KTH RDGWY

Readers are thieves. We break into books. We burgle them. We see what we want and we make off with it. This is ok. We’re burglars, it’s what we do. Sometimes there’s nothing in there we fancy. Sometimes we don’t notice the really valuable stuff. We fixate on the flat screen TV and miss the original Hockney hanging on the wall. We’re in and out. There are a lot of houses to burgle. And we know that many of them are packed with treasure. So we dash in and dash about, and we knock things over and spill drawers on the floor, and we forget that this is somewhere somebody has lived. For months or years. A writer has lived in here. Meticulously placing the coffee table in exactly the right place, carefully arranging the figurines on the mantelpiece. And what if, while we’re rifling through the kitchen cupboards he should suddenly return home? We freeze. We look around. We pick up the poker from the fireplace and we wait behind the door and we cave in his head.

The problem with Irish literature is best embodied in the considerable disappointment that is Ridgway’s trajectory, from the promising collision of rural maelstrom and urban inclemency in The Long Falling, to the stuttering but elegant iterations of Standard Time, through the increasingly formless manipulations of The Parts, to his apogee as a sort of unstable distant point of light, possibly approaching but in all likelihood disappearing, in Animals, where he has the temerity to present to us a book about The Condition Of Mankind. News that his next book Hawthorn & Child is set in London – a city Ridgway fled over a year ago – and features two detectives on the trail of a writer, seems to indicate a final disappearance of the author up his own ampersand. As for Ridgway himself he is reported these days to be posing as an alcoholic in a Scottish town where he can be seen throwing himself out of the pub and into the North Sea on a daily basis like a rag around a rock. Though in fairness, these reports come from people who don’t like him. There are no other reports. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about this dismal episode is that it was brief, and hardly anybody noticed.

More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other’s arms, disappear from each other.

Fremder, Russell Hoban

You are a refolded man. You are alone in the world. And no matter how it presses in on you and shouts in your ear and licks your face with its dogsbreath tongue there is only one of you and nothing will increase you and nothing will infect you other than dreadfully, and you are a refolded man.

And the people who claim to care for you are useless and deluded for their interest is only in this peculiar view of themselves that they see in relation to you, through you, in the perspective you give them, of themselves, in themselves, and it could be no other way, and they have no expertise or competence when it comes to your workings, and they try to love you like a child tries to know a bee by cutting it in half and watching. And they go.

You are a refolded man. And you will be left on the shore of a sea as the night comes in with no way home and the cold. And you will simmer in the midday of a foreign country where you understand nothing. You are stripped naked and regarded, you are the dead man of someone else’s story, you are the body in the field, the passer-by, the jostled bather, the wedding drunk, the murdered sailor, the second illiterate cook. You are the schoolboy with the open mouth. You are a lover in the blink of an eye. Any eye.

And you are always only one. You are the refolded man. Opened and read and folded over and folded again, and put aside.

And you will be punished for love.

I’m going to be in New York for a series of events on October 25th, 26th and 27th to launch the special New York edition of The Stinging Fly. I’ll be travelling with Sean O’Reilly, Emer Martin, Aifric Mac Aodha and Fly editor Declan Meade.

The events are :

Writing Dublin, Writing New York: a discussion at The Center for Fiction, moderated by Declan Meade.

Nick Laird, Emer Martin, Sean O’Reilly and Keith Ridgway discuss the literary and cultural connections between Dublin and New York, and share their experiences of writing at home and away.

Where: The Center for Fiction, 17 E 47th Street (between Fifth and Madison), New York, NY 10017

Web: www.centerforfiction.org/calendar/writing-dublin-writing-new-york

Wednesday, October 26, 8:00pm

A reading at Columbia University hosted by Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art.

Readings by visiting writers Aifric Mac Aodha, Sean O’Reilly and Keith Ridgway and Columbia PhD student Max McGuinness all of whom have contributed to the New York issue.

Where: Columbia University, Morningside Heights Campus, Dodge Room 501, 116th and Broadway, New York, NY 10027

Web: www.columbiajournal.org

Thursday, October 27, 7.00pm

Launch party at the Swift Hibernian Lounge

Join us for a night of readings and music from the pulpit(!) at Swift’s, an East Village Irish bar with a great literary tradition, to mark the official launch of the New York issue. Promises to be a fun night out. Readers will include Ciaran Berry, Tim Dwyer, Martín Espada, Emer Martin, David McLoghlin, Idra Novey, Jana Prikryl and Mark SaFranko with more to be confirmed.

Where: Swift Hibernian Lounge, 34 E 4th Street, New York, NY 10003

Web: www.swiftnycbar.com/

More event information here.

More information about the New York issue of The Stinging Fly here.

I’m going to be at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris next week – October 20th to 22nd  - for the Poésie and Prose festival. I’ll be reading (probably from Hawthorn & Child) and chatting at an event at 1630 on Saturday 22nd along with Alan Glynn and Ailbhe Ni Ghearbhuig, chaired by Sinead MacAodha. The festival also features the likes of Jennifer Johnston, Gerard Stembridge, Greg Baxter, Enda Wyley and lots of others. All events are free and take place in the Centre, which is at 5 Rue des Irlandais, 75005 Paris.

