Review: The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Sinead Gleeson

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka (Published by Penguin)

In the 1920s, as Ireland prepared to sign The Treaty, and the seeds of the Wall Street Crash were sown, groups of Japanese women traveled to America and a new destiny. These “picture brides”, who pre-dated Internet mail order spouses, journeyed to the US to marry men they had only seen in photographs. Julie Otsuka’s last novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, also dealt with Japanese American life, but this book, a prequel of sorts, focuses on women – daughters, sisters, wives. In the opening chapter, they endure an arduous ocean crossing, bonding and gossiping while battling sickness and starvation. Otsuka immediately sets up the book’s very specific narrative, told in the first-person plural. As the ship rolls and heaves, the group voice works brilliantly at capturing the shared lives of the women and the confined sense of sisterhood. “Most of us on the boat were sure we would make good wives. We knew how to sew and cook. We knew how to serve tea and arrange flowers and sit quietly on our flat wide feet for hours.” They dream of an idealised life of domestic quietude; instead they are greeted by husbands who are older than expected with “rough hands”, who expect them to work as hard as they do. For 15 hours a day, these women pick crops, clean houses or pack fruit, sleeping on floors, in sheds or outhouses. They have little money and fewer possessions.

It makes absolute sense for Otsuka’s narrator to be a group one. Each woman’s life is a brutal facsimile of a relentless shared experience. Their existences are barely distinguishable from each other, and Otsuka’s ‘groupspeak’ conveys this hauntingly. United by a common destiny, their consciousness is relayed with an incantatory rhythm. In ‘First Night’, a chapter about marriage consummation, each sentence begins with the same words: “They took us before we were ready and the bleeding did not stop for three days. They took us with our white silk kimonos twisted up high over our heads and we were sure we were about to die. They took us greedily, hungrily…” The repetition mimics the force and routine of their sexual experiences and this device works better in specific sections of the book. As we move through the chapters – ‘Babies’ and ‘The Children’ are self-explanatory – this pluralised narrative becomes both a strength and a weakness. The list-poem feel resembles a lyrical ode and is consistently effective in communicating the mindset of a group – of being thrown together on a boat; of relentless life in the fields; of the women’s shared sense of powerlessness. While it deliberately (and successful) creates the sense of claustrophobia that Otsuka is clearly striving for, it falters because of its lack of variety. Characters are interchangeable (which may be the writer’s intention) but the reader feels frustrated. Each woman flits past in a handful of sentences and none are explored in any depth.

In very understated terms, the book also explores the American Dream. These women expected were handsome, solvent husbands, instead of elderly landless labourers. On the rare (and clandestine) occasion the women are given pretty things (usually by men they are not married to), they learn another life lesson: “that in America you get nothing for free”. Otsuka is very convincing on the sense of assimilation, presented in an authentic 360-degree arc. The newly arrived women move from non-language, to grappling with customs, to later trying not to stand out, as the Second World War looms. The cycle of life continues as they give birth to children who work the fields as soon as they are old enough, and who become Westernised and ostracized at the same time. With the war, comes rumours of a “traitor’s list” which “was written in indelible red ink…The list contained over 500 names… The list contained over 5,000 names… The list was endless”. Curfews, travel restrictions and social isolation increase as war (and Pearl Harbor) thwarts America. Otsuka’s book is driven by language and a poetic vision, and while it is a beautiful act of lamentation, it is let down by a voice which reveals little about the women it represents.

This review originally appeared in The Sunday Business Post on January 22nd, 2012.

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The Works on RTE…

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Sinead Gleeson

The Works team, L-R: Kevin Gildea, Nadine O'Regan, John Kelly and me.

This Thursday, RTE’s successor to The View launches. The Works, which airs on Thursday nights at 10.45pm on RTE One, will be presented by John Kelly, and joined by myself, Nadine O’Regan and Kevin Gildea as reporters. We’ll be covering all sorts of topics and getting out of the studio to report. On the first show, I’ll be talking to Michael Fassbender about his roles in recent films Shame, Haywire and the upcoming David Cronenberg film A Dangerous Method; Nadine will be examining Irish rap; Paula Meehan recites her new poem Occupy Language and Neil Hannon – aka The Divine Comedy – will play live in studio and chat to John.

The über-talented Samantha Hunt took the picture above (and the one here) and made the terrifying process of having photos taken less terrifying.

The Works, RTE One, Thursdays, 10.45pm (and on the RTE Player and The Works archive). You can follow updates on the programme on Twitter at @RTETheWorks

 

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Interview: Ronan Guilfoyle

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Sinead Gleeson

OF ALL OF the instruments associated with classical music – violin, cello, piano – the electric guitar remains an unlikely boisterous cousin. Its plugged-in capabilities make it seem like a slick arriviste compared to instruments that have been the backbone of orchestras for centuries. As technology has advanced, more classical works are concerned with electronic sounds, but not electronic instruments, especially when it comes to symphonic composition. Tonight, musician and composer Ronan Guilfoyle will explore the possibilities of the electric guitar within a classical framework, with Hands , a new commission for the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra (NSO). Dublin-based Guilfoyle is primarily a jazz musician. He is self-taught, and his father had a strong interest in music and an eclectic range of tastes. “I was raised with both classical and jazz growing up,” says Guilfoyle. “My father loved music. He didn’t play an instrument, but he had speakers in every room of the house downstairs. He particularly loved jazz made after 1945 and classical music from the 1880s onwards, so I heard a mix of Bartók, Debussy, Ravel, mixed with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.”

