Sporting Ruminations - November 2020

 Hurling Abuse

The championship this year seemed a three-horse race: Limerick, Tipperary and Galway in that order. Kilkenny are in a period of reconstruction and Waterford are a bit behind these. However, the vagaries of the draw and a freakish Leinster final result have thrown the three strongest teams into one half and left Kilkenny and Waterford easier routes to the final. As a Tipp fan the one quarter-final opponent I didn’t want was Galway - a week after a tough match against Cork on heavy ground. Inevitably they got pipped at the post in a match where Cathal Barrett’s sending off and Tipp’s tiredness towards the end were both factors. Galway will now have to contend with this tiredness and a raring to go Limerick in the semi-final. Limerick to prevail easily. The other semi-final is hard to predict. Will Kilkenny get dragged over the line by T. J. Reid and the canny Cody - or will a resurgent Waterford have enough to finally put them down and send that cursed Cody into retirement? I suspect so but wouldn’t bet on it. Whoever gets to the final from that match will be eaten by Limerick in the final. If the two teams who didn’t have to play on consecutive weekends get to the final (Limerick and Kilkenny) it will confirm that the dice were loaded against the others. You could say that winning their provincial championships meant they deserved this preferential treatment.

Tipperary Redemption

I was still in deep mourning for the Tipp hurlers when the unprecedented occurred and our footballers beat Cork comprehensively in the Munster final. Over the years they’ve got to the occasional final but then always fell at the Cork or Kerry fences. It was a treat to see them in their anachronistic jerseys play some lovely open football and defend with such passion. They seem to have couple of real stars too in Michael Quinlivan and Conor Sweeney. The latter’s speech at the end was one of the most coherent and articulate I’ve heard from any sporting figure in a long time. Give that man a political career. He’s a teacher so well-equipped to join those ranks.

Rugby in Limbo

Our rugby team is in transition and despite the heroics of the young Leinster lads it’ll be a few years before we are back threatening the big boys. Sexton and Murray are over the hill and Kearney is gone. Our two best centers are injury prone and while we have a super abundance of good wingers they are not getting the opportunities they need to thrive. The lack of creative flair against England was evident - only when Burns came on did something happen so maybe we need to give him an extended run. Ross Byrne is not up to it. We also need more options at second-row and someone more explosive in the back row. Maybe Leavy will come back to his former self and add that element. So for now we’ll always struggle against England and France (especially away) and usually beat the others. But where’s the fun if we’re not beating England.

Thanks be to God for Horse-racing

Horse racing doesn’t really need an audience in terms of the spectacle and atmosphere so it’s suffered least of all sports in this regard. The jumps season is cranking up nicely and our thoughts are inevitably turning towards Cheltenham in March. I have already decided that my old favourite (and former 50-1 Cheltenham winner) Minella Indo is going to win the Gold Cup. He’s had two very smooth wins already and a Christmas run at Leopardstown will set him up nicely. And Saint Roi looks a likely lad for the Champion Hurdle - he’s at a decent price currently.

What is Beautiful in the Sky by Michael Harding

 

An edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times on the 25 October 2020.

