The Science and Art of Communications

Dineen on Jarrett and the journey of music

2011-11-30T22:10:00.001Z

Back in 1998, when time was not such a commodity, Donal Dineen was kind enough to set a considerable chunk of it aside to respond to a request from me to write an essay about his sense of the importance of music in life. It was for a book project I had concocted to deal with my own curiousity about the place of music in people's lives. Lilliput Press agreed to publish a collection of essays by public figures about 'serious' music, and Donal agreed to write something for the paltry sum of £50.

It was a two part essay, part one written on 1 January 1998 and dealing mostly with Dineen's desire to play music and coming to terms with being a listener: 'I had conquered the first verse of the Dawning of the Day when the realisation dawned that the intricacies of Rachmaninov's third were not for me'; part two was written on 24 March 1998, mostly about Keith Jarrett's Concert in Köln: 'Welcome to paradise!' he writes.

Sadly Lilliput got lilly livered about the market for such a book and breached the contract (my Today FM!), and I failed to find an alternative publisher despite much effort. So Dineen's essay, among thirty or so other contributions from equally generous and forgiving people such as William Trevor, David Norris, John Kinsella, Roger Doyle, have remained in a folder (a brown, card one in the attic) ever since.

Without having sought his permission, I won't reprint the entire essay (though I think it has withstood the test of time itself), but I hope, considering the moment he is in, he won't mind having this extract revived:

'Music has the power to leave an indelible mark on the soul. We can blame the 20th Century technology for lots of ills but we've got it to thank for the pleasure of being able to go back and experience those moments of magic again and again. The concert in Cologne began as just a moment in time. What Keith Jarrett played and how he played it was what made that moment special. The intervening years have done nothing to alter or diminish the power of what was heard that evening. Thinking about the places and spaces this music has travelled in the intervening years would be a test for even the wildest sense of wonder. [I'm thinking about Dineen himself, at this stage.]

Essays come and essays go, in first and second parts, but this music will live forever. We can bear witness to where it started whenever we want but knowing where it will end is beyond us. As pure as water that rises from the well, this is the joy of music captured at the source. Sample it, bottle it and make it yours.'

Annie West's spinning wheel of clichés

2011-09-29T18:24:00.000+01:00

Who will make an app of Annie West's wheel of empty rhetoric. I know seven definite customers already.

And it can be used for more than just the Irish presidential election campaign!

Buy yourself a print version here >>>

Roth's Zuckerman on abandoning writing for life

2011-09-12T10:19:00.003+01:00

"Twenty years up here in the literary spheres is enough - now for the fun of the flowing gutter. The bilge, the ooze, the gooey drip. The stuff. No words, just stuff. Everything the word's in place of. The lowest of genres - life itself." (From The Anatomy Lesson)

A geat perspective on editing and on bad science writing

2011-09-07T23:21:00.002+01:00

Take Out the Trash
by PW, July '06

A spectacular example of bad writing is in a recent issue of Science. Here's the first paragraph (don't read too closely: you'll get a headache):

Although many results from in vitro and in vivo models that express mutant Huntingtin, a-synuclein, tau, superoxide dismutase-1, amyloid-b peptide, or prion proteins are consistent with the proposal that non-native species can form toxic folding intermediates, oligomers, and aggregates, distinct mechanisms for toxicity have been proposed for each. These mechanisms range from specific protein-protein interactions to disruption of various cellular processes, including transcription, protein folding, protein clearance, energy metabolism, activation of apoptotic pathways, and others. This has led us to consider how the expression of a single aggregation-prone protein could have such pleiotropic effects and whether a more general mechanism could explain the many common features of protein conformation diseases. Moreover, because each cell and tissue contains various metastable polymorphic proteins, could the chronic expression of an aggregation-prone protein have global consequences on homeostasis and thus affect folding or stability of proteins that harbor folding defects?

(T. Gidalevitz et al., Progressive Disruption of Cellular Protein Folding in Models of Polyglutamine Diseases, Science, 10 Mar 2006, p. 1474 ff.)

The report describes experiments showing that the presence of one misfolded protein in a cell may provoke misfolding in others. The experiments are ingenious and have implications for diseases like Huntington's and Mad Cow disease. But the paper's impenetrable language not only neutralizes its impact, but even arouses the suspicion that the low quality of its prose might reflect that of the research itself.

The writer gets off on the wrong foot from the first word. The conjunction "Although" is separated from the two statements it connects (non-native proteins promote toxic folding intermediates; there are distinct toxic mechanisms) that do not appear until much later in the long, turgid sentence. The order of the statements themselves is inverted for no good reason. "Although" also implies a dependency or reciprocal relationship between the statements (e.g., "although I am a sinner, I do not despair") that does not actually exist in this instance. Here the two statements are parallel, not reciprocal. "Although" turns the sentence into a non-sequitur.

Other problems: the two complicated noun clauses crowd in so much detail that meaning is hidden rather than revealed; they would be better off in their own sentences. "Mechanism" occurs three times in a row, each with a somewhat different meaning (specific cause; general causes; systematic explanation). "Distinct" is another wrong word. It emphasizes the separateness of the toxic pathways. But in biology overlap between pathways is always possible, if not likely. "Different" would be better word: it allows some blurring. The imprecision gets worse with the appearance of the passive voice in the second half of the sentence, heightening the impression of the writer's confusion. The final offense is the dangling pronoun "each" at the end of the sentence, which is so far away from its antecedent that it's not easy to know if it refers to "species" or "intermediates ...". This is just the first sentence, but the abuse continues as the reader is obliged to slog on through the paragraph, parsing it in order to get at its meaning.

Here's how this dreadful paragraph might have been written:

Proteins that form toxic folding intermediates, oligomers and aggregates cause different kinds of cellular damage. The proteins include mutant Huntingtin, a-synuclein, tau, superoxide dismutase-1, amyloid-b peptide, and prions. The damage may be to specific protein-protein interactions or to general processes including transcription, protein folding and clearance, metabolism and apoptosis. Why do proteins with toxic folding defects give rise to so many different kinds of damage? Do they exert a global effect by destabilizing other proteins in the cells and tissues they reside in? A general mechanism would go a long way toward explaining the etiology of misfolding diseases.

Writing clear expository prose is not so difficult, but it does take time and patience. Lots of iterations may be needed to get a passage right. You look at the topic from several angles, like a judge considering a case. If you get fatigued you have to take time off from the task, then come back and resume work when you're refreshed. A few simple principles guide the process: whenever possible get rid of jargon, replace big words with small ones, use simple sentences unless the idea contains component statements so closely connected that a compound sentence is positively justified. Rewrite repeatedly. Keep asking yourself, what am I really trying to say? What's the point of the passage? Not infrequently some internal contradiction will reveal itself during the interrogation, demanding further rewriting and reorganization. Gauge progress by counting the words. As long as there's no loss of meaning, fewer words are better.

Watson and Crick knew these principles:

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest ... This structure has two helical chains each coiled round the same axis (see diagram). We have made the usual chemical assumptions, namely, that each chain consists of phosphate diester groups joining beta-D-deoxyribofuranose residues with 3',5' linkages. The two chains (but not their bases) are related by a dyad perpendicular to the fibre axis. Both chains follow right-handed helices, but owing to the dyad the sequences of the atoms in the two chains run in opposite directions. ...

(JD Watson, FHC Crick, A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid, Nature, Apr 25, 1953 p 737)

Even omitting the diagram their meaning is clear. Sentence structure is clean and uncomplicated, and when the uncommon usage "dyad" is encountered it's obvious from context that what's referred to is a hydrogen bond. The compound sentence is used judiciously to unite two closely related ideas (there are two right-handed helices; they run in opposite directions). A single reading of the paper suffices, and one emerges at the end with a feeling of uplifted understanding.

In this lovely passage by Darwin a positive, sympathetic connection is easily established between author and reader:

... I watched a group of plants on two or three occasions for an hour; each day I saw numerous specimens of two small Hymenopterous insects, namely, a Hæmiteles and a Cryptus, flying about the plants and licking up the nectar; most of the flowers, which were visited over and over again, had already had their pollinia removed, but at last I saw both these insect-species crawl into younger flowers, and suddenly retreat with a pair of bright yellow pollinia sticking to their foreheads; I caught them, and found the point of attachment was to the inner edge of the eye; on the other eye of one specimen there was a ball of the hardened viscid matter, showing that it had previously removed another pair of pollinia, and had subsequently in all probability left them on the stigma of one of the flowers.

As I caught these insects, I did not witness the act of fertilisation; but C. K. Sprengel actually saw a Hymenopterous insect leave its pollen-mass on the stigma. My son watched another bed of this Orchid at some miles' distance, and brought me home the same Hymenopterous insects with attached pollinia, and he saw Diptera also visiting the flowers. He was struck with the number of spider-webs spread over these plants, as if the spiders were aware how attractive the Listera was to insects, and how necessary they were to its fertilisation.

(Charles Darwin, "On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing," 1862, p 146-7)

Why does the author of the Science paper fail so dismally at communicating his findings? And why have the editors of one of the world's premier scientific journals tolerated the appearance of such graceless and confusing prose in their pages? Fatigue, disorganization, deadline pressure – perhaps even the narrow education of the writer – may explain, but do not excuse, what has been done.

Professional science today is a production industry. Labs are factories and the research productivity on which funding and careers depend is measured by papers. Up to a point, the research can be speeded up with reagent kits, software, high throughput machinery, and by laying on more low-cost grad student labor. In communicating the results, even certain elements of the writing may yield to engineering efficiencies: the References can be automated with End Note software, and perfunctory treatment may be adequate for the Materials & Methods, and perhaps in some cases even the Results.

But the heart of the job – the Introduction, Discussion and Abstract – remains a solo, green eyeshade, midnight oil kind of business, a process not much different from the one that Linnaeus, Darwin or Haeckel sat down to do, demanding of time, patience and a respectful consideration for the reader who will later share the work. Communication of results is crucial to the scientific enterprise, but poorly written prose is likely to be misunderstood or ignored, and to prejudice the reader with feelings of alienation and mistrust. Writers and editors of scientific prose should insist on a level of clarity, grace and economy that is all too often not attained in the scientific literature today.

A piece of writing is an invitation to the reader. Gidalevitz's invitation is like one to an unruly house where you arrive to find the light in the entryway burned out, a bicycle negligently left on the threshold, the front hall dark, narrow and unwelcoming. As you make your way through the disorder, you say, I wish they had cleaned this place up. They should have taken out the trash.

(via >>>)

Graydon Carter (Vanity Fair) on great magazine writing

2011-09-07T22:32:00.000+01:00

Vanity Fair editor, Graydon Carter:

"In general, a magazine article needs at least one of three basic ingredients: access, disclosure or narrative. A great article has to have at least two of these components, and a memorable one has all three – along with a distinctive style and a fresh way of looking at its subject. Business-class travel for the writer doesn't hurt, either.

Access lays the groundwork for one of the most satisfying experiences a reader can have – the sensation that he has entered a world foreign to his own, a realm rich in detail and character. Access doesn't necessarily mean the cooperation of a subject. In a war zone, for example, it can mean entering an area that journalists have yet to penetrate. While large news organisations can deploy teams of reporters to cover a major event, there is something to be said for the power of a single, intrepid journalist...

Disclosure, that key second element, is the result of great reporting or interviewing techniques and can result in a story breaking news. It can also attend an article that advances the scholarship on a particular subject.

Then comes narrative. Anyone can relay a sequence of events. But only the best writers have an instinct for telling a story: building suspense, fleshing out characters, shaping the narrative arc of the tale at hand. A great article transcends reportage. In the right hands, narrative journalism can be as insightful and stirring as a novel."

(via The Dubliner >)

Logos: Irish versus international

2011-09-07T22:12:00.004+01:00

Highlights of Recent Dublin Architecture circa 2002

2011-09-07T17:08:00.000+01:00

Another feature I did for Cara magazine back in the day. This is the pre-publication, uncut version, with more recently sourced photographs:

One of the stories in Joyce’s Dubliners paints a thoroughly bleak picture of the architecture of the city in the early twentieth century. ‘A Little Cloud’ concerns a clerk nicknamed Little Chandler.

He emerged from under the feudal arch of the King’s Inns, a neat modest figure, and walked swiftly down Henrietta Street... He picked his way deftly … under the shadow of the gaunt spectral mansions in which the old nobility of Dublin had roistered.

Standing today outside the James Gandon designed King’s Inns on conserved Henrietta Street it is easy to think that nothing much has changed in one hundred years. Indeed, in some parts of the city very little has. But in the last decade or so various additions to Dublin’s architecture have transformed other parts of the city utterly. The erection of the slouching International Financial Services Centre in 1990 and the setting up of Temple Bar Properties in 1991, on opposite banks of the Liffey, mark for some the start of a renaissance in architecture in Dublin, and for others mark the last days of a charming city – “dear, dirty Dublin” as it is called in Joyce’s story.

Following in the footsteps of Little Chandler from Henrietta Street down Capel Street towards the river, with Thomas Cooley’s recently restored neoclassical City Hall off in the distance, it’s still quite a while before you see signs of change. The charm of Capel Street today is a ramshackle, independent retailer one (“the sense of generations at work”, as Kevin Myers has described it).

… his soul revolted against the full inelegance of Capel Street. There was no doubt about it, if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin.

Many Irish architects felt that way about their capital city through the 70s and 80s, and it wasn’t until the 1990s that they were given any real chance to do something in Dublin. They had meanwhile worked in the UK, the USA, and later in Berlin and Barcelona. All those influences are now to be found competing for domination of Dublin’s skyline.

However, along Capel Street, it’s only when you reach the quays that any evidence of great architectural progress can be seen. I say ‘can be’ because you do have to look. Overall, Louis MacNeice’s description of Dublin in 1939 - “O greyness run to flower,/ Grey stone, grey water,/ And brick upon grey brick” - still rings true. It’s easy to traverse the city and notice only the great Georgian and Victorian legacies.

Little Chandler, again:

As he crossed Grattan Bridge he looked down the river towards the lower quays and pitied the poor stunted houses. They seemed to him a band of tramps, huddled together along the river-banks, their old coats covered with dust and soot, stupefied by the panorama of sunset...

The Bookend – Arthur Gibney & Partner

Renovation taking place on Grattan Bridge tells a different story. The City Council has planned a book market there, Seine-style, with permanent stalls in place for traders to display their wares. The book theme is then sustained in a building, two down from the wonderful, cleaned-up Sunlight Chambers, called The Bookend. It is the last building in the row along Essex Quay and the curving Exchange Street Lower to the rear. The client, Temple Bar Properties, wanted a ‘punctuation point’ where the building line ends looking west over a landscaped area and the embedded Viking boat sculpture.

In contrast to the houses pitied by Joyce’s character this is a bright, white building, picked out dramatically in the evening sun’s rays coming from over Phoenix Park. The front of the building on the quays is quite sparsely kitted-out in comparison to its neighbours, particularly towards that west end. This plainness emphasizes its terminal role, but is not very engaging to the eye.

The west facing elevation, with a café at ground level and apartments above, is, however, a treat. There aren’t many buildings in city centre Dublin that offer such an unobstructed viewing opportunity of one whole unattached side of a building, and the architects, Arthur Gibney & Partners have taken the opportunity to make a bold statement with it. The projecting walls appear almost detachable, the overall effect, perhaps, being of robust book shelving. At the same time, it’s a lookout; somehow boat like, with the screen wall creating decks and a sense that the building is moving up river. The design is strong, but there are, sad to say, already signs of wear and tear in the masonry.

The Wooden Building – de Blacam & Meagher Architects

The Bookend is one of over 15,000 apartment developments built since 1990 aimed at repopulating the city centre. Another, even more prominent example, on the far side of Dublin’s Viking Experience from the Bookend, is the Residential Tower or Wooden Building, situated on Upper Exchange Street in the west end of Temple Bar. The wood panelling brings us back, of course, to Viking times, and the way each floor steps out slightly from the one below is quite medieval, but the tower itself is very modern.

The building is actually two towers, one five storey block and another nine-storey block with the gap between serving as an entrance up to a raised courtyard and very busy crèche. Designed with two more storeys in mind, the architects, de Blacam & Meagher had to compromise, but still achieved a height nearly double the neighbouring buildings. This is a thrilling work to view, with a wonderful array of material on show: the central shaft of tropical hardwood, one wing of white render, and another of bronze-coloured brickwork, highlighted by white cement. Artisans were commissioned to add customised features, such as the six-panel oak doors, and the copper window casements. The building also offers an endless variety of lines and shapes to the eye, and yet still holds together beautifully. “It’s a complex composition,” said Shane de Blacam, “because it responds to all its neighbours.”

The problem trying to appreciate such interesting residential architecture is how difficult it is to access for the public, not just in terms of actually buying apartments in places like Temple Bar, but just getting a decent view of the outside. This is especially so with the award-winning Printworks building, designed by Derek Tynan Architects, further east in Temple Bar. Only one full elevation is visible to the public, and the entrance to the raised courtyard is closed off with a gate for security reasons. It’s unfortunate that things have to be so because judging from the published photographs this is another spectacular design, and this time without the obvious appeal of wood to help it along. The RIAI award citation observes that this mixed development is “a thoroughly considered ensemble of uses and volumes, consistently and thoughtfully detailed with a scale and orientation that make it an oasis in the midst of street-level urban activity.”

Hair Salon – de Paor Architects

Temple Bar Properties fostered a group of architects in the 90s to produce work of such very high standards in the context of carefully planned, State-sponsored urban renewal. Less easy to achieve is a high quality of once-off retail architecture as this necessitates a broadminded entrepreneur meeting up with and trusting an adventurous architect. Just such a match has resulted in a bizarre little “outlet” on South William Street. Dylan Bradshaw’s hair salon, once you notice it, will cause you to do a double take. The dark exterior is both discreet and conspicuous. It’s both proscenium arch, and camera obscura. Where you’d expect to see a sign, all you get is a blank box that looks like it has been slid into the existing 1950s building, lit at night by a hidden blue light. This is architecture as branding. The door is all stainless steel, so to see what you’re getting yourself in for you are forced to look through the window again, and the temptation there and then is to step into the frame and walk down the long hall that stretches before you through the window. “The inside and the outside are deeply interlinked,” says Tom de Paor.

de Paor Architects wanted to create a durable interior reacting against the prevalence of disposable shop interiors being constantly ripped out and replaced. The materials used – teak and various colours of marble - glisten, and shine, and reflect in the chorus of slim lights that dangle from the ceiling.

The low-ceiling space is divided down the middle so that there is no front of house/back of house, but two parallel sides-of-house and a triangular section at the end. This establishes separate spaces for the many and varied activities of a modern salon, from reception, to washing and cutting, to storage, to shiatsu massage, and even a private room for any customers who have business to see to between the cut and highlights. Such daring work is a much-needed criticism of the banal kitsch of the shopping centre opposite.

Leinster House 2000 – Architectural Services, Office of Public Works supported by Donnelly Turpin Architects/Paul Arnold Architects

The State, through the Office of Public Works, has been very successful as a restorer of our architectural heritage. The new parliamentary building, however, comprising office suites for 100 Oireachtas members and four parliamentary committee rooms, is a fine example, with some restoration work involved, of its capacity for modern in-fill projects. Adjacent to Leinster House, and adjoining the National Library and National Gallery, this design required sensitive integration into a highly irregular space. The result sinks deep into the site, increasing in height as it recedes from Leinster House, and is delightfully asymmetrical in all directions.