In professional musician terms, Guilfoyle is somewhat unusual, in that he has never been classically trained and, comparatively, was a late starter. At 18, he took up bass guitar and always felt that he would “gravitate towards the double bass”. As an instrument, they were pricey, cumbersome and the cheaper models “were poorly made”. In the 1980s, a friend gave him an acoustic bass (not an upright one, like the double bass he once craved) and he confesses it was an Orwellian moment of “seeing the future”.

Having listened to several acoustic bass players as a child, one of the standout influences for him was Charles Mingus. “He was the first double-bass virtuoso, and a difficult man who did what he wanted.” After years of working with both acoustic bass and guitar, the genesis of Hands came about after conversations with people connected to the orchestra. “I remember expressing my amazement at how little the electric guitar is being used by contemporary composers, considering its possibilities. Post-Jimi Hendrix, the guitar has a 50-year history of virtuosity; of tonal variety and sonic possibility, but its use is almost unknown in the repertoire, and the idea forHands germinated out of that.”

Playing electric guitar tonight is Rick Peckham, also assistant chair of the Berklee College of Music Guitar in Boston, where 1,100 guitarists are in training. Guilfoyle’s preferred instrument, however, is acoustic bass – another instrument that he says “doesn’t get a look in, in orchestral terms” – but the possibilities of the electric guitar made the idea of a symphonic work appealing.

“Classical music has its own traditions, and its tradition is one of acoustic instruments. Composers have taken on the idea of electronica and electronics, but not the idea of electric instruments. There are very few classical pieces from the last 30 or 40 years that actually use electric instruments – from electric bass, guitar or keyboards.” With the constant updating of technology, making an array of things sonically possible, there is now more convergence between the two. Composers such as Nico Muhly, Jóhann Jóhannsson and Dustin O’Halloran work within classical parameters, while experimenting with the possibilities of sound and instrumentation. Guilfoyle is interested in this concept of cross-pollination, but is wary of “genre-fication”. However, he is accepting of the myriad influences that may find their way into a composer’s work. Rather than being censorious, he believes they should be embraced.

“Debussy went to the World Fair in Paris in 1889, where he first heard a gamelan group. If you listen to the piano music he composed around the turn of the century, you can really hear its influence in the Études and the Preludes. It’s there in the tonal influences, and is subsumed into his work. It’s a great example of how something from outside one tradition – perhaps so-called crossover – produces a piece of music that would not have existed if he had never heard that gamelan group.”

Hands is Guilfoyle’s second commission for the National Symphony Orchestra. He has also been commissioned three times by the National Concert Orchestra and has written for the Manhattan School of Music’s Jazz Philharmonic Orchestra. What does this latest commission mean? “It’s a privilege and such a thrill. The NSO is an extremely undervalued cultural asset to the country. Week in, week out, they play very challenging music and it’s an absolute cultural treasure.”

Guilfoyle believes there is a symbiotic relationship in being both a musician, and a composer. “Because I’m a jazz musician, the act of being creative is the same. Composition is just improvisation slowed down – it’s the same impulse. Most jazz musicians I know also compose music and the act of performing can bring a lot of practical baggage, like travel, hotels, and bad sound. “With composing, all of those irritants are gone, and it’s very seductive. The ultimate impulse for me is to play, because it’s immediate and that’s where I started. The feel of the instrument under your hands and responding to it – that immediacy of playing music will never be replaced in my affections.”

Hands premieres tonight at the NCH at 8pm, with works by John Adams and Shostakovich. Ronan Guilfoyle is in conversation with Rick Peckham from 7pm. nch.ie

This article originally appeared in The Irish Times on Friday, January 20th, 2012. 

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“You’re gonna need a bigger boat” – Why I love Jaws

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Sinead Gleeson

Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Quint (Robert Shaw) watch Jaws chomp through a rope

