If you’re in Berlin next Tuesday (February 7th) then come along to the Kulturbrauerei, Knaackstrasse 97, Berlin 10435 where I’ll be doing a reading/interview with my German translator Jürgen Schneider and the Cork writer Conal Creedon.
More info here.
This started as a bit of a joke on Twitter (that sentence-opening is increasingly becoming the “I’d had a couple of drinks” qualifier of our era) but it has now been taken up by several people and so I need to do it properly or I will be made to look like a liar or some other sort of eejit.
Online books retailers like this one have already got Hawthorn & Child on their systems. Almost six months before its actual publication. So, the deal is that if you pre-order the book from any retailer, you can claim from me … a signed photograph of my Bare Left Knee, which I will send to you (IN DUE COURSE) in a nice little envelope, along with other unpredictable assorted detritus associated with the book (a page from the proofs for example, or from the original manuscript, or an egg, or a vintage car, or some sort of threatening letter … who knows? I certainly don’t.)
In order to claim this munificence, all you need do is send me proof-of-purchase. If you pre-order online the easiest thing is to forward me a copy of the email receipt. If you pre-order from an actual shop, ask them for a printed receipt and scan it or something and then send it to me – I don’t know, you work it out. And make sure you include the address where you want the envelope-of-misunderstandings sent.
The address to send to is : HAWTHORN [DOT] CHILD [AT] GMAIL [DOT] COM
I hope that’s clear. I will try to send nice things, interesting things, and not just my ugly knee. But be warned, as time goes on and I get bored with my knee, other body parts may feature.
K
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
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 :
Tuesday, October 25, 7:00pm
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
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.
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
This is a radio piece commissioned by the BBC in 2004 to mark the 100th Bloomsday. It was preformed (beautifully) by Sorcha Cusack, but I can’t find a recording anywhere and to be honest I had forgotten all about it until today, when general Bloomsday chatter on Twitter reminded me. If anyone out there happens to have a recording, do let me know. K
I’m off for a walk. I’m out the door and down the drive. I’m out of the kitchen, into my coat, across the hall, shouting I’m off out for a while, I’ll be back in a while, and I’m out the door and I’m into the air, the noise, the world, and I’m not stopping I swear to God I’m never stopping, the way I feel – that’s the way I feel and I can’t disguise it. Why would I want to disguise it? But I do of course, I do disguise it, it’s like I have two different lives, and who’d want that, but that’s what I have. Two different bloody lives, and both of them stopped, halted, stalled, stuck in that house like secret children, like secret bewildered aunts, miserable hidden souls locked in an airless drum. One of them doesn’t mind, doesn’t mind at all – one of them is a good daughter, happy daughter, at ease with it all; the other one has all her fingernails hanging off from scratching the back of the door. I have to force myself, force myself, not to slam. Having to close the front door gently is like a little Calvary all of its own, another one, a tiny one yes, but one of a million other tiny ones, to go with the small ones, and the medium ones, and the big ones, and the massive ones, and the overall one – the overall, over-arching, complete and comprehensive sacrifice I have made of my life for the benefit of another. And where is the kingdom? Which way lies paradise, my peace everlasting, my eternal bliss? Don’t make me laugh. Don’t make me tell you.
Oh alright then. It’s my mother. My mother. She isn’t dead yet.
I stomp down the road looking like an eejit. It’s the middle of the day. There’s no one around now but men in vans out to fix things or deliver them, au-pairs with prams, au pairs with shopping bags, au pairs in the prime of other people’s lives. They all glance at me, stare at me, and I’m so sick of it all that I’m sure it shows. I’m sure they know. Look at you, they’re saying. Running away from your mother. At your age. Good God I could walk to the edge of the world, the mood I’m in, I could stamp my way to the edge of the earth, I’m so disgusted with the centre. But isn’t that the problem? Wherever you are, that’s where you are. You’re always at the centre, never out of the crosshairs, never away from the eye of the storm. We’re always the centre of attention in our rotten little lives. Aren’t we mother? Aren’t we?
What day is it now? She has a thing about dates recently, as if waiting for one to come along unlike the others. It’s Wednesday, isn’t it? Wednesday? The middle of a scrappy June. The middle of a scrappy year.