If you’re in Paris come along and say hello.

On Fonthill Road near Finsbury Park Station in north London, opposite the corner with Lennox Road, in faded lettering across the brickwork of three shabby terrace houses is written GREAT NORTHERN SCHOOL OF MUSIC. If you sit in Arianna’s Café across the road you can contemplate it freely. If you get there before 4pm you can still have a decent breakfast in Arianna’s. But at a fiver it’s pretty steep for the locale.

I knew the man who lived in the OF MUSIC section of the GREAT NORTHERN SCHOOL OF MUSIC. On the second floor of three. Cheap PVC windows. Old thin faded carpet. The bass thump of techno from elsewhere.

He and his brother came from Lodz. They had work in the neighbourhood. Plastering. Good work. For a guy their cousin had known in Poland. The brother wanted to set up on his own – more money. Harder work probably, but more money. And my friend, Jozef, he thought it would definitely be harder work, which he wouldn’t mind – of course – but he would like to enjoy himself too, you know? You understand? He would like to enjoy himself while he was in London, because life is short. No it isn’t, I told him, but he thought I was being funny.

The brothers argued. London split them and they became two. Jozef stayed in OF MUSIC. His brother moved further west towards Camden and bought a second-hand van. I met Jozef in Arianna’s, and he chatted to the girls and then leaned in and told me dark things about his brother. His brother, he said, was trying to kill him. What do you mean trying to kill you? Exactly that, he said. He is trying to kill me. I awoke and he was standing over my bed with a brick in his hand. A brick? Yes a brick, a brick.What are you doing I asked him and he laughed at me. Hateful laughter. And he dropped the brick on the floor and went out. Went away. But why, I asked him, would your brother want to kill you? And Jozef told me that his brother’s business was failing, and he was losing money, and that he could not really drive the van and had no insurance, and that he resented Jozef the simple life that he had stuck with. Plastering. Enjoying himself. But still sending money home.

When I did not see Jozef for a while I wondered if his brother had killed him. I sat in Arianna’s and stared up at the windows and the faded letters and I rearranged them into terrible sentences. I asked the girls once or twice if they had seen him. Yes, maybe, no, they couldn’t remember. They thought I fancied him. I did, but that was not why I was asking. I could not tell them that I was worried about fratricide.

Then Jozef turned up again, smiling, sucking his cigarette at the door, winking at me, and he came in to tell me about a woman he had met at a club, about a housewife he’d slept with on the job, about getting drunk and watching football. And he watched me listening.

He asked me up to OF MUSIC one day, and we lay on his narrow unmade bed and he smoked and giggled about his brother. Oh, he said, my brother, what would he say if he could see this. He would kill me for sure. He would cave my head in with a brick and he would leave me for dead. My brother, my brother, my brother. He made me tea and offered me some food and I smoked one of his cigarettes for no reason other than that it meant that I could lean out of the window. If you walked down Fonthill Road that day you may have seen a bearded man coughing and turning pale between the OF and the MUSIC.

I know a boy with no head.

He has a body and he can walk and run and turn corners. He can jump and stretch and he can make people want him and he can make people hate him because he can make them want him, and he can do almost anything he puts his mind to (he has a mind). He has a laugh and he laughs, and he can smile at anything and he can keep up with anyone and he has all the world in the palm of his small hand. And he can swim and talk and tell jokes and make you suddenly brighten. And he can warm a room or a street or a bed simply by wishing it warmer. And he can dance and kiss and make love like he’s invented it, as if nothing else matters and no one is there. He can cook.

But he has no head.

And the chief drawbacks of this are that you can never quite tell what might be in it, or which way it’s facing. And he cannot wear a hat.

It hasn’t exactly been a secret (or if it has it’s been a very badly kept one) but the deal has now been done, the contracts have now been signed, and I’m very happy to be able to announce that I am now a Granta Books author.

The new book is called Hawthorn & Child and it will be published sometime next summer (2012). Those of you who have read Goo Book in the New Yorker or Rothko Eggs in Zoetrope earlier this year have already had something of a taster. It’s an episodic book of detachable fictions. It’s about London, and about policemen; and it’s also about wolves and pickpockets, racing drivers and criminals, ghosts and children, and it’s about the way we try to turn everything into a story – even when (maybe especially when) it can’t be done.

I’m quite proud of it. And it’s wonderful that my new publisher Philip Gywn Jones got it immediately, and that he is so enthusiastic about it. It’s very good indeed to have a publisher who believes in and is excited by what I’m doing.

I’ll keep you informed as the book goes through the various stages before publication proper, and I will be better, I promise, at updating this site more regularly, with bits of writing as well as news and general … things. And if Twitter is your thing, you’ll get more information (probably too much information) about what I’m up to from here.

K