I met him once, at City Lights, of course. He was a stone cold gentleman. He let me go smoke weed on the roof of the store, because of course he did, and he gave me a book they’d published of the same poem, entitled ‘Irish’ translated into English from the German by 30 different poets. Rest in power, Lawrence. Alas WordPress won’t accommodate the line lengths and spacing of the original.
There is a bookshop in the memory of America A shop of books and everyone’s uncle singing Woodie Guthrie and speaking poems from memory in a bookshop in the memoryof America.
Among everyone’s favourite places, in the secret speakeasies with the best cocktails, over dumplings at the family-run restaurant by California and Grant, swanking at the Tonga Room, dancing at the party in Cole Valley Heights that everyone called the Haight, stoned, laughing, is a private place, a lovesong, a melody of verse, all the bookpages turning, those dangerous books about fucking in the memory of America.
In a private place belonging to everyone in the memory of America, everyone’s adopted granddad might hand you a book, say “Read this” and you would, or quote Yeats, or clasp your hand, cold but warm, thank you for coming, thank you for listening, thank you for being there.
Who now will remember the poems for us, who will be the memory of America, a century long, now you’ve joined i genitori perduti, Allen, Bill, Jack, as the world sighs by cowering like frightened lost kids on a road none of us recognise any longer.
This alternative history was written at the time of the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin, which had led ultimately to both Irish independence, and partition.
It was published in the 16th April 2006 edition of the Irish Mail on Sunday newspaper, where I was a staff journalist. I expect they might hold the copyright, but I wrote it and I think it’s fair of me to reproduce it here as I suspect they’re unlikely to reprint it anytime soon.
THE TRIALS of the trenches seemed a long time ago now. On Sackville Street, in glorious June sunshine, Prime Minister John Dillon and his guest, David Lloyd George, led the cheering thousands who saluted the returning Irish troops who had defended their nation and empire so valiantly against the Germans. It was a time of celebration, even if the seditious activities of the once-respected lawyer, Edward Carson, were beginning to cause unrest in the north of the island.
And for the joyous crowd, their Union Jacks held proudly aloft, it was the achievement of the soldiers in the trenches that had helped bring about Home Rule. There might always be the odd crank for whom self-determination was never enough, like the wild-eyed MP for East Clare, Mr de Valera. But the vast majority of the Irish citizenry as the recent landslide election victory for Dillon’s Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) had indicated were delighted to have their own parliament and saw no need to reject the monarchy or sever the brotherly bond with Britain.
Of course, things could have been so different, as one Rathgar schoolteacher noted sullenly. Had the Irish Volunteers’ chief of staff, Eoin MacNeill, not learned of their plans to strike for Irish independence three years earlier and immediately countermanded them, then PH Pearse and his comrades in the Irish Republican Brotherhood might well have obtained complete independence for Ireland while England was embroiled in a foreign war.
Or so he believed. But the arrest of the former diplomat, Roger Casement, and the scuttling of the shipful of arms he was bringing to Ireland had made their plans for an uprising pointless, as Mr MacNeill had argued. The rising had evaporated before it had even begun.
By 1919, Mr MacNeill was prominent on the opposition benches in the House of Commons on College Green. Sinn Féin, led by the irascible Arthur Griffith, still argued for absolute independence but its minority status in parliament proved that desire was not shared by the people in general. Casement still languished in Kilmainham, and the IRB had withered away to an irrelevant handful of dissidents. With Home Rule now a fact, their role seemed increasingly defunct.
After decades of trying, the late John Redmond had finally secured Home Rule from Britain as a reward for sending the National Volunteers to the trenches. The humourless poet, Pearse, had returned to teaching Irish to sour-faced lads and dreaming of fomenting revolution. The radical Scot, James Connolly, was still preaching the gospel of socialism from his trade union headquarters in Liberty Hall. But few listened to them.