Michael Harding tells us that his latest memoir is “a song of joy to the simple mystery of life”. This is a commendable aspiration at a time when a lament full of fear and loathing would be understandable. However, sadly for those seeking some joyful wisdom to get through this plague year, the book is merely a rehash of the author’s familiar concerns with a few token nods towards our current circumstances thrown in (“love is everywhere”). We are all by now familiar with Harding’s tropes: his rural folksiness, his admirable frankness about his bouts of depression, his love of nature, his affection for Lough Allen and scenic Leitrim, his spiritual questing, his shifting religious allegiances, his constant and some would say well-founded self-deprecation, and of course his recurring references to his “beloved”. (This latter tic starts as being cute but with repetition becomes peculiarly irritating in its implicit denial of independent agency to his wife (the artist Cathy Carman).) Harding has revisited these themes over the past 30 years in three novels, nineteen plays and six memoirs. Such fecundity is slightly alarming coming from a man who reminds us constantly of his modest talents. And of course, if that’s not enough, Harding has his regular platform in the Irish Times in which he regales us with tall tales from rural Ireland. On the evidence of this latest offering he may be running out of steam, or perhaps hot air. In a recent interview he claimed that he makes art from the “meaningless meanderings of strangers”. In What is Beautiful in the Sky you can certainly spot the meandering but there’s little evidence I fear of the art. His ruminations and anecdotes are delivered amidst accounts of his domestic chores: making fires, mowing the lawn, and feeding the cats. Kafka it ain’t. It would be polite to call the structure of the work elliptical. We flit randomly in time from Drumshambo to Mullingar, from Cavan to Warsaw and from Donegal to Paris. The anecdotes and recollections suggest the rueful ruminations of an aging man as memories bubble up disordered and unbidden from the past. He recalls music sessions in Drumshambo, an idyll where we were “forever young and the bars never closed”. The mood is thinly elegiac – only a lost sexual opportunity in Paris seems to go more than skin deep: “I was so terrified of committing the literal act of love that I dilly dallied around the subject.”  Insights are not thick on the ground. We are told, for example, that “in rural Ireland old people are everywhere.” Harding is an incorrigible romantic which probably explains his undoubted popularity. He looks back on a pre-Covid Ireland where summer tourists and locals shared a “single unifying trance of joy”. Then there’s his wearying invention the General – an old crank spouting witless nonsense and farting a lot. A character perhaps but not an entertaining or an interesting one. The coffee shops of rural Ireland are name checked (Café le Monde in Mullingar catches the eye) and celebrated in all their warm mundanity. For Harding is above all a sound man, a man of the people. If there’s a theme, it’s well buried. There are a few reflections on the Covid-19 lockdown but they’re half hearted: “It could lead to the grave…or a new beginning.” The most evident and recurring subject is the poet and playwright Tom MacIntyre who died in October 2019 and whom he still mourns. He was a valued mentor of Harding’s and their connection was confirmed for Harding when “a book belonging to him fell off a shelf in my studio the night he died.” In some ways this memoir is a love letter to MacIntyre and Harding quotes an actual letter he wrote to the poet after he died: “I too believe in angels Tom that catch us when we fall.” MacIntyre is best remembered for his play The Great Hunger based on fellow Cavan man Patrick Kavanagh’s epic (and undervalued) poem. Harding recalls the advice MacIntyre offered him as a young writer: “Walk over the cliff blindfolded and do it every day without fail”. He also admires his “relish for words and all their juicy innuendo.” Harding is much given to gnomic statements: (“ideas cannot contain truth…like the eyes hold the moon on a good night”) that mean less the more you examine them. An annoying feature of the book is the fancy notion someone got about the type-setting. Here and there throughout the text perfectly banal sentences (“It’s almost 9am; time to take a break from reading”) are repeated. They are extracted and blown up font-wise to stand out from the body of the text. Why? It’s distracting, it’s repetitive  and seems to serve no purpose except to pad out the book by a few pages. Harding often describes himself as a “story-teller” but on the evidence of this book he has few interesting ones left to tell. 

 

Hachette Books Ireland

PP: 229

 

 

 

 

 

 

One hates to be a pedant but...

A feature of this lockdown year from an art perspective has been the series of highly successful auctions with records been broken and many artists achieving their best prices since the boom years. Paul Henry has done particularly well at both Adam’s and Whyte’s. The latter auction house claimed a world record for the €420,000 paid for Henry’s A Sunny Day in Connemara last Monday. This achievement was subsequently recorded in the Irish Times in its Saturday art section. However, it’s not quite true. In 2002 Henry’s The Lobster Fisher sold for €423,497 at Christie’s. While the hammer price was a mere £265,000 the sterling/euro rate that prevailed (the spot price at the moment of sale) produced this world record in Euros.  The only way that Whyte’s can claim a record is to convert its €420,000 into Sterling at current rates - which are much for favorable to the Euro. That will yield a price of £381,164 - a world record. As Whyte’s are an Irish auction house who deal in Euros - it should qualify its claims. Also, the Irish Times, our paper of record should follow suit. As we’re being pedantic, the estimate quoted by the Irish Times is also inaccurate: it was €150,000 to €200,000 and not €150,000 to €250,000. This was clearly a slip of the pen by the auction house that was then repeated by the Irish Times. The Artprice web site (www.artprice.com) is a very reliable guide to the world art market so if you want Henry’s painting  to be a world record use its Sterling filter. If you use the Euro filter it falls a few grand short. Just saying.

Recent Reads - October 2020

 

1.    Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker

This is a fascinating study of the multiple incidences of schizophrenia in a middle-class American family. Although I call it a study, it’s actually an absorbing story as the family is transformed from the average, suburban Americans (all football and and church-going) into a dysfunctional group riven by madness, incest and murder. The sane ones get to tell us about the mad ones while the mother and father spend most of their lives in denial. The scientists have a field day with this family where arguments of nature and nurture and the best treatment for schizophrenia can be examined. 

*****

2.    Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

This is a well-written account of an IT ingenue who moved from a literary background to work for startups in Silicon Valley. If you want to know about the fashions, food fads, and foibles of the young computer gods, this is the book for you. Wiener (who is now a staff writer at the New Yorker) casts a cold eye on the whole cosseted, insulated, and self-entitled shower. It peters out a bit towards the end where she’s wrestling with her conscience but her observations are acute and entertaining.