Externally clad in Irish limestone, and extensively glazed, the building, designed by the OPW supported by Donnelly Turpin Architects and Paul Arnold Architects, provides members with air-conditioned, oak-lined offices, around a series of sunken courts, a glass roofed multi-storey atrium, and a landscaped courtyard with water garden. Daylight streams in everywhere, despite the confined site.

Again, though, the problem for the public is access, and in this case only the upper floors are generally visible, and only from Leinster Lawn and Merrion Square. There was talk in the Dáil of plans to consider taking down the railings around Leinster House, and to open the gardens to the public, and even to provide a walkway linking Merrion Square and Kildare Street, but in these insecure times this seems unlikely, so we can only take the word of our public representatives about the success of Leinster House 2000. Will any of them refuse to stand for reelection?

Citibank - Scott Tallon Walker Architects

The new Citibank Dublin Headquarters on North Wall Quay in the IFSC extension is the largest individual office building in Dublin, comprising approximately 374,000 square feet over six floors and basement parking. The building had to accommodate up to 2,000 staff while complying with the Dublin Docklands Development Authority’s somewhat cowardly height restrictions for the area. Frank McDonald of the Irish Times says the result has a “crew cut appearance”.

The Citibank building is, of course, not open to the public, but its front elevation, best viewed from the south side quay opposite, is revealing enough to indicate the success of the building. You’ll see nine clear subdivisions, four of Wicklow granite, three of alternating glass and white aluminium, and two fully glazed sections where two massive atria rise up through the building. The west end is stepped back along an angle formed by the glazed main entrance, and this creates a broad fan of footpath in front, marked by Citibank with the replanting of a mature oak tree.
Once through the revolving doors, on the other side of the glass wall you enter a huge, thrilling atrium space: a calm, quiet interior courtyard contained by office windows. Ivy drapes from internal window boxes above. Sounds travel smoothly without any edgy echoing. This calm, light-filled atmosphere is retained right throughout the building, in massive open-plan offices, carefully laid out to prevent shadows being cast and feelings of isolation among staff. It’s a comfortable, attractive working environment.

On the far side of the reception and the glass-encased lift shaft is a landscaped garden, replete with tropical plants and small trees. There is another internal potted garden in the east atrium and a small landscaped courtyard between the two atria. Good architecture lets nature in, apparently, and this building was awarded the Westland Landscape Award in the interior-landscaping category in recognition of this. The icing on the cake for an instance of “corporate architecture at its international best”, as the RIAI award citation goes.

Liffey Boardwalk – McGarry NíEanaigh

Judging by the number of people who without hesitation opt to take the new boardwalk rather than the footpath along Ormond Quay between O’Connell Bridge and Grattan Bridge, this architectural project is a huge success. There was some resistance to it in conservation circles, with An Taisce worried that it would be gimmicky, and might become shabby. But Dublin City Council is very proud of it, delighted that their idea to reintroduce Dubliners to the river is working so well. As the City Architect says, “Its success will accelerate the public demand that the quality of the Liffey continues to improve.”

The parallel footpath had to be left untouched, so the McGarry NíÉanaigh design rests on a series of rock anchors drilled diagonally into the bedrock of the river. The deck and elbow rail are timber from a sustainable managed source. The south-facing location is not over-shadowed by buildings, so it has a lot going for it as a place to stroll or sit in the sun. There are small terraced cafés along the route, slightly curvaceous wooden benches, and overhanging lights that may be angular interpretations of the traditional streetlamps on the quays.

The boards feel great to walk on, bring you closer to the river, and offer a whole new outlook on the quays and city skyline. This was a fantastic idea, and like the Georgian squares in their day, provides essential release from and architectural perspective on the ever-increasing density of city life.

Later in life Joyce reconsidered his treatment of the city: “I have reproduced (in ‘Dubliners’ at least) none of the attractions of the city ... its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality.” Of course, he didn’t mention buildings, but with all these recent outstanding additions to the architectural repertoire of the city, maybe now he would. Let’s just hope the hospitality isn’t diminished.

Paul O’Connor wishes to thank John DormanArchitects for their advice.

Irish Times feature on water park in France, Aqualand

2011-08-15T13:32:00.001+01:00

I had to cut the article down considerably for publication - see Times here >>>. And here's a fuller version >

With a combination of luck and avoidance tactics, we managed to get around the EuroDisney thing despite the three offspring between the ages of six and 10 practically equating France with that attraction. But we were in Languedoc-Rousillon, in the vicinity of another big French attraction, namely Aqualand, and considering their indulgent aunt had given them money marked ‘For Aqualand’, there was no getting out of this one.

Picture all the rides you’ve ever seen in an average playground and then add growth hormone, psychedelic inspiration, distorting mirrors and water. Slides, gutters and pipes of all shapes & sizes, in a park of moulded multi-coloured plastic, reaching up into the blue sky at every conceivable angle; running, filled or overflowing with chlorinated water, and accessed via steel stairwells leading to tree-height platforms.

Empty of people, it must be fascinating for engineers, insurance actuaries and suchlike to contemplate the admirable structures and their relationship with gravity and risk. To the kids this was a shrine to the fun gods. To us it was a safety quandary.

Having stuffed our gear, and maybe our dignity, into a locker we gamely stepped out in our togs prepared for that most unIrish of experiences: a whole day wandering around a park, and queuing for rides, in nothing but our swimsuits. Never mind there being no elbow room at a concert, or standing shoulder to shoulder at the match, in typical French style this is more bum to bum and chest to breast as, semi-naked, you wend your way among your fellow water-worshippers on the narrow pathways from ride to ride and between the crowd control railings at each. You may be used to the conventions that make near-nudity acceptable on the beach, but it takes a little adjusting of one’s perspective to get used to this standing around and walking along semi-clad in an amusement park. Needless to say, the French carry it off with their usual panache, semi-naked or not.

It’s nearly all bikinis for the girls and mostly either briefs or boxers styles for the boys. It’s mostly thrill-seeking teenagers in groups, but there is a high proportion of families and even some unaccompanied adults – although, they may just have become detached from their children. It’s mostly French, although we did have to queue at one stage for half and hour near an irritating bunch of a Irish teenage lads who spent their time commenting on their so rarely exposed bodily features.

Most of the rides are given English names, not to help the minority tourists, but reflecting the French weakness for English when they want to sound cool. “Crazy Race”, our first stop, is a racetrack of side-by-side water slides, gently waved to give that essential stomach-lurch thrill half way through. Most of the adults sit upright and concentrate on retaining some semblance of dignity as they splash through the water down the slope in their togs being watched by hundreds of strangers. Some have no shame and try to mimic the youth in testing out different positions – lying supine, lifting limbs, and ultimately looking remarkably like penguins from Happy Feet slipping gleefully down ice slopes. Some even manage to get a little bit of a lift-off on the hump and are momentarily flying!

We went down in parallel as a family and enjoyed it enough to line up again immediately for another go. We went from there to the “Anaconda”. When our youngest saw the somewhat deeper pool at the end of this ride, being uncomfortable with putting her face in the water, she decided to give it a miss and took off with her mother to find the kiddy’s section – a miniaturised version, a training ground for the future Aqualand customers.

I and the other two children duly queued up for “Anaconda” to collect a spongy mat each from those already descended. As we watched them spill off the end of the gutter and splash, limbs every which way, into the pool beneath, an image from Dante’s Inferno troubled me, but I continued to wait. Sadly after taking possession of the mats, we had to join another queue winding slowly up a steel stairwell, making me dizzier and queasier with every step. Realising at the top that pulling out would have been too embarrassing for my kids, I found myself adopting the required position, face down on the mat at the mouth of the twisting gutter, ready to take the fast route down. I found it to be a most unpleasant experience, chlorinated water constantly splashing up my nostrils, twisting and turning up and around the gutter and all the time picking up speed and losing control, wondering if I’d be an exception to the laws of physics they’d used to design this one.

The next queue was off-putting enough but when I beheld the scale of the ride itself, I decided to opt out. “The Wave” is a massive U shape of folded plastic lifted high in the sky on a steel frame. Sinners, holding onto the handles of their float for dear life, are pushed in two-man, figure-of-eight plastic floats from the top of one side of the U to be let fall almost straight down one side into the water trough below and slide up high on the opposite face, and so on until they come to rest, shaken and keen to disembark.

The children immediately joined the procession. I spent the best part of the next hour sitting on a scrubby bit of ground in front of “The Wave”, with other Dante types. I imagined errors in the design or exceptions in the trajectories, while watching two of my children slowly wend their way along the stanchions of the queue system, my sense of foreboding as to their safety growing with every scream from the descending souls, and not alleviated by the piped Beach Boys.

They survived and claimed, despite panic-stricken facial expressions that suggested otherwise, to have enjoyed it. We re-formed as a family and took a welcome relaxing trip down the “Congo River” in individual doughnut floats. Our youngest loved this one, and the absence of thrills and spills meant no queues and a very willing father.

The queuing for “Big Bob” would be a better explanation of its name than the fun payload, and “Twister” has fewer twists than its line-up had turns, but at least “Black Hole” was enough to scare off our kids and save us from that wait.

Finally, “Surf Beach” presented us with what my wife called a ‘soup of people’ floating around in a chlorine sea, chanting over and over for ‘La vague’ reminiscent of the aliens in Toy Story worshipping ‘the claw’. A similar pool is to be found at our own National Aquatic Centre, but the French do it in their inimitable way. A bell rang out, more bodies gathered in and cheers went up as some unseen mechanical arm generated the beginnings of a wave that spread and grew in vigour across the pool over the following few minutes. Ashore, others sat or lay in the sun, looking to all intents and purposes as if they were on an actual beach except for the fact that there was no one playing the usual beach racket ball or smoking.

Combining a good few of my bêtes-noir, including heights, crowds, queues and cheap thrills (which leave only a hunger for more), Aqualand was never going to be my kind of outing. But when I saw my youngest leaping joyfully in her armbands over the man-made waves, and the next one jumping time and again from the edge into the pool in every conceivable arrangement of limbs with the exception the one you’d call a dive, and the eldest witnessing the unfettered way the unselfconscious French lapped it all up, I appreciated that it was more a heaven than a hell.

Two different perspectives on business world

2011-08-10T11:28:00.000+01:00

This, from Philip Roth's American Pastoral:

These deep thinkers were the only people he could not stand to be around for long, these people who’d never manufactured anything or seen anything manufactured, who did not know what things were made of or how a company worked, who, aside from a house or a car, had never sold anything and didn’t know how to sell anything, who’d never hired a worker, fired a worker, trained a worker, been fleeced by a worker – people who knew nothing of the intricacies or the risks of building a business or running a factory but who nonetheless imagined that they knew everything worth knowing.

And this from Ted Hughes' The Iron Woman:

She pushed in through the plate-glass doors of the main office block directly behind a man in a suit who clutched a briefcase and walked with bounding strides as if he had only seconds to get where he was going. Hogarth followed her just as three men burst out of the lift and came hurtling across the reception hall almost running and out through the glass doors, rearranging their folders and papers in their arms as they went, and talking very loud all three together as if they had planted a bomb on a short fuse somewhere inside the building and were trying to disguise their getaway.
            Lucy seemed to know what to do. She looked past the unhappy screen of rubber plants and saw the plan of the office block of the wall. She marched across, past the little fountain and its bowl of plastic lilies, and Hogarth imitated her.
            He had enough sense to know that if they glanced towards the receptionist and caught her eye, she would ask them what they wanted – and that would be the end. She would say: ‘Please wait over there.’ Then she would phone for somebody who would tell them that nobody could speak to them that day. And their attack would have failed. Luckily, she was busy. Hogarth watched her out of his eye-corner, bent over her jumble of computers and fax machines, her hands scrabbling through heaps of papers as if her fingers chased each other. The phone was tucked between her cheek and her shoulder, and the top of her bowed curly head was plainly saying ‘Please don’t interrupt me.’
            The Manager’s office was on the fourth floor. Hogarth and Lucy went to the open lift. Two men got in beside them. Lucy pressed the button for the fourth, in beside them. Lucy pressed the button for the fourth, one of the men for the second, the other for the third. Neither spoke to the other. Both stared at Lucy and Hogarth but neither opened his mouth. Both for some reason looked very angry.

Where is the Rupert Pupkin of the internet?

2011-08-06T08:41:00.001+01:00

I'm sure this guy, Mathew Epstein, currently chasing a job with Google through various notice-me tactics and blogging about it, isn't the Rupert Pupkin of the internet - he seems too intelligent and talented. Yet, I was definitely reminded of the King of Comedy, the cringe-inducing desperation and delusion captured and dissected so relentlessly and mercilessly in that movie, when Robin Blandford drew our attention to M.E.'s activities.

Intentional, perhaps?

I do like his c.v. layout, though, Robin!

Capturing the essence of anatomy ...

2011-08-03T23:08:00.004+01:00

I wrote a feature article recently for the Irish Medical Times about the decommissioning of Trinity's Anatomy Building, where I studied for a while many years ago.

Before submitting it to the editor I needed to make sure I had my facts straight so I sent it to the Anatomy Department staff who I had been dealing with.

Their replies were music to my ears:

"this is excellant! You have managed to capture the essence of anatomy!

Well done and good luck with the publication,"

"That, I like a lot......brill
..Hope they print it all!! as nothing should be cut out ...its just too good."

Can you blame me for turning to mush and wallowing in it?

Sorry!

Conference on connections between arts & healthcare

2011-06-20T10:07:00.001+01:00

Recently attended the ‘Narratives of Health and Illness across the Lifespan‘ conference (- a rather unwieldy title, perhaps reflecting (unintentionally, I’m sure) the slight nervousness we all seem to feel about looking for a CONNECTION between the “fuzzy and creative” arts & “practical and factual” healthcare).

Wrote up some notes on it here >>>

The Taoiseach's speech writers

2011-05-26T06:58:00.005+01:00

The Indo today suggests that the controversy about Taoiseach Kenny's transposition of Obama's speech highlights "the 'West Wing' world of young government advisers, some of whom think the public is as attuned as they are to a virtual world of politics as seen through the US TV series."

Apparently it was written by a former journalist, Miriam O'Callaghan, and she argued that "it was such a well-known speech that everyone would recognise it and that the man who delivered it in Chicago would be standing beside Mr Kenny as he spoke."

And the Indo outlines the speech writing process:

But like all his speeches, Mr Kenny laid down the outline of what he wanted to say on Monday evening, the mood he wished to set and the message he wanted to send out.According to sources, while Ms O'Callaghan usually polishes up the final draft, others contribute to the areas where they have expertise.After the general election, Andrew McDowell, who wrote most of the Fine Gael manifesto and who has a broad knowledge of economics, moved into the Department of the Taoiseach.Mr McDowell and another young policy adviser, Paul O'Brien, who also worked for Fine Gael in opposition, contribute to any of Mr Kenny's speeches that touch on their areas of expertise.Other government departments are also asked to submit material from their specialists if a specific speech requires technical details.Chief of staff Mark Kennelly vets most of the speeches before they are delivered, but Mr Kenny has the final word on every speech.

Obama on Irish writing

2011-05-23T12:03:00.007+01:00

President Obama: "If you need someone to do some good writing, hire an Irishman."

He said this in reply to Taoiseach Enda Kenny explaining the background to the gift the Government had made to the Obama children: a collection of Hawaiian fairytales & legends put together by Irish poet Padraic Colum, published by Yale University Press >>>

Legends of Hawaii

Padraic Colum
Nineteen bright and charming fairy tales of Hawaii have been skillfully retold by this gifted storyteller. Padraic Colum brings to them a rare feeling for the things of the imagination, and he tells them with poetry, imagery, and enchantment. These legends have been treasured by Hawaiians from time immemorial and are perhaps our best approach to the cultural background of the Hawaiian people.

“A selection of native stories such as this, so skillfully retold by a gifted storyteller, is perhaps… the best approach to the actual cultural background of the Hawaiian people…. Altogether a notable selection, valuable to the adult as to the child, and delightfully told.” –Martha Beckwith, New York Times

“Padraic Colum… has never combined charm and delicate adventure more effectively than in this set of nineteen Hawaiian tales. They are powerfully imagined, rich in character and atmosphere.” –Charles J. Finger, New York Herald Tribune

“Those who know Colum’s retelling of old stories need not be told here that this is a beautiful book. His most distinctive gift as a man of letters is his feeling for the folk mind, his ability not to put it on, but to be it. In prose lovely, simple, vocal, he tells these stories, leaving you to feel the symbolism for yourself.” –Horace Reynolds,Christian Science Monitor

“This is a fine book for children, because the stories are so entertaining; and it is a good book for anybody, because one learns so much of the folklore of these loveliest of gardens.” –William Lyon Phelps

THE ELEMENTS OF PRESS RELEASE STYLE by Gary Klein

2011-05-20T12:59:00.004+01:00

Like the unpredictability of this turning-on-its head ("BETTER"!) take on the epidemic of Ten-lists, from McSweeney's >>

1. Omit needless words.

Vigorous writing is precise. A press release should contain no unnecessary words, for the same reason a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

BAD
"The company regrets its role in this major environmental catastrophe, and we are fully committed to making the community whole."

BETTER
"This environmental catastrophe is regrettable."

[My favourite >>>]

8. Avoid fancy words.

Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able. Anglo-Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo-Saxon words. In this, as in so many matters pertaining to style, one's ear must be one's guide.

BAD
"We are carefully monitoring the FDA's response to widespread Clostridium botulinum and Listeria monocytogenes contamination in our products, and are deeply troubled by reports of acute gastrointestinal hemorrhaging."

BETTER
"We stand by our line of organic, free-trade products."

Dictated idea takes shape

2011-05-12T11:05:00.000+01:00

I was driving home from an interview with a medic in relation to a job I'm doing at the moment and some of the topics of the interview joined up with an idea that occurred to me about how to present it.

I grabbed the dictaphone and began recording (- if that's illegal when driving, I'm in trouble) and though I struggled to get the full result out smoothly it was enough to allow me to 'move on' in my thoughts (and pick up the kids, no doubt) and come back to it later.

Here's the dictated draft >>>

Copy writing on the fly by Penhire

And here's the current visualisation of the idea >>>

One hell of an indictment

2011-05-06T22:41:00.002+01:00

David Lenehan's post about an apartment block from the days of our bubble is a MUST-READ item >>> "Its a shame that this place was built in place of the old mill which stood for over a century, but its a tragedy that it was not maintained and used to house someone. It must have cost between €5m and €10m to build and now its worth nothing. Water and electricity are cut off and the only sounds are the dying batteries in the smoke alarms."

Teasing Annie West teasing Seamus Heaney

2011-04-14T00:37:00.011+01:00

The Ballad of Annie and Seamus by Penhire

Seamus is famous for poems and verse,

While Annie would sooner he climbed in her purse,
But, the poet is known for being averse
To things that could put him into a hearse,
So Annie’s reduced to drawing a curse
On Seamus and all his "nonsensical verse".

Children's thoughts

2011-04-13T09:48:00.000+01:00

Follow that car ...

2011-03-16T22:03:00.002Z

Deputy Luke 'Ming' Flanagan's first speech in Dáil Éireann

2011-03-09T22:18:00.002Z

Taken from Oireachtas website here >>>

The speech is here on YouTube >>

Deputy Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan: I wish you, a Cheann Comhairle, the best of luck in your new position. It is an amazing honour to be even standing here today representing the people of Roscommon-South Leitrim and the people of the Republic of Ireland. What is good for the people of Roscommon-South Leitrim will be good for the people of the Republic of Ireland and vice versa. One will not be able to work without the other.

