Homage to Myles – Friday – Mind your Language

Himself was in rare form when he reached the pub last night. Coming in on the bus, he was afflicted by a notice: Room for 10 standees only. “It’s the same when some young fellow does a bunk from Mountjoy: the next day the papers have headlines about the escapee. And are we burning our copies of the Irish Times, or screaming that there is no such thing as an escapee, that it is an impossibility?” 

The Writer had the misfortune to suggest that the mistake was around for so long now, it was probably approved by the Oxford English Dictionary. That really drove Himself wild. He laid into the Writer. Accused him and his kind of crimes against language. Then he demanded to know where the apostrophe had gone from the Irish Writers Centre.

He claimed there should be public floggings for such crimes. Look at the hash they were making of Yeats’s poetry on his 150th. Hadn’t a bull’s where to stick the apostrophe. Might as well keep it for scratching their backs. What we needed was a bunch of greybeards, as the French had, to protect the language against atrocity. You wouldn’t catch those boys inserting their dangling apostrophes into inappropriate places.

The Cynic snorted at the ribald innuendo. “What you’re looking for,” he said, “is a CIA or an MI5 for homeland language security”.

“Bloody right, I am, and a Guantanamo for offenders.”

But the Writer was game and rose to it. He said it demonstrated the flexibility of the English Language. Yeats himself, he said, wouldn’t have had a clue where to stick the apostrophe in Yeats’s poetry. He could write, but he couldn’t spell, and he wouldn’t recognise grammar if he met it marching down the street, led by a fife and drum band.

When the Writer gets the wind up, he is well able for Himself. He took a long draft from his Guinness, wiped his lips, and sat back, good and square. “The English Language,” he said, “is infinitely flexible. It is organic, always growing, not like French, which has been fossilised since the Eighteenth Century.”

“Stop waffling,” said Himself, “and tell me how the Writers’ Centre became the Writers Centre.”

“They just decided to drop the apostrophe,” said he, smug as you like – and he sounded like the boy in class who knew the answer when no one else did.

“Apostrophe – you might as well be talking to yourself.”  Himself looked around to see if anyone twigged his witticism, but was disappointed. It was two minutes later when I twigged it, and smiled, but the conversation had moved on by then.

“But is it right or wrong?” asked the Young Lad. “To leave out the apostrophe.”

“It’s right if you decide it’s right,” said the Writer, “and wrong if you decide it’s wrong.”

Himself was winding, like a cock looking for a cockfight. “You sound like a Jesuit,” he said. “Tell me the answer you want and I’ll give you the justification.”

“Those boys were ahead of their time all right,” piped in the Cynic.

“So what’s your justification for leaving out the apostrophe?” Himself had decided to drive for home.

“As with the Jesuits, you first decide what outcome you want. If you decide that the Centre belongs to the writers, then it is the Irish Writers’ Centre, apostrophe included. But if you decide that it is a Centre dedicated to Irish Writers, then no apostrophe, the words Irish Writers become an adjectival phrase qualifying Centre. Both are grammatically correct.”

Himself shifted uneasily on his high stool.

“And what about standees?” asked the Young Lad.

“You mean you don’t know your ‘ers’ from your ‘ees’!” scoffed the Cynic with mock astonishment.

“For God’s sake, give him a lesson” said Himself, as he got up abruptly and headed for the door marked WC.

“Alright,” said the Cynic. And the Young Lad was all ears. “Once upon a time Paddy the Irishman and his dear friend, Jock the Scotsman, boarded a bus in London without tickets. It was a Thursday evening and they didn’t have a red rex between them. They sat on the top deck, but after a while they heard the dreaded words behind them, ‘tickets, please’. As the Inspector was making his way towards them, Jock whispered, ‘What will we do, Paddy?’ ‘Don’t panic,’ said Paddy. ‘We’ll pretend we’re two lawyers. They’re scared shitless of lawyers. Now put on your poshest accent and your best English, and start talking.’ So good and loud, and posh as hell, Paddy said, ‘So you were in court today, Jock. How did you get on?’ ‘Oh, very harrowing, very harrowing indeed, a dreadful case.’ ‘Really? What kind of case was it?’ ‘Oh it was that dreadful rape case that is all over the papers today. Dreadful.’ ‘And tell me, Jock, were you representing the fucker or the fuckee?’ ”

There was a bit of a guffaw but it was drowned by the whine of the hand-drier behind the door marked WC.

“Right so,” said the Young Lad as he took a long draught from his pint and thought about it.

