white males, accompanied with the words "Liberty" and "In God we Trust", while "E pluribus unum" (from many, one) features on the otherside with one of an array of the many icons of the American State. Our coins carry the official symbol of the Irish Government, the harp, and an array of animals. These were chosen in the early years of the state by a commission that included WB Yeats. In a way these innocent fauna are a sign of Irelands' placid political nature; by contrast with the axe of Vichy France, the official fertility of the Soviet Imperium and the Caudillo's stern eagle, Irish coins are really quite charming.

Review of Adaptation for Limerick Event Guide, 2003

adaptation Once I was trying to write a short story and was stuck. The old advice to budding writers “write about what you know” came to mind, and what I knew about at the time was a budding writer trying to think of an idea for a story. So I began to write a story about a budding writer who was stuck and began to write a story about a budding writer who was stuck and began to write about … you get the picture. There were various other twists, by the way, if that summary sounded exceptionally boring (you don’t think I’m going to reveal them here, do you?). But I abandoned the story, because of the ridiculous belief that fiction should be about Emotions and Great Themes and The Famine and Difficulties With Girls. Adaptation is the best film of the year so far and made me wish I stuck with my story. It is manages to be intricate and amazingly clever but also, through not even trying, moving and emotionally true. It begins on the set of Being John Malkovich with a (real) out-take of Malkovich ordering the crew to cut the dead time between takes. The camera follows various real-life figures from the Being John Malkovich set, finally focussing on “Charlie Kaufmann”, the screenwriter (he really was) who is played by Nicholas Cage. The Charlie of Adaptation is a neurotic bag of self-loathing and doubt, hired to adapt New Yorker writer Susan Orlean’s elegiac, and apparently action-free, tale of orchid obsession The Orchid Thief. Charlie’s happy-go-lucky/annoying (delete according to taste) twin brother Donald (also played, naturally, by Cage, with a winning sweetness in my opinion) decides to become a screenwriter too and becomes a devotee of a screenwriting guru, much to Charlie’s initial disdain. I don’t want to give away anymore of the plot, as much of the joy of the film lies in the brilliant way it perfectly predicts itself and contains itself, the way the Adaptation of the title refers not only to adapting a book into a film but to Darwinian natural selection, to personal change, and most dizzyingly of all to the film itself. Reality and the world of the film merge confusingly; for example the screenwriting credit goes to “Charlie and Donald Kaufmann, adapted from the book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean”. Characters within the film talk about their portrayal in the script and constantly wonder who will play themselves. Oddly, despite its cleverness the structure of the film is actually quite linear, aside from flashbacks that are more traditional than they seem. And for all its avant garde, mess-with-your-head aspects, Adaptation gives the same kinetic rush of joy as Singin’ in the Rain and Bringing Up Baby. It manages to be hip and vastly thought-provoking while “having a heart” in the most unsentimental and least manipulative way possible. In the last issue I wrote about a film I hated, Punch Drunk Love, and now its my pleasure to write about one I adored. In both cases, in the end one has to stop writing and lay it on the line: see this film now, five times at least.