I’m off into the park. Where else would I go? Out into the pale open spaces with me, with my muddy little feet clicking and clacking over the blankness, over the empty lawns, squelching and sucking at the black mud, dribbling through this tidied up, diminished world, just me, alone. Except for my mother at my back like an undone thing. I turned at the gate and looked back at the house. Just now, as I left it, in my froth. I do it every time. Every single solitary time. I cannot not do it. As if I have forgotten something and I turn back to remember it, but there’s nothing to remember, there’s just the house and its blank, bovine face. Can a house have a face, do you think? A bovine face? Is that possible? The door I haven’t slammed needs painting. As do the window frames. There are some roof slates dislodged. The whole thing looks listless, biding its time. It is in alliance with me, I know. Impatient and grumpy. Perhaps that’s why I look back. Because it calls out to me. Where are you off to? You come back now, do you hear me? Don’t leave me here with her. Don’t dare.
There’s been rain overnight. My shoes are turning dark. The radio is full of nonsense. She, my mother, has her ear glued to it since I arrived. I can get no sense out of her. She’s listening out for something. It may be another request. The last time she had that grotesque man on the mid-morning show play “Son Of A Preacher Man” for Frances – some apparently unspeakable private joke between them – and it was all she could talk about for days afterwards. About the phone call she made, and the girl who took the details, and the waiting, and the panic then, when he was reading out a request from someone called Frank, that the stupid girl had got it all wrong, but he played some opera for that, and the girl couldn’t have got it that wrong, could not surely have mistaken Dusty Springfield for some damn opera fatso, and the relief then, when the very next request was for Frances, from her, from my mother, and how he did it beautifully, got it perfectly right, and about how marvellous it all was, and how accessible the national airwaves are, to all of us, and what a wonderful resource really, one we should treasure. Today though, she seems less enthusiastic. She almost seems nervous. She’s quieter than usual. Oh don’t think she’s quiet, she’s not quiet, she hasn’t been quiet since the day I was born, I don’t mean she’s quiet, I mean she’s quieter than usual, which is still noisier than the rest of humanity gathered together, still nattering on about all sorts and nothing, about next door’s grandchildren and the cuteness of them, which she exclaims is to die for, but it’s just an expression, and the times the postman calls, never predictable, never the same, with his bundle of junk and brochures and the things she sends away for, she can never resist the licking of a stamp, and damn it now I’ve left without the letters she wants posting, and the parcel of God only knows what detritus for the earthquake victims. About whom she held forth for a good solemn fifteen minutes while I peeled the potatoes. Oh she loves a disaster. She loves catastrophe now. She wheels herself up close to the television and shakes her head at the wonderful misfortune of others, at the scale and the depth and the extent of the misery. Oh she moans, oh, who’d be a mother? Not me, mother. Not me. On the list today, the daily list, of things she needs me to retrieve – as well as a shoebox full of letters from the top of her wardrobe, as well as a dusty old novel from father’s bedroom bookcase – there was a photograph of us all taken, en famille as they say, in some kind of caravan, sometime far back in the last century, my father looking like he’s got the camera on a timer – will it or won’t it – my mother looking like he’s annoying her with his technical nonsense, me looking like I’ve had enough of it all already. I’m about three. What does she want that for? What made her remember it? Why was it hidden away behind a pile of crime novels on a top shelf in the spare room? But she doesn’t say. She has it on her lap. With the radio. She’s turning slow circles in the living room. Or was, the last I saw of her.
My mother, I should explain to you, is in a wheelchair. And I say that in the same way that I might say that I am in a rage, or you are in love, or so-and-so is in a coma. It is a state of being. She’s only been in it for about a year, but she shows such a terrifying level of expertise you’d swear she’d been in it since birth. Do I mean expertise? I mean that corners mean nothing to her. That the wallpaper’s scraped and the skirting boards are blackened with rubber and splintered like kindling, and she couldn’t care less. I mean that tables and chairs are shown none of the respect my father had for them. She clatters her way around like he never existed. She’s put a crack in the central stained pane of the kitchen door. He had that specially made. I mean that steps hold no fear for her – she jumps them, I swear to God, like a side saddle skate boarder. She gets up a bit of speed and goes flying off into mid air as if the worst that could happen has already happened. She is morbidly optimistic. And she has more muscle in her arms than a weight lifter. She can wrestle the machine up steps if she feels she needs to. A remarkable procedure, which I once witnessed, appalled, from the living room window, as she came in from the garden with a bunch of sorry chrysanthemums. She looked like she might burst. I watched. The net curtains tickled my nose. She didn’t.