 

 

 

 

Homage to Myles – Thursday – Appreciating Poetry

It was a strange contraption that Himself brought into the pub last night. He parked it on a bench but wouldn’t talk about it until the Teacher came. It was only on a Wednesday night that he graced us with his presence. Celebrating the crossing of the ‘hump’, as he called the mid-week day. Even then he would arrive late and drink only two or three pints. A scabby way of celebrating anything. With his moaning about his workload you’d think he would need at least a dozen pints. Still he seemed to be short of money too, with his five children, two of them in college.  Ah well.

As soon as he arrived, Himself said, “I have just the job for you.”

“I have a job,” replied the Teacher, “and it’s killing me.”

“Just the job to make your job lighter.”

“I could do with that. What is it?”

“Last week you were complaining about how hard it was to teach poetry.”

Sure enough last week he and the Writer were hard at it about poetry. The Writer claimed that schools should be barred from teaching poetry because after fourteen years all the students wanted was never to see a poem again. The Teacher defended the system and claimed that the students learned plenty of useful literary and verbal skills by analysing poems. But the Writer would have none of it. They could learn the same skills by analysing a football match. They could fake ecstasy at the rhythm of the Arsenal football team when they were in attacking mode. They could verbalise about the lyricism of Aidan McGeady’s left foot.

At this the Cynic had snorted. Try that and you would have a visit from a few football heavies in crew cuts. Leave football alone or we’ll break your legs. We don’t want you doing for football what you did for poetry.

“The problem, if I can summarise,” said Himself, “is that students have to prove their enjoyment of poetry by verbalising their reaction, and this destroys any pleasure they may have got. Am I right?”

The Writer and the Teacher nodded in synchronised agreement.

“Now supposing you could gauge their pleasure without forcing them to verbalise, without asking them to prove they enjoyed the poem.”

“That would solve the problem,” said the Teacher.

“It would,” agreed the Writer.

“So, I have invented the machine to do just that.” Himself waved his arm grandly in the direction of the contraption he had parked on the bench. He took a long slug from his pint and then put the glass up on the ledge behind him. “Clear the table.”

There were a lot of leads and wires, and there was a monitor that looked like your common or garden computer tablet. Himself sorted out the leads and then plugged in the gadget. “Now,” said he, “we are going to have the trial-run of the Pleasureometer.”

“What is it? The latest in sex toys?” asked the Cynic.

“It is a revolutionary new method of assessing the pleasure that a student gets from a poem. It is foolproof and will eliminate the faking and learned responses that earn students high grades at the moment, even when they hate the stuff.”

“Too good to be true,” said the Teacher. “How is it supposed to work?”

“Like a lie detector,” said Himself, proud as Judy, taking up two leads. “You wire someone up, read a poem to them, and you watch their heartbeat. If they get excited, it will show up on the monitor. Simple but ingenious. Now who wants to go first?”

The Teacher was really curious, but reluctant. “It’s not dangerous, is it? There’s two twenty volts coming out of the wall there?”

“And going through a transformer. The gadget operates on six volts.”

He attached about six terminals to the teacher, then told him to relax, and fiddled with the gadget. When he was satisfied, he took out a battered copy of The Golden Treasury from his pocket and began reading. He read a bit from The Lady of Shallot, but there was no response from the Teacher. Then a bit from Tintern Abbey. The Teacher’s needle didn’t budge. Then he tried one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Not a gig.

Himself seemed disappointed. So he took the wires off the Teacher and attached them to the Writer, no doubt expecting a better response to the poetry of the immortals. He read Keats’s Nightingale, but the Writer’s pulse didn’t soar. He thought it might be an ethnic problem, so he fingered through the book until he found Yeats. But Sailing to Byzantium similarly left the needle floundering in the doldrums.

The Young Lad asked to have a go, and was wired up. They read what seemed to me like a religious poem by John Donne. But to my surprise there was a great ooh after a few lines. I was elbowed out of the way in the excitement. They tried a modern poem, Eliot’s Prufrock, and again with the same result. Every few lines the needle would soar, and there would be an ooh from the observation team.

Himself was really excited. He got out a notebook and handed it to the teacher, telling him to make a note of which images sent the Young Lad’s needle soaring. They were working their way through the Golden Treasury trying to establish a pattern, what it was that excited the Young Lad’s imagination. I had been elbowed out, as I said,  and began to lose interest. My gaze wandered around the pub.

Over among the theatre crowd there was a young one sporting a lovely pair of legs. She was sitting on a high stool and her mini-skirt kept receding up her thighs. Every now and then she would swivel around, or cross her legs, or uncross her legs, and each time there would be a teasing flash of her knickers. It kept my interest while the rest of them were so absorbed in their pedagogical experiment. Then I noticed the strange synchronicity of the flash of the young one’s knickers and the ooh from the scientific community. I made a closer observation and noticed that the Young Lad was eyeing the girl on the high stool, and every time there was a flash of her knickers, his needle must have soared because there was a resultant ooh from the observation team.