Instead, the general election held in late December 1918, while many of Dublin’s tenement poor were wracked with Spanish flu, was heavily influenced by two factors. One was David Lloyd George’s firm commitment to Irish Home Rule, made in his Armistice speech only weeks earlier. ‘This is no time for words,’ he had declared. ‘Our hearts are too full of gratitude to which no tongue can give adequate expression. We especially pay tribute to our Irish brethren, in return for whose valiance long-promised Home Rule is the least reward we may grant them.’
The other factor that swung the election so forcefully in the IPP’s favour was the introduction of universal suffrage. The radical Countess Markievicz was elected to represent Sinn Féin but most Irish women who voted for the first time were much more conservative and rallied to Dillon’s paternal leadership. A State visit in 1921 by King George V helped to shore up the popularity of the monarchy but, throughout the ’20s, the popularity of Sinn Féin seemed inexorably to rise.
Sinn Féin, led by a younger generation than the increasingly tired IPP, by now renamed the Irish National Party (INP), were making huge inroads into the working class vote. Sinn Féin’s charismatic young leader, the Corkonian Michael Collins, made a series of angry speeches in Dublin’s House of Commons calling on the government to deal with the increased sectarian rioting in Belfast.
Unionist Party leader Edward Carson, by now deputy prime minister in the ruling coalition with the INP, denounced the activities of his former colleague, James Craig, a stockbroker turned terrorist. In 1926, under pressure from Sinn Féin, the INP pressed to have Ireland included in the declaration made by the Earl of Balfour at that year’s Imperial Conference. Prime Minister Kevin O’Higgins triumphantly returned from London to an Ireland now officially considered independent within the British Empire, sharing only a monarchy with Britain.
After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, left wing governments swept to power in Britain and Ireland. With the support of Jim Larkin’s Labour Party, Sinn Féin at last made it into power, despite the recent split in their ranks (Eamon de Valera had formed his own party, named Fianna Fáil, after a bitter row with Michael Collins over devolution for Ulster).
The following decade was a dark one for the nation. While membership of the British Commonwealth continued to encourage trade and helped to grow Ireland’s economy, the dark spectre of fascism was spreading across Europe. General Eoin O’Duffy attracted many disaffected soldiers to his quasi-fascist National Guard movement quickly named the Blueshirts in recognition of the traits they shared with Mosley’s Blackshirts in Britain.
By 1933, the fascist salute could be seen in every town and village in the royal dominion of Ireland. Clashes between O’Duffy’s paramilitary organisation and the RIC became a weekly, almost daily occurrence. O’Duffy announced a major rally for Dublin in August 1933, to be held in the Phoenix Park. Fearing a coup, since O’Duffy carried much support in the Irish battalions, Prime Minister Collins banned it and announced martial law. The Irish civil war had begun.
Troops loyal to the House of Commons moved to secure the capital, while O’Duffy’s men marched through Cork, Belfast, Londonderry and Limerick. James Craig’s Ulster Volunteer Force, a heavily armed terrorist organisation responsible for sporadic bombings and murders in the north of Ireland, declared its own ‘war’ for independence in Ulster.
Collins moved quickly against O’Duffy and Craig. With the help of troops provided by Ramsay McDonald’s national government in Britain, both rebellions were quickly suppressed and their leaderships interned in The Curragh army camp. Before restoring democratic government, Collins approved the executions of O’Duffy and Craig. He told Deputy Prime Minister Jim Larkin later that day: ‘Early this morning, I signed my own death warrant.’
However, Collins’s decisiveness contrasted with Britain’s dithering. Westminster moved to ban the fascist Blackshirts only in 1937 but, by then, the world was lurching towards another world war. The first had brought Ireland Home Rule; the second would prove devastating. Accused of dictatorship by the leader of the opposition, Eamon de Valera, Collins formed a government of national unity on the eve of German hostilities breaking out. Only William Cosgrave’s Irish National Party, where many former blueshirts had found a political home, refused to take part, arguing instead for peace at any price.