Essay on the art and science of medicine which I very assiduously recycled

This is one of those pieces that I read now and think "ah, youthful idealism..." corny as that sounds. It won me the Irish College of General Practitioners Shepperd Memorial Prize in 2001, was published in the New Statesman in a version, and also I published a longer version in the University Observer. the art and science of medicine “The practice of medicine in its broadest sense includes the whole relationship of the physician with his patient. It is an art, based to an increasing extent on the medical sciences, but comprising much that still remains outside the realm of any science. The art of medicine and the science of medicine are not antagonistic but supplementary to each other. There is no more contradiction between the science of medicine and the art of medicine than between the science of aeronautics and the art of flying.” - Francis W Peabody From the most cursory glance at the newspapers and from even the most inattentive listen to the news, it’s obvious that the medical profession faces many and varied challenges. Yet while the logistical, political and organisational issues that face us are severe, the most profound challenge facing General Practice and medicine in general is a philosophical one. Where once medicine was seen as the royal road to a safe, respectable position in society – along with the priest and the teacher, one of the three traditional pillars of a stereotypical Irish community – now most people all too aware of the problems facing the profession. Perhaps the first issue any lay person would identify is the system where doctors in training work hours that take on the qualities of Dantean torment. It’s undeniable that many intelligent and compassionate people, who would make excellent doctors of every sort, but perhaps particularly GPs, are put off from even considering medicine by this situation. As the old system whereby a medical graduate could simply set up as a general practitioner are replaced by structured training schemes, the situation in hospital medicine profoundly effects GP training. The changing demographics of medical school intake is another challenge to be faced by medicine. Increasing numbers of women in the profession will face a career structure still rooted in the days when fathers were all too often strangers to their families. Ireland is occasionally called the “51st State of the Union” because of the high number of incidents of medical litigation that take place here – it’s estimated that Irish doctors are four times more likely to be sued than their English colleagues, and eleven times more likely than Hong Kong doctors. Does this lead to the practice of a risk-averse, defensive medicine; does it destroy the relationship of trust between doctor and patient? There are signs that the political will is there to establish a less adversarial process for resolution of disputes; I personally know many people who would make excellent doctors who are put off not by the prospect of long hours but of being sued while trying to help their fellow human beings. And doctors will have to face the changing public perception of doctors – high profile scandals both here and in the UK involving not only malpractice, professional arrogance but also deliberate homicide have strongly affected the public imagination. I earlier referred to the “pillars of the community” that were the priest, the teacher and the doctor – all three have fallen from their eminence. We are constantly told that Harold Shipman was an isolated case, but an isolated case that murdered at least fifteen and probably over two hundred of his patients will certainly crack public confidence in all doctors, but especially in the General Practitioner. Perhaps as a function of this increasing public climate of assertiveness and scepticism, many patients will now supplement the information they get from their GPs with research on the Internet, from sites of varying quality. As primary health care providers, General Practitioners are faced with these issues on an ever-increasing basis. In the rest of this essay I would like to deal with what I believe is the most fundamental issue facing both general practice and all of medicine, not only in Ireland but internationally, in the future. This is a more philosophical, the cynical would say a more airy-fairy, point; but one that has a vital relationship with general practice and indeed all of the issues above. It is the fundamental question, what is a doctor? Presumably something more than an individual with the required qualification and certification, who pays the appropriate annual retention fee to the Medical Council and displays their certificate of registration. During the narrowly-averted junior doctors strike, we could see in the public pronouncements of many NCHDs a drift away from the sense of medicine as a vocation to a more hard-headed view of it as a job like any other. In fact, many of those interviewed responded with anger and derision to the notion that medicine was a vocation; many referred to the market value graduates of their status would have in the private corporate sector. The beloved cliché of lazy feature writers and pundits, the C***** T**** (I refuse to give further exposure to the defining phrase of our time) has had far-reaching, and in some respects very positive, effects on Irish society. But as Puff Daddy and the Notorious B.I.G. put it, mo’ money, mo’ problems, and whereas once medical graduates had the ego boost of knowing they had well-paid, prestigious employment, now they look at their contemporaries working in the sexy industries de jour, Information Technology and the wonderfully vague Management Consultancy, and feel underloved by society. Of course this may be a force for good; part of the changing demographics of medical graduates that may force long overdue changes in our health system. Perhaps the more idealistic doctors leave themselves open to exploitation from healthcare managers, allowing even more corners to be cut, and ultimately their patients are the victims. But am I alone in seeing a risk here? Might this new hard-headedness become a new hard-heartedness? There is a tendency in medicine and medical education that has perhaps been ever-present, to downgrade the "art" of healing in favour of the "science" of medicine. Personally, it’s obvious that many of my fellow students regard subjects like Public Health and General Practice, with their emphasis on the overall picture of medical practice with at best indifference and often contempt, while seeing the technocratic, science based subjects as true medicine. “Every profession is a conspiracy against the public, every profession has a language of its own,” said the American novelist William Gaddis, and the specialised vocabulary that is popularly caricatured as “doctorese” derives from the world of medical science. Allow me to digress a little on this subject of the language used in medicine. It is an oft-repeated truism that there is a deluge of ever-increasing information; a figure of 2 million biomedical papers published per year is often cited. Yet how relevant is much of this information, and what are the motivations of those who produce it? The editor of the British Medical Journal once told a conference that “only 5 per cent of published papers reached minimum standards of scientific soundness and clinical relevance and in most journals the figure was less than 1 per cent.” In 1976, the Dublin physician J B Healy suggested that “we should for an experimental period of a year, declare a moratorium on the appending of authors’ names and of the names of hospitals to articles in medical journals. If the dissemination of information is the reason why papers are submitted for publication, there will be no falling-off in the numbers offered … But if far less material is offered to the journals, we shall have unmasked ourselves.” In other words, the culture of research-for-the-sake-of-research, of publish-or-perish, means that many papers are not written to be read but written to be cited, to become fodder for a CV. How is this damaging to medical practice? Aside from the obvious diversion of resources and effort from other areas, a culture that exalts personal ambition above all is entrenched. And the use of “scientific” language which can create an artificial mystique around the doctor, can thereby also create a new barrier between doctor and patient. In 1885 the surgeon William Marsden wrote the following straightforward sentence: “A hospital devoted to the treatment of cancerous disease seems to me to hold out the only prospect of progress in the treatment of the malady; an institution conducted by those who recognise in medicine and surgery but one art.” And in the year 2000 Dr. Michael O’Donnell “spread a month’s supply of journals across a table, opened them randomly, then used phrases plucked from the opening pages to encode Marsden’s original message." The sturdy High Victorian prose of Marsden is transformed into: “It would seem to the present author that only a specialist centre organised on the basis of concentrating its resources solely to address the treatment of the malignant disease process could offer a potential for realistic improvements in treatment outcome. Furthermore, such an institution would be a de facto resource centre under the direct line management of personnel sensitive to the fact that multifaceted disciplines of medicine and surgery are each essentially manifestations of the same entity.” Indeed. Although it would be naïve to believe that “journalese” is a new phenomenon, many journals seem to be written by people for whom speaking plainly isn’t an option; perhaps they are motivated by a nervous fear of not seeming “scientific” enough. If the medical profession is losing its eminence, than perhaps the rise of mystifying jargon represents a subconscious (or perhaps conscious) attempt to maintain some of medicine’s power and mystique. It is a near-cliché to define medical practice as a combination of the art of healing and the science of medicine. Many students (and doctors) would place the emphasis on the science term of the equation. But patients don’t exist as black-and-white illustrations of physiological phenomena. And if we are to communicate with our patients on a truly empathetic way, we have to realise that human experience is not like reducible to purely scientific phenomena. As John Fowles wrote "our fallacy lies in supposing that the limiting nature of scientific method corresponds to the nature of ordinary experience. Ordinary experience, from waking second to second, is in fact highly synthetic … made of a complexity of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history, hopelessly beyond science's powers to analyse." And patients live their lives and come in to doctors’ surgeries enmeshed in this web of strands that we call life. If we are to practice patient-centred medicine, we must resist the temptation to transform the stories we hear into a means to an end – as Brian Hurwitz wrote in a recent article "the traditional medical view of the consultation is to see it as an opportunity to fashion a clinical case history … a story that begins with a succession of events or experiences relating to the patient, which then becomes progressively abstracted from the patient's control and the context of the original telling …[and] transformed by a medicotechnical vocabulary not likely to be understood by the patient. The patient tends to lose control of the story as the case history develops and becomes a tale that only someone else can tell, taking on a life of its own in staff rounds, case conferences, and the medical literature. Meanwhile, the patient as the person from whom the story originally arose becomes increasingly incidental to it, maintaining within it only the anonymous presence of a ghost." And it’s general practitioners, as always, who are primary health providers; primary meaning both the “first line of defence” but also the main practitioners most people will encounter. As Francis W. Peabody said in 1927 to the Harvard Medical School: “the essence of the practice of medicine is that it is an intensely personal matter, and one of the chief differences between private practice [by ‘private’ meaning general practice] and hospital practice is that the latter always tends to become impersonal. At first sight this may not appear to be a very vital point, but it is, as a matter of fact, the crux of the whole situation. The treatment of a disease may be entirely impersonal; the care of a patient must be completely personal.” It is a mark of Peabody’s wisdom that it wasn’t until after reading his address that I discovered it was written in 1927, for example he writes “the amazing progress of science in its relation to medicine during the last thirty years,” a sentence that anyone could utter today. This is an illustration that sometimes in medicine, like in many spheres, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose – every era sees itself as unique and pivotal, doctors will always be busy, medical science will always be shattering old dogma and producing new dogma to be shattered in turn, and the doctor-patient relationship will always be at the heart of medicine. That may be true, but equally there is no room for complacency – it would be ostrich-like behaviour of the worst order to imagine that we’ll all muddle through somehow, that all our problems are purely imaginary, or simply part of some sort of natural order. In the same speech as that quoted above, Peabody said “medicine is not a trade to be learned but a profession to be entered.” The most profound challenge for general practice in the coming years is to maintain the balance between the art of healing and the science of medicine, to resist the temptation to view patients in mechanistic terms, to retain the special character of the doctor-patient bond despite the pressures from both within and without the profession. The various challenges that I have listed above are all serious, and are all inter-related. They all both contribute to and result from a new mood in society – a general suspicion of the institutions of the past, a new assertiveness. All the above challenges can be seen as a opportunity for growth and renewal; the old paternalistic medical order has crumbled, so let us build a new one in partnership with our patients.

