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?

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.

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