One morning in the 1980s, my younger brother and I shuffled down the stairs, bleary-eyed and slightly shell-shocked. As we mournfully munched our cereal, we wondered who’d confess first. “I thought he was going to come through the wall!” he finally wailed. I nodded in solemn agreement. “I was sure he was under my bed”. 12 hours previously we had seen Jaws for the first time. A couple of things were lost on me at the time, not least that a large fish couldn’t survive out of water, tormented by the itchy carpet under my bed. At 9, the fact that Jaws was a masterpiece also went over my head. It was made during Steven Spielberg’s finest decade in various film-maker roles, which began with Jaws (as director) in 1975, followed by Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Blues Brothers, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET, Poltergeist, Gremlins, The Goonies and Back to the Future. On release, Jaws was an unprecedented success, becoming the highest-grossing film in the US, until Star Wars, two years later. The studio believed that big names would distract from the story, so several actors were mooted but turned down for film. Robert Duvall and Charlton Heston were rumoured for Brody’s part (Heston never forgave Spielberg when he didn’t get it). Lee Marvin said no to playing Quint and both Jeff Bridges and Jon Voight auditioned for the part of Hooper. The chemistry between the trio who eventually played the roles Quint (Robert Shaw), Brody (Roy Scheider) and Hooper (Richard Dreyfus) is nail-biting to watch. Shaw and Dreyfus didn’t get on, and fought constantly on set, which added to the claustrophobic tension on the boat. The fourth performance of note is that of the shark, fondly nicknamed ‘Bruce’ (after Spielberg’s lawyer). Like most directors dabbling with horror, Spielberg recognised that the possibilities in an audience’s imagination would be far more effective than anything he created visually. As a result, it’s an hour into the film before we get to see the actual shark. The first sighting arrives via an understated moment, as Brody shovels ‘chum’ bait into the water. It’s also punctuated by one of memorable lines in cinema lore. “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” wasn’t in the script and was famously improvised by Scheider’s Brody. Several key scenes were shot underwater – at sea and in customised tanks – and Spielberg shot many scenes at waist level to give the audience’s point of view. He also used the camera to show the shark’s eye-view, but this was due to delays caused by recurring faults with the mechanical shark, than arty aesthetics. What remains the most memorable element of the film is not sinewy, floating limbs or Ben Gardner’s disembodied head, but John Williams’ terrifying score. Spielberg initially had doubts about it (it went on to an Oscar) but later admitted that the film wouldn’t have been as successful without it. Comedian Billy Connolly once quipped that Jaws “was a film about a shark that played the cello”.

I’ve seen the film at least 50 times, and one of those was on the last night of a working summer in 1995. 10 students shared a house in Martha’s Vineyard, the fictional setting of Amity in the film. Located off the coast of Massachusetts, it has six towns, four of which are ‘dry’. All of us had numerous jobs: one worked in a shop that sold shark memorabilia, another, in a fancy restaurant where he alleged Spike Lee refused to sign autographs for white people. We jokingly recreated scenes from the film and one night even found ourselves at a party on South Beach (where the famous opening party scene was filmed). Another housemate thought he had contracted Lyme disease after a tick bite and took a trip to the doctor. The GP turned out to be Dr. Robert Nevin, who had played Amity’s medical examiner in the film. I will never pass a television when Jaws is on, without sitting down to watch it. There are too many favourite scenes: Robert Shaw’s USS Indianapolis monologue; the scar-swapping where they sing Show Me the Way To Go Home. It’s an intelligent blockbuster that still has bite.

Jaws screens as part of the Spielberg Season at the IFI, Dublin tonight at 11pm, and on Monday January 16th at 18.40pm. www.ifi.ie. 

This article originally appeared in The Irish Times on Monday, January 15th, 2012.

 

 

 

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Interview: Carol Morley

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Sinead Gleeson

Carol Morley, director of Dreams of a Life

Carol Morley’s obsession with a young woman’s death has led to a powerful film, writes SINEAD GLEESON

IN 2006, FILM-MAKER Carol Morley was on a London tube when she picked up a newspaper. The headline concerned a young woman, Joyce Vincent, who had died alone in her flat, but wasn’t discovered for three years. Morley felt what most of us would feel – horror, sadness, incomprehension – and was determined to find out more.

The article contained few details and no photograph, but the story consumed Morley, who decided to make a film called Dreams of a Life about Joyce.

With scant information, the first stop was the internet, which was both helpful and infuriating. “I discovered people discussing the story online, speculating that she was a couch potato or a ‘miserable bitch’. It made me so angry – that couldn’t be someone’s legacy.”

Morley met the area’s MP and attempted to obtain information from local authorities. She began her search by placing ads in newspapers and on the sides of cabs. Several people got in touch, but with the same opening gambit – that the woman Morley described, who died alone and lay undiscovered for years, couldn’t be the same person.

Those who knew her told Morley that they assumed she had left them all behind and moved on to better things. The more Morley delved, the more connections she found to her own life. She and Joyce were almost the same age and had lived on the same street. Both had lost a parent at a young age. More people came forward to say they knew her, including Martin, an ex-boyfriend, who features heavily in the film. Another boyfriend featured is music producer Alistair Abrahams, who introduced her to Jimmy Cliff, Gil Scott Heron and Isaac Hayes.

What comes across is that here was a beautiful, smart, kind woman, with a great job and countless friends – how did no one notice she was gone? “It’s ironic,” says Morley. “People say that she lit up a room, that she was unforgettable. She was dynamic and this, conversely, seemed to contribute to her being forgotten. Everyone thought she was off having a better life than them.”

When Joyce’s body was found only a skeleton remained – making identification difficult. The cause of death is unknown, but what becomes clear is that Joyce’s life was unsettled and contributed to her falling off the radar. She moved between jobs, boyfriends and flats in an endless nomadic trek.

Her family had lost touch with her and Morley tracked them down while researching the film.

“They didn’t want to be involved and I respect that. We screened it for them and my aim was always to make a film of consent, and to have people involved who wanted to be involved. I think this is a tragic case of someone who isolated themselves and cut themselves off. She stopped communicating with her family, and we don’t know why.”