Interview with Bret Easton Ellis, University Observer, Spring 1999

This was evidently before Christian Bale was particularly famous. Originally published in two parts, I have handily merged them together like so:
an interview with bret easton ellis, feb 25th 1999
"Ask him to roll up his sleeves," said an acquaintance when told I was to interview Bret Easton Ellis. “He has his name written in trackmarks on his arm.” This is typical of the myths surrounding Bret Easton Ellis. Since Less Than Zero, written while still a twenty-year-old freshman in Bennington College, Ellis has been a consistently controversial figure. 1991’s American Psycho was dropped by Simon & Schuster, boycotted by the National Organisation of Women and Ellis received death threats far more graphic than anything in the book. The Satanic Verses is the only other novel of the last decade which has caused comparable outrage. His new novel Glamorama deals with the fashion industry and our infatuation with beauty, as he has been quoted: "the fact that so little of our infatuation has to do with genuine accomplishment - but with what's basically known as 'cuteness' - is ugly"
Bret Easton Ellis is bigger and healthier-looking than expected, laidback and with a languid Southern Californian drawl, and in conversation has the same slightly rambling, slightly unfocused way of expressing himself of many of his characters. The interval between American Psycho and Glamorama has been filled with the whole Psycho controversy, the death of his father, the breakup of a seven-year relationship, a short story collection, and as he put it himself “a small problem with drink and drugs.” Despite all this and the rigours of a book tour, Ellis is relaxed and friendly, although he confesses to be nervous at the prospect of speaking in Trinity College's Edmund Burke Theatre: “it seems uptight to me; I just went into the hall and it has a very severe, academic aspect and all the dons are going to be there and I’m gonna be reading about supermodels and doing dope by this pool and breast implants and group sex… “ He trails off, waves a hand in the air, and emits a very So-Cal "HELLO?"
He is also slightly anxious about his plans for the evening: “I’m supposed to have dinner with Irvine Welsh. About half an hour ago I was supposed to do a photoshoot with him but he disappeared into a pub. I’m kind of thinking, ‘This cannot be an Irvine Welsh night, I cannot have what I think Irvine Welsh probably does on an average Thursday night. I have to get up very early, do some more interviews and catch a plane.” He is also slightly amused about one of our own cults of celebrity; "Everyone keeps telling me I'm staying in the 'Bono' Hotel.[presumably the Clarence] I don't get to see any of Dublin but at least I'm staying in the 'Bono' Hotel."
The last time he was in Dublin he didn't even get to stay the night. Do the rigours of book tours take their toll? “I find them incredibly stressful. And I noticed that when I took a bath earlier that so much hair had fallen out of my head that the bath was ringed with it, forgive the disgusting imagery. I get nervous rashes on my hands. The only time when stress really isn’t there is when you meet the people who come to see you read and are interested.”
The words "cult reputation" and "voice of a generation" are among the great media clichés of our time and have been applied to Ellis since his debut. I wonder did he ever feel like emulating that other "cult voice of a generation" JD Salinger and becoming a media-averse recluse? “I suppose if I had that inclination I would do it. It’s not a part of who I am and maybe later on I’ll feel that way. I guess I have a little bit of guilt when a publisher pays me for a book that I owe them to go out and promote the book and communicate my ideas about it. I tend to it for the publisher in many ways. In the best of all worlds I would love to be a John Grisham and stay at home in my room and let the book sell itself”
Ellis has been quoted as saying that Joyce’s Ulysses, which he read in college, was ‘the most exciting thing I ever read.’ I ask him how it affected his ideas about literature. “I can’t say it was an influence,” then he qualifies this, “Although in some ways I think everything you read does become an influence, an unconscious. What was so exciting about reading Ulysses was that there seemed to be no boundaries to what a writer could do. In so many other novels there seems to be a list of rules that you must follow in order to make a coherent novel. Breaking apart those rules is really thrilling for a young writer. People often find it funny when I say that Ulysses was the pivotal reading experience of my life because they can’t directly locate it in the work. I don’t think you can, but the inspiration that that book supplied was," he pauses, for the right word "limitless.” Don deLillo (who he regards as "the greatest American Writer", Joan Didion, and Hemingway are among his more direct influences.
Ellis did not intend to take eight years to write Glamorama, indeed he confesses to being "slightly embarrassed about taking that long to write a book about supermodels." Asked if the novel would be radically different if he had finished it in 1992 or 1994, before the OJ Simpson case and the Internet's magnification of the cult of media celebrity he replies “Well maybe there wouldn’t be this level of intense paranoia. The question really is would it have been a different book if American Psycho had been just another novel that came out without all the hysteria. There’s a definite paranoia that began to enter into the book after that whole debacle. But would it have been different. I don’t think so, it was very carefully structured from the start.”
The lingering impression left by Ellis’ fiction is the sheer superficiality, emptiness and spiritual desolation of American life; the title of Douglas Coupland's "Life After God" seems apposite. I ask if he feels that America is a post-religious society. “Underlying all the wildness in America is an incredible puritanical streak. It is a very religious country with over half of the population attending some other religious services. I think people now are more separating their religious life, finding peace in a higher being, but still understanding that all the constraints don’t need to have to apply in order to have a belief in religion. Finding a way to adapt religion so it’s not so strict. I don’t know is that’s ever going to happen, this post-religious mood. I guess the post religious mood is that people are now adapting religion to their own personal feelings and personal lives.”
Are you in any way religious yourself? “I was raised an agnostic and growing up in Los Angeles doesn’t help with religion. There's very little religion going on in LA. I have many Jewish friends in New York and there is something interesting to me in Judaism, although I wouldn't convert. But I’m not religious myself.”
The controversy that surrounded American Psycho was certainly similar in magnitude to that which surrounded The Satanic Verses, and was just as shocking since it took place among the liberal Western intelligentsia in this very decade. Patrick Bateman, the psycho of the title, lives in a world of awesome superficiality, where detailed descriptions of Armani suits and Whitney Houston albums are given equal weight to detailed descriptions of horrific murders. Few other novels so divide their readership. The comment board at www.amazon.com ranges from ". It justifies what (sic) the Nazis' burning of books. The one high point in the book is a scene in which the protagonist goes to a U2 concert. This book is just really bad" to the perhaps equally disturbing " this is my favorite book ever. anyone giving this a bad review should beware bateman..... american psycho rules....period! "
Unsurprisingly enough, next in my notes is “The Inevitable American Psycho Question” - do you look back in anger?: “The longer I read about the book and think about the book perhaps there’s a bit of me that thinks maybe I should have toned down some of the gore a little bit because it was so gory and upsetting for some people that it distracted them from what my intentions were. You can’t go back. The book is very representative of where I was in my life at that point. That was me and my feelings about my life and the world and I stand by it.”
Do you think that American Psycho will always be the first thing people associate with you? “I can’t imagine twice in a career a book having that kind of impact. I assume that book will be talked about more than anything else I have written. In a way, there’s nothing I can do about that. That’s fine. If people want to associate with me that book, at least there is a book they associate with me.” Have you heard the Manic Street Preachers song “Patrick Bateman”? “I heard it very late. It was recorded a long time ago but someone just slipped me a tape during the American tour. I put it on in the car driving from Milwaukee to Chicago and I was thinking, “My God, my life has turned out very strange” He is also curious about “some band called The Divine Comedy who mentioned my name in a song.”
Finally I ask him about the forthcoming film version of American Psycho, and specifically the prospect which had existed of Leonardo di Caprio jeopardising his matinee idol status by playing Patrick Bateman: “I was happy with it, I think he’s quite a good actor, I’m sorry, call me an idiot but I thought he was quite good in Titanic. His character was such a goody goody kind of guy, and I know he wanted to play it darker. I was quite happy, then quite disappointed when he pulled out.” But he pronounces himself happy with English actor Christian Bale (Jim in "Empire of the Sun" and more recently in Velvet Goldmine and Portrait of a Lady) …"he's very big, very physical"… and with the direction the film is following under the direction of Mary Harron ("I Shot Andy Warhol") Interesting that a woman is directing the adaptation of a book of which the National Organisation of Women urged boycott.
Are you worried about people seeing American Psycho as a film rather than as a novel? “Not worried at all. The version of script I read is so faithful to the book; all the dialogue is from the book, 95% of the film is from the book. In a way, I’m not worried about how people choose to see the work.” Ellis seems quite indifferent to how people perceive his work. Perhaps American Psycho and its attendant media hoopla have bred a sort of fatalism. He says that he "grew up" while writing Glamorama, going from the precocious author of Less Than Zero to a thirtysomething writer.
One of the characters in Ellis' short story collection "The Informers" talks about "a boredom so monumental it humbles." Ellis' American lives are extraordinarily empty and vacuous. Satirical and despairing, Ellis' insight into the cocaine heart of America and the Heart of Darkness in all of us makes him a writer worthy of attention.

Taking It Up The Banner

From my University Observer days, presumably written in late 98 or early 99. I'm not proud of the article title. 

