January 7, 2014
Hack My Hearing
Hack My Hearing
In this programme, Frank asks what the future holds for people like him, part of a tech-savvy generation who want to hack their hearing aids to tune in to invisible data in the world around them.
Could these designers and hackers create the next supersense?
January 3, 2014
Live with the rolling tarps
Here is a LIVE weather report. Behind the rainy system, which was deceptively warm looking but when I took my trotters to run the track proved icy rain and unkind on my spectacles, hid a North Westerly Wind storm. It has just arrived in the past 30 mins at is gusting at 63 KM p hr.
It just body checked my window with what sounded like a hefty bump off the arse of a wrestling owl colliding with it. There followed another gust which sounded TARP esque.
I am tentatively predicting the next windy sounds will be redolent of sheet metal being shook.
On va voir.
Meanwhile over on the East Coast a big thunk of a snowstorm is landing. Of course our 63 k phr have shook things right up. All sympathy momentarily dissolved and distracted. An Orange alert declared in Connemara, (Ireland obv) but my weather spy reported the roof of the house ready to lift off I quote “Orange alert my eye”. We are united in weatherly affront.
Bonne nuit.
January 2, 2014
Radio rain
Oh God this perishing rain. The sound of it through the curtains makes one feel like you are having your hair washed in a too small sink, with one of those dubious plastic plugs onto the taps pink shower attachment and the water is constantly douching your protesting ears and running down the back of your neck.
Good morning World — that’s my radio rain frustration moment passed. Now I must step and give this weather system something of a chance to express itself visually.
The second day of 2014 has deadlines, reading and no toast on the menu.
January 1, 2014
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year to one and all! Bonne Année et Bonne Santé ! e2014 commenced with fog, rolling fog or mildly undulating fog.
I wish you health, humour and happiness during 2014.
I ended 2013 with my family here in Vancouver, eating, watching comedies ensemble (and then subsequently one of the worst films ever written, set in Paris) drinking and scrambling to learn muscle names up and down the anterior and the posterior views of the body.
December 29, 2013
Contrasts
Two contrasting offerings: the first for the sound of her voice here’s an interview with Sheila Watson from 1975.
http://www.thecapilanoreview.ca/ (scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll also find Crawford Killian interview)
I can’t tell if it’s the tape quality as well as Watson’s voice, along with the pauses, hesitancy or simply the sound of Watson’s voice alone that’s appealing. I wasn’t so struck necessarily by what she said. I just found something particular in the quality of her speaking voice. Also, the gentle quality of the two voices questioning her, how they are sat back from the recording device. Voices these days when recorded have an equality which does not give the same listening inference that’s suggested here. The image of ashtrays on the table between them also springs visually to mind. Diluted orange squash in beakers with garish patterns — ok I shall cease with my 1970’s teleportation. I love the moment where she says “I don’t write, I haven’t written anything since 1957 … and then carries on about how much revision she does leading to her remark “I have an untidy mind ..” and latterly “stream of consciousness is a technique I abhor” On Joyce: “He does it. I wouldn’t”
Secondly in somewhat sharp and technological contrast, here is Mckenzie Wark on Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie — read it until the end, the second half is very engaging.
“Bodies are not such coherent things, then. They are fabricated in meshes of images, tech, laws, and so on. “We are not a body without organs, but rather an array of heterogeneous organs unable to be gathered under the same skin.” Pharma-porno gender is not just an ideology or an image or a performance. It gets under the skin. It’s a political technology, “and the state draws its pleasure from the production and control of our porngore subjectivity.”
But its capital and tech rather than the state that most interests Préciado. “These artifacts (us) can’t exist in a pure state, but only within our enclosed sexual techno-systems. In our role as sexual subjects, we’re inhabiting biocapitalist amusement parks. We are men and women of the laboratory, effects of a kind of politico-scientific bio-Platonism.” She usefully extends what is basically a Foucauldian way of thinking onto new terrain, where commodification and power meet.”
December 28, 2013
Kay McCarthy
It is with great sadness that I acknowledge the recent passing of Kay McCarthy of Dublin 9. (RIP) One of the most wonderful human beings I have known. Luckily I can still very much hear her voice and see her standing in the kitchen. Usually she was moving the teapot towards a cup or offering me something to eat or sitting at the table where we’d all catch up. And then there was the laughter, lots of laughter and warnings about the draft that might come in the back door when Gerry would open it to take the dogs out for a walk. Kay loved the three dogs, but was especially fond of Tolly, who was a small barrel of short legged dog with a ruffle of fluff all over her. The dog was named for the River Tolka where she was fished out of and saved before the McCarthys’ adopted her.
I hope I always hear Kay’s voice. She was the best a person could be loving, caring and unfailingly warm at the sight of you. “Isn’t that great?” was a phrase she often used in conversation and meant it. We loved you Kay and we miss you. Hard to imagine this planet without you. Oíche mhaith.
December 27, 2013
Ernie in the Manager.
I mislaid the Baby Jesus. I hid him in a safe place until he was due to make his entrance into the manager in the Crib. Then I couldn’t locate him, so Ernie had to step in as the understudy. He looks aglow. Click on the image to see Ernie in Widescreen. I don’t know why this photo insists on being so small in this interface.