It is unfortunate that as a west of Ireland man I will be opposing the nomination of Deputy Enda Kenny as Taoiseach, not because I have anything against him personally but because I do not believe he is the best person for the job. Before the election it was clear that everyone who was running for the Labour Party thought that Deputy Gilmore would be the best person for the job. A short time before the election it was clear that a majority of people within Fine Gael did not think Deputy Kenny was the best person for the job, but there is nothing I, Deputy Gilmore or those people in Fine Gael can do about that now. The situation is a fait accompli as Deputy Enda Kenny will become Taoiseach.

I wish him the best of luck on behalf of my two children because if he has good luck and he does well then they will not have to take the boat or the aeroplane to London like 19 out of the 20 members of my family and my wife’s family. I am terrified of the prospect that they will have to take the same road. I am conscious of the fact that parents in Germany, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and other countries do not have to tell their sons or daughters when they turn 18 that the best thing they can do is leave their country.

I dream and hope that after five years the Government will have solved the problem of emigration once and for all. I hope the Government will stem that tide as quickly as is possible. Not only that, I also hope that those people who have had to emigrate in recent years, many of my friends and neighbours among them, will be able to come back to a country that can sustain them, just as other modern European countries can.

I hope Deputy Enda Kenny will be brave when dealing with our European partners. I have nothing against Europe. I have lived in Holland, Spain, Germany and Great Britain. All I know is that if I fall on hard times-----

(Interruptions).

Deputy Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan: The people of Roscommon-South Leitrim would like to be shown a bit of respect and that Members would keep quiet while I am talking. I will do exactly the same thing. I am conscious that we need to do many things immediately and as quickly as possible to get ourselves out of the hole we are in. We need to do them right because otherwise we are sentencing the people in this country to a life of hell. I am confident that if it is done right then things can go very well for people. When it comes to the agrifood sector and the tourism sector there is massive potential for jobs. If Deputy Kenny, his colleagues in Fine Gael and the Labour Party do it right then we will live in a wonderful country.

The first thing that needs to be done - and it is what I do when, for example, I am buying a car - is to talk to the experts. When I buy a car, I talk to my friend, the mechanic. When I was buying my house, I spoke to an engineer and I listened to his expertise. I am begging Deputy Kenny to listen to the experts, people like Constantin Gurdgiev, David McWilliams and that man across the Chamber, Deputy Ross. He must listen to their view that we have no choice but to default on this bank debt. However, to those who use what is now being described as the “D word”, the question is immediately thrown back as to what we will do for money if that is done The reality is - and the experts cannot all be wrong on this - that we will have to default anyway down the line. It is better to do it of our own accord than to wait for that tonne of bricks to fall on our heads. If we do that we have some chance of getting out of the hole we are in.

There are many things in the programme for Government with which I agree. I agree with reforming our health system, although I would like to see more detail on that. I agree with reform to deal with the fact that government does not work in this country. There are several other issues with which I agree. I hope, above all, that the Government that will be elected today also agrees with these aims, that its members mean it when they say they will go for political reform. Unless they do we will not get out of this hole.

I especially hope they want to reform the health system. I am not any sort of expert in health care from the point of view of being a doctor, but I am an expert from the point of view of being a patient. My children, my wife, my late mother, my father and I have all had to use the health system. It is totally and utterly inadequate. It was embarrassing and nothing short of a disgrace to watch what my mother went through. If the Government does one thing, I hope it gets this right. If it cannot do so it will have failed.

I wish Deputies Kenny and Gilmore the best of luck in the next five years. If I agree with that they are doing I will vote with them. If I disagree, I will oppose them hammer and tongs on the floor of Dáil Éireann, and if I do not get my spake in here I will do it through the media. I hope the new Government will see sense. We all have one thing in common, namely, our wish to make Ireland great again. That great Irish man, Seán Lemass, once said that Irish people are capable of doing things just as well as anywhere else in the world - if not better, then equally well. I believe that and I hope the new Government believes it. If we follow through on it Ireland will become great again.

Dublin poem

2011-03-05T23:31:00.001Z

Clondalkin
Clonskeagh
Clonsilla
Clonee
Clonshaugh
Clongriffin
Clontarf

To be continued ....

The Little Red Hen: a movie in a book

2011-02-27T11:12:00.008Z

Full disclosure: I know Annie West, the illustrator; but only a little; and it hasn't influenced my opinion of this book in any way.

Maybe genius is too strong a word for it, but this book has left such a positive impression on our story time that I have to say something jolting about it. It is a gift, a cause for celebration. What is terrible is that the talent, imagination, thinking, effort and time that goes into such "children's books", and in particular this one, goes so unrecognised. (For example, I don't think this one is even in print anymore.)

Annie West has, with phenomenal attention to detail and (I would guess) a lot of tea, sweat and tears, given us a movie in a book. Let me say that again - this book is a movie. The standard camera angles are all there: extreme long shot, long shot, medium shot and close up. The angles are there, ranging from bird's eye to eye level. The camera movements are given a still treatment: pans, tilts and dolly shots. But Annie's eye takes us way beyond these standard tools of the trade; her framing of the action and choice of angles are what make the story come alive, giving an otherwise dull farmyard arrival scene a Wild West showdown feel, or giving an uphill climb the proper sense of just how much effort it's going to be.

In terms of location scouting for the shoot, Annie might not have had to go that far for inspiration considering she lives on a farm herself, but with a slight of hand and ink she has transformed her Co Sligo countryside into something classical, and given Drumcliff a French facelift for the town scenes. It brings to mind for me a miniature, self-contained universe, like that realised in, say, Jean de Florette & Manon des Sources; and this fits in perfectly with the tale's universality, Little Red Hen being a folk tale as old as the hills. Or think of Kavanagh's line: "I made the Iliad from such /A local row."

The characters - namely: the little red hen, the fat pink pig, the black-tailed sheepdog, and the tall grey goose - are superbly cast (some having roles in Annie's own 'Moxie the Underdog' also) and give pitch perfect performances, ranging easily across friendly, lazy, hard-working, brave, adventurous, excited, curious to chastising and chastened - challenging emotional states for children's book drawings.

The "screenplay" was written by one John Escott and his control of the material is as perfect as Annie's. It has a gentle, laconic, effortless feel to it, as if everything was just so; a beautiful internal rhythm and pattern. The "And she did" refrain is a lovely touch, and it has become almost a catchphrase for me and my children.

The moralising at the end is minimised, and the little red hen is matter-of-fact and rational in her scolding of her lazy friends: she simply asks them whether they helped her make the bread (leaving Annie's close ups to do the accusing), lets them answer and concludes: "Then you will not help me eat my bread." The movie-book ends as it began with a return to the birds-eye view of the world the characters occupy. (I kinda wish this shot was not an exact repeat of the opener, that it had been given a slight tweak to indicate a subtle change in the dynamic of the farmyard, but then again one's imagination does that job just as well thanks to the impact of the tale itself.)

A great, great work of art. (So much do we love it, we have one of the original drawings in our sitting room!)

!!!!!!!! = 8 thumbs up from us for The Little Red Hen (Brimax). Buy it here >>>

Wordpress site

2011-02-26T00:13:00.006Z

Delighted to have helped my publishing pal, Peter O'Connell, get the hang of Wordpress; and to see such a good outcome from our hour or so working together on his PR/Marketing site. The Caroline theme is very simple but properly constructed to avoid being dull, and Peter's choice of image gives it that perfect little lift it needs. Needless to say, Peter didn't need a lot of help with the writing!

TCD's Anatomy building

2011-02-25T16:39:00.008Z

Delighted to have been asked to write an accompanying text for Fionn McCann's eye-poppingly perfect photographs of Trinity's anatomy building (where I spent some time many years ago, almost blind to its beauty).

Here is Fionn's dedicated website >>

Here's what I wrote:

Coinciding, as if by design, with the tercentenary of medical education in Trinity, the University of Dublin's School of Medicine is relocating to the magnificent Trinity Biosciences Development. This new home for preclinical training and bioscience research also means a new setting for the College's Department of Anatomy.

While embracing the progress, we benefit from looking to the past, and so the photographs taken by Fionn McCann of the interior of Trinity's historic Anatomy Building are not conservative, but rather philosophical and progressive. In multiple ways these serene images elucidate the workings of the human eye, and by extension, human anatomy.

In a number of the photographs we see drawings, paintings and sculptures of the human form as musculature and as skeleton. These are the work of Cecil Erskine, Professor of Anatomy here from 1947 to 1984. Many are copies of and tributes to Vesalius' famous anatomical drawings which in turn pay tribute to the latest discoveries about the body in the sixteenth century; and thus through McCann's photographs we are under the spell of a chain of representations: pictures of pictures of pictures.

But McCann's images are more about the setting of Erkine's homages, not only recording the building's design and contents, but also surveying the patterns and symmetries of its form, assaying the ‘eye’ of the designer, the viewer and the artist for what we ‘see’.

And though we do not actually see cadavers or details of anatomical specimens, we inevitably find ourselves filling in the spaces and inferring such details from our store of information and previous experience. The spaces McCann creates await and even call out for action. They are sets or stages, a little like the landscapes used by Vesalius in which to pose his anatomical figures, only in Fionn's case with the human forms mostly in the wings, or absent altogether and implied.

Imagine Erskine's Vesalian forms climbing off the walls to take centre stage and fill the spaces, or, less fancifully, call to the mind's eye the bodies, teachers, staff, students and visitors who have acted out their parts here for nearly 200 years, donating, embalming, dissecting, studying, teaching, learning, researching, maintaining and moving on."

A brace of clichés in a poem of persuasion

2011-02-24T14:17:00.002Z

You are what you do.
You reap what you sow.
You only live once.
Go on, have a go!

A reading of WB Yeats' 'Paudeen'

2011-02-21T18:38:00.005Z

Paudeen by WB Yeats read by Penhire

INDIGNANT at the fumbling wits, the obscure spite
Of our old Paudeen in his shop, I stumbled blind
Among the stones and thorn trees, under morning light;
Until a curlew cried and in the luminous wind
A curlew answered; and suddenly thereupon I thought
That on the lonely height where all are in God’s eye,
There cannot be, confusion of our sound forgot,
A single soul that lacks a sweet crystaline cry.

Sub-prime poem

2011-02-11T12:07:00.004Z

Sub-prime song (apologies to Tom Waits) by Penhire

Sub-prime,

with barely a dime,

but still I'm holding on

to the notion

that we'll find a potion

and won't have to

do the time.

Me and My Mammoth, by Joel Stewart

2011-02-02T20:58:00.009Z

My and My Mammoth by Joel Stewart (Macmillan).

Just read this to my 5 year old daughter & we both liked it a lot. (Was probably made even better by our quiet circumstances: I love all my three children, of course, but when there's only one of them at home, as there was earlier tonight, there's a peacefulness that you've really gotta cherish; and we did!)

It's the story of a young girl (not specified as such in the text, but that's what we assumed - and there needs to be more girl stories of this sort, in my opinion) who loves making things but admits that they don't always turn out the way she expects. It's funny, genuinely funny - as in, the gags are clever and the timing is good. And it's not in the slightest bit moralistic or preachy as some books about kids doing art have been of late (I'm thinking of The Dot).

My favourite bit was when she is shown working on an aeroplane kit: "But when I had finished ... [turn over to see a massive mammoth across two pages] ... it was much larger than I expected. And it was nothing like the picture on the box."

My daughter's favourite bit was when the mammoth, flying the girl to the Arctic, crashed onto the ice, and in perfect understatement as she lies upside down beside a propeller, the girl just says, "The landing was tricky ..."

The writing is totally without fault. The font is a really lovely home-made thing. The illustrations, by the author, are delicious in style and give plenty of engaging detail on each page and in each element. There are one or two contrived moments in the narrative, but overall it works.

And by the way, Joel is the illustrator of many really good quality children's books including, what is probably my favourite children's book, The Magic Paintbrush (written by the amazing Julia Donaldson). He also illustrated a book I don't really like in terms of the words, Underwater Farmyard.

iiii = four thumbs up from us for Me and My Mammoth. Buy it here >>>

Tim Radford's 25 commandments for journalists

2011-02-02T09:27:00.002Z

Tim Radford has published his own writing rules in the Guardian here >>>>

My favourite:

"You are not writing to impress the scientist you have just interviewed, nor the professor who got you through your degree, nor the editor who foolishly turned you down, or the rather dishy person you just met at a party and told you were a writer. "
"Nothing sends a reader scurrying to the crossword, or the racing column, faster than pomposity. "
"It is precisely because issues – medicine, politics, accountancy,... – are complicated that readers turn to ... papers ... expecting to have them made simple."
"If you are a science writer, you occasionally have to bandy words that no ordinary human ever uses, like phenotype, mitochondrion, cosmic inflation, Gaussian distribution and isostasy. So you really don't want to be effulgent or felicitous as well. You could just try being bright and happy."

Mama Panya's Pancakes, by Mary and Rich Chamberlin

2011-02-01T08:28:00.000Z

Mama Panya's Pancakes, by Mary and Rich Chamberlin

I quite like children's books that not only entertain and play on the heart but also educate - as long as they do so with a lightness of touch that makes them pleasant to read aloud.

Mama Panya's Pancakes is subtitled A Village Tale from Kenya and the idea of giving my five-year old some insight into east African life was part of the reason for choosing it. It might have been more appealing in that respect if the author had a Kenyan name, but I rarely pay much attention to who writes the children's books I read so the fear of patronising tones that "Chamberlin" might instill didn't put me off. And I'm glad it didn't.

This is a really pleasant tale of a mother and son meeting friends on fair day. Adika, the son, starts inviting everyone they bump into to come over to his house for pancakes, while his mother, Panya, worries about not having enough to go round. But she needn't worry, of course, because guests always bring gifts.

A sunny version of life in Kenya is presented, which is as you'd expect in a children's book, and Julia Cairns' illustrations, while very accomplished, are a little predictable. But overall, it's a decent read, the writing is smooth, and the taste of another culture you get is very well incorporated: names of people, habitat, activities, food, clothes etc.

At the end of the book, you get a few pages of factual information about Kenya, and this too is well pitched for the readership and not dull. Finally, you get Mama Panya's Pancake recipe, which is, interestingly, flavoured with cardamom and chilli - not something my five-year old would go for, but that's the point really.

iii = three thumbs up from us. Buy it here >>>>

Feature in Irish Medical Times re Ian Wilson music

2011-01-31T00:34:00.000Z

[Original is here >>>]

Paul O’Connor was at Tallaght Hospital recently to witness the world premiere of Irish composer Ian Wilson’s musical take on stoke.

As the writer Rachel Cusk has put it, hospital is “a place of steel, a place where things happen, where event is irresistible” and so it is not an ideal setting for classical music performances.The functional furniture, the shinyobjets de médecine around about and the surrounding drama are in sharp contrast to the mellow hues of concert halls and the glamorous swirls of musical instruments. And yet the Day Hospital of the Age-Related Healthcare Unit of the Adelaide and Meath Hospital, Tallaght, recently played host to the world premiere of a brand new work for string quartet and soprano singer by the celebrated Irish composer Ian Wilson.

Through Arts Council funding, and co-ordinated by the Director of Arts and Health at the hospital, Hilary Moss, Wilson has recently completed 10 weeks in residence at the Hospital and has composed a sequence of songs (with one instrumental piece) about the experience of stroke from different perspectives.

It is a risky and witty juxtaposition of newly-composed songs based on the words of people Ian met in the unit, with masterful arrangements of classic Doris Day hits.

In the first piece, Water, the words of a stroke patient are set to a gently avant garde stream of music. The libretto goes, “When I was at the hospital I was very scared, I was crying a lot because I couldn’t articulate what I was feeling… Sometimes I could say ‘water’, and sometimes I could point to water, and other times I just couldn’t think of the word.”

Soon the music shifts into a swirling, plucky arrangement of Fly Me to the Moon: “In other words, hold my hand. In other words, darling kiss me.”

Four members of the Irish Chamber Orchestra and sop-rano Deirdre Moynihan were charged with bringing the work to life in the unit lounge for a small audience of patients, staff and guests. Doctors in white coats, patients in gowns, nurses in uniform, patients with walking frames or in wheelchairs – you could tell that everyone had ‘stolen away’ briefly from where they were really meant to be to enter this other world.

Hospital environment
It is bringing that rarefied yet ‘normal’ world of serious music to this clinical setting that is so important to the likes of Hilary Moss and Prof Desmond O’Neill.

Not only does it offer, briefly, something special to the patients and staff, it also normalises the hospital environment in some small way too; and considering how many people spend considerable time in these institutions, why shouldn’t the full range of human activities of the world be conducted here?

In a way, Wilson achieves something similar in the musical juxtaposition: by incorporating the everyday words of patients and medical staff into the composition, he lifts their experiences into the realm of art, and then by putting the famous lyrics into the mouths of their characters in the music, he bridges the gap between their world and ours, normalising their perspective through familiar sentiments.

Another patient/character declares: “The only thing I can remember is feeling terrible, terrible, terrible tired… After that I could see double vision all the time, the time, the time. That’s how slight it was… Close your eyes, rest your head on my shoulder and sleep, close your eyes and I will close mine… Oh! This is divine… Close your eyes, when you open them dear, I’ll be here by your side.”

Wilson explained beforehand that of course Doris Day was perfect in terms of the average age of many stroke sufferers, but he indicated that there was also more to the choice than that. Accessibility is one thing, and the hit songs make that a sure thing, but it is the way the original material and the classics work off one another that provides the meaning in this composition.

Many of the Day songs, while delightfully playful and fun and positive, have a slightly poignant feel to them, a pathos that is heightened by the call of another era that one hears in the songs: “In other words, please be true”; “Que sera, sera, whatever will be will be”; “Bewitched, bothered and bewildered”.

Old-fashioned words from a bygone era when jazz was gentle enough to be mainstream.

In that poignancy combined with art you get what is called ‘sublime pathos’: a sense of how human freedom can triumph in the struggle against suffering, and this may well be what we experience in this song cycle.

Another song, Carry it with You, is a setting of the words of one of the doctors: “I think people are looking for empathy and you cannot empathise with people without feeling what they are feeling. Of course, you can’t get over-involved or else you couldn’t make any decisions at all. You’d just be swamped. I don’t think we can do that… Whatever will be, will be, the future’s not ours to see, que sera, sera.”

And while you are sitting there, listening to these unusual bedfellows, you notice also that the life of the hospital carries on, has to carry on, while the music unfolds: staff come and go; beeps go off; smells of food being prepared fill the air; medics and patients go by with barely time to notice that a powerful work of art is in full swing through those open doors. But their work, suffering and lives have been noticed in Wilson’s art, and are transformed every time that work is listened to.

A public performance of Ian Wilson’s piece of music has been scheduled for early 2011.

Housing hyperbole

2011-01-28T22:10:00.003Z

Wondering just how high agents can talk up a property? Sun-drenched gardens! Penthouse to describe a top floor apartment in a two-storey block! Dream home used in relation to a 3-bed semi in another housing estate! Well, I've heard them all a million times over [See! Contagious], but this one struck me as an unintentional new height in housing hyperbole.

Just shows that there's no housing the hyperbole of estate agents.