Mirror from my former Geocities site

taking it up the banner

 When I came to College, I knew next to nothing about County Clare. They had won the Hurling All-Ireland the year before, Ennis and Shannon were there, and that was about it. Little was I to know that Clare would become the perfect illustration of the strange, postmodern blend of old and new cultural forces that have created the Ireland of today. The white heat of the information revolution and the white heat of All-Ireland hurling would merge in the banner in a massive, super combination of white heat. White heat that would burn indelibly into the National Consciousness that the Banner had arrived, and to prove it, it was here. It was once said that the Irish peasant of the 19th century may have been materially poor, but was as politically informed as any citizen of any land; the newspapers of the day were au fait with the latest trends in political thought. The information age perhaps isn't as new as we think. The award of the Information Age town title to Ennis in 1997 (beating off the considerable challenge of Castlebar, Kilkenny and Killarney) may have been an exercise in corporate PR (and possibly an exercise in various other activities as well, if rumours in Castlebar are to be believed) but it is symbolic of the New Ireland of the C***** T**** and an armada of lazy magazine articles and promotional copy for industry; young, dynamic, forward-looking blah blah blah. This New Clare was also seen in the 1992 election of Dr Moosajee Bhamjee of the Labour party as a TD. Whatever your political convictions, the idea that Clare, which at times has been a Fianna Fail four-seater, would elect a Labour psychiatrist of Indian Extraction to the Dail would once have been as likely as an International Airport in a bog in Mayo. Dr Bhamjee's subsequent attempt to combine his consultancy with representing the people of Clare in the Dail and unwillingness to fight another election may tamper my theory somewhat; but nevertheless the principle remains that things would never be the same in Ireland again. Shannon has developed a sizeable community of refugees, which in a perfect world would only enhance the cosmopolitanism of the place. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. 1995 was the breakthrough year for Clare hurling in one sense, yet the game was an obsession for generations. Clare's victory, their colour, spirit and panache, was the moment when the GAA threw off the shackles of the cultural inferiority complex and stood up and took its place as possibly the greatest and most vibrant part of Irish culture. Clare hurling, for so long an endless story of heartbreak and humiliation, became the most extraordinary epic of Irish sport. Clare hurlers became like rockstars in the Banner County; the Sparrow, Jamesie, Davy Fitz, Brian Lohan, and the Brian Epstein to the team's Beatles, Ger Loughnane. Loughnane helped shake off the inferiority complex the team had towards the so-called aristocrats, the Tipps and Corks, and instilled a new-self belief. Last summer saw Clare go from media darlings to villains and Lougnane go from a generally popular manager to being demonised as snarling and arrogant after his energetic defence of his team and attack on his enemies on Clare FM. Loughnane's bile was hilarious (who could forget his ridiculous claim that the treatment of Colin Lynch was "the worst human rights abuse of all time", or his account of three priests in Semple Stadium who were overheard announcing that "Clare were tinkers, Loughnane was a tramp and Clare were on drugs") yet it was hard not feel that here was another aspect of the New Ireland; the media dictating simplistic, stereotyped roles. Clare's story was a romance; their label was "plucky underdogs" and when it became obvious that their success owed much to ruthlessness and toughness they had overstepped their defined role and the knives came out for Loughnane. But the colour and sheer spirit that Clare hurling brought out was the most heartening aspect of the New Ireland; a pride and love of life rooted in the local community. Recently former GAA executive Jimmy Smith published a collection of "Ballads of the Banner" in a book of the same name. These lyrics were sung unaccompanied and contain considerable wit and insight. Think how much social history is contained in the lines "Sue Ellen like a Turk on the farm is working/Without getting a great deal of help from the men." Or "The men who founded the GAA/Would scorn the modern parasitic way." Or the romantic vision of "Her step is light, her waist is slim/The lass that loves a hurler." These Ballads of the Banner are full of life in all its facets. Clare is a microcosm of the New Ireland in many ways, not all positive; the Brendan O'Donnell murders in 1993 (EDITORS: NOT SURE ABOUT THE DATE) seemed to mark the beginning of an era of increasingly horrible murders. It was portrayed in the media as murder in Paradise, in "God's own country." Yet again this is not really anything new; delve into the archives and you'll find that, far from being a haven of purity and virtue, a demon seed of violence always existed. The fratricidal killings of the Civil War have been erased from our memory, but not from our collective unconscious; barely a lifetime ago this country was torn by as bitter and vicious a Civil War as has been seen anywhere. Yet Clare is a great place. It epitomises many positive aspects of the New Ireland better than anywhere; with the Information Age town, with the very Sean Lemass-era Shannon Airport, and with a new self-confidence in their hurling team, in the traditional music and dancing which has always been strong there. A New Ireland in touch with the wider world and aware of it yet also unafraid to be itself and proud of its own uniqueness. A New Ireland that isn't perfect, but then again we like people for their good qualities but love them despite their faults. Clare is the lab for the New Ireland, the arena where the future of this country is being forged. And the people are dead sound

TLS website screenshot

"Somewhere Near Venice", from Shelf Life Magazine Issue #14,

Somewhere near Venice, Guy began talking with a heavy, elderly man, a refugee from Germany on his way to Trieste. The gentleman in the carriage was not handsome, but neither was he particularly bad-looking; he was neither too fat, nor too thin; he could not be said to be old, but he was not too young, either. The land itself was beautiful, with hills that ran down to the sea, and there were cold green waves that broke on the rocks that marked the edge of the land. No sound can be heard from the fields. But I don’t understand the least thing about my illness, and I don’t know for certain what part of me is affected.


The supine figure could almost have been sleeping were it not for the eyes. When the Simibirsk, of the Russian Volunteer Fleet, had at last completely vanished, carrying away the three sisters to Shanghai, I came back to my room at the hotel. She sighed, and sipped, and then to my dismay trotted them out. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter ‘Weep’. Then Roscommon stumbled out and tore down our badminton net. From the open windows of her sickroom, a warm draught stirs the loose white hair at her neck, bringing scents of coal smoke, jasmine, opium.

You was in India, and that’s not the East any more than this is. Liebermann edged forward. Janet must have opened the window before she left. Was he born in Paris? “Drink – Rum”.


A dazzling ray of light slanted in through the trees. I was eating chocolate cake and drinking fragolino, a sweet swarthy wine distilled from the strawberry grape, in my bath. A woman in a black dress with a lace collar had led them to the table.





Seamus Sweeney is a writer from Dublin. He won the 2010 Molly Keane Short Story Competition.


Note on the composition of "Somewhere Near Venice"

Take a bookshelf (perhaps you can do this with a Kindle or the like as well, but an old fashioned shelf of old fashioned books has a certain physical reality to it). Take the first book on the left. Copy the first sentence. Then, copy the second sentence from the second book. Then, the third sentence from the third book. Then, the fourth sentence from the fourth book. I'm sure you are getting the picture. You can either confine yourself to fiction (I did) or not. On our shelves, as well as the volumes already there, there are infinitely many other possible narratives waiting to be combined. I imagine a perfect library in which this method can be used to compose an entirely fresh and coherent new story.