Once again, British troops flooded into Ireland, and were stationed on the Allies’ westernmost border. After Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Collins used Radio Eireann to inform the people that little Ireland was at war with Nazi Germany. The western seaboard was prowled by ‘ wolfpacks’ of U-boats and patrolled by the Royal Irish Air Force. German nationals were interred in The Curragh camp recently vacated by O’Duffy’s and Craig’s followers. Rationing began. Dublin and Belfast were devastated in the Blitz. Carpet bombing reduced many historical buildings to rubble. The key ports of Derry and Queenstown, where convoys from the United States came to dock, were blockaded by U-boats.
In 1941, as the dogfights of the Battle of the British Isles raged, a plot was uncovered. William Joyce, like his party leader, Eamon De Valera, was an American of Irish heritage. It soon emerged that he was in secret negotiations with the Nazi regime to provide a ‘backdoor to the British Isles’. Together with some extremist republicans, who espoused an independent Eire free from the monarchy, he planned to smuggle Nazi troops into the largely unguarded southwest of the country.
De Valera, who personally espoused neutrality in the war though he sat in Cabinet, was appalled at the treachery and exposed it to Collins. Not for the first time, Prime Minister Collins was forced to sign execution orders. Hundreds of thousands of Irish troops fought valiantly on the African front under Allied General Richard Mulcahy, who later played a major role in the D-Day landings. For many Irishmen who had been conflicted by their republican sentiment, the discovery of the Nazi death camps seemed to vindicate the decision by de Valera to expose Joyce’s treachery.
In the post-war elections, Fianna Fáil swept to power, backed in coalition by William O’Brien’s Irish Labour Party. Collins’s Sinn Féin was reduced to a fraction of its former power. Basil Brooke’s Unionist Party boycotted the Commons in protest and again called for a regional parliament for Ulster. Returning soldiers in the North were dismayed by this lurch towards republicanism, and the Ulster Volunteer Force attracted many of them into its fold.
The assassination of Collins by an unknown UVF man while driving through remote north Antrim in 1952 is believed by many to have sparked the so-called ‘Troubles’ in Ulster. Collins had never been forgiven for ordering the execution of William Craig. Collins’s State funeral was the biggest ever seen in Ireland. It was attended by dignitaries from around the world including US President Harry Truman and the heir to the throne, Princess Elizabeth. Prime Minister de Valera gave a valedictory speech, in which he said: ‘History will record the greatness of Michael Collins.’
By the late 1950s, an economic revival was under way. As the population edged towards seven million, Ireland joined other European countries in inviting foreign workers to its shores. The first wave of ethnic immigrants, from the Caribbean, docked in Queenstown in 1958, and black faces were soon commonplace in Ireland’s major cities. The call also went out to Irish descendants in Australia, North America and even Argentina to return to help build up the economy of the motherland.
By the mid-60s, the so-called ‘Celtic Boom’ economy was in full swing. Ireland and Britain were invited to join the EEC. But Catholic Archbishop John Charles McQuaid was appalled by the loose morals and drug-taking of young Irish people in the swinging ’60s. In 1969, firebrand Ulster preacher Ian Paisley, whose fringe political party, the DUP, had been linked by some to the ongoing UVF terror campaign, helped to negotiate a Unionist ceasefire and the ‘Troubles’ finally came to an end.
Se·n Lemass’s Sinn Féin government agreed to devolved government for the nine counties of Ulster, within a federal Ireland. The oil crisis of the following decade led to years of stagnation, and Sinn Féin finance minister Charles Haughey famously warned the people to tighten their belts. The ’80s was a period of unstable coalitions. Haughey-led Sinn Féin twice entered coalition with Gerry Adams’s Fianna Fáil. In between came the so-called ‘rainbow government’, in which INP Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald led four parties, including Dick Spring’s Labour Party and David Trimble’s Unionists.
