The Cathach 2011 - Volume II (PDF) - Sligo Libraries

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Virtual Realities Recently I read an article in the New York Times about the fact that Sony has developed an electronic portable screen onto which the entire text of a novel can be downloaded. And the fine people at Amazon have manufactured their own reading device, the Kindle, with a screen ‘so paper-like, it demands to be read’. Amazing, isn’t it? What’ll they think of next? I find these cutting-edge technological developments fascinating, of course, but a while ago I came across one even more astonishing innovation which I would like to recommend to you if I may. It’s cheaply produced, made of entirely recyclable materials, userfriendly in almost any situation you care to imagine - even in the bath. It requires no re-charging, anti-virus protection or fiddly wireless connections, and it runs an extraordinary number of applications. It’s called ‘the book’. It’s widely available. And it’s even more paper-like than the Kindle. The other night, my eight year old son asked me if I thought a time machine would be invented within my lifetime. It was nice to be able to tell him that the time machine was actually invented several centuries ago by that clever man Mr Gutenberg. For the book can transport you to all sorts of time zones and virtual realities, to distant planets, magical worlds, to anywhere you’d like to go. The territory of the novel, from the form’s first appearance, has been vast, capacious and daring. The shipwreck, the riot, the revolution, the storm, the knights charging windmills, the madwoman in the attic, the children of the ghetto, the pickpockets of London, the explorer who finds himself in a land of little people, the Wuthering Heights, the depths. Through these territories, and many others, has gone wandering the storyteller, with only words as a lamp. He has seen the hunchback in the cathedral, and Huckleberry Finn, Madame Bovary and Count Dracula and Leopold Bloom. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and the Secret Scripture. What a pantheon, what a party, what a multitude of selves. The novel has the capacity to describe the drama of life as no other art form can do. The original Virtual Reality, it downloads more quickly than broadband, and its effects, as we know, are more widespread. It’s also the form that captures most affectingly what it’s like to be a human being. We carry the past and the future as we go. We drag anchors that are attached to us – indeed we sometimes cling to them. The very essence of the human is to experience time in this way. In addition, we carry the pasts of those people around us, and frequently, also, their futures, which we embody, because we ourselves are part of that future, and will be part of our loved ones’ pasts. Only the novel can describe what that’s like. And when we look at the some of the oldest things any culture possesses, we see the modes of storytelling 1
everywhere. The Greek myths, the Celtic sagas, the legends of vanished societies. And what is the Bible, that stupendous work of storytelling, if not a kind of jigsaw novel? Four separate accounts of the life of its hero: Angels! Talking serpents! Dead men walking! In the beginning was the Word, the scripture tells us. But perhaps, in the beginning, was the story. And consider those fantastic words at the end of the gospel of John. ‘And there are many more wonders that Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I think the whole of the world could not contain the books that should be written.’ How I love the childishness and innocence of that beautiful line. It connects us with the author across the millennia. We know exactly how he felt. The world is stranger than we can hope to understand – to picture it, to imagine it, is immediately to make a puzzle. Human existence is so mysterious, a Rubik cube we can’t solve, no matter how many times we turn the squares. I like a novel that feels as though you can walk into it, look around, touch the walls, the way we walk into a piece of great music, like Handel’s Messiah or The Beatles’ A Day in the Life. These are structures we want to experience again: one visit is not enough. I want the potholes of a novel, the bumps, the flaws, the cracks in the ceiling, the draughts. I don’t want it to be smooth; I want to see the textures. I want fiction with friction, jaggedness, juice. I want the words to rub together so the sparks fly in my face. And I can say with the great French writer, Anatole Broyard, ‘the more I like a book, the more slowly I read it.’ This spontaneous talking-back to a book is one of the things that make reading such a pleasure. Ugliness is so widespread and profitable and catching-on that if you could buy stocks in it you’d be a billionaire. There is a property crisis, we are told, but not an ugliness crisis. Invasions are justified on the basis of non-existent weapons, torture is called liberation, the hangman a hero, and everything Orwell told us has turned out to be true. Only his date of 1984 was wrong. Language is debased on an everyday basis, often by being made too smooth. The best readers, once remarked the American novelist Philip Roth, ‘come to fiction to be free of everything that is not fiction.’ But that beautiful remark is not quite true. The best readers come to fiction because of the paradox it offers. To know briefly what it is to transcend the self, and to imagine briefly what it is to be someone else, is to come to know more profoundly what it is to be yourself. I’m telling you, this is magic and it works. It’s available in your local bookstore, for less than the cost of a round of drinks. So do yourself a favour. Dive in. - Joseph O’Connor 2
Page 1 and 2: The Cathach A Literary Journal Volu
Page 3: CONTENTS 1 Virtual Realities Joseph
Page 7 and 8: Thank You for Venice (for Jean) All
Page 9 and 10: fill with the cold intense light of
Page 11 and 12: She rang me seven times, The dying
Page 13 and 14: Traveller Support centre, for which
Page 15 and 16: I was baffled. Kitty was well up wi
Page 17 and 18: ‘I don’t believe you.’ ‘Cal
Page 19 and 20: Baltic Amber Someone said I would u
Page 21 and 22: From Carrick the boat begins To mov
Page 23 and 24: of authority. They came in sidecars
Page 25 and 26: Cold Eye A total stranger did me gr
Page 27 and 28: Bada Shanren, the painter, at odds
Page 29 and 30: Trieste James,” said Nora, “I t
Page 31 and 32: Putting the Baby into the Postbox W
Page 33 and 34: When Zinedine Zidane receives the b
Page 35 and 36: Paper Boat Series Patricia Curran M
Page 37 and 38: Your eyes shine sloe-bright, Your b
Page 39 and 40: They dig and fill, the soil rich an
Page 41 and 42: Argyle’s Stone Around his neck Ar
Page 43 and 44: The first rock I had in my hand tod
Page 45 and 46: The cold snap on the stairs ‘The
Page 47 and 48: Treegirl Alice Maher 44
Page 49 and 50: Not long after this conversation, I
Page 51 and 52: on the adult novel in the morning w
Page 53 and 54: early 1990s my bereaved father beca
Page 55 and 56:
Instead of venereal disease passing
Page 57 and 58:
In 1995 the mechanism was abolished
Page 59 and 60:
Treeheads Alice Maher 56
Page 61 and 62:
Contributors Leland Bardwell is fro
Page 63:
Joseph O’Connor was born in Dubli
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