Books used:
The Great Fortune - Olivia Manning
Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
Dream Angus - Alexander McCall Smith
Sorochintsy Fair - Nikolai Gogol (from "Village Evenings Near Dikanka")
Notes from underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Witchdoctor of Chisale - Stephen McWilliams
Futility - William Gerhardie
Flashman and the mountain of light - George macdonald Fraser
Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
Zodiac - the Eco thriller - Neal Stephenson
The Difference Engine - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
Time For A Tiger - Anthony Burgess
Vienna Blood - Frank Tallis
The Fit - Philip Hensher
What a strange creature is man - Johann Peter Hebel (from The Treasure Chest)
"The Balance" - Evelyn Waugh (from Collected Short Stories)
He who fears the wolf - Karin Fossum
Quentins - Maeve Binchy

The Scarface Project: Macbeth and Scarface (or, Scarface and Macbeth)

The Scarface Project: Macbeth and Scarface (or, Scarface and Macbeth)

"The Solitary Golfer" Written in 2004. Published on nthposition.com March 2012

Simon loved being on a golf course. Happiest playing the course alone, free of having to compete with another player, free of the steady succession of patients, he found the game an unexpected source of solace and freedom. In his surgery there was control, there were books, the internet, even Sandra’s advice on the mobile if need be - but there was still the unknowable, the potential chaos and hassle brought by every new patient.
Thursdays he took a half day. Before Paul Gildea had come back from America, he used this time to read and daydream. After this, he played golf with Prof Gildea each Thursday. They had been in medical school together, and lived with each all the way through college. Simon found that he began to enjoy the experience of being out playing golf, and began to play every Thursday, even if Paul Gildea was at a conference or otherwise engaged.
At ten to one that morning he had seen Mrs Watters. She had been attending the practice for ten years. Always presenting with headaches, or backaches, or general fatigue, nothing was ever discovered to be the matter with her. Simon knew, for Beda the practice nurse knew, that Mr Watters drank - not in a spectacular, destructive way, but in the slow corrosive way of late middle aged disappointment. It seemed obvious to Simon, at this stage, that Mrs Watters' great disappointment with her life had transmuted itself into aches and pains, but every time he asked how things were at home, or if she felt stressed, or if things were OK between herself and her husband, she smiled and denied anything was wrong. This would usually frustrate Simon, but he found Mrs Watters likeable, always feeling a strong desire to put his arm around her and tell her that it was alright, no one would judge her if she admitted the truth.
Today, Mrs Watters looked a little more drawn than usual.
"I'm very tired, Doctor."
She had been tired two months ago, when she was last seen, and Simon had ordered routine bloodwork which was - as always - absolutely fine.
"Are you more tired than two months ago?"
Simon was hungry, and was consciously trying not to seem irritated, for anxiety not to offend her.
"Its more intense tiredness. Then I was tired all the time. Now I'm tired right through me, all the way."
"Has anything happened?"
"No, nothing, everything is fine. It's only that - well my appetite is totally gone." This was another frequent symptom of Mrs Watters', investigated many times.
"Do you get food into you?"
"It's a struggle. I don't, really."
Simon had resolved the last time to limit the investigations on Mrs Watters. This was a recurrent resolution.
"Let's go back to the tiredness. How are you sleeping?"
"I'm sleeping better than I was, but I just feel exhausted. I go to bed for a nap after a few hours and sleep the afternoon."
This was a new variation. Simon paused, and then launched fluently into a explanation he had given many times before.
"Now Mrs Watters, you know that isn't a good idea. If you nap during the day, you'll have a worse quality sleep at night, even if you sleep. If you just stay up through the tiredness, you'll feel better in the long run."
"I've tried that, I've really tried, but I'm just so tired."
"I really think if you try for even a week, it'll make a big difference."
What he disliked about golf was having to take it seriously. It was a chance to be in the open air, to daydream. It was an escape from the cares of running a clinic, not only the stress of seeing patients but of managing the practice, ensuring everyone got paid and had their ego massaged appropriately. Paul used the game to regale Simon with malicious gossip about medical and academic figures Simon had usually only dimly heard of, if at all.
The day had begun with towering slate grey clouds looming from the Atlantic, usually the harbinger of the inescapable rain. Today, however, the day had turned out sunny. Dr Simon Harris, who took everything he told his patients seriously, shifted a little uneasily in the sun. He had no sunblock or sunglasses, and thought of all the old ladies and gentlemen he had solemnly commanded to always cover themselves in Factor 50 at the very least, and to make sure to wear proper ultraviolet-resistant sunglasses. Prof Gildea, who liked to holiday in Florida ever since working there as a medical resident, strutted confidently in the sun. Simon, feeling fat and red-faced beside him, was crushed at cutting such a ridiculous figure.
Futhermore, he was worried about Mrs Watters. He had managed not to order any investigations, which was a victory. And yet he thought back to his consultation. She did look like she had lost weight. She looked drawn. Why hadn't he done a quick physical? She was the last patient before lunchtime, or on Thursdays finishing for the day, and he had been impatient. Despite his liking for her, his desire to comfort her and help her, he had been impatient. Thursday afternoons were a time he felt younger, when Paul Gildea was a satisfyingly bitchy companion and, by his gossip, seemed to treat him as an equal.
The night before, after dinner and a few glasses of wine at Paul’s house, Simon had lain awake for two hours, or maybe more, picking over the endless I-me-my-mines of his old friend’s conversation. He felt guilty at resenting Paul, and wondered if it was rooted in resentment at how far his academic and social star had risen. No, he didn’t think so. Paul was still very nice to him, very considerate. He suddenly thought - one could be considerate, kind even, and yet utterly self-absorbed. Indeed, the listener - or rather the one who had the privilege to attend to the egoist’s remarks - with their individual virtues, could become part of the awesome, humbling egotism of Paul Gildea.
For it was an egotism so monumental it humbled, a force of nature; which Simon found it hard to blame Paul for. Paul had always had a fairly healthy opinion of his own worth, but in the last year the self-absorption seemed to have taken nearly entire hold of his person. Simon noticed it in his every utterance - everything he said seemed intended largely to reflect the greatness of Paul Gildea. It was impossible to converse with him any more. He delivered monologues, anecdotes which he seemed to have learnt off by heart. Simon had a mental image of him getting up early each morning and polishing his lines in the mirror each morning. Paul did not so much brook no interruption as carry on unregarding of not only interruption, but the normal conversational give-and-take. It seemed at times as if he was afraid, as if he felt that to allow the other to speak would compromise him in some way. Only on the golf course did he seem to relax - a little. For there, while he needed to dominate the conversation, he seemed to want to entertain.
On the par four 15th, Simon hit the ball sweetly, full on. For once, he knew he had hit a good shot. He experienced the keen pleasure of something done well. The satisfaction of achieving. At instants like this, Simon understood why some became so fixated on golf. If only it could be a succession of these moments and nothing else, free of the false bonhomie hiding so much resentment and disappointment, free of the losing and the failure.
The ball flew high and true. It would get close to the green, Simon thought. No, it would get closer - it would make the green. It flew right towards the hole, and Simon and Paul both were seized by a feeling of certainty of what was about to happen. The ball neatly disappeared into the hole.
“A hole in one!” said Gildea, redundantly. “and on a par four too!” It was the sort of obvious thing the new Paul Gildea would say, except Simon did not mind, for this time it was said simply and unaffectedly. For an instant the achievement transcended things. They were simply two figures on the golf course, enraptured by one of those special moments that made sport worthwhile.
In the silence, Paul addressed the ball. He played (as Simon almost always did) woefully and holed in ten. The quiet continued as he completed the hole.
Walking to the next tee, Paul said “A funny thing happened the other day” and Simon knew that what he was about to hear would certainly not be funny. He tightened his buttocks and curled his toes, and tried to assume an interested expression. Does Paul notice the disappointment, disdain even, on my face? he thought. Simon however was already in anecdotal midstream, and Paul knew from experience it was impossible to steer back to any shore.
That morning, before they had gone to work.