But in 1996, following the election of Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin again, the radical government called for a referendum on an Irish republic within the British commonwealth. The proposal was passed by a narrow margin and, in the subsequent presidential election, INP veteran John Hume became the Irish Republic’s first president, 80 years after an abortive rebellion in Dublin now almost forgotten by the history books.
Timeline:
1926: Irish PM Kevin O’Higgins gains Dominion status
1933: Michael Collins tells Jim Larkin ‘I’ve signed my death warrant’
1945: U-boats fight the Royal Irish Air Force off Queenstown
1958: first shipload of Caribbean migrant workers arrives in Ireland
Into the Seventies and at the midway point of the series on Burgess’s invented languages over at Ponying the Slovos.
What did people speak before Indo-European languages developed?
How many invented languages can you fit into a small novella that’s mostly poems?
I’ve attempted to answer those questions there.
Bonus: if you ever wondered what 19th century Romanescu dialect sonnets sound like when translated into Mid-Ulster Hiberno-English, I got your back there too.
Into what, I hear you ask? Into the actual dialect of the North of Ireland. You may have heard tell of Ulster-Scots. It too is an invented language, created (and not the first either nor the last) for political reasons. One day I’ll tell that tale too.
It’s always nice to see something new from Adam Curtis. He’s a genuine original, not just in terms of his vision but also in terms of his cultural position. There is literally no one else who holds his kind of position, salaried at the BBC to rummage in the entirety of their archives for his own purposes. Therefore, we have to value him, especially as he now is reaching pensionable age.
Can’t Get You Out Of My Head is a kind of capstone to the work Curtis has been doing for the past two decades or more. It has the thematic obsessions of Hypernormalisation or Bitter Lake, presented in the longer, episodic form he used for earlier work like Century of the Self.
It’s subtitled as an ’emotional history’, which could mean that Curtis has eschewed his habitual monotone voiceover or attempts to emulate the communicative modes of reportage, but in fact means that he intends this to be understood as a history of human emotions, specifically how people have emotionally responded to key events and societal developments in recent times.
People familiar with his work, so iconic at this point that a number of biting satires exist, will know what to expect: grand macro-theories about global geopolitical developments undercut by psychological speculation deriving from key practitioners, and illustrated by the succinct telling of lifestories belonging to people from the slipstream. Not Malcolm X but Michael X, not Mao but his fourth wife Jiang Qing, not Lee Harvey Oswald but his buddy from the Marines Kerry Thornley, and so on.
This is, of course, all extremely interesting, and provocative, especially when little known or long forgotten facts, such as Michael X selling John Lennon’s hair to raise money, are illustrated with archival footage. And the sheer welter of information, and imagery, alongside Curtis’s calm and lugubrious voiceover script, and the soft lulling of an expertly curated soundtrack of ambient music, all adds to the effect of being almost hypnotised.
Curtis loves to tell us how we have collectively and individually succumbed to dreamscapes, be they the futility of revolution, the seduction of online existence, the pseudo-authority of the banks, the fabricated myths of lost nationhood. Ironically, the narratives which emerge from his own work, acute though they are at times in skewering key engagements of the West with the non-Western world, are no less delusional.
It would be churlish and indeed ungrateful to pick holes in a work delivered to the world for free by a man who dedicated two years of his life to constructing it, a work of nearly 8 hours in length, that is carefully constructed, and perpetually intriguing and informative. So I’m not going to do that.
His theorising, in the academic sense of the word, which means argumentation that varies in quality from actual philosophising to bar room speculation to fervent ideological signalling, is exempted from the usual somewhat limited standards of academic review, largely because of the format in which he presents his arguments. The archival collage effect is so impressive, the editing so neat, the soundtrack so excellent, that one realises the inappropriateness of desiring an evidence base, or references, or footnotes.