A poem for Annie West on the anniversary of Yeats' death

2011-01-28T11:35:00.003Z

Go see Annie West by Penhire

"I will arise from grave now, to go see Annie West,

And a cup o’ tea drink there, of leaves and water made;

Nine biscuits will I eat there, before I make my request:

That all image royalties be paid.”

How 2011 can be the year of a 'plain English' health service

2011-01-11T09:22:00.002Z

[From Indo >>>] Phrases like 'stakeholder engagement', 'buy in', 'integrated pathways', 'funding envelope', 'systemic failure' trip off the tongue of health executives while also littering reports and reviews.

Other words or phrases, thanks to their vagueness, are used time and again. Some of the worst platitudes include:

Reform -- a hoary old chestnut in the health service at this stage. It has been debased through over-use and has been called on too often as a way of playing for time when in reality no meaningful change for the better has been made.
Subject to budgetary parameters -- a great fallback when avoiding a straight answer to a question on whether funding for some service will be made available. Politicians love it because it allows them delay the bad news.
Service users/providers -- titles which have now reached epidemic proportions. They crop up all the time in particular areas. A patient with a psychiatric illness, a person with a disability or an older person with a home-care package cannot be described as such but instead they become a generic 'service user'.
Challenge -- a word that has been trampled on in the health service in recent years. It is one of those shields senior executives use when they are confronted with a tough question.

So, for instance, when quizzed on why people are enduring long delays to see a specialist they prefer to talk of the challenge instead of spelling out what they are doing to solve the problem or admitting they don't have a solution.

Clinical leadership -- the reality is most people outside health professions would be hard pressed to know what it means. It merely involves professionals like doctors involved in decision-making rather than relying solely on lay people. Yet managers and executives use the phrase with abandon. It is yet another pompous use of jargon.
Stakeholder engagement -- this must be one of the first for the dustbin. It sounds fine and lofty but the reality is much more mundane. Why not say simply that 'we are speaking to all the groups and individuals who have an interest in the area'?
Intervention -- a word not just beloved of bureaucrats, but doctors who should know better. It could all be more easily explained as some task or action to treat or cure an illness or condition.
World-class health service -- definitely time to give this one a rest. We have been constantly promised the elusive world class health service but then we see our survival rates and waiting lists contrasted against the best in Europe.

Better to keep it real and stop patronising people with nonsense.

Lucy Kellaway: A vintage year for the Management Guff Awards

2011-01-10T13:26:00.003Z

(Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011) See here for full article >>>

Category: Daft new names for common nouns
Toyota, which has rebranded the car as a “sustainable mobility solution”, scoops the gold.
Ian Freed, vice-president of Amazon Kindle, gets a silver medal for renaming books “reading containers”, but Toyota, which has rebranded the car as a “sustainable mobility solution”, scoops the gold.

Category: best combination of weasel words
Royal Dutch Shell recently declared that it was “in a delivery window for new growth”

Category: Golden Fig Leaf for euphemisms
Stockbroker JM Finn explained to customers that it was charging more: “We have decided to further progress a fee element.”
“We invested in several key talent additions.”

Category: mixed metaphor award
The UK Corporate Governance Code contains a heroic quadruple mixed metaphor: “a turning point in attacking the fungus of ‘boiler-plate’”

Category: nouns pretending to be verbs
Ernst & Young's phrase “the up-skilling of the workforce” wins the prize for most annoying use of “up”, it also wins the nerb award, handed out for nouns pretending to be verbs. The gerund “skilling” introduces us to the new and unneeded verb: to skill.

Category: silliest job title
Frost & Sullivan for its client value enhancement executive, and the “major international bank” that advertised for a customer journey re-engineering manager. But the prize goes to Andy Roach of FBM consulting, who calls himself a “prosultant”.

Category: golden flannel award for talking utter jibberish
Investor Chuck Davies who was quoted in the FT as saying: “He is a deep-dive, granular, research-oriented person who really understands the inner workings of companies and is just a very free-cash flow, hard-asset-based investor.”

Category: global guff award
The People’s Republic of China has taken a great leap forward in guff. In a yellow box at the bottom of its new Five Year Plan it declares: “Facing the future we are standing at a new historic starting point.”

From the Guardian: Medical ghostwriters who build a brand

2011-01-05T22:53:00.001Z

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian, Saturday 18 September 2010
Article history

If I tell you that Katie Price did not, necessarily, write her own book, this is not a revelation. From academics I have slightly higher expectations, but now the legal system has spat out another skip full of documents: we get a new insight into the strange phenomenon of medical ghostwriting.

Attributed authorial assistance is one thing. This is different, and more cynical. A commercial medical writing company is employed by a drug company to produce papers that can be rolled out in academic journals to build a brand message. After copywriters write the articles, in collaboration with the drug company, to their specifications, the ghostwriting company finds some academics willing to put their names to them, perhaps after modest changes. READ MORE >>>

The latest documents come from a court case brought against Wyeth by around 14,000 patients who developed breast cancer while taking Prempro, the hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

The open access journal PLoS Medicine, acting with the New York Times, argued successfully in court that 1,500 documents which detailed the ghostwriting should be placed in the public domain, because they represent information on a potential threat to public health.

Now, PLoS has published the first academic analysis of these documents, which is free to access online.

HRT has a rocky history. Initially the panacea to all ills, by 1998 the HERS trial showed it did not prevent cardiovascular events and by 2002 the Women's Health Initiative showed it increased the risk of breast cancer and stroke. We now know it increases the risk of dementia and incontinence.

Survey data shows that even today many gynaecologists have beliefs about the efficacy of HRT that are in excess of the evidence. Reading how the literature was engineered, it is not hard to see why.

The medical communications company DesignWrite boasts that over 12 years they have "planned, created, and/or managed hundreds of advisory boards, a thousand abstracts and posters, 500 clinical papers, over 10,000 speakers' bureau programmes, over 200 satellite symposia, 60 international programmes, dozens of websites, and a broad array of ancillary printed and electronic materials".

They proposed a "planned publication programme" to Wyeth, of review articles, case reports, letters, editorials, commentaries and more, using the medical literature as a marketing tool.

DesignWrite wrote the first drafts, and sent them to Wyeth, who advised on the creation of a second draft. Only then was the paper sent to the academic who would appear as the "author".

The academics were not paid cash, but they did get an easy publication in an academic journal for their CV. And once the publication process was in train, the chap from Wyeth's marketing department provided comments and suggestions for the authors to use in response to peer reviewers' comments.

The PLoS documents show DesignWrite sold Wyeth more than 50 peer reviewed journal articles for HRT, and a similar number of conference posters, slide kits, symposia, and journal supplements. Adriane Fugh-Berman, associate professor in the department of physiology at Georgetown University Medical Centre in Washington DC, who analysed the documents (who appeared against Wyeth in the class action) found that these publications variously promoted unproven and unlicensed benefits of Wyeth's HRT drug, undermined its competitors, and downplayed its harms.

There are no rules against this. There are traditions, good faith, and leaky regulations. It's illegal, for example, to promote a drug for "off label" use, which means selling it to treat a medical problem for which it has no licence.

In the case of Wyeth's HRT drug, they could not market it for preventing Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and wrinkles, to name but a few. Fugh-Berman's analysis found that many articles promoted the drug's use for exactly these conditions: but academic journal publications are not regarded as promotional activity, so this was all legal.

Worst of all is the complicity of the academics. There is no possible way they could persuade themselves what they were doing was correct. "Research shows high clinician reliance on journal articles for credible product information," said DesignWrite. They're right: when you read an academic paper, you trust it was written by the person whose name is on it.

There are simple solutions. If a commercial writer employed by a pharmaceutical company writes a paper, their name and their company's name should be on it. If the authors on a paper did not write or lead on it, they should say so. Universities could take a lead, but do not, and so these problems will persist, because they are complicated, and hidden from public scrutiny. That's why you should read about them in PLoS, talk about them, crane your neck over, scratch your chin, and mutter in astonishment. Nobody in a regulatory role is interested. Our only hope is the power of shame.

Crystal Clear health literacy

2010-12-22T10:22:00.004Z

The Crystal Clear MSD Health Literacy Awards 2010 are sponsored by MSD and supported by NALA. The awards recognise and reward excellence in health literacy in the healthcare sector. The awards are open to anyone working in healthcare, whether you are a receptionist in a GP surgery, a catering manager in a hospital, a pharmacist, a doctor, a nurse or a patient advocate.

Awards categories:
Best Project in General Practice
Best Project in a Hospital
Best Project in the Community or in a Social Setting
Best Health Promotion Project
Best Health Communication through Journalism

For information on the Crystal Clear MSD Health Literacy Awards 2010 or to enter click here >>>

Dennis O'Driscoll on money

2010-12-21T16:26:00.005Z

(from Irish Times, an extract from Dennis O'Driscoll's poem >>>)
Paper Trail

Once, money had credibility. Its word was its bond.
The story it told was backed up by casket-shaped gold bullion
interred in cold, calculating vaults of central banks.
Once, money added up, was secure in its identity, knew
exactly what it stood for. It had standing: was seed capital,
buying power, providence, a healthy reserve for future needs.
The love of money was the root of evil. Yet thrift was virtuous.
Saving was good for the soul. ...
Then the bottom line turned notional; losses, gains
proved mere statistics, collateral for loans a default mode
consigned to timorous, wimpish, bygone times.
Labyrinthine instruments were trafficked on
global exchanges in the blink of a cursors eye,
quicker than a bullish broker could roar Buy!
>>>>

Praise from Karl Deeter

2010-12-20T15:05:00.003Z

"That is legendary copy! I sent it on via email"

Praise from Dragon, Gavin Duffy

2010-12-20T13:09:00.005Z

Comments from Gavin Duffy of Dragon's Den about the copy we did for Animatazz when it was first launched in Ireland:

"Yes Paul that’s the business!"
"Paul, first of all let me state the obvious, this is very well written according to my wife and I, both former journalists."
"Well done. I can only imagine the amount of heartache, perspiration and frustration that goes into pulling a project like this all together."
"That’s super. WELL DONE!"
"Paul received your script. Excellent work, a dramatic improvement."

Praise is always welcome!

2010-12-15T21:27:00.004Z

I wrote an unusual article recently about classical music in hospitals that will appear in the New Year in a medical publication, but in the meantime I'm pleased to say I got great feedback from the people involved who have read it:

"Paul O'Connor has written a fantastic article for The ________ on the music project."

"Fabulous!"

"Great article, Paul, well done."

The principles of scientific editing

2010-12-15T15:09:00.003Z

The principles of editing according to my aunt, referenced in an article, 'Personalities in Publishing: Maeve O'Connor' by Hazel Bell in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing (University of Toronto Press, April 2001:Volume 32, Number 3) -

"After a career that started with a degree in literature and training in typing skills, and that has culminated in international regard as a Personalities in Publishing: Maeve O’Connor 173 174 Journal of Scholarly Publishing doyenne of scientific copy editors, Maeve O’Connor maintains that, as much as editorial technology has changed, enabling easier and speedier work and correspondence and better standards of production, the principles of scientific editing remain unchanged – above all, clarity in delivering the precise scientific message."

Editing science research proposals

2010-12-15T11:51:00.008Z

Client:

"Paul was commissioned to assist with writing a lay summary of a research grant proposal for a piece of laboratory equipment. We needed to communicate the rationale for using this highly technical equipment, and explain the experiments that would be performed to a the trustees of the arthritis research UK funding charity. Paul phrased advanced science concepts in a way that could be easily understood, and which was a pleasure to read."

It probably helps, in my editing of scientific texts, that I studied health sciences for a few years, but the texts require the same kind of attention that editors give to all copy: making sure the intended meaning or effect is brought out in full at the level of word, sentence, paragraph and structure.

The fact that I have my aunt's books, a little old though they are, to hand might also be a factor >>>

Editors as vandals

2010-12-13T12:21:00.000Z

Conscious of how writers, especially new ones, sometimes feel about having their work critiqued and edited, I recently prepped one of them as follows:

"I've started to do some editing, S____, and to get a sense of how much work might be done on the text. I'm going to email what I've done so far, but beforehand I just wanted to put it in context ... as I know from experience that editors often end up being seen as vandals rather than advisers at this stage, and I don't want that to happen here. My approach is similar to Brendan Barrington's, editor of the Dublin Review, who was asked by the Irish Times recently what kind of editor he felt himself to be; and answered:

“Thorough, I think. Sometimes to a fault. I think I’m ambitious in that I’m usually not satisfied with a piece that’s perfectly fine. I’m always looking for little ways of making it better. Sometimes that means cutting things out of it but other times it means sending the writer away to develop or clarify or sharpen something. Editing feels a little bit like archeology or sculpting, working with a big piece of granite, and chipping away at it.”

What reaction does this provoke from writers? “I frequently get comments to the effect that ‘I’ve never been edited like this before’, and sometimes one might sense a slight edge of irritation. But mostly it’s positive in that good writers enjoy being edited. They enjoy the interchange. They may not agree with all my ideas and that’s absolutely fine, but the encounter is valuable, and they value it.”

The client, thankfully, was understanding and pleased with the work:

"Paul
Thanks. I understand exactly what you are doing and of course like all authors one always feels a slight sense of irritation when somebody corrects what you have written. My skin is fairly thick.
I have looked at your suggestions and like most of them! I have incorporated them into a revised text... I want this to be a success and so I am delighted with most of your suggestions. Please continue with the two chapters and we will talk."

Phew!

Literacy teaching

2010-11-21T14:25:00.001Z

I completed a NALA-based adult literacy volunteer tutor training course in Blessington VEC this month. This means I join a panel of local volunteer tutors that the Blessington Adult Learning Centre choose from to work with people who come to them for help with reading, writing, spelling, numeracy and other communication problems.

According to the 1995 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), one in four Irish adults have literacy difficulties, compared to 3% in Sweden and 5% in Germany. According to the survey, early school leavers, older adults, non-English speakers and unemployed people are most at risk of having literacy difficulties. In addition, the people with the lowest skills are least likely to take part in adult education.

I had to write something afterwards >>>

What have I taken from the course?

What stands out most is the fact that the world of literacy difficulties has been opened up for me by this course: I am now more aware of how many people are affected by them, and how they impact on people’s lives. The course brought that out into the foreground for me, when it had only been something I was vaguely aware of. At the same time, my admiration for people experiencing these limitations has increased, as I see now that they employ strategies to hide the evidence of their being a problem, and the very fact that they get by is enough to make you realise they must have incredible skills in other aspects of their lives. We all tend to play to our strengths, and so I now admire even more the people who have what it takes to do something about their limitations. I think I have something to learn from them.

Doing the course also showed me that excellent people (the organisers, lecturers, guest tutors and the trainees) are actively trying to right these wrongs of society: the neglect that our system has inflicted on so many people, depriving them, through inequalities, of basic tools that so many of us take for granted. It was also pointed out, in the course, that the State was continuing to neglect the already neglected by not properly funding professional educational activities, which the students need, and instead expecting volunteerism to take up the slack.

However, the course was not about solving the broader social and political problems, but about equipping tutors with a skill set that might be used to help learners.

The course covered issues such as the theory of teaching, adult learning, the nature of the student-teacher relationship, confidentiality, the idea of student-led and student-appropriate learning, the learner’s own language experience, the resources and approaches for helping out with different literacy problems, the individualisation of lesson plans, the need for flexibility and adaptability, and the options for further training, education and guidance that the VEC offers, as thoroughly as possible within the time constraints; and as a result I think that combined with my previous experience of teaching (communications, English as a foreign language, History, study skills, computers and literature) and the preparation work that I will do each time I’m required, I am ready to begin helping adult learners.

*********

My first aim will be to put the student at ease: in my tone, my body language and in what I say and do, making sure the student sees me simply as someone helping them out in a neighbourly way, and feels fully respected.

From a bit of a chat, I would hope to get to know a little about what interests and activities the learner has in their life. I will be happy to share some of my own thoughts on these, but it is more functional than anything else: helping to establish a rapport and to generate material for later use. (As was made clear in the course, the service is not based on a friendship model, but on a friendly assistance model.)

I think the student’s journal will be of great help to me in getting the ball rolling. It should give me a first-hand sense of the level they are at to supplement the information provided by the facilitators, and it should be very helpful in establishing whether or not progress is being made as we go along – again, emphasised as important in the course was the idea of making progress at a good pace and the satisfaction that the student will derive from seeing evidence of that.

Once I have a good sense of the aims of the learner I will go through the handouts and my notes from the course as well as any other material recommended from the VEC library and make sure I am prepared sufficiently for each session and aware of all the issues that might arise.

From there I think I will be inclined to offer the learner resources that I generate from real-life material of immediate interest and relevance to their situation and their everyday life. Although I will look to the books that are available for inspiration and style and format and methods, I was convinced by the point made often during the course that the less school-ish the work feels and the more authentic the material, the better for the student.

I think I will want to talk through progress with the facilitators and seek advice from them and I hope that won’t be too much of an imposition. I hope there will also be chances to share experiences and resources with fellow tutors, while maintaining student confidentiality.

*********

Finally, another very impressive and reassuring thing the course showed me was how properly holistic the approach being taken is: seeing each student as possessing potential to go further and not just dealing with the problem they have “presented with”. It is refreshing to see actual proper planning being done so that the student’s future is considered and the possibility that they might want to go on to learn computer skills, to further training, get careers advice and even re-enter the educational system that may itself have done them such a terrible injustice in the past.

Sarah Carey lists the failings of Fianna Fáil

2010-11-18T10:27:00.001Z

Because they have been wrong. About everything.

About the guarantee, about Croke Park, about AIB, about Anglo, about lame budgets and the likelihood of bailouts (which has been inevitable all along). But that’s just since September 2008.

There was all the wrongness that preceded that. The condescending tripe that Fianna Fáil were the great managers of the economy. The moral superiority and desperate naivety of the Greens who put them back in power.The danger of keeping one party in power for 20 years with the same set of comfortable mandarins protecting each other in their palaces of permanency. The insanity of benchmarking. The auctioning of votes with hard cash. The sneering at honest men who just didn’t understand the necessity for cute hoorism and populism. The deluded masses who voted for men who they knew – knew – were dishonest because they thought they could pull off one last stroke and avoid our fate. (From Irish Times >>> )

How we fool ourselves

2010-11-16T21:18:00.008Z

"To look at bodies abandoned on a rubbish tip, to write details of torture ... To risk a gaze at such wounds of humanity is to choose to be changed forever.

The conservative can exist in comfort only by averting his gaze. To choose to know is to risk being presented with a dilemma. That dilemma, put simply, is that, once one knows, one can, from that moment, live only in the bad faith of guilty silence or act." Michael D Higgins TD - a passage from his speech accepting the Sean MacBride Peace Prize in 1992.

>>> Yes, and we might take it a step further in order to be completely honest: the truth is most of us are living in the bad faith of guilty silence all the time, because whether we have looked ... written ... gazed or not, most of us do actually know; we know there are those who are being denied the chance to live dignified, meaningful lives because of our complacency and our greed; but we choose to convince ourselves that we cannot act. And we go on.

Helping make a website for a charity that helps people with a rare muscle wasting disease: myasthenia gravis

2010-11-16T15:56:00.012Z

As part of http://24theweb.com/ organised by Stewart Curry http://www.irishstu.com/ I was on a team that was tasked with producing in 24 hours a brand new website for one of the chosen charities, the Myasthenia Gravis Association of Ireland. My job was the orchestrate the copy (the text, the words, the writing - too many ways of saying it!) for the site.