December 27, 2013
4 degrees above
Christmas Day was a pissy rain day when I observed the weather in the lamp light, which is where I like to do my wondering. The forecast today was for four degrees above and it was less pissy thankfully. I was curious to note that the weather forecast was identical today in Tofino, right down to the high and the low and the action. I don’t know why I assumed it might be different, but I practice the cutting edge science of weather wondering rather than the science of meteorology.
I love Christmas because it’s an excellent time to work! I manage pots of things during these two days and I don’t mean the cooking variety. I mean the reading and writing variety. And this year the theme was exercise. The gym was open yesterday and I took myself to it. It was packed. I continue my physiology studies. Now I conduct them while on the strange up and down, elastic band, mountain machine — the name of which I have never figure out. The problem is I am short and the reading material sits above my head so I have to perform an acrobatic reading feat. I have to balance the book and my hands on two poles that are not intended for that purpose.
When I rang the Motherland today they reported a storm underway. A storm that had been blowing for days. The wind speeds were up to 150KM per hr. We collectively diagnosed it as a Tropical Storm type wind event, except of course rural Ireland is far from Tropical. Met Eireann issued a red alert or Status Red (here are the details just to share a bit of variety on the weather watching).
Wind Warning for Wexford, Galway, Mayo, Clare, Cork, Kerry and Waterford
Update
Becoming very stormy this evening with gale force southeast winds veering southwest early tonight and further veering westerly tomorrow. Severe and damaging gusts of 120 to 140km/hr expected and 150km/hr gusts in exposed coastal areas.
Very high seas also with significant danger of coastal flooding also.
Winds moderating Friday afternoon and evening.
**
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, we can see again where penguins are streaks ahead of us. Power cuts do not piss off penguins.
**
I hope you all had a lovely Christmas or two days off with your family or friends. I hope you had the benefit of good health, warm Brussel sprouts and some comedy to wash it down. At this time of the year and because I pass the hospital often, I think of everyone in there and those working hard to give them pain relief, resolution and comfort. The ones who’ll come out and those who may not. The families and friends who climb the stairs in to visit them regardless. I salute you all. As Mr Strummer says “Without people you are nothing.” VGH also has my favourite Christmas lights in the world.
December 23, 2013
Two treats
Abysmal rainy day here and terror ice storm in Toronto and further east. I feel for all those people with no heat and no kettle in those shivering temperatures.
Thus a treat (those sans power can join this treat once the lights come back on) Here’s a trailer for a film based on Robert Walser’s short story The Walk. It is made from from found footage and directed by Siobhan Davies & David Hinton.
Also, a friend sent me this yesterday. An essay on the problems of reading by Moyra Davey. Davey’s show Ornament and Reproach is currently up at the Belkin Satellite gallery.
December 22, 2013
Debut-Litzer Prize for Fiction: Podcasts on Malarky
I make no apology for admitting that when I listened to the Debut-Litzer Prize Judges Podcast and heard Fiction judge Leslie Jamison and Patrick McGinty discussing Malarky, I felt weepy. I think I was weepy with delight or disbelief that such an intelligent, close reading of a book I struggled so long and hard with was possible. (This probably sounds strange since I have been blessed with many excellent considerings, but there’s something unique about it being an extended audio discussion sailing out of your computer and also, it’s because I have felt this passionate about other people’s books.) I wished this for every writer, who was driven as demented as I was trying to write my novel.
Then, ever the cynic I felt like weeping all day long for the fact it would be unlikely to happen again in this lifetime and I might never write another book and how could I find company again like Our Woman. (she was pretty dandy, kept me en pointe) Completely and reliably irrational, but there’s a degree of exhaustion as I continue to struggle or interrogate a footnote novel to Malarky called Martin John, that may or may not see the light of day. Whatever the reason I lay in bed stunned and internally emoting before I carried the computer to my son’s room and said I can’t believe this podcast that includes my book to which he replied “look at this app” and showed me his phone. We deflected to teenage business instead, quite rightly and I got a grip.
Anyway here is the podcast you will be guaranteed not to weep at, but can hear discussions of all three books as there were three prize categories that included one for poetry won by Natalie Diaz When My Brother Was An Aztec and non-fiction Benjamin Busch’s Dust to Dust.
Here also is the podcast interview that Late Night Library did with each of us. Thank you to Patrick McGuity for the ace natter and for telling me about those writers he mentions. I love the ethos behind Late Night Library, an organization well worth supporting.
I think my heightened emotion was also due in part to the formidable news my mother won BEEKEEPER OF THE YEAR in her beekeeping group in Westport, Co Mayo. Here are some fantastic photographs that capture the moment. She is very passionate about bees and has been studying them and keeping them. It was especially great to hear this news because I recently did an event in Ottawa with Diana Beresford-Kroeger which included remarks on colony collapse and bee and tree calamity. Thus I could imagine Diana beaming at such. We need the bees!
RTE Radio One the Sean O’Rourke show had a feature on Christmas Book Picks and Malarky was one of Sinead Gleeson’s picks. Thank you to Sinead for this. The segment was on a show that included a weather story. The show also starts at 10am. Sean O’Rourke is a voice I associate with 1pm because 15 years ago he used to read the news at one I am nearly sure. I like this collusion of 10am and 1pm, of weather and literature.