And because he doesn’t have to provide footnotes and references, he can wildly connect this to that, across time and space, operating with the facade of reportage so it seems to be without the constrictions of ideological argument. But of course there is an ideology in there, albeit submerged and tentative, and there is a rashness to the wild connecting which suggests causality where in fact there is at best correlation, or at most ideological desire, or perhaps nothing except the sort of false pattern recognition he simultaneously propagates and excoriates.
If there’s a meta-theory beneath all of Adam Curtis’s endless, and often spurious big-picture postulating, it’s Dasein. Curtis’s sense of optimism is rooted in Heidegger’s understanding that we must really be in the world we occupy. Which is perhaps an understandable but ironic desire coming from someone who spends decades at a time in dark rooms watching ancient film footage.
The collage aspect, along with his culminating call for us all to wake up and be in the world, as well as his predeliction for slipstream figures and their tangential relationships to his grand narratives, may be why his huge lacunae often pass unnoticed. It seems perhaps that precisely because we have spoken so much about Trump and Brexit that Curtis need not refer to them except in brief passing.
Or we have worried ourselves so much about Putin’s Russia that the story of fringe element Limonov seems refreshing and interesting. Or we have agonised over both the causes of BLM and the civil unrest unleashed by it so much that it is preferable to look to previous eras and discussions of race relations, like Tupac or his mother. Or our lives have been so upended by Covid that we prefer to consider China’s business relationship with the west rather than the origins of the virus.
In the end, though, these are not slipstream events. They are the key elements of our age, and will define the chaos we have before us, indeed are already experiencing. Curtis’s slipstream narratives do not address these matters, because they don’t fit his narrative, his theorising. Curtis would have us to keep dreaming of new futures, which is desirable, but not at the expense of sleeping through the present.
Can’t Get You Out Of My Head is highly recommended, the keywork of a master at the top of his game. But it’s just another dream. One wonders if Curtis has it in him to document what happens if, how, when, we dead awaken. I hope so, because I doubt who else could.
The MOSF Journal of Science Fiction has produced a fascinating special edition volume focused on what they term Middle Eastern SF (though the inclusion of an article on Iranian ‘theory fiction’ writer Reza Negarestani suggests a somewhat expansive understanding of Middle East).
It’s not especially focused on religious futurism, despite the inclusion of a review of Jorg Determann’s book (my own review of which is pending publication in the next edition of Foundation.)
Nevertheless, there is much of interest here for those curious to know more about Arab futurism, Gulf futurism and the interactions between Israeli and Palestinian SF especially. Highly recommended.
Cardiff even has an entire square dedicated to Roald Dahl.
But Manchester to date has not recognised its greatest author. Manchester City Council has launched a new consultation exercise on the future of statues and monuments in the city. You can see the questionnaire by clicking here.
There is an opportunity to propose new subjects for monuments. Perhaps you might consider filling it in and proposing that they rectify their egregious lack of an Anthony Burgess statue?
The third part of the series on Anthony Burgess’s invented languages is now live over at Ponying the Slovos, featuring what just might be Burgess’s most significant novel, the weird, wonderful and intensely Structuralist riddle that is M/F.
In my book on Anthony Burgess, I pay M/F a lot of attention, because I think it’s a very misunderstood novel and also one that is extremely important in Burgess’s own development as a writer. It’s a novel about riddles, based largely on Claude Levi-Strauss’s Structuralist thinking, especially as applied to early myth such as Oedipus.
It’s also a novel about what meaning actually means, and how we look for it in vain and what it is that generates it for us.
And, as this article on PtS details, it’s a novel which, like A Clockwork Orange, features its own invented language.
Why the title M/F? Apparently an actor said to Burgess that someone should update Sophocles’s Oedipos Tyrannos with the title “Motherfucker.” Alas, that title wasn’t possible at the time of publication, but the truncated version actually facilitates other interesting dynamics from the novel, such as male/female and the protagonist’s own name, Miles Faber, the soldier-maker.