I thought about telling them of my own scientific observation. However I was enjoying the show too much, with the flash and the ooh coming ever closer, as if they were about to eliminate the middle man.

 

 

 

Homage to Myles – Wednesday – Art is for everyone. Right?

Himself is into art now. Or so he says. He always had a passion for art but realised when he was a kid that he couldn’t draw for nuts. If he brought a line for a walk, the line would jump over the fence and bolt across the fields, never to be seen again. No, Himself and the pencil never got on. And if you couldn’t keep manners on a pencil, how could you expect a paint brush to behave for you. So he abandoned his art career before it could make a mockery of him.

It was different nowadays, he maintained, and he pulled something from the pocket of his overcoat and put it on the table in front of us. We drew back our glasses to have a better view.

“What’s that?” he asked.

Straight away the Young Lad, not yet having acquired the circumspection of the mature, blurted out, “A beach stone. I always wondered how all the holes are made in those stones. Looks like they were eaten away by some insect in the sea.”

Sure enough, it was one of those perforated stones that litter the shores of Ireland. And it was a good question, how do they get so many holes? But himself was not to be distracted by such curiosity. He had a new perspective.

“That’s where you are wrong,” said Himself. “It’s a work of art.”

“Is it valuable?” asked the Cynic. “If it is, I’m heading for Killiney Beach.”

“You can bring a tractor and collect a trailer-load, but they will be worthless. What makes this one unique is the concept.”

“Conceptual art,” sighed the Writer rolling his eyes heavenwards.

“It makes art accessible to all,” said Himself. “Even to someone who has two left hands, like me. All you need is the concept.”

“What are you going to do with it?” The Young Lad had taken it up and was turning it over in his hands.”

“Mind what you’re doing,” said the Cynic. “That’s a work of art you have there, not a bloody stone.”

Himself took it back. “I am going to have it mounted on a plinth, with the title underneath, ‘Holey Stone’. Spelt with an ‘e’. And then I’m going to submit it to the RHA.”

The Young Lad’s eyes were wide as saucers. “And do you think they’ll take it?”

“Why wouldn’t they? It’s a clever concept, isn’t it?”

“We’ll go out tomorrow with you and collect some more. Then you can have a one-man show.” The Writer didn’t look impressed.

“An original talent never repeats himself. Anyway, I have my one-man show all planned out.”

“What gallery?” asked the Writer.

“It won’t be in a gallery. That’s passé, bourgeois. I want to bring art to the people. The important thing is to engage the public, get the people to use their imagination. So my exhibition will be out in Herbert Park. I am going to have a set of little plates made up, the kind you can stick in the ground. Like the ones that say ‘Do not walk on the grass’, that type of thing. I will have a plate stuck in front of a park bench with just the word ‘Grass’ on it. That will be the title of one of my pieces. And people can sit on the bench and think about grass, what it means to them. I will be inviting them to use their imagination. That’s what conceptual art is all about. And if it goes well, I will have themed exhibitions. For example, Sport. In front of each bench in Herbert Park, I will have a plate saying, ‘Soccer’, ‘Cricket’, ‘Hurling’, etcetera, and people will sit there thinking of the game, maybe remembering matches they saw.”

“Bohemians must have discovered that. It’s the way they train, without going out, just looking through the window of the clubhouse, thinking about it.” The Cynic could make all the jokes he liked about Bohs, so long as he kept his snide remarks off Rovers.

 

 

 

 

Homage to Myles – Tuesday – Writer’s Arse

 

The Writer had us all in a quandary when he came into the pub last night. He looked like a cat that had eaten ten mice for the dinner. Out of his pocket he took a piece of plastic, smoothed it out until it was a nice circle with a hole in the centre of it. There was a nozzle, so he inflated it into what looked like a ring a child would wear learning to swim. Except that no child would fit into the hole in the middle.

“What’s that for?” says he with the tone of a challenge.

“You’re going to teach your hamster to swim,” suggested the Cynic.

“It’s for keeping the banks afloat,” said Himself.

The Young Lad took it and was turning it over, looking at it front and back, looking through the hole as if a different world might manifest itself.

“It’s a cure for my medical condition,” said the Writer.

“I didn’t know you had a medical condition,” said the Young Lad.

“Oh he does,” said the Cynic. “It’s a social disease, so sit well away from him.”

“You heard of Tennis Elbow,” said the Writer to the Young Lad – who nodded. “And Golfer’s Knee.” The Young Lad nodded again. “Well what I have is Writer’s Arse.”