She has taken all the carpets up and put down linoleum. In every bloody room. From the front door to the attic. It used to be a house that was entirely carpeted, wall to wall, gable to gable, many colours, many patterns, many textures – all my father’s choosing and planning and execution, warm and rich and his. But once she was in the chair she found the carpets heavy going. Had them all ripped up and the linoleum put in. She could get up some speed then, which is what she’s always liked, she can gather some momentum – down the corridor to the kitchen, back up the hall to the front room, spinning that corner like a rally driver, back out to the foot of the stairs, a figure of eight, back to the living room, a ferocious pace, her big arms just a blur at her side, faster than any upright person can manage. Moving through the house with her is like walking with a hyperactive child. She’s all over the place, under your feet, charging towards you, charging away from you, heading straight for a hall table disaster with the two old vases my father bought in Venice perched on top terrified, the poor things, and avoiding it at the last second, oblivious to the chaos in her wake. It gives me heartburn just to look at her.
Everything was always quick with her. She drove the same way. She keeps the car you know – it’s out in the garage, starting to flake with rust at the bottoms of the doors. She gets me to go out and turn it over every now and then. Which involves sitting in it with the engine on for a few minutes, wondering whether she’s encouraging me to kill myself. I can’t drive. I’ve no interest. Walking is better. Slower. She won’t let me sell it. Sure why should she sell it? As soon as she’s out of the chair she’ll be driving again, it’s only a matter of time.
The park is deserted. It’s not as warm as it should be, for this time of year. It never is.
She’ll never be out of the chair. But she won’t be told. She thinks, my mother, that everything is temporary, except life. That one of these days she’ll stand on her own two feet and walk out to her car and speed off to find a man to relay the carpets. Which are rolled up in the spare room like the dead sea scrolls.
She’s benign, my mother, do you know what I mean? Benign like a tumour. She’s not killing me, but I want her removed. Is that terrible? Is it? Is that terrible of me? There she is in the house, my house, by rights my house really, and she’s persevering, clinging on grimly, no actually, not grimly, if she was grim then at least she might be of the same mind as me – waiting for some release – but she isn’t grim, she’s cheerful. Rolling around the linoleum, in my house, talking up her chances of a holiday with Frances and Maud, to the Algarve would you believe, the three of them, a holiday for the girls, can you imagine such a thing? Frances is practically blind, and showing early signs of Alzheimer’s, I’m sure of it. Maud is due her third hip replacement next month and spends most of her days, from what I can make out, chatting to teenage boys on the internet.
Every day I have to come over here. Every single bloody day. When I get to the door I turn and look back down the drive towards the gate, at the world. Every time. As if I’ve forgotten something. I don’t know what that’s about. And then in I go, to a maelstrom of words and news and gossip and ideas, and a list of things in inaccessible places, remembered things that suddenly seem important, I don’t know why, I never know why, and an unquenchable thirst for living, for being bloody well alive, on her steel wheels and her linoleum, like a woman stapled to life, affixed with spokes and levers, propelled by her own strength. Damn her.
I should get back. I’ll have to leave the shoes in the porch. I love her of course. I do love her. But what good is that? She loved my father. My father loved me. What of it?
When I get back she has stopped moving. I think for a moment that she’s finally had the good grace to leave us, but it’s not that. She’s sitting in the middle of the hall, and the radio is gone berserk, with a woman’s voice droning on and on and I can’t understand a word of it, and my mother is clutching that old novel, Ulysses it is, Joyce, that thing, and the photograph of the three of us in the caravan, and there’s a tear on her cheek but she’s smiling broadly. At me. Yes, says the woman on the radio, a few times, and my mother mouths it with her, like it’s a song, and then there’s a long silence, and the announcer comes on and says what it is we’ve just been listening to, and it’s the book in my mother’s lap, the same book, and she’s nodding, my mother is, and the announcer says the date, June 16th, and my mother smiles at me, as if it’s significant, but frankly I’m not getting any of this, and then she asks me, my mother, she asks, with the photograph held up towards me like she’s meeting me at an airport or a train station, and she asks me, do you not know what today is darling? Her eyes sparkling so you’d swear she’s been drinking, or singing, or something good. Do you not know this date?
Matin Provost’s film Où Va La Nuit , based on my novel The Long Falling , opens in cinemas in France and Belgium on May 4th. It features Yolande Moreau in the lead role. Here’s a trailer.