"I need a break. We need a break, I should say."
"Where would you like to go?"
"Well, I know I don't want to just go to Connemara and do what we always do."
"Oh, you know I don't mind much where we go."
"But you never want to go anywhere new."
"Well, I guess I do think that if you own a holiday home, you should get use out of it."
"I know, I know. But we've been done six weekends already this year. We've got great use out of it. We get nearly as much out of it as our own house."
"I have no problem going anywhere."
"But you always do, Simon, you always worry about the money."
"Well, that isn't so unreasonable."
"Simon, we have nothing to worry about."
"We still have to finish off the mortgage."
"Yes, in triple quick time. Everyone else is buying property to invest, to let out. While we are just in hock to your fantasy about living without debt."
"Is it a fantasy? We are nearly there. In another year it'll be a reality."
"Look, why not celebrate by going somewhere really nice?"
"Like where?"
"South Africa."
"South Africa." he trailed off. A trip to South Africa would hardly be bad. "Would it be expensive?"
"We could always take out a loan?"
"Why?"
"Not this again. Oh, Simon, this is so bloody irritating."
"I just don't see the point in getting into debt."
Simon was happy enough to stay around and read novels during his holidays or perhaps go to the bungalow in Connemara. Dutifully he went on ski-ing holidays with Sandra and the Maxwells - she a psychiatrist from Sandra’s college class, he engaged in some line of business Simon could never pin down - despite the fact that the activity held no interest for him whatsoever. He would gingerly slide down the basic slopes, while Sandra and the Maxwells went straight to the black ones. These holidays had resumed after a break of some years now the Maxwells children were older. The children too could ski with verve and confidence. All Simon could do was the snow plough, badly.
At moments of loneliness in the early years of college, Simon would think to himself “I was the brightest student in one of the best schools in the country. Therefore, I’m one of the brightest people of my age in Ireland. Therefore, I’m not too far from being among the brightest people of my own age in Europe.” He drew comfort from this. He imagined himself, after a few years of medical practice, pioneering some new treatment or - better yet - conceiving an entirely new concept in medicine. Then, in retrospect, his early years in medicine, barely passing each exam despite long hours of looking at textbooks and anatomy atlases.
He had always been around pass or at most low second class honours standard. Academic achievement was something that you never talked about, but everyone coveted.
Harris didn’t think he was a bad GP. He was kindly, and sympathetic, and had developed enough clinical confidence to have a pretty good idea what needed to be referred on and what could be kept at his level. He knew many of the patients, particularly the older ladies, had become slightly dependent on him. He had a certain edge of fear, the fear not just of litigation but of the shame of anything that he could possibly accuse himself as malpractice. As an intern, once he noticed an elevated sodium on a patient who had subsequently died, but hadn't discussed it with anyone superior, until he was asked about the patient an hour or so later. Simon knew - he knew at the time - that it would be stretching the point considerably to blame him for this, but he still felt that if any, even the remotest, possible blame attached to him, he was complicit in a wrongful death.
Is this what I want? he often asked himself. He still indulged in the schoolboy dreaming of making some great discovery - a Harris constant, a Harris’ procedure, a Harris equilibrium.
Life was good. Sandra was extremely congenial company. They had a beautiful house in Galway and a neat bungalow in Connemara. They had had no children.
It was the alphabet that brought Professor Paul Gildea, Professor of Medicine at the University of Galway, and Dr Simon Harris together. Gibson, Sorcha. Gleeson, Sandra. Gleeson, Suzanne. Gildea, Paul. Harris, Simon. That little group, for six years, sat in tutorials together, gave presentations to each other, was ignored in outpatients and ignored on ward rounds, and ultimately filed up one after another for their degrees, their brief moment with the President of the College. Of the six, Simon had married Gleeson, Sandra, had lost touch with Gleeson, Suzanne and Gibson, Sorcha, still played the odd game of golf with Fadden, Eamon and was the best friend and confidant of Gildea, Paul.
Paul had returned to become Professor of Medicine two years previously, the youngest incumbent in living memory and wildly believed to be the youngest Professor of Medicine in Irish medical history. He had come back from Boston, having established an international reputation in his field.
Calm, judicious, politically adept in the widest sense, Professor Paul Gildea was the risen star of Irish medicine whose horizons were still expanding. The only question was, what next? He had already been inducted onto various committees, and was spoken of as the most influential voice in shaping health reform in the country. All sides, even the most seemingly radical, in the often vicious debates about the nature of the reform seemed to feel that Professor Paul Gildea was on their side.
With Simon, Paul could relax. They played appalling golf together, laughing until Simon’s cheeks seemed to hurt at the successive awfulness of each of their games and for once Simon felt it wasn’t such a bad game after all. That was the first year of Paul’s return, the first few months when things seemed as they were. .
Sandra shoved The Connacht Advertiser under Simon's nose. She wheeled around, obviously gleeful; Simon tried to decide if it was innocent or malicious glee.
"Look who it is."
She pointed vaguely at the page. Simon looked down, but could only make out a sea of print and photos.
"Who? Where?"
"There." She pointed at an ad in the left-hand corner.
It was a full page ad in the tabloid section of the paper. “Dr Simon MacSorley, Natural Healer” was printed in large letters on the top of the page. “Simon MacSorley, a Registered Medical Practitioner with a degree from the University of Galway and qualifications in Chinese and Ayurvedic (Indian) Medicine, will be in attendance at the Merlin Park Hotel every Saturday during April”, it read.
“So that’s where he is,” commented Paul. Sandra had taken back the paper. She started reading from the advertisement in an archly sarcastic tone. Paul hated it when she read stories from the paper in tones of either righteous indignation or of outright mockery. She would say something like “you should read this” and, after he had made some noncommittal noise, begin to read it out aloud. It was annoying, but a habit he objectively saw was so trivial that he could never bring himself to say anything to Sandra.
“Dr MacSorley has travelled Asia and South America studying traditional healing in those countries,” she put a special emphasis on the word ‘countries’, “as well as immersing - immersing - himself in the faith healing tradition taught by Fr Antonio del Amici in Padua, Italy.”
If Simon Harris was someone who never quite fulfilled his promise, Simon MacSorley did not have any promise to squander in anyone’s imagination. He had been a completely unknown presence to his peers as well as to the faculty when an undergraduate, both as a preclinical and as a clinical student. He had failed into the year Simon Harris' graduated form after beginning two years previously, and somehow managed to get through despite having to repeat nearly every exam. MacSorley was neither a big drinker nor a great socialiser - indeed no-one knew him well. He graduated with his peers as a sort of afterthought. There was a certain amount of bitterness expressed by some. They had slaved so hard, had turned up at so many lectures and on so many early hospital mornings to be roundly ignored, that it seemed unfair that MacSorley had the same degree as they did. There was even talk of a petition.
By now he was the object not of sorrow but of pity. MacSorley had become an infamously hopeless intern - not lazy, not dangerous as such (enough checks and balances were in place), but hopeless. He was adequate at internship, but his was an adequacy that would go no further. He managed not to land a job after Intern year and spent time wandering around looking for work, and had then got a place on one of the nascent GP schemes. Soon he was dismissed from this for chronic non-attendance at his Obs and Gynae rotation. “By mutual consent” was the phrase used in the inevitable gossipy exchanges in the medical world.
Mrs Reilly was one of Simon’s regulars. At least thrice weekly she attended the clinic, with the elderly constellation of anxiety, arthritis, hypertension and at the back of it all loneliness and a fear of the next world.
Paul was neither particularly anti-alternative medicine not completely for it. He could reconcile an ungrudging appreciation of its possibilities with a cynicism about the scientific basis, or lack thereof, of the enterprise. His attitude could be summarised as: it might make them feel better, but does it actually work?
Mrs Reilly’s major complaint was rheumatoid arthritis, for which she was on a great range of conventional and unconventional treatments. None seemed to make much difference to searing pain of the evenings. She habitually wore a little brass band, purportedly magnetic, on each wrist, as well as various scapulars.