Morley discovered that, at one point, Joyce lived in a women’s refuge after a partner subjected her to domestic violence. Towards the end, she was working as a cleaner. “People said she had immense pride and she wasn’t where she wanted to be in life. A lot of people identify with that. Often, we don’t reveal how we’re really feeling,” says Morley, “but I think we have a personal responsibility to tell others how we feel, especially if we’re isolated.”

Morley’s father died when she was 11, through suicide, and she finds something relatable in that tragedy to this story. “I feel you can’t save someone if they don’t reach out. Not that Joyce needed saving, but we have every right as an adult to cut ourselves off from the world – regardless of how those around us might feel.”

A huge amount of research went into the film, and Morley admits that it took over her life for five years. Partial funding came from the Irish Film Board, who Morley says were her “saving grace”. Dreams of a Life was released in the UK before Christmas and provoked a huge reaction. “People watch it, but it makes them think about their own lives. One person told me they’ve started inviting friends around again after they realised that had kept others out of their private space. It seems to raise questions around isolation and how we share our difficulties. So maybe now we can stop passing people by or assuming everyone is okay.”

When Joyce’s remains were found, she was surrounded by wrapped Christmas presents, whose recipients we never discover. It’s a tragic detail, but Morley sees it as a sign of hope; Joyce was ready to re-engage with the world. Her exhaustive research also turned up footage of Joyce at a concert for Nelson Mandela – a gig that was watched on TV by millions.

“The film is called Dreams of a Life because I didn’t want people to think that it was purely a work of journalism where they would find answers. It was more about evoking her life.”

Morley never knew Joyce, but has spent much time poring over the details of her short life. “I feel that she will always be with me,” she says. “She is someone I only know through other people, so she has been defined that way. But I don’t think people exaggerated about her, I think she was a genuinely lovely person. She loved poetry and music and had a real energy for life. She’s a person I would loved to have met.”

This article was first published in The Irish Times on Monday, January 9th, 2012.  
Links: Carol Morley’s excellent piece in the Observer about Joyce.
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Fine dining on day of The Dead

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Sinead Gleeson

John Huston's film version of James Joyce's The Dead (© Brenda Fitzsimons)

The Champagne corks had barely fallen silent on January 1st and James Joyce was already taking up headlines and column inches. In 2012, the focus has been on the lifting of EU copyright restrictions, allowing publication and performance of all his major works for free. Those familiar with the author will know the first week of the year has a direct link to Joyce. Events of The Dead , his masterful bookend story in Dubliners, takes place on January 6th. Joyce probably chose the date deliberately. As well as being Nollaig na mBan (a day when women traditionally took a rest from housework), January 6th is the date of the Epiphany. Given his contempt for the Catholicism of his time, it is likely Joyce was referring to his own extrapolation of the word as much as the Christian feast day.

In The Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man , Stephen speaks about moments of epiphany, which Joyce equated with moments of spiritual revelation. He later explained to his brother Stanislaus that epiphanies were “little errors and gestures – mere straws in the wind – by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal”. The explanation mused over by Stephen was carefully transposed onto all of the stories in Dubliners. The Dead’s central characters, Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta, who laments the memory of a dead love, attend the story’s centrepiece dinner. The lavish feast takes place at the home of the Misses Morkans.

Tonight, what is considered one of literature’s most famous meals will be recreated in Dublin’s Gresham Hotel. Organised jointly by Sweny’s pharmacy (now run as a Joycean cultural centre) and the James Joyce Centre, the event has attracted huge interest. “Last year, we held it in two places because we had a capacity of 50. We had 25 people for food in Sweny’s, while another 25 watched the film version of The Dead in a private cinema – and then we swapped around. This year, we wanted to do something bigger,” says Wendy Conroy of Sweny’s. Sweny’s pharmacy is mentioned in Ulysses (where Leopold Bloom buys a bar of lemon soap), but the closing pages of The Dead take place in the Gresham. No less than 150 guests are expected there tonight for the sold-out event and will dine on the same food as in the story.

Joyce’s story menu is simple, but ambitious: “Goose, ham, spiced beef . . . two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam . . . Purple raisins and peeled almonds, Smyrna figs, custard topped with grated nutmeg, a bowl of chocolates . . . oranges, American apples . . . with port, dark sherry, stout, ale and minerals.”

“For cost reasons we’re providing turkey, not goose, but everything else will be the same – except the cigars,” laughs Conroy. She recalls that the specific food choices in the story had their origin in a vivid memory of Joyce’s. “When he and Nora Barnacle went to live in Trieste, they were a young, married couple, far from home, with no money. They spent their first Christmas Day in bed, and daydreamed about the food they would eat if they could afford a big feast.” The Dead Dinner will also echo several events of the story, from being welcomed by Gabriel Conroy’s maiden aunts to a rendition of Arrayed for the Bridal, sung by the Shannon Colleens (Sinéad Murphy and Darina Gallagher, who frequently perform their own Songs of Joyce shows).

The singing of The Lass of Aughrim falls to singer Noel O’Grady, who has an interest in Joyce’s own musical past. “He was a very accomplished singer and a contemporary of Count John McCormack. Both shared a music tutor, and while Joyce’s voice didn’t have the volume, it certainly had the quality. I have a light, lyrical tenor voice and so did Joyce, so he intrigues me.”