Karen (@karenclancymga) briefed us on what Myasthenia Gravis is and what the Association does. We had a lot of questions for her and fired them at her as they occurred to us. She was well able for us! Bear in mind, too, that most people on the team had only just met for the first time and never worked together before.

The team was as follows:

Niall Cusack

We had lots to say ourselves on the MGA's current communications and found ourselves discussing branding and naming and PR etc. Karen got a lot from this, she told us, and found it refreshing her sense of what could be done in terms of positioning MGA etc.: it helped her see the MGA from a different perspective, and we gave her lots of "off the top the head" ideas, including giving the ragdoll mascot associated with MGA a name: Mya. (Maybe even Mya G would make it even more effective, it occurs to me now.)

We got down to work then on planning and structure and arranging content and layout and navigation etc. Karen supplied a massive amount of written material which I sifted through and arranged under logical headings. These were matched up with the website navigation items, and at that stage I removed myself somewhat from the group in order to read through and start editing some of the copy. (When I have to read and edit or write I really need to be away from the action; peace and calm are more conducive to clear thought and verbal fluency for me than is group work and dialogue.) Meanwhile the rest of the team worked in various sub-groups to start building the site (on Wordpress) and managing the process. We got together regularly through the night to make sure we were on target and on message.

It was not easy to work through the night but with lots of help and encouragement from each other, from a sense of the importance of the cause, from Stewart and Darragh, and from the food sponsors (Kanum, Jo’Burger, Bel & Bellucci, iQ Content who bought breakfast, Innocent Smoothies, Tayto) we managed. We very nearly pulled it off too, but due to the sheer volume of material that MGA involves we didn't quite get the entire site ready for public viewing by the 24th hour. We're doing the final tidying up over the next few days to make sure Karen & the MGA & MG patients have a website that does what they need it to. We finished up the process by giving Karen a quick tutorial in using Wordpress for content management, and finally revealing the site to her. I'm glad to say that how much she loved it was very clear from her facial expression: pure delight.

It was a great experience for us too, I think: artificial in that it was so intensified in terms of time, team, space, concentration and energy; yet revealing in that it showed about as dramatically as you could get the volume and value of the work that web teams handle all the time; and ultimately exhilarating and fascinating in the way a team shapes together around an impending deadline and does what it has to do in spite of the odds and the forces of physiology.

Should have gone to Penhire

2010-10-27T15:14:00.005+01:00

Mic FitzGerald sent out an email describing how 'busty' he was, instead of how busy.

Turning the loss-leader mentality back on capitalists

2010-10-07T13:00:00.007+01:00

Pic from http://www.gutterbookshop.com/

A very interesting post by the Gutter Bookshop in Temple Bar discusses why people would continue to buy a book at a higher price in independent shops when they know they could pay less (as much as €3 or more is suggested) in one of the multiples, where it is possibly being sold at a loss. The benefit of the independent shop being nearer, the good vibe from a more personal service, and the hope that because it's one of a limited number of books the owners have chosen to stock it will be a good book, are all mentioned as explanations.

Another element is what might be seen as a kind of reverse loss-leader strategy.

A loss leader is a product sold below cost to attract customers, and the reverse of that, I'm suggesting, is a consumer buying at a loss to themselves in order to encourage more sustainable business practices in their locality. The customer takes a hit on a number of purchases in order to attract into their community/society/economy better businesses (ones that operate in a less capitalist fashion?) - they might pay their staff better; they might stock more ethical & environmentally sound products; they might use their profits to purchase goods locally rather than transferring them off to the bottom line of a fat-cat holding company in some far off land.

So, it's just an elaboration of the idea of shopping locally, of supporting local businesses, doing so very conscious that it's costing you more in the short term but benefiting you and your community more in the long term: an investment in your future and society's future.

Putting us all in our place ...

2010-10-06T11:39:00.002+01:00

(Don't want to forget this!)

You're not deep.

You're not an intellectual.

You're not an artist.

You're not a critic.

You're not a poet.

You just have internet access.

A thorough going over ...

2010-10-06T00:28:00.002+01:00

Brendan Barrington, editor of the Dublin Review, was asked by the Irish Times recently what kind of editor he felt himself to be; and he answered:

“Thorough, I think. Sometimes to a fault. I think I’m ambitious in that I’m usually not satisfied with a piece that’s perfectly fine. I’m always looking for little ways of making it better. Sometimes that means cutting things out of it but other times it means sending the writer away to develop or clarify or sharpen something. Editing feels a little bit like archeology or sculpting, working with a big piece of granite, and chipping away at it.”

What reaction does this provoke from writers? “I frequently get comments to the effect that ‘I’ve never been edited like this before’, and sometimes one might sense a slight edge of irritation. But mostly it’s positive in that good writers enjoy being edited. They enjoy the interchange. They may not agree with all my ideas and that’s absolutely fine, but the encounter is valuable, and they value it.”

Checklist before meeting

2010-09-22T08:18:00.009+01:00

Whether you're selling or buying, teaching or being trained, managing or taking instructions, brain-storming or reporting, you will waste less time & effort if you invest more time & effort PREPARING in advance for the meetings you attend.

Here's a checklist to get you started & off on the right foot in advance on your meetings. As with all checklists, you need to answer all questions & bear in mind that you are not ready until you've carefully considered, acted on, and ticked or answered 'yes' to each item:

Do you know the names of the people you're meeting?
Have you noted them down?
Have you noted down telephone numbers in case of unforeseen problems?
Do you know where you are meeting and at what time?
Have you other things you might be able to do in the area while you're there?
Do you know how to get there?
Do you know where to park?
Have you vetted the venue as appropriate to your needs?
Have you allowed for enough time to travel?
Have you confirmed meeting with them in advance?
Have you informed others what time you have to leave meeting at?
Are you dressed appropriately?
Are you groomed appropriately?
Have you informed colleagues of your unavailability?
Have you read the background material?
Have you an agenda/clear purpose for the meeting?
Have you thought through what you want out of it?
Have you thought through what others want out of it?
Have you considered all the possible outcomes & how you will respond?
Do you have everything you need for the meeting? Pen & paper? Background documentation?
Is your phone &/or laptop charged?
Have you set your email "Out of office" & telephone voice messages?
Have you left enough time before departure to deal with final routine items, e.g. checklist, petrol etc.?
Have you got change for parking?
Have you brought other work to do or reading material in case there are delays?

Any others to suggest?

Fintan O'Toole on Willie O'Dea and language emptied of meaning

2010-09-21T06:39:00.003+01:00

The real problem is not that Cowen can’t communicate – but that communication has long disappeared from official discourse, writesFINTAN O'TOOLE

THE FUNERAL elegy for Fianna Fáil has already been written, by TS Eliot: “We are the hollow men/ We are the stuffed men/ Leaning together/ Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!/ Our dried voices, when/ We whisper together/ Are quiet and meaningless/ As wind in dry grass/ Or rats’ feet over broken glass/ In our dry cellar.”

Here is the sound of hollow men whispering meaninglessly: a Fianna Fáil politician writing in the Sunday Independent about the Twitter rage that followed Brian Cowen’s now infamous Morning Ireland interview last week....

Even in the bubble of self-importance he inhabits, Willie O’Dea must know that he is a notorious slanderer whose calls for civility in political discourse are as meaningful as a vampire’s vegetarianism. There is no real pretence at persuading anyone of anything. There is just empty noise.

When words are used, not to stimulate discussion, but to deny the possibility of discussion, they die. They wither into verbiage. They become spin that has stopped spinning, propaganda that no one expects to fool anyone. And the first official language of the State is no longer Irish or English, it is this system of empty sounds, spoken into a void. >>> (Times here>>>)

A poet president sounds good to me

2010-09-15T08:28:00.003+01:00

From Michael D Higgins' poem Exiles in his collection, An Arid Season (which you can purchase here >>>):

"An old vision of freedom

From hunger, fear, abuse,

Has faded in the terrible times.

We are invited to forget an old promise

That ours was a world to create.

Out of the depths we cry

We shrink in fear.

Few break the silence.

But then light flickers

In hope

In resolution

We must make our own answer.

Our liberation from the nightmare will come.

Our exile will end,

Not from the making of miracles

But from the strength of will and heart

Combined,

Affirming,

That we make our own history

With heart and head.

We make our common fate.

Together

We move on and recall

That old promise,

Not rejected,

Unfulfilled"

Live communications

2010-09-13T14:34:00.002+01:00

Just heard Barry Brophy speaking on the Pat Kenny show & he seems like a rock of sense when it comes to this issue of speaking in public & making presentations. His book, The Natural Presenter, is out now >>>

His website & blog are well worth taking a look at too >>> some great writing & advice, for example: "I recently bought a CD of late piano works by Liszt, and I was reading the sleeve notes - rarely an edifying experience - when I came on the following line: 'These works were considered suitable for reading, not for performance'. At the time, I was really getting into the music...that is, until I read this. Suddenly I wondered if it was really all that good, and I also wondered - if the music was unfit for human ears - why had the record label recorded it, and why had the record shop charged me 15.99 to purchase it. The experience exactly mirrored something I often say when giving courses, namely: never apologise."

Twitter as a message board in a lonely hearts club

2010-09-09T10:57:00.003+01:00

I originally likened Twitter to a kind of rotating, multi-sided message board in a virtual office peopled with hand-picked, like-minded "colleagues" - perfect for someone like me who had recently shut down a lively office and found himself working from home in the countryside, alone, isolated (work-wise) and recession-hit. But I now think other motives are dominating Twitter and people's message boards have become so over-filled that they are being ignored, failing in their potential & purpose, and have been transplanted to a virtual lonely-hearts drop-in centre packed to the gills but dominated by an in-crowd, t-list celebrities getting their kicks on karaoke-like machines.

Life online seems more and more to be about people desperately seeking (as a marketplace for some, an audience for others) more followers by ingratiating themselves with "key" people, following/befriending strategically only to entice a follow-back, RTing strategically for friends or would-be friends, or engaging only with in-crowd people. Vying for attention & popularity by being the most up-to-date, controversial, early-adopting. It's all terribly unhealthy in terms of relationships, and terribly fragmented in terms of utility.

I'm concerned that this is turning social media in general & Twitter in particular into mostly a don't-think tank, full of inane "notes to self" and diary-like observations at worst, to, at best: messages never read, links to articles never seen, insights forgone, appreciation never expressed, minimal understanding of things that actually need careful consideration & debate or that warrant taking on board and doing something about. Like the web in general, it is fragmenting the world (of communication & action) into ever-thinning groups (in some cases just one person) who believe they are doing something positive, but who are in fact isolating themselves in a fantasy world far from where they are really needed (in their community, in their family, in their marketplace, in their society).

An increasing proportion of the work I do involves sifting through the mass/mess of information available out there in automated or user-generated forms to pick out the bits that will be useful to a very precise group with clearly defined needs, who either don't have the time or the know-how to do it for themselves because they are too real-world-based in their work or upbringing. It reminds of a story I once envisioned writing about a book shop that didn't sell books newly published unless they had something totally original to say; and that didn't have stock on display but rather had a counter at which you discussed your needs with the owner (a prolific reader) until he had identified the perfect book, always old & perhaps long forgotten, for you and fetched it.

I think it is possible that the same thing is going to happen in Twitterland. "Editors" who you will provide a synopsis of issues discussed online, who you then follow exclusively because you know they will pick up on the stuff useful to you & pass it on without the other nonsense & repetition getting in your way.

Suggestions for improving your Twitter life (Tantric Twitter, perhaps!):

Follow a maximum number of accounts - the number depending on how much time you spend on Twitter. (100 to 200 seems about the limit for fitting in quality communication via Twitter to an average working day.) How? ...

Only follow people you know or admire, and/or
Only follow people already well-established/ recognisable as experts in a particular field, and/or
Only follow people who offer mostly a particular type of information/communication, and/or
Follow mostly organisations of interest to you
Don't follow celebrities unless they have something worthwhile to say (their lives are generally "designed" around the idea of making everyone else envy them)

Don't expect to be followed back

Read all the tweets in your stream & reply when approriate
Check the items referred to in tweets & read them or act on them when relevant
Thank the person/organisation if they have provided something useful to you
Consider favouriting the really good stuff rather than RT'ing constantly

Don't tweet vacuous drivel ... too often!
Don't blog on something unless you're an expert & can't find the information/thinking elsewhere
Don't publish anything unless you feel you absolutely have to
Provide a particular type of information/communication (even if it's one-liner jokes, to tech tips, to recruitment advice)
Don't RT as a favour or because you think you owe it to the person

Don't let Twitter substitute for communicating with your real friends by phone or face to face

Finally, do expect to be followed back, RTed or replied to when you tweet something important or original; and if you are not repeat the above steps until you are!

My kind of ad ...

2010-09-06T10:05:00.000+01:00

Like the angle on this.

Arguing rhetoric (with a teenager!)

2010-09-02T14:25:00.002+01:00

Just had to take note of a few things in this Jason Robert Brown email argument about stealing music online >>>

"And your answer is sophistry, Brenna. That same scenario could take place exactly the same way if you paid for the music. And that's how that scenario is SUPPOSED to take place. You assume that because a good thing comes from an illegal act, it's therefore mitigated. That's nonsense. I'm glad people want to sing my songs, and I'm glad that when other people hear them, they enjoy them – that doesn't mean I surrender my right to get paid for providing the sheet music."

"arguing with teenagers is a zero-sum game, as I've learned from my experience on both ends of the argument. You insist on your right to think you know everything and do whatever you want, and anyone who corrects you or tries to educate you otherwise is the enemy; I don't wish to be the enemy, I'm just a guy trying to make a living."

Precise by name, precise by nature

2010-09-02T13:39:00.000+01:00

Re-visiting an old job I did for Caragh Precision, an engineering company in Galway, I recall how precise the client was in briefing me, in giving feedback on the drafts, and in making final edits before signing off. But it was actually a real pleasure to work with such a client BECAUSE it sometimes took extra effort to have my way on certain points of dispute, and explain the precise thinking behind my choices.

Writing for suppliers

2010-08-03T16:28:00.000+01:00

Inevitably you get asked by business associates to do some writing for them and it can be a bit awkward, but I am very happy to do so when I know the services/products they provide are worth shouting about. The impetus is to let others know what you know, and that is a good starting point for copy as much as it is for "word-of-mouth". Of course, you don't always have the final say on the wording (as was the case here) but that's as it should be.

Hyperinflation in the Irish property market

2010-08-01T22:09:00.001+01:00

[This dates back to a time, in the late 1990s, when I wrote a monthly column for theNewfoundland Telegram about connections between Ireland and Newfoundland, where I had been brought up for a while and visited a number of times since.]

Our wonderfully unaffected president, Her Excellency, Mary McAleese, on her most recent official visit to the United States, carried with her a very important message about Celtic Tiger Ireland. She told of the social dangers concomitant with a roaring economy, expressing deep concern about the development of a two-speed society, one group storming ahead, rolling in dough, while another lags horribly behind, hampered by poverty and social disadvantage.

“A vibrant modern economy is not necessarily a healthy one if large sections of its citizens are experiencing exclusion and inequality,” is how she put it.

My blushing wife and I are among the fortunate. We both have good jobs. We are in a position to save for the future when, finally, we get around to thinking about it. We were even able to buy some shares in the recently privatized national telecom company. We can ‘get away’ every now and again to take stock of our lives, and recover from the proverbial slings and arrows.

The roughest aspect of the Celtic Tiger that Sinéad and I are experiencing directly is the hyperinflation in the Irish property market.

The first thing to understand about property in Ireland is that, unlike most other Europeans, the Irish simply must own their own houses. Rental is not a long-term option, and apartments are considered unsuitable as family abodes. Home ownership here is around 80 per cent, as compared to the EU average of 56 per cent. Couples like Sinéad and I are expected to own, typically, a nice, three-bed roomed house, with a small, immature garden … which I mow every Sunday and Sinéad plants on weekday evenings. (Not!)

So far we haven’t been able to live up to those ideals, or our own ones centring on the artisan cottage that we would do up in impeccable taste room by room. Instead, we rent a little, one-bed roomed apartment on the coast – ‘round the bay’ as it were, 20 minutes south of the city. It costs us IR£650/CA$1300 a month. We’ve been eager to find something bigger, especially since wedding presents have begun to clutter every inch of every room ( - all two of them!). And it’s not from lack of effort that we have failed.

It’s not really money either. Money is dirt cheap in Ireland these days; borrowing could hardly be easier, with interest rates as low as 3.8%. Banks and other financial institutes are falling over themselves in a race to procure new business, desperate to “help out”, and contravening many official lending guidelines in order to be the ones to finance your dream home.

But no matter how willing the banks are to stretch their calculations they just can’t keep up with Dublin property prices. The average three-bedroom, semi-detached house in traditional residential areas of the city now cost around IR£300,000/CA$607,000. As a result, first-time buyers, such as ourselves, are forced to settle for satellite lifestyles in out-of-town locations.

Even there, sometimes over an hour’s drive from the Dublin, prices are prohibitively high. Sinéad and I are looking at a new house in a brand new development about an hour from the city. It’s so new, in fact, you might more accurately call it a building site. If we go for it, our house won’t be ready until April 2000. In the meantime we have to come up with IR135,000/CA$273,000. What could I get for that in Newfoundland? Offers on a postcard, please.

The temptation for me, as ever, is to follow Yeats to his Lake Isle of Inishfree and build something cozy from clay and wattles. Another option would be to run for President and take over that wonderful presidential mansion in Phoenix Park.

Too much choice?

2010-07-23T11:58:00.002+01:00

Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: "When the choice set is larger, people tend to make worse choices. They choose on the basis of what's easiest to evaluate, rather than what's important to evaluate...the safe, highly marketed option usually comes out on top." (Taken from >>>)

Modern homes

2010-07-21T22:19:00.010+01:00

[An article I wrote for the Home section of the Sunday Times back in February 2004. The publiched & edited version is archived here >>> ]

It's where the hearth is, or wherever you lay your hat. You implore Kathleen to take you there, or you leave it without saying goodbye. There's no place like it, or none like your own at least.

A home does different things for different people depending on their circumstances, lifestyle, aspirations and suchlike. Refuge, entertainment, family, work, storage, history, security, investment - priorities vary from person to person. Simply a roof over your head for some, but a special place to call your own for others.

If you were asked to describe your ideal home, without the usual considerations of money and location to fence you in, you would have to think about how it could be made to suit your life. Your pasttimes – whether gardening or sports, baking or butterfly collecting, making music or watching wide-screen television - would have to be accommodated. Different stages of your life and your family's lives would need to be considered – children, teenagers, adults and the elderly all have different needs. Aesthetic preferences – the straight line of Lloyd Wright or the cavernous mouldings of Gaudi - might even feature.

Of course, for most people life has to be worked around the house they can afford to live in, but for some the ideal home can become a reality, at least until it comes up against the planning process. Increased disposable income in recent times has meant more Irish people are getting the chance to try something different with their homes and employing architects to help them.

On the back of this, and in an attempt to broaden the debate as to what a home should be, the Architectural Association of Ireland is giving interested parties, architects and non-architects alike, the chance to express their opinions on the matter through design. The AAI is making “an open call to home owners and all budding designers to submit material on what they think a home is or should be.” The result will be an exhibition called HOME, to be held in March this year.

