Disillusioned Lefty

Sun Ji-Sigh

Published Monday, April 28, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.

I'm a Manchester City fan. Have been since childhood. It's a strange club to support: though we'll topple our fair share of giants every season, we'll invariably throw those points away to teams we really should not. As the years pass, you learn to deal with this, our strange kind of mediocrity. Last Saturday, at home to 19th place Fulham, leading comfortably, two-nil up with just 20 minutes to left to play, we fell apart. Man City 2 - 3 Fulham. Still, nothing shocking. The first City match I went to was, I think, in 1993, when City gave away another two-goal lead - this time, to rivals United. Man City 2 - 3 Man United, that one ended. Saturday's game's pattern mirrored our season's; its result's reality typified our temperament. But City fans long ago learned to live with it.

Sun Ji-Hai gave away yet another penalty on Saturday, though. I really wish he'd stop doing that.

Labels: football, fulham, man city, premier league, sport

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Pierre Bonnard, Nu dans le bain au petit chien (1941-46)

Published Sunday, April 27, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.

"J’espère que ma peinture tiendra, sans craquelures. Je voudrais arriver devant les jeunes peintres de l’an 2000 avec des ailes de papillon."

Labels: art, les nabis, pierre bonnard

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This Fella, Ronaldo

Published Thursday, April 24, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.

There isn't much RTE does well. But their post-match analysis, however unsightly, is consistently brilliant. Johnny Giles looks like a cigarette, Liam Bradey like a potato. Eamon Dunphy, a terrible writer, is football's most loquacious philosopher. And Bill O' Herlihy, well, he's some chancer. Three giants of punditry, and their mate. Consistently brilliant, I say, but if Ronaldo disappointed last night, our parliament of sages simply outdid itself.

Labels: eamon dunphy, football, johnny giles, liam brady, ronaldo, rte

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Reading Themselves, Not Others

Published Wednesday, April 23, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.

David Maybury, on auto-analysis.

Labels: literature, poetry

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Whereof one cannot speak well, thereof one must echo

Published by Kevin Breathnach.

I spent last night frantically research an essay (now overdue) on Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. For the first time, I consciously noticed that, when reading a book taken from the library, I scan a few underlined passages of the chapter I'm reading to see if the scibblers of old were researching the same essay. And if I decide that they were, I pay more heed to the passages they deemed important.

The only way I can imagine this essay being particularly original, is if it first finds its feet on the wrong side of sense. Ah, le silence vertébral indispose la voile licite.

Labels: essays, russell, university, wittgenstein

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Sons of a Gunn

Published Tuesday, April 22, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.

All young men are unhappy. That’s why they identify so strongly with Hamlet. They’re unhappy in a formless kind of way, partly because they don’t have an identity, they don’t know where they’re going, they don’t know who they are. You’re a pretty unusual person—something slightly sinister—if at the age of twenty or twenty-two you really know exactly who you are and what you’re going to do. More likely you’re undefined, and being undefined is rather painful. I don’t know that I was more sorry for myself than anybody else was. I was trying to be brave about it too. Of course, I was striking postures.

Thom Gunn, quoted in the invaluable, though generally inaccessible Paris Review, 1995.

Labels: paris review, thom gunn

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Misc: Mesc.

Published Monday, April 21, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.

"It was in 1886 that the German pharmacologist, Ludwig Lewin, published the first systematic study of the cactus, to which his own name was subsequently given. Anhalonium Lewinii was new to science. To primitive religion and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest it was a friend of immemorially long standing. Indeed, it was much more than a friend. In the words of one of the early Spanish visitors to the New World, 'they eat a root which they call Peyotl, and which they venerate as though it were a deity.'" The Doors of Perception, by Alduous Huxley

At 10pm on Friday evening, I took mescaline, the active principal of peyotl, for the first time, with four friends. It was unlike anything I've ever consciously experienced before. It was at once a communal and individual experience of incredible proportions. It would have lasted until about 11am the next day, though sleep, found with the help of a Valium, put an end to my experience two hours earlier than foreseen, at 9am.