****

3.    Warhol by Blake Gopnik

You really need to be an avid Warhol fan to enjoy or even complete this book. The level of detail is exhaustive and unnecessary - especially around his early graphic design work. It’s over 900 pages and in all that real estate the writer has nothing but uncritical praise for Warhol’s every artistic endeavour. Even his most tongue-in-cheek, taking the piss (and using the piss) exploits are treated with reverence and cloaked with the most risible and often impenetrable artspeak. A constant throughout is the artist’s work ethic and his consuming ambition to be famous. There are interesting biographical facts. Much of his early work in art and advertising featured his mother’s lettering as she was better at it than him. Also, despite his later reputation, he was no sexual slouch and went through an array of likely lads. But ultimately his unlovable persona dominates and nothing in there makes me change my mind about his affectless and facile art.

**

4.    Forgotten Fatherland by Ben MacIntyre

We mostly associate MacIntyre with page-turning accounts of spies and espionage. He’s a fluent writer and I’ve enjoyed a few of his real-life Le Carre stories. This is something completely different. It’s ostensibly an account of the life of Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche and her abortive attempt with her deluded fascist husband Bernhard Forster to set up a New Germany colony in Paraguy. The book starts out as a travel book to the little-known regions of a little-known country and we get plenty of colour and incident. It then diverts into a competent potted life of Nietzsche - good especially on his relationship with Wagner. Then it covers Elizabeth’s efforts after his death to shoe-horn his thinking into the Nazi’s jackboots. Nietzsche was an avowed enemy of all anti-semites (hence his break with Wagner) and German nationalism so this endeavour proved hugely problematical. Her shameless courting of Hitler is detailed.  The book latterly doubles back to encounter some of the dissipated and assimilated descendants of the failed colony in Paraguay. A real curiosity of a book full of interesting sections. One caveat, the casual way MacIntyre deals with the drowning of a native boy on a voyage up river in a boat he hired is a bit of a shocker. Poor old Ector.

****

5. Black Hearts by Jim Frederick

This is shocking stuff on two levels. On the one hand it’s the story of how a squad of US soldiers in Iraq murdered an innocent family in Iraq after raping the 14 year old daughter. The squad was sorely put upon in terms of the duration of its tours of duty and the killing of its members but it also housed at least one psychopath who was the prime mover. The secondary story is on-the-ground details of the pure folly that was the invasion of Iraq without a plan for reconciling the discordant elements.

****

Lace, Paint, Hair at the NGI

An edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 6th September 2020.

The National Gallery of Ireland is back up and running – just remember your face mask. It’s operating a one-way system so you enter at Merrion Square and exit on Clare Street. Lace, Paint, Hair features three artists, Fiona Harrington, Cian McLoughlin, and Eimear Murphy, who have made “significant contributions” to the NGI’s public programmes in recent years. The opportunity to showcase their work in our national gallery is a handsome quid pro quo for these young artists. McLoughlin already has a permanent place in the NGI with a self-portrait in the National Portrait Collection (located nearby and always worth a visit). The title of this new show refers to the medium used by each artist. All of the exhibits were created during the lockdown and according to the attendant press release represent the artists’ responses to this modern plague. McLoughlin’s two pieces, Crowd 1 and Crowd 2 (see image), are part of a series however that predated the pandemic and originally explored the theme of crowd behavior – how we abandon our individualism and cohere to the energy of the masses. Now of course this coherence acquires a new and sinister import. A crowd becomes a dark and dangerous place. The swirling colours, flesh tones, blood-red threads, and ominous blacks all contrive to warn us off. Fiona Harrington’s hand-made lace works are suggestive of our fragility in the face of this deadly virus. This vulnerability is made explicit in Fragile Economies where she has attached her delicate and exquisite lacework to a series of halved eggshells. There is also a resonance in the title of the history of lace-making where poor women laboured so that rich ones could look good. Hair was an issue for many during lockdown, especially I suspect for women. Eimear Murphy’s Hair Correspondence was created by gathering hair from 65 people she contacted via social media  – evidence perhaps of widespread amateur efforts. She wove the hair together to create a large relief drawing that will give viewers an opportunity to exercise their imaginations. It’s a kind of Rorschach test. Murphy’s other works display the mundane detritus of every day life suspended in cast tablets. An anticipation of what the future archaeologists will gather to tell about how we lived. Murphy shows her versatility with materials in the form of a large charcoal drawing showing rock and concrete suspended in a fictional moment.

 

www.ngi.ie