OÙ VA LA NUIT : BANDE-ANNONCE de Martin Provost… by baryla
This week’s issue of The New Yorker has a new story of mine called Goo Book . The issue is dated April 11th but it’s out now (April 4th). Apologies to those of you who were expecting it last week (or the week before), but world events intervened and The New Yorker was understandably pressed for space.
There is also a brief Q&A on The New Yorker website about the story which you can read here .
The current issue of Zoetrope All-Story also has a new story called Rothko Eggs . The version printed in the magazine has some errors that crept in during a copy edit. There isn’t a huge number of them, but they do affect the flow of the story, and one on the last page alters the ending. So Zoetrope have put the correct version of the story up on their website, and you can read it here . Ideally, go and buy the magazine – there are some great photographs in there by Mark Romanek; there’s a David Means story; there’s other fiction by Johanna Suskind and Frances de Pontes Peebles; there’s an old Raymond Carver – then print off my story from the website and stick it in there using glue, Sellotape or spit.
I wrote a review of Kevin Barry’s début novel City of Bohane for the Irish Times, and that came out on Saturday. You can read it here .
Finally, I’ll be in Dublin next weekend for the Franco Irish Literary Festival , which takes place at Dublin Castle. This is the second time I’ve attended this festival – it’s a great opportunity to meet and hear writers from France and Ireland (and elsewhere). I’m doing a Café Littéraire on Friday 8th at 6pm with Philippe Forest and Julia Franck; and a Literary Brunch at 11am on Sunday 10th with Claude Arnaud, Eric Fottorino, Virginie Linhart and Micheál Ó Conghaile. All events take place in the Coach House in Dublin Castle, and are free and open to all. Come and say hello.
I have moved to Edinburgh. After nearly 12 years in London it suddenly seemed time to get out, and I left almost immediately. Moving is horrible. If you do it very fast at least the pain is concentrated and quicker to fade.
The main reason was financial. Edinburgh is really not at all a cheap city. In many ways it’s as – or more – expensive than London. The cost of essentials such as cafés and buses and heroin do not compare favourably to London. But in terms of rent, it is much cheaper. And my rent in London was getting spidery, fisty, rank.
There were other reasons. The Met is deranged of course, institutionally, but there are amongst its ranks some clever detectives still, and one in particular was making progress on the Forrester Road episode from the summer before last. I believe I sealed things off before leaving, a cauterising iron on the landlord for example, the shifting of the boxes out of storage and into the attic of a house in Bounds Green one afternoon while my friend who lives there was at the dentist. He never goes into the attic. I’m pretty confident that my move north won’t have left a trail. Although what I did in Burton-In-Kendal services when I was taking the van up the M6 was fucking stupid. Luck limps after me.
Edinburgh is a relaxed city. I am still settling, still getting used to its layout, its atmosphere, its peculiar demography, its noises, odours, tastes. But it feels, especially now, clipped out in darkness and a light cold, the right place to carry on my work. The alleys and closes, the stairs and steps and graveyards, the tenements and mansions, the hills and views, the stone and the stone and the stone. It is an excellent hall for me. A walk in the small hours across the Meadows and up into the lanes around the Grassmarket yields possibilities at almost every pause.
In December there was snow, so obviously it was far too dangerous to do anything at all. Which was a pity, as I’d done nothing since September. But after the thaw at the start of this month I have been out amongst the elderly of Morningside, the students of the Old Town, the bankers of Charlotte Square, and the schoolchildren of Bruntsfield, my eye and my hands like slithers and flays, icing the cuts with the kiss of a million little prickling daggers, ringside on a circus tragedy, mothering and fathering a magnificent goodnight, send in the frowns, etc.
They don’t know what’s going on. It’s a privilege. For all of us. And gloriously entertaining. I giggle in the narrows and the stone makes a song of it. It is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.
My flat is small, but it has a pleasant outlook, and though the electrics are eccentric and the plumbing ancient, it serves. I have made no friends. My isolation is solid as a lamb. I have switched broadband supplier, to BT, who are expensive and neurotic. I don’t recommend them. I hope to write more regularly to the blog now, perhaps about the books I have been reading, perhaps about aspects of my life unsuitable for other platforms. About books I think, for the most part. I am continuously startled and overwhelmed by great books. They strangle me and I am happy I am happy I am happy here.
All in all, it has been a good move I think. I read a lot of Barraclough, and Michael Mercer, and when the moon is out I hiss at its face like an axe.