But today things were different. Mrs Reilly walked in - no, she bounced in. Paul, in the five years he had been attached to the practice, had known her to be his most consistently unhappy patient. Always the pain of the arthritis, always the worry of being worried.
“How are you, Mrs Reilly?” he asked.
“How are you, Doctor?”
“I’m fine. I have to say you look marvellous.”
“Doctor Mac Sorley has me cured,” she announced.
Doctor MacSorley’s name was being mentioned more and more by the patients. Most of them felt just as bad, or worse, after whatever exactly MacSorley did to them or for them - nevertheless, their reverence for him held. Simon began to feel a resentment at this unquestioning allegiance.
Simon had his memories of first year physics, and his later reading of popular science magazines, to thank for his big idea.
Every so often, seized by an enthusiasm for science, he bought a copy of the New Scientist. Seduced by the fascinating variety of the world of science depicted therein, he would subscribe to the magazine, and over the next year accumulate a stack of unread copies. For he was much more interested in the publication as an abstract entity than a reality. He would flick through the news at the front, then the letters and the amusing column at the end, start on one of the feature articles which always seemed to promise much more than they delivered, and that would be that.
He would unwrap each from the plastic wrapping, for he would feel guilty if he left the magazines not only unread but unopened (like the medical weeklies) After a while he would put the growing pile into the attic, with the other unread copies.
It was a long summer for him. Sandra’s annual leave had all been taken earlier in the year, and St Elizabeth’s Maternity was much busier than usual. Thus he was spending the earlier part of most evenings alone. The slight disappointment he had began to always feel grew. He began to think on what might have been. He should have studied history, or even better done pure science. Then he would have achieved something, left some kind of mark.
He had always felt an affinity for Simon MacSorley, possibly because of their shared first name, but more fundamentally because they were both, in very different ways, at odds with the mass of the class. MacSorley had done something with his life, he thought. Something ridiculous perhaps, but remembering Sandra’s cut phrases of disdain, Simon felt a great sympathy for him. Sandra at times like that took on the form of the great, impersonal world, crushing the spirits brave and eccentric enough to follow their own paths.
Simon Harris had never really been an enthusiast for “travel”, but the idea of MacSorley’s travels - not the travels themselves or the places he had gone, but the idea of them, with their search for the healing, the search for the sublime, appealed to his sense of life as a novelistic series of grand gestures. He had come to believe that the rational calculation of advantage was not only impossible, but not a true motivator for any human being, no matter how seemingly rational. People acted as they were emotionally impelled to. The rationalisations followed. This was not a call to indulgence of whims; Simon’s own thrift, for example, was his own emotional need and also in his own interest.
He was not naturally given to ruminating, and after a short while he would get up, pace around the house, and start reading a book. Or watch TV for a while, although he disliked the passivity. It was better than the ruminating, and then Sandra would come back and they would talk over the events of the day.
One evening this ruminating went on longer than usual. What might have been, if only I had used my talents, he thought. A prize he had won in school for science writing - it was on quantum physics, Simon forgot most of the details - had come into his mind. It felt so recent; his self-image was the same as that fifteen-year old. This is what the passing time means, he thought, the realisation that possibility has come to an end. And then, returning suddenly to his usual essential optimism, he thought no, that isn’t necessarily it.
He got up and went to the attic, and began to dig around the stack of old New Scientists. Then he found it.
“The Computing Power of the World in a cup of tea.” The cover showed a cup of tea in plain white mug, against a white background. One could barely tell where the cup ended and the background began. Only the crescent of brown liquid reassured the viewer that this was a cup of tea. It was an article he had never finished, but the idea had stayed with him.
The article itself he skimmed over, reading the enticing opening paragraph with great attention but gradually losing interest as the article became more detailed. The idea of immense computing power in a little liquid stuck with him. Sometimes he wondered if something like the colloid plasma expanders who used to write up for intravenous administration for so many patients when he was a young doctor might do the job.
If only he had devoted his life to something like this! It was not too late. But where to begin? After all, he couldn’t even finish the article.
Then he thought of the savings he had accumulated with Sandra. They had bought a house in Galway when the prices were reasonably, and two doctors had no problem getting a mortgage at at time when this was not to be taken for granted. As the mortgage reduced in scale, their not inconsiderable salaries had gone into high-interest accounts. And all through the years Simon himself had put a thousand pounds here, a few hundred euro there, into various saving certificates and government bonds and forestry shares.
“The Irish Investor’s Bible” - that was the subtitle of Investment Republic, the magazine which Dr Harris subscribed to. Usually he would hop over from the surgery at lunchtime, and would pick up the post. He hid this from Sandra, feeling a vague shame. It would be like being found with a self-help book, of which he had more than a few hidden in drawers and amongst piles of clothes Simon liked to keep in touch with the world of investments, as high yield and low risk as possible. These aspirations are of course mutually contradictory, and up to now he had always leaned towards the low risk.
Therefore, for a long time he had never looked in the section called “Investment Opportunities” Investing in a company as opposed to a savings plan, guaranteed by a reputable financial institution, had never appealed to Simon, but now - mesmerised by the idea of money as a stairway to, if not scientific eminence, than the visionary status of a Craig Venter, he looked eagerly every month, especially for the magic q word. He might not understand quantum computing, but he knew that his greatness, his destiny, lay in the field.
And one day it appeared. Quark Quantum Qumputer Inc. Simon giggled at the name. How could it be so incredibly perfect? Then he read the brief profile. Q3, as they referred to themselves throughout, were a start up company based in Duluth, Minnesota. Their CEO was Allan Archibald Montgomery. They intended “to bring the quantum revolution into every living room.” They were looking for an investor with one million U.S. dollars to kickstart their work. They had a promising prototype quantum computer. For more details send an email to info@q3.com. Simon accepted this invitation.
A week later so some folders came through the post. Simon had got into the habit of coming back home at lunchtime to check the mail. There were pages and pages of diagrams - the prototype computer was a small gel which exploited gammatronic properties of Polybendium. That sounded good. There were many press cuttings - from newspapers such as the Pennsylvania Democrat-Enquirer, the Skokie Constitution-Telegraph, the Alabama Vanguard and the Peoria Post-Palimpsest, from magazines such as Investment Frontiers, Technology and Computing Quarterly and The Monthly Atlantean. Simon had never heard of any of these publications before, but they were all evidently genuine - in the margins of each photocopied piece there were items of unfakeable local colour - Senators and Congressmen and Mayors praising or denouncing this or that, Skokie and Peoria residents achieving notable feats or bemoaning official apathy.
There were pages of financial details, which boiled down to one salient fact - investors who put their money into Quark Quantum Qumputer would have a unique opportunity to get involved in the tomorrow’s biggest technology - today. Not only were riches promised, but a place in history.
Why not? Why not? The thought stayed with him all through the afternoon and evening clinics. He sent another email later that evening, before Sandra came home. This was addressed directly to Allan Archibold Montgomery. In it, Simon proposed that he invest one million dollars in Q3
Two days later, he received a reply.
“Dear Dr Harris,” it began. As he opened it, Simon felt a surge of joy, of anxiety. “We would of course be absolutely delighted to have you on board. In exchange for your generous investment, we can guarantee you a seat on the board of Q3, and 20% of all profits for the next ten years. As the Q3PO prototype is nearing the end of beta testing, we anticipate a launch date in the next eighteen to twenty months.”
It continued in this vein for a while, and ended with a request for wire transfer of funds to an account in Duluth. They would dispatch contracts of agreement immediately, and once returned signed Dr Simon Harris would be “on board” the Quark Quantum Qumputer bandwagon.