Huxley, who wrote a lot of his experience with mescaline in 1953, said that, while on mescaline, he "realised that I was deliberately avoiding the eyes of those who were with me in the room, deliberately refraining from being too much aware of them." But I suspect Huxley's was not a communal experience because, though he was not alone, he was alone in his drug-use. We were not alone and, so, we did not avert our gaze from one another. Mescaline made us laugh and laugh and laugh, but looking back, the evening's jokes actually were funnier than usual, our conversations longer, their insights more original, and yet extended periods of silence and nothingness seeped slowly (and unforced) over our hours, and were never at all boring or awkward. One inside-joke jumped atop another until the whole evening seemed to be one big inside-joke. The experience was very communal.

We listened to Music from the Big Pink by The Band a few times, then some Dylan, some Robbie Basho and, I think, some Jimi Hendrix. All very orthodox. We slowed everything down, and when, as daylight approached, we tried a regular tempo, it sounded awful, painful in the same way daylight was to dilated pupils. Pull the curtains across, give me those sunglasses and slow that music down. One of my nostrils was blocked, but when I breathed in through the other, it felt pleasantly cold, as if I were breathing in the air of a clear mountain morning. But I smelt nothing. I wasn't hungry until sometime the next afternoon - and when I did eventually eat, it was just yogurt.

Peripheral vision extended beyond its usual reach, so that, for instance, the condensation of the room's window, which danced as if in a beautiful screensaver, was as vast and as peaceful as some incredible landscape blown by a soft, swirling wind. John Berger said somewhere that the problem with painting mountains is that the subject inevitably dwarfs technique: Nature reveals art to be a tiny thing. On mescaline, that problem grows taller than mountains. Mescaline reveals reality, at even its most mundane, to be a thing infinitely more beautiful, more vivid than most art. Always flux, always flux. The tiles of the bathroom floor became another swirling landscape, as if viewed from above this time; fields of bleached grass separated by straight, brown hedgerows, as good as those damned mountains. Ah, oh!, how those fields became that bathroom floor.

But nothing stood to be interpreted; everything just was.

Sometimes I was hot, sometimes I was cold. Sometimes I had headaches, sometimes I felt sick. But these were mere sensations - mistaken phenomena. The room was neither hot, nor cold. I could think my headache away, and I had nothing to throw up. You might think that 10 or 11 hours of such fluctuating sensations would make for an unpleasant, somewhat claustrophobic experience, but on mescaline, you lose all interest in space and time. It's a bit like a dream, in this sense. Without a watch or a window, you'd be hard pressed to estimate the trip's length. An hour, a day or a week? Could have been any of them; could have been all of them.

Thirst was occasionally a problem, as it is on any drug. The problem with thirst on mescaline, however, is that the mescaline-taker sees no reason for doing anything in particular. A trip to the kitchen for more water becomes an onerous chore. "Can't be bothered with those," as Huxley puts it, "we have better things to think about."

Labels: basho, drugs, dylan, huxley, mescaline, the band

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Minimalist Art

Published by Kevin Breathnach.

Not that the mail he brings is always consoling. "No culture has a pact with eternity," he says. "The conditions which made possible the giants of the western poetic, aesthetic, philosophic tradition no longer really obtain." Steiner doesn't believe "there can be a Hamlet without a ghost, a Missa Solemnis without a missa", and if you say that the questions addressed by religion are "nonsense or baby talk or trivial, I don't believe that certain dimensions will be available to you. Particularly today, when the atheist case is being put, if I may say so, with such vulgarity of mind." Most writing "seems to me too often, in this country, at the moment, a minimalist art.

Saturday's Guardian carried an interview with George Steiner. It's all very interesting. I'll offer a few words of my own sometime this week; I promise an end to this silence, this minimalist art.

Labels: intellectualism, notice, steiner

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Frankly Unusual

Published Thursday, April 10, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.