In the story, a tenor, Bartell D’Arcy, sings the plaintive song in a room upstairs as Gabriel’s wife Gretta listens, lost in thought, on the stairs. The “off-stage” aspect of Gabriel’s song is quite theatrical, almost operatic. “Bartell D’Arcy is hoarse when he sings the song, and he’s invisible, which echoes Michael Fury’s death,” says O’Grady. “Joyce was brilliant at placing music in specific places in his books. He knew that presenting such a simple song that way would have that very effect.” Much of O’Grady’s work is linked to Irish literature, including writers such as John B. Keane and Patrick Kavanagh. He has sung The Lass of Aughrim in Moscow and Berlin at Joyce-related events, including a dinner in 2004, the centenary year of Ulysses . The venue was the Georgian house at 15 Usher’s Island, Dublin, where the original musical gathering of the story takes place.

Owner Brendan Kilty has long been fascinated by the house and its connection to Dublin literary history. “I decided in the 1970s that one day I would buy the house at Usher’s Island. I just knew it would come my way, and in 2000 it finally did.” Far from the Georgian grace of the story, the house was in a poor state by then, housing drug addicts who slept rough. It had no roof, no top floor and a back wall on the brink of collapse. “All I wanted to do was to restore it to its original condition and recreate the famous dinner from Joyce’s story. I got great support from the late Arden Gantly, who worked as an artistic director on John Huston’s 1987 film version. He explained what they’d done on the set of the film, and while it was helpful to replicate elements, we were careful of just presenting a Hollywood interpretation.”

Kilty admits to spending a “black hole” of money in his efforts to restore the house, and that scaffolding was still up when the dinner took place on January 6th, 2004. “We had original tea urns and Georgian cutlery loaned to us by a lady with a significant collection. I was delighted that our guest of honour was Josie MacAvin, who was set decorator on the Huston film version. While we had 100 people for dinner, it was very informal, but people dressed in period costume. There were a lot of white bow ties.”

Sweny’s hosts regular cultural events, many connected to Joyce. Privately funded, the former pharmacy is staffed by volunteers. Those with tickets for the dinner will enjoy the vintage frocks and hair feathers, and for those who do not there’s a reading of the story open to all today at 1pm in Sweny’s at Lincoln Place. The snow will not be “general all over Ireland” tonight, while galoshes will be in short supply. Will the Sweny’s event preach to the converted or attempt to win new fans? “There has always been an elitism associated with Joyce that we really want to get rid of,” says Wendy Conroy. “We often refer to our interpretation as ‘James Joyce Light’ or ‘Ladybird James Joyce’, but it’s only because we want people to realise how accessible Joyce is as a writer, particularly with Dubliners. Last year, we had a lot of couples, so it ended up being quite a romantic evening. Everybody dressed up, they sang songs, and they learnt the dances. It proved that Joyce could be fun. This year, all the table names will be stories from Dubliners , and it’s sold out – which proves the interest is there.”

This article originally appeared in The Irish Times on Friday, January 6th, 2012.

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Anniversaries, coincidences and fate

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Sinead Gleeson

Today as I drove my daughter to crèche, I found myself driving behind a hearse. It was carrying not one, but two coffins, a doubly sobering symbol of the end of life. One looked bigger, bulkier and together I wondered if it was a couple, or a family. Perhaps there was some comfort in lying side by side – pine coffins like parallel sleepers on the road to who knows where. Hearses – all heavy-duty black sleekness -always rattle my sense of mortality. Five minutes later, clutching my daughter’s hand and pushing ourselves into the slanting wind, I heard a funeral bell. Not one coffin, but two. Not one funeral reminder, but two. The coincidence that today is January 5th was not lost on me.

 

Nine years ago today, before I ever dreamed I would battle a windswept Thursday holding the pale pink hand of my little girl, something nearly took it all away. The day started with an ambulance visit and a pain in my lung that required no fingers on buzzers (“Correct! That DVT in your leg HAS traveled into your lung! Bonus point if you can spell “pulmonary embolism” Ding!). Eight hours later came the diagnosis from a blonde haemotologist who looked my own age. A sentence that begins “Well it’s not good news…” never pulls itself out of that negative tailspin. Leukemia. The only person I had ever known who had had it, was treated in Jervis Street, when it was a crumbling hospital and not a consumerist shrine. My dad had been taken there with a ruptured ulcer when my mother was pregnant with me. Only for the fact that he worked on Gardiner Street, and the hospital was nearby, he’d have died. Fate and death are interesting adversaries in my family.

Having to tell other people was the worst part. My parent’s arrival on the ward was imminent. Fearing my mother’s reaction, I chickened out and asked a nurse to tell them. When they’d been given tea, biscuits and crumpled tissues, the same nurse brought them in. To date, I don’t remember this moment, but my mother insists it happened. When her ashen face appeared around the curtain, I piped up – with forced cheeriness – “I’m not going to die, I’m going to write a book!” I have no idea where those words come from. Or where any of the words or thoughts or feelings that crowded my head did. I do remember calling my brother 11,000 miles away and listen to him sob down the phone.