“Separate accounts and separate beds”, Sandra had once read before marriage, and sometimes repeated, “are the secret of a successful marriage.” Simon was glad she had ignored both parts of the saying, and she entrusted their savings to Simon. Cashing in all their savings plans, Simon knew he could raise two hundred thousand euro. Not enough.
What about the house? His name was the only one on the deed. Sandra had never bothered to make any enquiries about it. She need never know. Their income was pretty much guaranteed, and once Q3 came good there would be no problem in any case. There was the flat above the King’s Head that they had bought as a buy-to-let investment. Every academic year it was let to students, and then in summers it would be let to tourists, or JYAers from the States.
Simon couldn’t face evicting the students now, right before their exams. For he wanted the money quickly; he wanted to have made the investment yesterday. There was a rush of impatience in him that would not be satisfied to wait. As he sat in front of Montgomery’s email, his thoughts turned to Paul Gildea. Arrogant, masterful Paul Gildea, strutting around the golf course, talking about his keynote presentation to the European Society of Renal Medicine or somesuch body of chancers. Paul Gildea. Simon resolved that he would outstrip Paul Gildea, outstrip him easily.
Sandra rang at this point. She had been driving home when a call came from the hospital - a woman in the twenty-third week of pregnancy coming in. She had to rush back to the maternity hospital. It could be late when she got back. She was sorry, Simon told her not to be.
He would do it. Tomorrow, he would go into Connacht Building Society and remortgage the house as soon as possible. He could arrange to cancel the morning clinics for a few days next week, arrange to have a valuer come round, and within a few days the remortgaging would be arranged. A house three doors down with only three bedrooms had gone for six hundred thousand euro the previous month. Theirs should easily realise at least that. At the current rate of exchange, he should easily be able to accumulate a million dollars.
Three weeks after he had went into the Bank of Ireland, and waving his passport at the disbelieving manager, arranged to have the million dollars transferred to the Q3 account, Simon sent another email to Montgomery. Where are the memoranda of agreement that were to be sent, the contracts? He had been anticipating their appearance in every post. He then thought that they would be delivered by registered mail.
There was no reply. And no reply either to the succeeding emails. At first, Simon told himself that something had perhaps gone wrong with the email server. He also wondered if the money had disappeared into the ether. There had been something unbelievable about the series of transactions. He had been a millionaire, and then no longer a millionaire, without ever seeing any money. A check at the bank had confirmed that the money had gone into the Minnesota account. The account had, further enquiries confirmed, since been closed.
Simon would always have been terrified of just this eventuality. Yet now he faced it with utter equanimity. After all, their salaries were equal to the mortgage repayments. And despite the evaporation of Q3 - their website still existed out there in cyberspace, but no-one answered the phones - Simon felt that at least he had staked his all on something. Sandra noticed his detached air, but didn’t say anything. It was just Simon. She felt no guilt when she rang to say she was working late, and then drove to a room in the Radisson Hotel to change for dinner with Paul Gildea.
There was no reason things couldn’t go on as they were, Simon realised with relief and disappointment. There was no reason things couldn’t go on as they were, until one day Sandra came home. She came into the living room, where Simon was reading the Irish Times, evidently holding herself together with great difficulty.
“I had a needlestick today. In theatre.”
A needlestick incident. Of itself, this wouldn’t necessarily be anything to worry about, he thought. There would be a tiresome series of tests. It happened to him every so often. Usually he ignored it. In hospitals, and especially in theatre, it was harder to just carry on - so many people saw it.
Sandra continued with a clipped delivery. “She’s HIV positive. High risk. High viral load. It’s always the way.”
What did that mean, “it’s always the way?” Simon thought. Then he realised that Sandra had abandoned her mask of self-control and was weeping openly. He went to embrace her, folding his arms around her awkwardly.
She cried and cried, and then composed herself. Then she told him she needed to take some time off work for the series of blood tests that would be required. The initial tests might be negative, but she would need to have them again over the months. Due to the bloody nature of her branch of medicine, she would have to take this time off work.
“Still,” she was almost smiling as she wiped away tears, “we have all those income protection insurance things, don’t we?”
She was smiling fully now, with a look that said “I always thought you were a dry stick, but now look who’s right.”
Simon felt fear grasp his intestines. There was no way to avoid it now. Perhaps he could tell her half the truth, tell her that he had cashed in some of those policies, but leave out the mortgage and the bulk of their savings.
But he realised that he couldn’t - not anymore. Each lie would only lie buried for a little while, and would then be uncovered. He would have to tell her everything.
“Sandra, I have to tell you something about that.”
She looked alarmed. He wondered what was the best, the most persuasive way to explain what had happened.
“Sandra, you do know that when I was young, I was one of the most brilliant boys in one of the best schools in the country...“ he began.
Simon walked out of the house. It would always be empty for him from now on. It was the end of the academic year, and the flat above the Kings’ Head was becoming free. He got into the waiting taxi, looking back at the door. Sandra wasn’t there.
It had all been smooth, really. Respective solicitors had taken care of everything. One day he had gone back, to get his clothes and a few books. It had been pre-arranged that Sandra would not be there. The practice was finished, after all.
When he got back to the flat, he went straight to the bedroom and lay down. He was wrecked, too tired to move his things from the house into the flat. They could stay in the car another couple of hours, what harm?
What will I do now? He thought, and for the first time he realised that this was more than just what would he do for the rest of the evening. This was what now for the rest of my life. He couldn’t go back to the practice, that was certain. While his medical registration was obviously unaffected by all this, the incident at the conference had ended it all forever. His patients had been taken over by Dr de Morgan, an eager young man with none of Simon’s apprehensions and hang-ups.
He looked through his phone numbers. He still had Simon MacSorley’s number, as he hoped. He went to find a pay phone, for he could no longer pay the mobile phone bill.
Three months later he was walking along the beach at Berehaven. Running up a sand-dune, he felt exhilarated. He had become used to the life as Simon MacSorley’s Personal Assistant, seeing the desperate men and women who came to see him.
The day of the interview with MacSorley, he put on a suit. He went back to his parents' home to pick it up. It was the suit he had worn for work experience with an estate agents firm when he was in school. He had lost so much weight that it now fitted once again.
The interview hadn't lasted long.
"Ha, you. Not so up yourself now, are you?"
"I'm sorry."
"You and that Sandra. Weren't you great? Well, how the mighty have fallen, eh?"
"Look, I don't need this..."
"But you do. You wouldn't be here if you didn't. And I can tell you something else too. All of this is bull. Only fools and dopes could believe it. You have got to pretend you do, and you don't have to pretend very well, because Simon boy you wouldn't believe how bloody stupid people are. They believe what they want to believe."
Simon came to hate the work more than he hated Simon. However he slept well, and felt full of energy and enthusiasm. He made the little bit of money that was needed, and most of all he had no limit on his time. He could walk in the wind and rain, and felt connected to the universe then. He had tried. The universe carried on, oblivious to our efforts, our triumphs, our failures.
As he reached the top of the sand dune, he suddenly realised how close he was to the golf course. The realisation came just as the course itself came into view, and all at once he could see Paul Gildea and Sandra on the course. They were laughing, and Gildea was standing astride Sandra, taking her hands through the motions of the swing. She never played golf before, was Simon’s first thought. He then noticed their physical proximity, their ease together.
Simon saw them on the course, and told himself: To hell with them. I feel sorry for them, I feel sorry for their lives. Not half as beautiful as mine is now.
He said this to himself a few times, but he didn’t feel it. He didn’t feel sorry for them. Try hard as he could, he really longed for the warmth of Sandra again. The wind picked up a step, and the gust made Simon shiver. And with that shiver, Simon suddenly felt the beauty of the world, and he felt sorry for the laughing golfers.