I left Ireland at 11am yesterday for Frankfurt with a group of friends. It rained there constantly, most clubs were closed, there were very few people around and the city looked very little like it does in this picture. Our flight, which we boarded fatigued and filthy, left an airport 120 kilometres from Frankfurt at 6am. But it wasn't half bad.

Labels: frankfurt, germany, travel

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Magnums and Lego

Published Friday, April 04, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.

Henri-Cartier Bresson cubed.

Labels: cartier bresson, lego, photography

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An Appeal

Published Wednesday, April 02, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.

Allow me to paraphrase, for right now, I can do nothing but: 'A civilised man is one capable of living with two contradictory consciously in mind at once.' I'm nearing the end of an essay on Baudelaire. He's really very good. What I need is the actual quote which, I believe, belongs to one Carl Gustav Jung.

I'd ring Ray D'Arcy's Fix-It Friday, only the essay is due on Friday morning.

Labels: appeal, baudelaire, jung, ray darcy

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Old Scribbles

Published Monday, March 31, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.

The critic and essayist John Berger wrote that the problem with painting mountains is that the subject inevitably dwarfs technique: Nature reveals art to be a tiny thing.

I found this in my notepad. Not sure when I wrote it or where I first saw it. It must be a year or two old now - long before I ever read John Berger, in any case. But I like it.

Labels: art, john berger, lost and found

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Poem of the Day XX: je veult chanter

Published by Kevin Breathnach.

The Antiquities of Rome, II, by Joachim du Bellay

The Babylonian will boast of his high walls
And hanging gardens; Greece Will describe the
Ancient construction of its Ephesian temple
And the people of the Nile will sing their pyramids.

That same, still vaunting Greece will proclaim
The Olympian image of its great Jupiter;
The Mausoleum will be the Carian glory;
And Crete will not forget its old labyrinth.

The ancient Rhodian will raise the glory
Of his famous Colossus to the temple of
Memory, and if any other work can boast

That it deserves to join this company, someone more
Eloquent will tell of it. As for me, in place of all these,
I wish to sing the Seven Hills of Rome, Seven Wonder of the World.

Labels: du bellay, french, poetry

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Come on, Eileen

Published Saturday, March 29, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.

There are, to my mind, two things in the enterprise literary or cinematic journalism which, when fused, announce amateurism louder than any other failings can: reviewing an old book or film for no particular reason, and then remaining more or less within the parameters of synopsis. It is on this injurious marriage that the pages of university art magazines are generally founded. This year, for instance, Trinity News published, under the guise of a review, a quick run-through of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty 3 years after it had won the Booker Prize. Martin Amis received a similarly gushing review for his memoir, published no less than eight years ago. I wouldn't mind this instance, for it could so easily have been made relevant, but the reviewer offered no mention (indeed, seemed entirely unaware) of the disrepute into which Amis fils had only recently thrown himself. Instead, on the strength of his Experience (published in 2000), Amis was pronounced "the wittiest man alive." Not even in 2000, kid.

In today's Irish Times, incidentally, Eileen Battersby revisits Franz Kafka's The Trial. In case you were wondering, Kafka's parabolic masterpiece has not been recently re-translated. Nor is it marked by any significant anniversary. And it certainly isn't afforded the privilege of any new or original insights on the part of Ms. Battersby. Still, though, if you can't be bothered to read it, this is for you. The series, in which Ms. Battersby revisits classic titles to ensure they have not changed, continues next week in our paper of record.

Labels: eileen battersby, hollinghurst, irish times, journalism, kafka, literature, martin amis, trinity

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Poem of the Day XIX: standing on the street

Published Friday, March 28, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach.

Proletarian Portrait, by William Carlos Williams

A big young bareheaded woman
in an apron

Her hair slicked back standing
on the street

One stockinged foot toeing
the sidewalk

Her shoe in her hand. Looking
intently into it

She pulls out the paper insole
to find the nail

That has been hurting her

Labels: carlos williams, poetry

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