The treatment – what else is there to say? – is utterly grim and relentless. Six months of intensive chemo followed, as well as a revolutionary drug made from Vitamin A by in a Chinese scientist, who I googled and nearly emailed once. The cosmetic side effects were fine. My teens were a litany of shaved head experiences, but now my expensive highlights were tumbling out, so I took the razor to them. It was the sickness; the eyesight problems that made reading impossible; the pneumonia; the jaundice; the ability to only eat crackers and cheese; the isolation.

Remission – that wonderful green light – kicked in quickly, followed by two years of obligatory maintenance treatment. Finally, in October 2005, I was free of all drugs. One year later, I was pregnant with my son. My daughter followed 16-and-a-half months after his birth and I know I am the luckiest person in the world. Every January 5th makes me feel that even more. Today is also the anniversary of my grandfather’s death. A kind, funny man who had been an army chef, he used to tell me that if anyone saw my grandmother’s ghost, it would be me (I did, but that’s another story). But death to him wasn’t frightening, nor were people who were no longer with us.  He would mysteriously say: “You should be more afraid of the living than of the dead”. And he’s right. It’s the living – usually our finicky, griping selves – who stop us from stepping up, from taking chances, from doing whatever it is we really want to do. It’s been nine years, and I am well and happy. Perhaps it’s time to make good that promise to my mother and write that book.

 

 

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Review: Kate Bush – 50 Words for Snow

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Sinead Gleeson

CD OF THE WEEK:

KATE BUSH

50 Words for Snow (Fish People)

Rating: **** 

You wait forever for a Kate Bush album and two come along in the same year. Known for her fastidious approach to making music, Bush recorded these new songs while working on her revisionist collection (Director’s Cut), released earlier in 2011.

Bush is a lifelong innovator and auteur, someone who marches to the beat of her own musical drum, defying classification and spitting reinvention like fire. This latest work, “set against the backdrop of falling snow”, promises another departure. There are just seven tracks over 65 minutes, epic rise-and-fall pieces that veer towards experimental song cycle and concept album.

Bush knows the power of voice-as-instrument, so there’s little surprise when a choirboy falsetto appears on the opening song, Snowflake . Except it’s not Kate, but her son Bertie (credited as Albert McIntosh), who sounds spookily like his mother. Snowflake also introduces a minimalist piano, which recurs and dominates an album that is the most economical work Bush has ever made.

From Lake Tahoe through to Among Angels, the album is hugely ambitious while sounding very interior. Poignant and reflective, it requires time and commitment: there are no radio-friendly centrepieces such as King of the Mountain or Rubberband Girl.

Stalwart collaborators Steve Gadd’s (on gorgeous brushed drums on the standout track, Misty), Danny Thompson and Dan McIntosh return, and the production is less crowded than previous work, giving the songs the space they need. With so much focus on piano, some will point to the similarity between the songs, but 50 Words for Snow sidesteps sameness, and actually binds the album into a story of overlapping themes and musical tropes.

Bush always surprises with her contributors – remember Prince and Lenny Henry on The Red Shoes? Here Andy Fairweather Low, Elton John, and Stephen Fry guest on an erotic song about a Yeti, lost love and different words for snow (“phlegm de neige”), respectively.

The voice is aging well, and its sonorous tone adds a solemnity to things. 50 Words for Snow is a sublime achievement, as uncompromisingly original as anything Bush has ever done. See www.katebush.com

Download Tracks: Snowflake, Misty, Among Angels

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A meeting point for rock and classical

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Sinead Gleeson

Nico Muhly

It used to be that rock and classical couldn’t be in the same room together – literally in some record shops – but Jonny Greenwood, Nico Muhly and Dustin O’Halloran have broken down the walls writes Sinéad Gleeson

WHEN COMPOSER Nico Muhly released his first solo work, he chose not to release it via a classical music label. Instead, Speaks Volumes , from the Juilliard student and Philip Glass protégé, found a home on Bedroom Community. The Icelandic collective counts among its musical founders Valgeir Sigurðsson, who has produced albums for Feist and Björk.

Earlier this week, speaking ahead of his Young Americans show with Crash Ensemble in Dublin tonight, Muhly acknowledged the distinction between the many facets of his music – but in an unexpected way. “I don’t tend to think I’m making classical or non- classical music; I like to say that I’m either in collaborative mode or non-collaborative mode, which is a slightly sneaky way of dividing up the year. A collaboration can be with anybody from a choreographer to a theatre director or a rock band. But when I’m alone, I’m alone.”

Muhly’s work has encompassed classical commissions and operas, but he has also overseen arrangements for acts such as Grizzly Bear, Antony and the Johnsons, and Bonnie “Prince” Billy. In terms of his influences, New York-based Muhly is happy to cite 16th-century religious composer William Byrd in the same breath as Prince.

Rather than locking into a push-pull conflict, the eclectic expanses of his musical interests coalesce. “I haven’t yet found that there’s such a jarring imbalance in what I’m doing,” he says, “but if sometimes I feel like I’m doing too much of one thing, it’s less about the type of music, more an indicator that I’m in the tech week for that work, where it’s all very intense.”