Through this and similar activities, AAI president, Gary Mongey, hopes to take architectural issues beyond the profession and show that modern design can improve on conventional house types. He says his personal aim in this role is to take some of the the aloofness out of architecture. “The way people buy the latest models of cars or go for new fashions in clothes is taken for granted. But when it comes to their house, more conservative attitudes prevail in Ireland. The idea is to get people to see the advantages in modern approaches to house design.”

With the AAI behind it, the exhibition in March and whatever debate it spawns is bound to centre on non-traditional designs: you won't find items from a snag list for a standard semi-detached units being picked through. Having a committee made up of mostly under-30s, the AAI is the architectural body pushing out the boundaries of design, making as much room as possible for creativity and the artistic aspect of architecture. But Mongey is keen not to leave the general public behind in this, and has settled on the theme of home design for the AAI programme right up to June 2005 as one that will relate to as many people as possible. “I'd like to get more people to see what's possible with architecture rather than just what's been done.”

Specifying what modern architecture can bring to a house, Mongey mentions tactics such as the orientation of houses towards the sun, the positioning of rooms to let the south light in, the opening out of the house into the garden simply by widening the patio door or the use of big, glass screens.

Two projects that exhibit such practices and indicate the type of house that emerges when artistic expression, rather than tradition or budget alone, determines how a unique home can accommodate a modern lifestyle.

Leitrim-based architect, Dominic Stevens points out that “Where we live, our home, has both a mundane, everyday influence on our lives, and a deep subconscious one.” The ultimate goal, in his opinion is, comfort: feeling comfortable. But getting comfortable is an on-going, ever-changing process, too complicated to accommodate in one go or in a simple design. “To be comfortable is to have the ability to adapt our situation, to wriggle,” Stevens believes. “Most people in Ireland are lucky enough to have somewhere that they call home, so we are discussing something that we all have and use every day. When something is so used it becomes commonplace, and often we forget to examine it. We take it for granted. Taking your house for granted is a missed opportunity; where we live affects us so much in so many little ways all the time, that it must surely warrant some careful thought.”

Trained careful thought is what you pay an architect for in the process of building or reshaping a home, but when you choose a designer that embraces modern ideas you can be sure that the end-product will be anything but safe and predictable.

Stevens' design for the In-Between House in Ballinamore, Co Leitrim was commisioned by a couple who, thanks to being able to work from home, decided to move from cental Dublin to a hillside overlooking a remote lake in County Leitrim. While abadoning the prescriptions of city life, Stevens has also helped his clients abandon many of the traditional rooms that make up a traditional home: instead of “from the garden you enter the hallway, off which are found the lounge and sitting room”, we get “hillside becomes entrance space becomes reading corner becomes gathering space.” He sought to avoid the rooms becoming particular in their use, taking inspiration from “in-between zones” like a forest clearing or a hilltop plateau rather than from traditional housing.

A very unusual house in the setting of Howth Head exhibits similar attempts to avoid conventional divisions of a home into rooms. Architects, O'Donnell + Tuomey, best known for larger-scale public and commercial projects, were very excited by the opportunity presented by this “more intimate scale”. Adjacent to a 19th-century villa-style house and more modern, pitched-roof houses, the owners of the site lived in the former but found themselves restricted by its old-fashioned arrangement of dining room and sitting room off a hall and so on. Their brief for more open-plan living and an easier relationship with the garden, have become, in O'Donnell – Tuomey's expression, “zones of family life” in an “inside-out” house.

In the context of Howth Head the design that O'Donnell + Tuomey came up with was unique for the area and the planners were uncomfortable with just how different the house looked and denied permission. On appeal to An Bord Pleanala the argument that the house was designed to be unobtrusive and thoroughly integrated with its steeply-sloping site to the point that it would be hard to pick out in the landscape, won the day and permission was granted, bravely, some might say, for the construction exactly as designed.

The house “faces” north to get the most of the view of Ireland's Eye, and the walls even curve towards that focal point as if the house is manoevering you towards it. This north-facing orientation is, as it were, lit from behind by glass screens front and back instead of concrete walls and the usual symetrical arrangement of windows. Solid walls on the east and west sides ensure that the house is not overlooking its neighbours. All internal walls crossing the houses are glazed to some extent or other to allow the natural light to get right through the house. Windows and doors swivel open to maximise the “inside-out” feeling.

But how much of an impact are designs such as these having on our built world?

President of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), Tony Reddy, points out that even the proportion of one-off housing designed by architects in general has only become significant in the last ten years and is still relatively small. With the general tendancy for a more planned built environment, including creating more compact towns and villages, a greater need for architects to be involved has emerged, Reddy says, and more creativity in design solutions is evident. Through such activities as the RIAI's Regional Awards and the AAI awards a greater awareness is emerging of the potential of architecture, and in turn more opportunities are now there for architects to produce designs that explore the boundaries of how our housing is built.

Reddy agrees that the planning authorities are also coming around to the view that modern design practices can produce houses that are sympathetic to their surroundings, but he points out that there are still pockets of conservatism and that RIAI still gets reports of difficulties being experienced by architects in relation to modern design.

Another issue in relation to getting your ideal home built is that one-off housing - and all the pleasures it can bring to architects and to their clients who see their dream homes become reality - may well become a thing of the past. The increased planning restrictions needed to protect the landscape and environment should mean, Reddy says, that a greater proportion of our houses will be built in clusters and within urban zones.

Of course, there will always be a demand for one-off houses. Let's hope the designs for them come from enlightened clients briefing well-trained, creative architects, working with well-trained, creative planners.

Freudian strip

2010-07-19T12:51:00.006+01:00

[Another one of the features I wrote for Cara magazine back in the days when I didn't need to make a lot of money to put bread on the table. This one is about a retrospective Lucian Freud exhibition in the Tate.]

Lucian Freud is not dead. He has reached fourscore years, but is alive, well and still painting in London. The point being, he has the reputation of a dead artist – he is often described as a great artist, and sometimes even as one of the greatest realist painters of all times: judgements rarely made of living artists. Freud is also, of course, famous, not at all for being the grandson of one of the central figures of Modernity, but for his own achievements as a painter.

His career has spanned some of the most radical decades in the history of art. He met Picasso after the war. He was linked with surrealism for a time. Among his friends, while still a very young man in London in the 1940s were Stephen Spender and Cryil Connolly. He was very close to the painters Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach, and to John Deakin, the photographer. And he is even associated with 1990s performance artist, the late, flamboyant Leigh Bowery.

But through it all Freud has worked well away from the trends. Few modern visual artists of his ambition and talent have stayed so faithful to paint and painting, not to mention portraiture and classical concerns with the human form. This is no wonder when critics like Germaine Greer say things like: “I think portraiture is a minor branch of painting,” adding that a particular artist who painted her portrait was “too good an artist to work in portraits”, and “In the case of most artists, I would say, ‘Take a photograph.’” Perhaps the point is worth making more reasonably: if modern figurative painting isn’t at least as good as the masters what’s the point?

Freud’s stubborn attachment to portraiture has set him apart from the pack in some ways, but in other ways it has hindered our full appreciation of his efforts. He is too often cast restrictively as Freud the case study for how we can, despite our ‘post-modern’ condition, stand by the cause of good old fashioned painting, without turning to conceptual art, installation art, video art or any other off-shoots for challenge.

And sure enough, we tend to ask ad infinitum, on looking at Freud’s work, can painting and portraiture still speak to us, and find new expression, new ways for us to see the world and each other in a technology-dominated age? But this is an inadequate response to Freud’s work, because it is immediately clear from that work that the answer is and always was ‘yes’. To move beyond that tired debate we have to look, look and look some more at what Freud is showing us about our condition.

First, a warning. In order to be able to make up your own mind about Freud’s painting, you have to ditch certain prejudices: all kinds of bashfulness and squeamishness at the sight of full nudity and exposed parts must go. As John Russell wrote in the New York Times in 1983: “Freud carries the [realist] experience so far that we sometimes wonder if we have any right to be there.” But, according to Philip Lindey, one of Ireland’s most talented figurative painters, in Lucian Freud’s detached gaze genitals seem to mean, on one level, neither more nor less than toes. (Freud himself admired Picasso for being “a master in being able to make a face feel like a foot.”) Lindey suggests you get the impression from the paintings that after some time working in the studio Freud has probably forgotten that he’s looking at a person, never mind a naked person – the subject matter has been turned into pure surface, as it were.

However you put it, in order to be able to give Freud’s paintings the consideration they deserve, you do have to leave your prudishness in the cloakroom.

However, this retrospective at the Tate Britain is not all nudity. Above all else it’s portraiture - room after room of portraits. Girl with a kitten, Evacuee boy, Francis Bacon, Woman smiling, Pregnant girl, The painter’s mother, Man in a chair, and so on. He has painted his wives, his friends, his neighbours, famously his daughters and mother, other artists, animals, plants … and even they have an air of portrait about them.

What we have in this retrospective, curated by his biographer William Feaver, is a Freud-guided tour through humanity as reflected in the people he has looked upon and how he saw them. Image after image of subjects Freud ‘saw’ in his various studios, some of them even laying on his many sofas. (You can’t help but think of his grandfather’s ‘studio’ and all the patients he saw. Portraits, after all, converge just as intensively on the subjectivity of their sitters as psychoanalysis, and similar to the scientific truths Sigmund sought in his exploration of people, Lucian Freud strives for an objectivity of sorts – trying to reflect the reality of a subject’s appearance.)

One thing we don’t see a lot of in a Freud retrospective is colour. Chromatically, he is concerned mostly with the pallor of flesh, and when his models are clothed it is in muted tones to make the skin stand out. His studio backdrops and props, significant though they may be, are usually dun or drab. When he does focus on a flash of colour it is amidst a sea of grey. He is not interested in colour as a theme in itself as many modernist painters were. He wants the colours to be the colour of life not of tubes of paint or an artist’s palette. He doesn’t want them to distract us from the reality, the life in the painting.

So instead of colour it is light that carries all the weight of meaning to and from Freud’s paintings. And that light is set up to reveal the sitter to a maximum, to expose them as thoroughly as possible to the gaze of the painter. In the eyes of his sitters you can see the tiny reflections of the light; against their faces you see its effects on their complexion; and on their skin you can see what birthmarks, blemishes and bulges it reveals.

In every way, Freud frames his work to focus attention on the scrutinised individual. His paintings are manifestly staged. He rarely leaves the studio setting, and often positions himself uncomfortably close to the sitter. The result is a theatre of posture, pose, expression, gesture under close scrutiny. How we place our hands, what we do with our fingers, how we position our legs, angle our feet, hold our head. How we control our facial muscles.

Freud is clearly obsessed. Obsessed not with nudity, which is, as we have seen, a given for him, but obsessed with precision, with exactitude. He has an astonishing ability to see details in a subject that an ‘untrained’ eye would miss no matter how closely it looked. “True expression (not to be confused with formulaic Expressionism) demands intensity to an obsessive degree,” writes Feaver in his catalogue essay for this exhibition.

Of course, such obsession requires considerable acquiescence from the model. What emerges from these rigorously observed portraits is very often a silent drama between the painter and the sitter. The relationship, no matter how conventional, professional and mutually understood, necessarily involves an intimacy that can pierce through our guard and get to the heart of our humanity. That a person would agree to pose like this for the sake of something so indefinable as a painting is the epitome of how complex our human motivations can be. Freud is surely conscious of this as the sitter poses inches from him, and the question is: what does he make of the privilege of the position?

Early in his career Freud began a relentless pursuit for the convincing modern portrait. His surfaces started out mostly smooth, and his rendering of form was quite ‘flat’ - modulated only by very gentle contouring. He avoided putting paint on top of paint, and his touch was very mannered. The results were eerie, paradoxically unrealistic, and suggestive of a universal existential imbalance rather than the everyday troubles of the sitters.

In the late 1950s he began using coarser hog-hair as opposed to sable brushes so as to shift the paint more roughly across the canvasses, paint across and through paint, gradually freeing his style, and bringing a grittier reality to the work. Francis Bacon impressed him at this time with monstrous contortions and tortured expressions. “He talked about packing a lot of things into one single brushstroke, which amused and excited me,” says Freud, “and I realised that it was a million miles away from anything I could ever do.”

But where Bacon could work from photographs without sitters and work up one detail into a figure study, Freud has always needed the person present in front of him to see the point. So, the change in style was difficult for Freud because he could not totally abandon precision. His instinct was, as Feaver says, still “to attend to every freckle and individual hair while still trying to amplify his handling,” and Feaver quotes John Berger describing some of the results as “painstaking naturalism… Only they are more startling because they all emphasise decay – like touched up photographs of rotten apples.” Freud himself says that he “felt more discontented than daring. It wasn't that I was abandoning something dear to me, more that I wanted to develop something unknown to me.”

The pursuit of a liberated style to match Freud’s organic view of the human form was realized more fully when he began to concentrate on the nude form in the mid-60s. Freud himself doesn’t refer to any of his paintings that feature nudes as nudes but as portraits of the whole person, or Naked Portraits. The approach is close to Enda O’Brien’s suggestion (used as an epigraph by Philip Roth in his recent novel, The Dying Animal) that “The body contains the life story just as much as the brain.” Indeed, Feaver quotes Freud saying that his “grandfather was adamant that to be an analyst you had to be a fully qualified medical doctor, and whenever he examined any of his patients – whatever desperate state they were in – he gave them a complete and thorough physical examination. That seems to me right and proper.”

A thorough physical examination is what many of Freud’s paintings are. In Picasso’s Weeping Woman, he saw a portrait that surpassed likeness, as Feaver puts it, and he Freud went after that effect: “I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having the look of the sitter, being them.” And elsewhere: “The picture in order to move us must never merely remind us of life, but must acquire a life of its own, precisely in order to reflect life.”

After looking and looking and looking, I confess to being left with a feeling of disappointment. It’s as if someone has expended considerable effort telling me about some funny situation they were in, only to finish by saying that I had to be there to appreciate it. Similarly, I do accept that Freud’s portraits reflect intensively observed encounters of astonishingly intimate nature, but I can’t help feeling let down by the delivery. Freud himself has said: ‘I was always very conscious of the difficulty of everything and thought that by will power and concentration I could somehow force my way, and depending simply on using my eye and my will power overcome what I felt was my lack of natural ability.’

Richard Hamilton’s Imagining Ulysses

2010-07-16T11:22:00.004+01:00

(Another one of the features I did for Cara magazine way back when. This one is about visual artist Richard Hamilton. This is the uncut version.)

Despite his ‘Portait of the Artist …’ Joyce was no great lover of visual art. He could be downright ignorant about it, in fact, as in his comment, ‘the nails on the wall are quite enough’, or, when he was being painted by Patrick Tuohy: ‘Never mind my soul. Just be sure you have my tie right’.

Going in the other direction, Joyce himself and Joyce’s writings have attracted the professional attention of many artists down the years, not least among them, Henri Matisse. Matisse was actually commissioned to illustrate Ulysses rather than being personally drawn to it, and then chose to seek inspiration in Homer’s Odyssey, never bothering to read Joyce’s novel. That kind of ‘it’ll do’ approach contrasts sharply with the attitude displayed in Richard Hamilton’s exhibition, Imagining Ulysses, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which reflects the fifty years Hamilton has been occupied to varying degrees with the self-imposed task of representing Ulysses visually.

Richard Hamilton, who, like Ulysses, is eighty this year, is the artist who gave pop art its name when in 1956 he created a collage full of bizarre juxtapositions called Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? depicting a bodybuilder in a sitting room holding a huge lollipop with the word pop writ large. (The product was Tootsie Pop.) Pop art is misunderstood in the history of 20^th-century art, in that it has been defined by its depiction of commerce and products (including people), rather than by its more fundamental motivation of addressing the common, the everyday. That’s the philosophical connection with Joyce.

This exhibition, organised by the British Council, London in association with the British Museum, has already been shown at the British Museum and at the International Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Tübingen, Germany. It is an exhibition of 112 drawings, etchings and digital prints, including only seven (out of a possible eighteen, equating to the chapters in Ulysses) finished works (as judged by Hamilton himself), which are then put in context by showing many of the studies and print stages that have led or are leading towards the final pieces. It is the equivalent of having all the drafts for the various chapters of Ulysses in the one place. So it is a reflection of the odyssey Hamilton has been on all his working life, as much as it is a reflection of Ulysses.

Hamilton has gone way beyond illustrating the book. It was TS Eliot who put the young Hamilton off that idea by explaining that the cost of resetting the novel for a limited edition would be too much. Regardless, the passion of Hamilton’s engagement with the text was always going to take him further than illustration. Since he first read the book while on, as he calls it himself, the ‘enforced detention’ of national service, he has been obsessed with what the book achieves artistically: ‘It made me aware of a stylistic and technical freedom that might be applied to painting in general. Joyce commands all manner of literary styles and combines then into an unprecedented display of linguistic pyrotechnics, and presents an example that later freed me to try some implausible associations in paint.’

A critic in the Guardian newspaper said recently that Hamilton’s work on Ulysses is a masterpiece, and ‘one of the most sustained engagements an artist has ever had with a book, marked by decades of rumination, reading and love.’ If Matisse had trouble with the novel because of the multiplicity of styles Joyce employed, it is that very quality that has occupied both Hamilton the artist and Hamilton the printmaker so thoroughly down the years, and also explains why it has taken him so long to get the work to this point. He is having to push the medium, his imagination, and his skills about as far they will go to match the achievements of Joyce. It a very exciting aspect of this exhibition, watching one artist rising to meet the challenge he sees in another … and succeeding.

Imagining Ulysses is very much a work in progress, and as much about printmaking processes as it is about Ulysses, which itself is as much about language and writing as it about Bloom and Dedalus in Dublin. Hamilton has sought to give each of his images the consideration, the depth of treatment, the systematic organisation that Joyce gave his work. Each print has its own technical approach, its own knowing cross-references to other works of art, its own obsessive level of detail.

Bronze by gold (of which we see seven versions), echoes Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère and is Hamilton’s visualisation of the ‘Sirens’ episode in Ulysses. Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy, barmaids at the Ormond Bar, pull beer for their customers including Bloom and the man who has made a cuckold of him, Blazes Boylan. ‘Bronze by gold, Miss Douce’s head by Miss Kennedy’s head, over the crossblind of the Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing steel,’ is how Joyce’s text has it in a rather melancholy chapter, full of music, singing and sounds, dealing with themes of love and betrayal. The subdued colours of Hamilton’s final print echo the chapter’s mood and themes, and the content of the print is meticulously faithful to the visual triggers in the text: ‘On the smooth jutting beerpull laid Lydia hand lightly, plumply, leave it to my hands. All lost in pity for croppy. Fro, to; to, fro: over the polished knob (she knows his eyes, my eyes, her eyes) her thumb and finger passed in pity: passed, repassed and, gently touching, then slid so smoothly, slowly down, a cool firm white enamel baton protruding through their sliding ring’.

The image for the Oxen of the Sun chapter, In Horne’s House, is equal to Joyce’s text in complexity, and seems to have gone through about twenty stages prior to the finished large-scale etching. In Ulysses the birth of a child in Horne’s house (a lying-in hospital) is paralleled in the birth of language seen through a procession of prose styles. For example, parodying the inflated style of the historian Macaulay, Joyce writes: ‘The high hall of Horne’s house had never beheld an assembly so representative and so varied nor had the old rafters of that establishment ever listened to a language so encyclopaedic.’ In Hamilton’s work we get a spiralling sequence of pastiches of historical art styles: Easter Island head, an Egyptian profile, Renaissance Madonna, Rembrandt self-portrait, Romantic propagandist, Cézanne self-portrait, Cubist still life, Futurist object moving through space, and abstraction. And as in Joyce the composition is so assured, so carefully worked out that the mixing of the styles does not ruin the picture.