There was a general guffaw. We had often had to listen to the moans of the Writer complaining about the pain in his rear end. A professional hazard, he called it, a condition of the work he did. An occupational injury. Of one thing we were all convinced, that the rear-end was central to the practice of the literary art. And the Writer had been a prophet of doom, in regard to the same. Many a night he issued admonitions that there should be a public health warning with every advertisement for creative writing classes. And if the numbers of writers in the country continued to swell, there could be unbearable pressure on the public health resources.

“It’s an orthopaedic cushion,” said the Writer. “I could put up with the pain in my arse no longer so I went to the doctor and he prescribed this, an orthopaedic cushion.”

Himself took it to have a look. “So it lets you sit on your hole without sitting on your hole!”

“It makes it easier to do what you’re good at, talking through your hole,” said the Cynic.

The Writer grabbed it back and put it under his backside. He swayed from side to side. “See,” he said. “It distributes your weight evenly.”

“They should distribute them around the bars of Ireland,” said Himself, “full of old codgers who claim they could write a book, but that they couldn’t bother their arse. Now they will have no excuse”.

“Do you think they might prescribe them for readers too?” said the Cynic. “We get a pain in the arse too, you know, from having to read your stuff.”

“They would just write longer novels if they thought our arses would be up to it. Still it could be the beginning of something, of a revolution perhaps,” said Himself.

“How so?” asked the Young Lad, all ears.

“Wasn’t it Edgar Alan Poe who said a short story was a narrative that could be perused at one sitting?”

The Writer nodded.

“In other words he linked the length of a short story to the staying power of the arse. Now if everyone had that cushion, then they could sit for longer and the short story could be extended by what, twenty, or thirty percent. See what I mean. That cushion could trigger a shift in literary genres: what used to be a novella could become a short story to a reader equipped with that cushion.”

“And every novel could become a blockbuster,” said the Cynic. “Don’t be encouraging him. Armageddon is always around the corner. No point rushing to meet it.”

 

 

 

Homage to Myles – Monday – Gender abuse in Irish Soccer

Himself was in the pub last night. In flying form. Back from a soccer match in Dalymount between Bohemians and Shamrock Rovers. And his beloved Rovers lost. He said he was going to report the FAI to the Gardai. And to UEFA and FIFA. For failing to stamp out Racism. He claimed that the abuse and intimidation of the Referee was what lost Rovers the match.

The men in black with their little whistles and their little cards in their back pockets were all that stood between civilisation and chaos. And what do they get for their heroic efforts? Nothing but abuse. And what is the FAI doing about it? Nothing.

Oh he was in flying form alright. The nub of the problem was the chanting of the fans. He claimed it contravened everything the soccer authorities said they opposed in their multiple campaigns – Fair Play, Respect, Stamp out Racism, No to Racism, and what have you. You would think these campaigns never made it across to Ireland. But the Irish are quick enough to complain about the Scottish and Rangers fans chanting the Famine Song.

What Himself heard in Dalymount made the Famine Song sound like a sentimental ditty. Abuse on the basis of sexual orientation, that’s what it was. And no one was raising a whisper in protest. No, but Himself was going to start the campaign, There and then. In the pub. Last night. Historic moment.

He took out his phone, slapped it on the counter, and played what he had recorded. Evidence. You could hear the sounds of the match, the cheering, the oohing, the aahing, the shouts of indignation, then the clear chant:

Referee, you’re a wanker, you’re a wanker,

Referee, you’re a wanker, you’re a wanker.

Now, he challenged us, is that not abuse on the basis of sexual orientation?

Mmm. We pondered.

Look at it this way, he said: it’s against the rules to abuse someone on the basis of his skin-colour, his race, his religion. Right? It’s against the rules to slag him for being gay, or transsexual, or a cross-dresser. So why should there always be open season on wankers? If sexual preferences are to be kept out of the arena, why are wankers not given the protection of the law like everyone else? And why should the referee’s sexual orientation be flaunted in an effort to humiliate and intimidate him?

You’re dead right, said the Cynic. Wankers have suffered enough in recent years. Time was when they were discreetly shielded by rhyming slang, and referred to as ‘bankers’. Now it’s vice versa, and the bankers are shielded by the same rhyming slang. The poor wankers are doubly humiliated by that association. I’m with you, said he.

The Writer pretended to take a long draught from his pint, but whispered to me from behind his raised glass: with the Cynic behind you, you’d want to watch your back.

But Himself is going to go hell for leather for the cause. Nothing less than having the FAI cited for Racism will do him. He won’t stop, and he won’t be satisfied, until referees are free to execute their duties without the threat of their private lives being flaunted to influence their decisions.