Earlier this month, former Coral guitarist Bill Ryder-Jones released his debut solo album, If , on Domino Records imprint Double Six. Fans of the jangly riffs he contributed to his former band will be surprised not just by the sound and scope of the project, but by its concept. Ryder-Jones took Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and added layers of orchestral instrumentation. Liverpool’s Philharmonic orchestra was commissioned and, overall, it’s a project whose ambition is equal to its success.

What’s most interesting is that Ryder-Jones’s previous forays into composition were linked to film. All three were for short films – two of his own and one for a friend – and one feels that If was made not just as an experiment but as a calling card. Rather than wander hopefully down Sunset Boulevard with a sandwich board, Ryder-Jones has shown Hollywood that he can do layered minimalism and orchestral sweep with the best of them.

Crossing over into classical is an obvious move for musicians who feel constrained by traditional instruments or the rubrics of a conventional band. Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood has increasingly gravitated towards the sonics of composition, while maintaining his role in the band.

In 2004, a year after Hail to the Thief was released, Greenwood was appointed composer-in-association with the BBC Concert Orchestra. A piece he made there, Popcorn Superhet Receiver , formed the basis for his score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. This year he agreed to score Lynne Ramsay’s chilling adaptation of We Need To Talk About Kevin after reading the script (he initially turned it down, citing time constraints).

Greenwood’s Radiohead profile undoubtedly means he has brought fans of the band into the classical arena, where they mightn’t otherwise have ventured.

This works both ways, with reciprocal moves for classical acts that find new – and younger – audiences with wider musical palettes. Take American pianist and classical composer Dustin O’Halloran, whose accomplished opuses and preludes have graced various ads and TV shows. That exposure certainly contributed to O’Halloran’s Lumiere album being released by the very progressive Fat Cat label (home to acts as diverse as Animal Collective, Hauschka and Vashti Bunyan). Iceland’s mercurial Jóhann Jóhannsson – whose work includes albums, soundtracks and music for theatre – found a similar alternative base in UK label 4AD (home to St Vincent, The National and formerly The Pixies).

For Nico Muhly, when people discover music outside of their comfort zone, it’s always a good thing. “I’m happy if somebody listens to me because they read about me, but even happier if it comes via another musician. I think the demise of the record shop itself has helped with this – once upon a time, buying classical music was like buying pornography, where you had to go into a little special room off to the side and men with sticky fingers and questionable body hair would carry on about the moral failings of one tempo versus another tempo in a recording. Now there is a more lateral listening, where people can come to my music via, say, Grizzly Bear, and from there move on to somebody like Sam Amidon, or to Timothy Andres or Judd Greenstein.”

Classical composition also provides a natural home for the tricky beast that is the concept album. One of the reasons Kate Bush’s new work , 50 Words for Snow, is so effective is because the lengthy song-cycle structure works so well in a classical context. That she chose to pare things back to piano and strings also indicates the classical leanings of the album.

Themes that can be difficult to represent aurally are often best suited to the opera form. When Nico Muhly tackled polygamy in Dark Sisters and a murderous friendship in Two Boys , he presented them as operas. “With dark, intense, layered themes, opera is the best way to go, and maybe less specifically but more accurately, theatre, because theatre can get at things in a way that music alone can’t always.”

Two films this year, Blue Valentine and Jack Goes Boating , credited Muhly, who had reworked Grizzly Bear’sVeckatimest album as the bulk of the score for both. “It’s a complicated reworking of existing material, but sometimes needle-dropping records into a movie is indicative of either a lack of imagination or of a huge imagination.”

For musicians such as Muhly, Greenwood and Jóhannsson, music is as uncompromising as it is panoramic, and the Venn Diagram of crossover is where you’ll find them.

Nico Muhly plays as part of Crash Ensemble’s Young Americans programme tonight at Dublin’s Liberty Hall. crashensemble.com

This article originally appeared in The Irish Times on Friday, November 29th, 2011.

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Interview: Chuck Palahniuk

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Sinead Gleeson

Chuck Palahniuk is no stranger to dark subject matter, but for his latest novel, ‘Damned’, he wanted to place an innocent character – a 13-year-old girl – in the worst-case scenario. So he took her to hell, writes Sinéad Gleeson

Chuck Palahniuk has travelled, metaphorically and physically, to some troubled places in his books, so it’s no surprise that his latest novel, Damned , chooses the ultimate dark destination as its setting: hell.

“I wanted the worst-case scenario,” says the writer. “There’s a classic story arc where an innocent person ends up in circumstances that they don’t fully understand. A good example is The Shawshank Redemption , where you have this banker who was so drunk that he’s not sure why he’s in prison. I structured Damned like Judy Blume’sAre You There God? It’s Me Margaret, because in that story Margaret moves from New York to the suburbs, which is her hell. I wanted to take that form of story where an innocent person is moved to a new place and take that to the greatest extreme, and hell seemed like the worst scenario.”

So far, so Palahniuk. From the violence and proto-machismo of his most acclaimed novel, Fight Club , to the corporeal bloodiness of the infamous story Guts , extremes are a hallmark of his work. And yet Palahniuk, considered a member of the same literary masculinity club as Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway, has installed a 13-year-old girl as his latest protagonist. Madison is abandoned over Christmas by her famous parents, who make films and adopt orphans (celebrities, alive and dead, are excoriated in the course of the book). She dies of a marijuana overdose and finds herself in hell, on the brink of puberty and convinced of her innocence.