Finn MacCool, for the ‘Cyclops’ episode, is developed anachronistically from a photograph of hunger-striker Raymond Pius McCartney to represent the ‘citizen’ who ‘rants against the English oppressors and the Jews from his favourite corner of Barney Kiernan’s low tavern’. How A Great Daily Organ is Turned Out is an arrangement of nineteen hand-sized prints as a newspaper broadsheet representing the ‘Aeolus’ episode, which is set in the offices of the Freeman’s Journal. The images include representations of an ad designed by Bloom for The House of Key(e)s, a childish drawing of Bloom by his daughter that Bloom keeps in his top drawer, and a Tuohy portrait of Joyce’s father here playing Stephen’s father.

Unfortunately, Hamilton has ‘barely considered’ eight of the episodes: ‘My thoughts on Molly’s introspective rambling are beginning to take shape’, but ‘there are large gaps to be filled before Joyce’s cycle, passing from mundane normality to dark night and final peace, becomes apparent in the illustrations’. And, for example, while we do have an image for the opening Telemachus episode, of Buck Mulligan atop the Martello tower overlooking Dalkey and overlooked by the praying ghost of Dedalus’ mother, it is a drawing - the plate for the print has yet to made.

This being a project conceived as a book, we do, however, get one extra, and it so happens, completed work, not corresponding to any of the episodes in Ulysses. It is the frontispiece of Hamilton’s imagined illustrated edition of the novel, and it is a portrait of Bloom. Amazingly, nowhere in Ulysses is Bloom’s appearance described; and yet - testament to the depth of character achieved by Joyce - we do get a distinct and clear image of him from his thoughts and actions alone: ‘balding, plump, moustached, soft-eyed and full-lipped’ as Hamilton puts it. The formal pose and classical style of Hamilton’s portrait match very closely that of Jewish composer Igor Stravinsky by Picasso. Hamilton has, thus, succeeded in presenting his ‘sitter’ ‘as if drawn from life’. It is clear that, for Hamilton, Bloom is the central figure in Ulysses, with Dedalus being relegated to a few appearances alongside others. It is Bloom’s odyssey, because, to Hamilton, pop artist, Bloom is more of an everyman and his story is ‘the story of all mankind at all times’.

While the ‘illustrated’ edition has never, and may never be published (considering Hamilton’s perfectionism and methodical approach), the catalogue that accompanies this exhibition is possibly much more satisfying than the book could ever be, at least from a visual perspective. It includes the relevant extracts from the chapters of Ulysses ‘illustrated’ with Hamilton’s prints, but also a detailed catalogue, with notes, of many of the preliminary works. Joyce, of course, would fail to see the point of it all, but surely he would recognise the tireless efforts of a fellow artist:

‘I like to think that the route my venture has taken was served by happy chance; the illustrations became a group of independent prints having their inspiration in Joyce – not bound to the words in a straight-book-jacket, but free to speak for themselves about the experience of learning ways to make images from a master of language.’

Simple site delivering professional message

2010-07-14T13:13:00.000+01:00

Re-visiting the marketing of a particular brand owned by a long-standing client, I am convinced that a very impressive message can be delivered in the briefest of forms. >>>

Taking the art out of the bog

2010-07-05T23:16:00.004+01:00

(Another one of the features I did for Cara magazine way back when. This time about painter Sean McSweeney. This is the uncut version.)

Sean McSweeney is one of Ireland’s finest landscape painters. Since moving to Sligo in 1984 he has, to powerful effect, scarcely lifted his painter’s eyes from the bog pools that mark the landscape around his studio and home.

Sean McSweeney has visions of bog lands, or, more accurately, of bog pools formed as a result of years of rain and spring water filling the holes of worked out and abandoned cuttings. When I visited him in April he led me through a network of such pools to show me the ones that set off most of his work. He was excited to see the pink flowers of the bog bean plant beginning to mottle the greenery. “They’re early,” he said. “Beautiful, aren’t they? Squint, and you’ll see them better.” I complied, and the watery surface shimmered, the protruding vegetation blurred, and the flecks of colour danced. The scene became dreamlike. When I met him most recently he was on his way to the rugged island of Inis Murray off the Sligo coast to paint shorelines for a while, but expressed a self-mocking and joking concern, with maybe some truth in it, that he might still end up painting bogs.

Curious to say, bogs have been more important in Irish society than paintings. The Atlas of the Irish Landscape tells us that “the bog has been etched as deeply into the human as into the physical record in Ireland, to an extent unrivalled elsewhere in Europe.” Indeed, bogs were once the sole source of fuel in many parts of Ireland. But they have long since been superseded, and now have little or no utility for most people and a much-diminished function generally. Analogously, painting too once played a more day-to-day role in society as a powerful tool of graphic communication than it does today as mere supplementary decoration and “art”.

In relation to both bog pools and paintings Sean McSweeney is sensitive to that movement from utility to adornment, that tension between necessity and indulgence. He emphasises the craftsmanship and physicality of painting, and uses the label painter more often than he does artist. You might say he labours rather than creates, and he has a very disciplined approach to working. McSweeney’s father was a painter-decorator by trade, but attended the College of Art in Dublin at night for some years and became quite a skilled amateur painter. After his untimely death when his son Sean was only five, his paintings remained about the house, less as works of art than as household utensils such as fire screens and fans for flaming the wet turf. (McSweeney thinks one of his father’s best works was a painting of Ben Bulben in Sligo.) McSweeney, like his bog paintings, is about as down-to-earth as you get, yet from early on all he wanted to do was make pictures. And he has done so ever since, however difficult it made life at times and however marginal an activity it may have seemed. He is now a highly successful artist whose work is admired and collected by people all around the world.

But returning to earth again, easily, McSweeney knows a thing or two about bogs. He would know, for instance, that the mosses of bog land are among the oldest living entities in the world. He would know that the decayed and compressed mosses in these wetlands, preserving anything that fell or was thrown in, formed peat - the first stage in the transformation of vegetation into coal. And he would also know that the dried peat so associated with Ireland has such a high water content that it is not as efficient a heat source as the coal associated with, say, England. He would also, of course, be familiar with the saying: “You can take the man out of the bog but you can’t take the bog out of the man.” In a recent essay the writer Dermot Healy called McSweeney, his neighbour, “a true bogman”, and the latter was quite happy to have the label used in a catalogue for an exhibition in a London gallery. His mother’s family would have cut turf from the bogs that stretch out around his studio, and he has chosen the redundant pools that remain as his subject because he feels a strong connection with them. Of a short period working in Spain he says he felt acutely the lack of a personal connection with that landscape which bogs have certainly provided. But the connection is not just personal, I believe. As symbols too, McSweeney is drawn to those man-made marks in our landscape returned to Nature, in which state the only utility they possess for humans is as something to look at. And, in turn, though we may stop and admire and even from time to time look up at the sky, we too are destined for the earth. (McSweeney rarely lets the horizon into his pool paintings.) I joke with him saying that in Ireland Genesis should read, “for water thou art, and unto water shalt thou return.”

Healy also remarked in his essay that the paintings are like a second cutting of the bog, but that could mislead in that this work heals rather than scars and McSweeney is not so much digging as filling in where our ancestors dug. One is reminded very powerfully of Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Digging’: “… the squelch and slap/Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge/Through living roots awaken in my head./But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.” Despite his down-to-earthness, McSweeney is no bog cutter. He is an observer, a visionary. His painted bog pools are not of this world. He does not concern himself too much with their botany, zoology or ecology. He does know their plants – the bog bean, the ragged robin, the irises, orchids and bog cotton, and their yearly cycles. He sees them as wonderful wild gardens, but he isn’t scientific about it. You could say that a bog pool is to him as a candle is to someone meditating. It focuses his attention, and sets off his ballets in paint. As the dictionary puts it, “the land of a bog is too soft to bear the weight of any heavy body upon its surface,” so it is a place more suitable for the lightness of imagination. McSweeney is first and foremost a lover of paint. He is a landscape painter but with emphasis on the latter term, and therefore his search for a theme is more about what it will allow him to do with paint than how recognisible it is as scenery.

His work is self-consciously simplifying of nature. Having become all too aware that colour in nature is hundreds of times more subtle than anything we get from a tube of paint or from our own blending, McSweeney has reveled in exploring the range of his palette for its own sake and to a lesser extent for the dramatic relationship between it and the landscape.

His pool paintings move from often darker, monochromatic margins to vivid centres where life is happening or stirring. He often puts the paint straight on to the canvas or board, squeezing it directly from the tube so that the palette is done away with. He then works the paint around with a knife or brush, a rag or even his hands, covering the area completely with whatever colour he is using as a base, red or blue or ochre. This he considers his ground to work in, a field of colour. He layers and blends colours very skillfully to suggest the subtleties of nature, but he is not afraid of using the pigments straight to give more dramatic effects.

He has been described by one critic as the most original colourist in Irish painting since Yeats. He shares stylistic approaches with the likes of Patrick Collins and Nano Reid - in particular a passion for colour, a sensuous, unrestrained handling of paint, and a struggle for original and often organic form rather than traditional structure.

Yet, while very much about painting, McSweeney’s Zen-like work with the bog pools is as vital to our relationship with the landscape as that of ecologists and botanists. It shows us ways of looking closer and finding form and seeing colour in our bleak climate. It dramatises both the historical relationship with our surroundings and our underlying molecular connections with the earth – where we come from and where we are going.

But bogs have not always been his subject matter, nor indeed has the countryside. McSweeney grew up in Dublin, leaving school at 16 and working in a variety of jobs, painting all the while and attending, like his father had, night classes at the College of Art as well as other informal classes. He feels he was freed from much of the baggage of the academy, on which subject he refers to Patrick Collins’ wish that he could wake up some day and forget everything he knew about painting. So McSweeney is effectively self-taught, and gives a lot of credit to time spent in the Hugh Lane Gallery near his family home, and the RHA, looking closely at work by the likes of Paul Henry and Emile Nolde. “I learned from looking first and foremost,” he says.

He was a loner, shying away from organised groups of artists. He and his wife Sheila eventually left Dublin to live in west Wicklow, suggesting that McSweeney was a countryman at heart, desirous of closer proximity to nature than occasional visits to Phoenix Park gave. He does not believe that it is a prerequisite of good landscape painting to live in the country, but he did feel the need himself to get to know the seasons and light more intimately, “to get to grips with the structure of landscape” as he says. He does not romanticise the life in any way, emphasising the austerity and difficulties. They were lean times for painters and their families. (McSweeney is implicit about how important his wife has been in his career, talking always in terms of “we”.) At around this time he entered what one might call, after Dickens, ‘a bog of uncertainty’. He had a row with his dealer over the sale of a painting, he was barely making ends meet in the harsh landscape of “a hungry mountainside”, and one or two critics had been pointing to a lack of structure in his work. What got him out of the hole, he says, was going into the landscape with his sketchbooks to look hard at the marks man had made on his surroundings. “Through those drawings the compositions hardened,” he says. Things began to pick up. He did a series of paintings based on a clearance of the land by the Forestry and on scarecrows. He also moved to Sligo.

As with his father’s county of Meath where the beeches and oaks gave “a vertical accent to the place”, Wicklow’s hills and trees had meant that he was always looking up to take in the uprightness of the landscape. But the part of Sligo he settled in was very different, lying flat and beneath eye level. It took him a while to adjust but once he did the work took off – literally, in that he had to imagine himself as a bird flying over the pools in order to get a functional perspective on them.

Of course, County Sligo offered many famously picturesque sights - Ben Bulben, Knocknarea, Lough Gill, to name a few; but McSweeney’s artistic vision never drew him to such obvious spectacle. Ben Bulben is surely an exception though, especially considering the connection with his father and with Yeats. I ask him when he will paint it and he answers, smiling, “Oh, when it’s ready”, and continues his whistling stroll through the bog.

Newfoundland delegation in Dublin

2010-07-01T22:01:00.001+01:00

Official Tourism Awareness Month in Newfoundland finds my wife and I over here wearing an extensive range of provincial lapel pins, thinking about holidays, and trying to come up with a new cocktail.

Let me explain.

It all started when, upon returning from our honeymoon in Thailand we found Dublin overrun with Newfoundlanders keen for us to attend the social events connected with their business mission here.

The first evening was actually spent on Canadian soil, at the ambassador and his very hospitable wife’s beautiful home (opposite Bono’s place) in south County Dublin. It was quite a gathering, in the most impressive of settings - a spectacular view of Dublin Bay across the many tree tops of their extensive grounds.

There Sinéad and I met minister for industry, trade and technology, Sandra Kelly, and it was she who gave us the brooches. She insisted Sinéad have the Newfoundland dog one in particular, as it matched her outfit. She handed me a palmful of other pins which I have been rotating on my suits ever since.

That evening of very friendly chat culminated in the ambassador and his traditional music friends - with whom he plays weekly in a small venue in north County Dublin - accompanying Ron Hynes in what became the soundtrack of the mission: ‘Sonny’s Dream’. A hundred well-watered voices joined Ron in his irresistable chorus.

The next time we heard the song was a mere hangover later. It was the evening that the Taoiseach of Ireland, Bertie Ahern, officially welcomed the delegation in Dublin Castle. Although not as eloquent as his Newfoundland counterpart, Ahern made it clear that the province had charmed its way into the hearts of the Irish administration, so deeply indeed that the relationship has crossed the famously divisive Irish political party lines.

Tobin’s more lyrical reply generated a warm round of applause from the largely suit-wearing audience. He informed us jokingly of having been tipped off about the Taoiseach’s need to get away quickly that evening to see the Manchester United soccer game on TV, and only spoke long enough to highlight his sense of being in a second home in Ireland.

It was much later that night, in a more relaxed and intimate setting that Hynes was again asked to play ‘Sonny’ for us. His guitar filled out the tie-loosening sing-song into the wee small hours.

On the final night of the delegation’s very productive stay in Ireland, Sinéad and I found ourselves in a small pub just on the outskirts of the city center, again surrounded by inexhaustible Newfoundlanders of all ages. I watched Tobin listening privately to the stories of exchange students from the Brother T. I. Center in St. John’s, listened to him pay public tribute to those who had worked behind the scenes preparing the delegation’s way, including in particular Craig Dobin (Honorary Council for Ireland), and joined him in calling one last time for Ron’s ‘Sonny’.

Once the Guinness had overpowered my reserve I spent the evening telling any one who’d listen about my honeymoon in the East, and how the same model needs to be applied to Newfoundland. The new generation of wealthy Irish globe trotters must be informed of the wonderful adventure holiday awaiting them in the exotic Newfoundland-Labrador outdoors.

I also advanced the idea that the rapidly developing special relationship between our two islands should be marked with the creation of a new cocktail, à la Irish Coffee. Something with Screech and Guinness in it, perhaps. I propose we call it ‘Across the pond’, but I’m relying on Telegram readers to come up with the right mix of drinks.

An odd day for a number of reasons ...

2010-06-30T10:04:00.000+01:00

It’s just after lunch on Friday 19/11/1999. An odd day in more than one sense of the word. In fact, there will not be another day quite so completely odd until 1/1/3111 - in that all the digits in today’s date are odd numbers. (The next truly even day will be 2/2/2222.)

It’s also odd in another sense of the word because this is to be my last column in The Telegram for the foreseeable future. I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience and hope that a few others have too. It has, I believe, been a worthwhile communication, but a far more important one has yet to be achieved.

That is: somebody needs to convince one of the Irish papers to host a column about Newfoundland. Because, while the vast majority of people in Newfoundland know something of Ireland, the inverse is sadly not true. As I have said in this column on numerous occasions, too few people in Ireland are aware of the province and the warm welcome and great times that awaits them there.

It is odd too today because the person who made the link allowing me to start writing this column is by sheer coincidence back in Dublin today, and I just had a liquid lunch with him and a few of his mainlander friends in town.

Their experience of Dublin until meeting me was odd in the extreme. Their first drink was in a strip mall. They ate in Eddie Rockets Diner. The first music they heard was Mary Chapin Carpenter live. The only thing they had seen on TV was Oprah. Not the Ireland of the myth.

Some degree of normality was restored as we all sat down in the dark and dingy atmosphere of a good old-fashioned Irish pub to a feed of Guinness. Around a table full of elegant pints of perfectly pulled porter, we chatted about Ireland and Canada. One declared how odd it was that no one in Ireland wore sunglasses.

In not being either Canadian or Irish, the American in the group was an odd one out. He spent a while at the bar asking the barman the secrets of pulling a good Guinness, only to join us at the table with a pint of lager.

The other odd one out in the group was odd because he wasn’t drinking at all, but very soon the sight of six lads tucking into the drink famous for having “both eatin’ and drinkin’” in it, drove him to the bar, gasping like a character from Father Ted: ‘Drrrrrink!’

It is odd also in that since I got back to work from my liquid lunch all the phone lines in the office have been down and no one has been able to do any work. That was oddly fortunate in that I was able to write this without feeling guilty about not doing any work.

Finally, it is an odd day because I have just found out that one of the Newfoundlanders visiting Ireland, about whom I wrote in this column, has died tragically at the age of 37. I would like to take this opportunity of extending my deepest sympathies to anyone who knew Jamie Morry of X-wave Solutions – a truly excellent ambassador for the unique charms of Newfoundland.

If anyone has odd experiences from 19/11/1999 to relate, do share them with me.

And:

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind be always at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face,

And the rains fall soft upon your fields.

And, until we meet again, may the Lord

Keep you in the hollow of his hand.

PS Anyone want to employ an out-of-work columnist?

The Slow Ad Movement

2010-06-29T09:47:00.007+01:00

Our manifesto

The Slow Ad movement believes that advertising is good for you, good for your family and great for your society. We advocate that people take more time out of life to enjoy more advertising and give their attention more fully to advertising more often. We believe that in return some people’s lives will be substantially enriched.

Have you ever heard the expression used in the media: “We’ll take a break” or “We’ll take a commercial break”? Ever wondered why they call it a “break”? Well, it’s because that like a tea break or a holiday break or a siesta, an ad break is good for you – very good for you. Ever wondered why women’s magazine always start with loads of gorgeous ads? Ever wondered why the best street perspectives are filled with posters? All these are signs telling you that advertising is GOOD.

In a world filled with imaginative programming, content, and editorial, beautiful landscape and great buildings, everyone needs some way of escaping the bombardment, of enhancing their lives with something different, something pure, something that doesn’t try to hide itself away or disguise itself as something else. Good advertising is what people need to make life better, more fulfilling and long-lasting.

Unfortunately, the media tend to always use the word “quick” when introducing the ad break, as in “Now, we’ll take a quick ad break”; but this is all wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. We suggest that what is needed more than anything else in people’s lives is SLOW AD BREAKS, in which people can savour the quality of the advertising and be fully exposed to the life-enhancing promised by the products.

