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

]]> http://KEITHRIDGWAY.COM/2011/12/14/russell-hoban-1925-2011/feed/ 1 http://KEITHRIDGWAY.COM/2011/11/30/the-unfolded-man/ http://KEITHRIDGWAY.COM/2011/11/30/the-unfolded-man/#comments Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:25:02 +0000 KR http://KEITHRIDGWAY.COM/?p=824

You are an unfolded man. You are open in the world like a door. And you wake beside others and they fold you into their warmth but you are the unfolded man. And they press against you and they find a way in and there is no gap between you for you are the unfolded man. The open man.

And the people who love you just love you. And they look at you and look at you and they look at you in the light of the world and they see what you are and they love you. And you are unfolded and you laugh. And curiosity is an endless engine and it hums in you and you see it in others and you sing when you’re with them and you weep when you’re not because you are the unfolded man.

And they come back. Or you set out to find them. And they are somewhere, all the time. And they know you.

You are loved and held and thought of and there are people in the world who would want to find you if you disappeared, and they are unfolded towards you, naked by your side, lovers and friends who are there in the mornings. Open. And your only fear is that this openness will admit more love and what sort of fear is that? You worry too much. And you look at them and look at them and you could look at them forever and never close your eyes.

And you are always only one. But you are unfolded like a page. Opened and read and read again, and there are other pages.

And you will be for love.

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.