Precocious, smart and independent, she is distinct from Palahniuk’s typical narrators. The author has faced criticism of his female characters and has been accused of misogyny, but Madison is an antidote to Snuff ’s Cassie Wright and the women of Invisible Monsters . Convinced she has been wrongly condemned, Madison begins a quest to hell’s appeals department.

The story, accompanied by a group of unlikely travellers, morphs into The Wizard of Oz meets The Breakfast Club . This device of randomly gathering a motley crew has also featured heavily in Palahniuk’s work.

“My assumption is that if someone is reading, they’re alone; so they’ve left a community of friends to sit down and read that book. The reader is intrinsically alone, so I always try to give them a group experience in their solitude. Doug Coupland did it with Generation X . He was living alone in Palm Springs and was so lonely that he invented a group of friends and wrote about them.

“Groups also serve a function that religion used to, where you come together with members of your community, present the worst aspects of yourself, and be accepted and forgiven. These days when I go to church services, I feel like the person who shouldn’t be there, the tourist, so I’m expressing that group relationship to religion.”

Palahniuk was born to Carol and Fred, in 1962, and raised as a Catholic with his three siblings. His paternal grandfather murdered his grandmother while his own father – aged four – hid under the bed. Palahniuk’s parents separated when he was 14, and his father later found happiness with a woman he met through a newspaper ad. Her ex-boyfriend murdered her and Fred, and the tragedy formed the basis of Palahniuk’s novel, Lullaby .

In the past, the writer has spoken of the anger he felt before writing Fight Club , and how Lullaby , which made him challenge his views on the death penalty, was cathartic. “In one of the first writing workshops I ever did, I was taught about ‘dangerous writing’. The theory is that you should always write about something that is very upsetting for you, otherwise you’re just wasting your time. Even if the book never sells to a publisher, at least you get the chance to explore and exhaust some issue of your own. You feel relieved and transformed, and selling the book is actually beside the point.”

The sudden, violent death of his father left little time to prepare for their parting, let alone to say goodbye. While writing Damned , Palahniuk’s mother was dying of cancer, and he looked after her. In Damned , Madison wanders through a landscape that takes in Hot Saliva Lake, The Swamp of Rancid Perspiration and Dandruff Desert. It’s hard not to see parallels between the physical decay of his mother and the charcoal humour of the placenames.

“It definitely fed into my writing. In the sick-room environment, there is this idea of separating the physical being from the mental being. In Madison’s case she is surrounded and threatened by this physical aspect of puberty. When my mother was dying from cancer, I had to face up to the fact that I had lost both my parents. It made me evaluate my life, and ask myself at what point had I started living my life as a performance for my parents. It took me back to childhood, and it was a very natural examination to go back. Even the novels Madison reads in the book were the books my mother read in her final year. She reread her favourite novels.”

This backdrop of terminal illness contributed to Palahniuk’s ruminations on mortality. He considers himself a lapsed Catholic, and despite the questions the novel raises, admits that he doesn’t give the afterlife much thought. Does he believe in something beyond death?

“I really couldn’t say. When you’re a pre-puberty child and you hear about aspects of sexuality, they seem so completely grotesque. It’s only by reaching puberty, that those things become palatable to us, and death is similar. Even if we did know about what happens after death, we wouldn’t accept it, because we’re not at the point in our lives where we can even conceive of it.”

If Fight Club the book, and later the film, made his name, it has also created a stereotyping of his readers. Palahniuk was credited with bringing men back to reading with his tale of sanctioned underground violence. Male readers have told him this, and some have been inspired to write themselves.

He laughs: “I used to have an idea who my audience were, based on Fight Club , but now it seems to be almost equal gender-wise. When I wrote Invisible Monsters , nearly everyone who came up to me and said, ‘This is my favourite book,’ was a woman, so it’s harder to say.”

After being reticent about his personal life over the years (there were rumours he was married), Palahniuk is now openly gay, and has been with his partner for 17 years. Unlike writers like Alan Hollinghurst, his sexuality doesn’t infuse his work.

“I always think of my characters as raceless and genderless, and in a way Madison is the ultimate manifestation of my characters. I prefer characters who take action, and whose actions constitute who they are. I’ve written gay characters, in Stuff and in Invisible Monsters , but to make a central character gay would be too much.”

The grotesqueness of Damned ’s landscape and souls who regenerate after being eaten by demons is infused with the kind of grand vulgarity found in his legendary story Guts . “I haven’t read it in public for two or three years, but the last time was at a festival in Brighton. Eight people fainted and the St John’s ambulance people had to tend to them. It was really glorious, really terrific.”

Damned took longer than any of his previous books to write. Having penned the first draft during his mother’s illness, he held on to it for a year after her death in February 2009 and then rewrote it. He plans to write two more Madison books, set consecutively in limbo and heaven. Given his productivity, will we see another book next year?

“No,” he says, laughing, “I’m really trying to space my books out a little bit better.”

This article originally appeared in The Irish Times on day, th, 20

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