Our philosophy

We believe that everyone has a fundamental right to pleasure and consequently the responsibility to protect the heritage, tradition and culture of advertising that makes this pleasure possible. Our movement is founded upon this concept of eco-economy – a recognition of the strong connection between marketing and Man. Slow advertising is good, clean and fair advertising. We believe that the ads people encounter should be of a good quality; that they should be produced in a clean way that does not harm the environment, animal welfare or our health; and that advertising producers should receive fair compensation for their work. We consider ourselves co-producers, not consumers, because by being informed about how our advertising is produced and actively supporting those who produce it, we become a part of and a partner in the production process.

Guide to getting more from ads

Here’s some pointers on how you can really appreciate and benefit from good advertising:Firstly for a publication-based ad -Generally, take your time with it.

If it’s in a printed publication, don’t look at the neighbouring editorial and ifg it’s on a page of its own you sould fold over the magazine or newspaper so that you’re only looking at the ad. Spend at least 10 minutes with each printed ad.

For posters, we recommend standing in front of them, or better still bringing a fold-up chair with you and sitting down, for about 15 minutes – they’re bigger than publication ads and so take more time in terms of appreciating the scale.

If it’s a broadcast ad, ideally you will need to record it and listen to it over and over again until the substance of the ad sinks in fully. Of course, with today’s MP3 players and iPods in particular, you can carry 1000s of ads around with you all the time and sort them into categories for a thorough archive.

Happy adjoyment!

Our events & related matters

The Cannes Advertising FestivalThe 2008 Munich AdFEST Week (Oktober)

The Man Booker Prize for Advertising

Don’t miss our stage at Electric Picnic

Admazon.com – where you can go to buy ad-related stuff including books of ads

Venice Biennale Advertising Exhibition

Local business work

2010-06-28T13:22:00.000+01:00

I've been helping a few local businesses to get their online marketing going, using blog platforms to expedite matters, keeping content to a minimum, showing them how to update the sites, and advising them how to use the web to attract more customers & generate new sales.

The idea is that once such a website has proven itself in terms of generating sales, a budget would be set aside for bespoke design etc.

Sustainable Business Ireland (SBI)

2010-06-24T18:59:00.002+01:00

This was my "Your Country Your Call" proposal, which failed to be short-listed.

“Sustainable Business Ireland will result in the establishment of better-run companies throughout Ireland employing more people, with more chance of long-term success nationally & internationally, and less chance of doing financial damage to others or of costing the State money.”

Other businesses will seek out SBI businesses in order to do business with them before all others.

This venture aims to transform the fundamentals of how business is done in Ireland, to enhance & streamline internal & intra-business procedures, to bring about a cultural sea-change in the world of business in Ireland; so that better, leaner, more sustainable businesses are established and run more efficiently and more transparently, to the benefit of all the stakeholders involved & of the Irish economy generally.

Via a proprietary online interface based on the latest web design & development techniques, client businesses will keep their records and conduct much of their routine actions in a highly secure, private and backed-up system that will make easier the mundane, distracting tasks of running a business, while at the same time empowering the businesses through revealing analysis of how they are performing, compared to their needs, their targets and to comparable businesses (through aggregation of anonymised data); while at the same time receiving the ongoing support & utilising the expertise of the Sustainable Business Ireland team.

The problems identified -

Massive amounts of time and money are being wasted each year by talented people on “housekeeping” businesses when so much of that can be done either automatically using computer applications or more efficiently and cheaply by experts
Too many small & start-up businesses are failing because they are not researching, not planning, not analysing their situations, not adapting to changes in the market
Too many larger companies are, at different times, stretching themselves beyond their resources and putting their entire operations at risk
Too many companies of all sorts are not paying enough attention to the key indicators of their performance and to changes in those indicators
Too many companies operate in an information void, unaware of the competitive advantages that would be available to them using more up to date systems
Badly run businesses are a threat to other businesses and have the potential to create domino effects in the market
Irresponsible behaviour in relation to tax, staffing, the law, salaries etc. should not be tolerated & can easily be eliminated with the correct procedures
Slow payment of suppliers is a terrible hindrance to our economy & should be tackled in a more pro-active way
Trust is businesses and corporations has been eroded among the general public, with the State, with banking and with employees

Ireland needs to try to achieve what it has in its tourist image for its business image nationally & internationally, and become “a destination” where business people, the general public & employees will want to come almost as “a holiday from the stress of elsewhere” – a transparent, fair, reliable place to do business, to purchase and to work.

SBI solutions -

A sophisticated system, much of it online, but with various levels of face-to-face interaction between SBI executives & clients supporting it, will be established to micro-manage certain aspects of client businesses, financially, legally, in the areas of staffing, marketing, sales and planning etc.

Client businesses will sign-up to this system in order to ensure the fundamentals of their operations are conducted to the highest, most profitable & sustainable levels, as established and managed (via the shared software interface) by the SBI experts across key facets of the business.

Client businesses must immediately record the details of all their activities and financial transactions in the secure, private system and having done so they will gain access to the crucial information about how their business is performing, what areas are problematic, how their spending in certain areas compares to other companies’, how their staffing ratios compare, how their sales pipeline looks etc.

The financial function at the core of the SBI system, acting very much like the best accountancy packages do, will, in addition, ensure the company’s finances are being run on an ongoing basis in a sustainable and tax-compliant manner – preventing overspending, excessive remuneration etc. and making sure VAT, PRSI, salaries, suppliers, rent etc are covered before more discretionary spending is enabled.

Sales forecasts and modelling based on sales records will be factored into the spending algorithm to enable a certain amount of flexibility in spending, but where ongoing imbalances in cash flows are detected a flag will go up to prevent the situation getting out of hand and face-to-face interaction will be necessary at that stage to deal with the problems responsibly and fairly before normal practices can resume.

Likewise, hiring will be enabled only where the business’s revenues indicate that it can be sustained; marketing efforts will be costed carefully in terms of the number of leads and deals required to make them worthwhile; and sales activities will be closely monitored to ensure enough leads are being pursued each month so that basic costs and profit targets have the best chance of being met.

SBI fees can be fixed or a percentage of client revenue or a combination of the two altering over time at different stages of the business’s development.

“When we cut through all the deceptions and try to do away with the seat-of-pants stuff, and we think rationally, we realise that this way of doing business is actually the correct and proper and most beneficial way for everyone”

SBI benefits -

This may all sound a little heavy handed for entrepreneurs, but what they get out of it in return for partially “handing over” these functions to SBI & the SBI system is:

The best chance of long term success for their business
A massive weight of worry & concern lifted from their shoulders in areas where most entrepreneurs are not comfortable in any case: accounting, HR, legal etc.
Access to excellent advice and mentoring from SBI executives
Powerful insights into how their business is performing relative to its own targets & ambitions AND
Relative to the other SBI businesses via aggregated & anonymised data on spending patterns, salaries etc.
The freedom to get on with what they do best – developing and fine-tuning their products/services and finding markets for them
An SBI marque that will give other businesses great confidence in supplying them and give their customers/clients confidence in purchasing from them
A sense of behaving responsibly towards staff, suppliers and society, content in the knowledge that the correct legal procedures are all being followed, their legal obligations are being met etc.
The likelihood of ongoing audit exemption from Revenue and reduced costs & stress around filing returns etc.

While our sense of “Big Brother” watching and our fear of accountants, lawyers and bureaucrats, might at first make us all question is this the way to go, when we cut through all the deceptions and try to do away with the seat-of-pants stuff, and we think rationally, we realise that this way of doing business is actually the correct and proper and most beneficial way for everyone.

It is important to highlight that once the basics are correctly established and the cash flows are such that the financial health of the company is clear and being maintained, there has to be no restrictions on clients in terms of how they want to run their businesses and how they continue to pursue their entrepreneurial & personal goals.

Of course, not all businesses will be interested in such a strict and hand-held way of conducting themselves, but SBI’s market can even target such businesses by offering non-SBI companies elements of the SBI service in isolation – the accountancy software, for example; or reports on cash flow models etc.

“Ireland in general would become not just an example to the rest of the world but also an even more attractive place to do business”

SBI potential -

SBI will result in the establishment of better-run companies employing more people, with more chance of long-term success nationally & internationally, and less chance of doing financial damage to others or of costing the State money.

With SBI as the trail-blazer, it is anticipated that such a system of doing business would begin to appeal to more and more companies throughout the country and beyond, and that SBI could expand through various models of scaling (software licensing, franchise, regional offices, international offices).

And with a whole new culture of doing business transparently and responsibly established, Ireland in general would become not just an example to the rest of the world but also an even more attractive place to do business.

The SBI marque will represent a better, leaner, more sustainable way of doing business that consumers, employees, the State, & other businesses can trust

Can't stay quiet ...

2010-06-21T10:48:00.002+01:00

"I am sorry, this is not music, though performed by musicians; it is bombast with high production values, Led Zeppelin for the newly posh." That was Enda O’Doherty in Irish Times today discussing contemporary problems with classical music's position >http://ow.ly/2uZmb

CEOs whose companies miss earnings targets give the game away with the words they use, writes PROINSIAS O'MAHONY >>http://ow.ly/2wArZ

Straight talkers used “I”, “me”, “mine” v deceptive execs preferred “the team”, “the company”, “they” and “their” references.

Contradiction in soc: women's rights to be as overtly sexual as they choose v women as terrified potential rape victims>http://ow.ly/2q0bo

The real meaning behind the media trained PR splurge of a seeminly meaningless celebrity interview (Mullally in Tribune)>http://ow.ly/2wBDb

RT @bengoldacre: Journalism Warning Labels: totally excellent http://dlvr.it/3lL6f>>> GENIUS

What should medicine do when it can’t save your life? by Atul Gawande This New Yorker article is essential reading >>>http://ow.ly/2p7u8

Bought myself the complete set of Buntús Cainte so that I don't get left out of conversations here anymore >http://ow.ly/2oJMX

John Bowman described Robert Love's piece on cholera & murder in Philadelphia as an “outstanding article" > http://ow.ly/2oHWS

Young Model's questions to Sean Mc were a riot > "What's on your iPod?"; "What's your fantasy car?"; but Sean a gentleman as ever!

"I am supremely unqualified to be a member of the Oireachtas: I can’t do my expenses properly." > Miriam Lord in Timeshttp://ow.ly/2ftkg

"The idea that the ability to win a popularity contest at local level should be a prerequisite to running the country is an absurd one"Times

"Many young people in Ireland do not hold strong political opinions, but this is a result, not a cause, of a failed political establishment"

Though I like & admire @robinb a whole bunch, uncomfortable with some of the way he sees the world (of enterprise). Need to examine why!

Music, it has apparently been said, "washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life" >> http://ow.ly/2f2jV

Irish culture is not merely about Gaelic art, music and sport. Cronyism is at the heart of the Irish personality. (Yates in Examiner)

Are you trying to tweet your way into celebrity/fame?

Plans afoot to stalk the wild rhubarb (Times)http://ow.ly/2eUwU (Why not a peace treaty, I say >> http://ow.ly/i/2KFY)

Refreshing to hear someone go to places in what they are saying that take the journalist by surprise & where the journalist follows. Strong, hard-hitting, frank analysis of regulator & more general criticism of banks. Well done @karldeeter & @morning_ireland! Cool. For once on RTE Radio we're hearing some thinking that isn't off a press release. @karldeeter re regulator on EBS.

Sheesh is the mot du jour for me & primus filia these days.

"the vacuum of profitable progress" > a phrase from The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon.

Instead of honest analysis, we are forced to listen to so-called economic commentators bleating about inconsequential press releases > McW

via @architectmark Novelists invent the characters for their stories; architects have to work with clients for theirs. http://bit.ly/ag6qnN

He was in two minds about most issues. His bum was forever numb from sitting on the fence.

"the Whitewashed Warriors who obscenely scrawled “Brits Out” on the nose of Ben Bulben" > Benedict Kiely (Times archive)http://ow.ly/2wEi8

You can’t always get what you deserve in Ireland, but if you try sometimes you might find you don’t even get what you need. #homelessness

What’s the word for the mental contortions we do to try to turn an otherwise unnoteworthy, fleeting observation into a tweet?

How much of world’s resources are depleted with a tweet? Will we ever feel guilty about tweeting too much as we do now about wasting H20?

B2B sales tip: if you haven’t got the phone in your hand, you are probably fooling yourself!

The fact that paying for 12 months on your motor tax saves you €65 is another reflection of the hypocrisy of our State. The poor made poorer

First wasp of the season just in the window, making my frame tingle in time with his buzzing. Stop electrocuting my air, please!

@GrantaMag re RTing being a form of plagiarism, I’d be more concerned about people misquoting me by “editing” the original in the RT.

Having been disappointed & disillusioned by McCann & Geoff Dyer (rarely don’t finish books), delighted to start Hemon’s Lazarus Project …”All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all the world is.” (Hemon)

You can take a piece of string to the bush, but you can’t make it like home.

Sickened, ired by the irrationality of human behaviour.

“Dada, your face is naked.” — Róise, age 4

You are the author of this post.

The penman endward plots his wearying way, and leaves the world in darkness to me.

(from Michael) The writer packs his pen with gems and puns from his mind and flies upstairs to dispel. I go back to my young, worms in beak.

The starling packs her beak with worms & grubs from our lawn and flies off to feed her young. I go back to processing words, coffee in hand.

Who buys books about crooks & gangland goings on? Mostly those mentioned & associates, I’d say. And I’d say the authors know that. Symbiosis

Too timid to tweet.

Between @ s, RTs, VIAs, and RT’ing of @ s & RTs, I get very confused sometimes about who said what.

“Politicians insist no favours are provided in return for donations. That self-serving bluster no longer carries any conviction.” (Times ed)

Bout of GTD inertia.

Some very balanced thinking on display in Times ed today. Perhaps too easy on politicians who should have shouted stop. http://ow.ly/1HBz Times ed: “Absurd to suggest the economic mess was deliberately engineered”. SOME of causes WERE engineered, vaguely & subtly. CAPITALISM Yes, we have to move beyond the “angry phase”, but not yet & not until those same politicians are GONE & have fessed up to mess THEY enabled

Head shops: part of what we are- overwhelming need in so many of us to get out of our heads any way we can, legally or illegally (Sindo)

The Hunky Dorey pictures are wrong, not as rape is wrong, but in a grating, irritating, lesser way .. because part of a ‘pornified’ culture (Times)

“an Irish solution to an Irish problem: a euphemism for the worst in our nod-and-wink political culture, for hypocrisy on stilts” (Times ed)

Criminality is directly proportional to society’s failure to teach everyone how to put themselves in others’ shoes.

The harder you have to work to pay your bills, the less chance you have of being an activist, a force for change, someone who can say STOP.

Co.s following co.s & ne’er a one paying the slightest attention to others = a slow-moving, 1-d stream of logo avatars spewing spin.

Entrepreneurs (including social ones) who are involved with developing new ideas ought to pay less tax than the rest of us.

President McAleese: Tabloidism, anecdote and stereotype are an inevitable feature of our freedom of speech (from speech to IIEA)

Ever wonder when the longing for things to be over will end, and you’ll be able live firmly in the present at last?

From time to time, I catch myself adopting the facial expressions to go with the sentiment of what I am typing.

Recent Updates Page 4 RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

Just skimmed 37 Signals book REWORK pdf. Apt title, perhaps, in that it has the feel of someone re-working a lot of standard 2.0 thinking.

You are the author of this post.

Sutherland had opportunity to change culture of Irish banking. Had he taken it, “we” would not be in loin-girding business now, says O’Toole. Sutherland has sailed blithely onwards, indefatigably smug & unshakeably self-assured. Sutherland’s illusion: a “we” that includes ordinary citizens & high-flyers of global finance in a shared pain. There is no such “we”. Sutherland’s “we” is now more copious, stretching as it does to the whole field of global finance capitalism.

I think of this line “Be kind to your web-footed friend, for a duck may be somebody’s mother” when I make a driving mistake & get that look.

Kerrigan: “We didn’t screw up the country. You did. That’s not gratuitous blame, it’s necessary fact.”

Kerrigan: It’s not we, but politicians and the people on behalf of whom they currently act, and their media cheerleaders, who are in denial.

Kerrigan: “the markets” is code for ruthless people, working for commission for billionaires, who just advance their short-term interests

Speaking of FOT, I interviewed him years ago for Cara mag. “When I told my mother that I had interviewed Fintan O’Toole” http://ow.ly/1JXMw

AIB’s “Bankcentre” (facing RDS) has feel of a Government building since the plaza was put in. Not alone in that thought http://ow.ly/1K2KX

The Science and Art of Communications

Dineen on Jarrett and the journey of music

Annie West's spinning wheel of clichés

Roth's Zuckerman on abandoning writing for life

A geat perspective on editing and on bad science writing

Graydon Carter (Vanity Fair) on great magazine writing

Logos: Irish versus international

Highlights of Recent Dublin Architecture circa 2002

Irish Times feature on water park in France, Aqualand

Two different perspectives on business world

Where is the Rupert Pupkin of the internet?

Capturing the essence of anatomy ...

Conference on connections between arts & healthcare

The Taoiseach's speech writers

Obama on Irish writing

Legends of Hawaii

THE ELEMENTS OF PRESS RELEASE STYLE by Gary Klein

Dictated idea takes shape

One hell of an indictment

Teasing Annie West teasing Seamus Heaney

Children's thoughts

Follow that car ...

Deputy Luke 'Ming' Flanagan's first speech in Dáil Éireann

Dublin poem

The Little Red Hen: a movie in a book

Wordpress site

TCD's Anatomy building

A brace of clichés in a poem of persuasion

A reading of WB Yeats' 'Paudeen'

Sub-prime poem

Me and My Mammoth, by Joel Stewart

Tim Radford's 25 commandments for journalists

Mama Panya's Pancakes, by Mary and Rich Chamberlin

Feature in Irish Medical Times re Ian Wilson music

[Original is here >>>]Paul O’Connor was at Tallaght Hospital recently to witness the world premiere of Irish composer Ian Wilson’s musical take on stoke.

Housing hyperbole

A poem for Annie West on the anniversary of Yeats' death

How 2011 can be the year of a 'plain English' health service

Lucy Kellaway: A vintage year for the Management Guff Awards

From the Guardian: Medical ghostwriters who build a brand

Crystal Clear health literacy

Dennis O'Driscoll on money

Praise from Karl Deeter

Praise from Dragon, Gavin Duffy

Praise is always welcome!

The principles of scientific editing

Editing science research proposals

Editors as vandals

Literacy teaching

Sarah Carey lists the failings of Fianna Fáil

How we fool ourselves

Helping make a website for a charity that helps people with a rare muscle wasting disease: myasthenia gravis

Should have gone to Penhire

Turning the loss-leader mentality back on capitalists

Putting us all in our place ...

A thorough going over ...

Checklist before meeting

Fintan O'Toole on Willie O'Dea and language emptied of meaning

A poet president sounds good to me

Live communications

Twitter as a message board in a lonely hearts club

My kind of ad ...

Arguing rhetoric (with a teenager!)

Precise by name, precise by nature

Writing for suppliers

Hyperinflation in the Irish property market

Too much choice?

Modern homes

Freudian strip

Richard Hamilton’s Imagining Ulysses

Simple site delivering professional message

Taking the art out of the bog

Newfoundland delegation in Dublin

An odd day for a number of reasons ...

The Slow Ad Movement

Local business work

Sustainable Business Ireland (SBI)

Can't stay quiet ...

[Original is here >>>]

Paul O’Connor was at Tallaght Hospital recently to witness the world premiere of Irish composer Ian Wilson’s musical take on stoke.