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richie6fingers: #thatcher

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:14:36 +0200

#thatcher

On Losing Iain Banks

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 18:52:52 +0200

Scottish novelist Iain Banks - author of the awesome cult classic The Wasp Factory - has announced that he has terminal stage gall bladder cancer. Katie McDermott has written a personal article for TMO explaining exactly why his writing has been so important to her.

Amidst the tragic news that Iain Banks has cancer, The Telegraph responds with a headline for the ages: “Iain Banks taught me that books can be a hand grenade“

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 18:45:31 +0200

Amidst the tragic news that Iain Banks has cancer, The Telegraph responds with a headline for the ages: “Iain Banks taught me that books can be a hand grenade“

Fantastic painting by Stuart Morle

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:51:00 +0100

Fantastic painting by Stuart Morle

The Economy of Ireland's infamous Magdalen Laundries

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 10:31:00 +0100

The Economy of Ireland's infamous Magdalen Laundries:

This week the Irish Government will publish a report on the workings of the Magdalene Laundries - infamous institutions run by the Catholic Church which kept ‘fallen women’ in their ‘care’, all the while working for those institutions gratis.

William Wall writes about the economy behind the laundries (the last of which only closed in 1996 - so it’s important to remind ourselves that this system wasn’t just a product of the dark days of the 1950s in Ireland).

The horrific evidence of sexual and physical abuse tends to dominate talk of these institutions. But in some ways this tends to obscure the abuse of slavery or servitude itself, even though it is insisted upon by the survivors who habitually describe themselves as having been slaves. While the physical and sexual abuse was widespread, the slavery or servitude was universal. Every poor boy or girl who found himself or herself in the tender care of Mother Church became a slave or an indentured servant, whether it was because of her parents’ inability to support them, because a social worker or a judge or a doctor consigned them there, or simply by being born within the walls of a Magdalene laundry. The ‘Maggies’ were slaves and could expect to spend their useful working lives inside.

Meat Deboner

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 10:25:21 +0100

Meat Deboner:

Meat Deboner is a short story by Aingeal Clare, part of TMO’s new original fiction and poetry section. Read the full story here

They’re looking for meat deboners at the processing site in Paull, a coastal village ringed by chemical plants and vacancies, so I fill in my slip and waft it towards the receptionist at my agency. She puts it in her out-tray without looking and without raising her head, and she doesn’t smile. “You’ll not need the code, for my file?” I ask. She tells me no, it’s not been policy since the take-over, and her eyes are flickering and green in the light of her onscreen solitaire.

The Roses on the Wall - original fiction in TMO magazine

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 09:37:39 +0100

The Roses on the Wall - original fiction in TMO magazine:

The Roses on the Wall is a short story, written by Miriam Foley. It’s the first in a series of original short stories that we’re publishing as part of our new ‘original fiction and poetry’ section.

TMO is looking for Poetry / Short Story submissions

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 09:31:00 +0100

TMO is looking for Poetry / Short Story submissions:

TMO magazine is looking for poetry and short story submissions for our new original fiction and poetry section. If you’re an aspiring writer looking for an audience, check us out.

Tony Small, the escaped slave who lived in Dublin's Leinster House

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 17:55:23 +0100

Tony Small, the escaped slave who lived in Dublin's Leinster House:

Interesting article, about Tony Small, an escaped slave who came to live in Ireland in the 1780s, fromn the brilliant Come Here To Me Now site

One figure associated with Edward Fitzgerald I’ve been fascinated by for a while now is Tony Small, an escaped slave Fitzgerald encountered in the United States who he later employed as a personal assistant. Small became a frequent sight around Dublin in the 1780s and 1790s, in a city where coloured men were few and far between.

Irish satire and fantasy - Mervyn Wall

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 11:05:50 +0100

Irish satire and fantasy - Mervyn Wall:

Criminally overlooked, Mervyn Wall’s The Unfortunate Fursey, written in the 1940’s is a brilliant mix of satire and fantasy - two difficult genres at the best of times. It’s the story of a medieval Irish monastery under siege by the forces of darkness, who find their breach in the cell of the unfortunate brother Fursey, a monk blessed with a stammer who thus can’t adequately perform the rites of exorcism required to keep the monastery safe.

Find out more here

M.J Hyland - putting all your eggs in one bastard...

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 09:46:33 +0100

M.J Hyland - putting all your eggs in one bastard...:

“I’ll probably always use that style, first person, present tense.” Her preferred style, though, is risky – as she pointed out at the Australian Writer’s Festival in 2004, with the first person “the reader is putting all of his eggs in one bastard” – but one that grabs her in particular, both as an author and a reader. “It only grabs me, of course, when it’s good. It can be disastrous. It can be a really bad way to tell a story, monotonous, gruelling, repetitive. Really dreadful when it’s bad. When it’s good, though, nothing beats it.

"When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that..."

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 10:26:07 +0100

““When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.””

- ― Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. (via howtobeterrell)

Photo

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 10:25:16 +0100

Monti is not the right man to lead Italy - FT.com

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 13:13:25 +0100

Monti is not the right man to lead Italy - FT.com:

Most Italians know they owe the fall in bond yields to Draghi

Novelist Sarah Hall on Tattoos and Literature

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 11:16:14 +0100

Novelist Sarah Hall on Tattoos and Literature:

“the subject of tattooing certainly appealed for its literary freshness and unbroken ground (tattoos seem to crop up as erotica or crime scene clues in fiction), as well as its inherently fascinating folkish history, and its curiosities. In practise and in literature it has possibly been seen as a prohibitive distasteful thing. There doesn’t seem to have been a great examination of it as a legitimate art before”

Asperger's Syndrome and Irish History

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 13:49:44 +0100

Asperger's Syndrome and Irish History:

Students of Anglo-Irish literature and Irish history may be interested to learn that their studies could be markedly different were it not for the phenomenon of Asperger’s syndrome, a type of high-functioning autism. Professor Michael Fitzgerald from the department of child and adolescent psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin has uncovered a link between levels of unusual creativity in men and Asperger’s syndrome. Among the outstanding figures of the past century whom he reckons were affected by this developmental disorder are the Nobel prize winning poet WB Yeats and the politician Eamonn de Valera.

Photo

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 12:01:29 +0100

46k: Best photo ever.

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 10:10:51 +0100

46k:

Best photo ever.

TMO Archive : The James Meek Interview

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 08:55:37 +0100

TMO Archive : The James Meek Interview:

Novelist James Meek talks to TMO about his third novel, The People’s Act of Love, his literary influences, and the difference between writing fiction and journalism.

Many of the writers I admired and tried to emulate in my teens and twenties – I still admire them – were characterised by one or more of four elements. First, an element of unreality, of surrealism, of absurdity,which can’t – unlike magic in a generic fantasy novel, for instance – be used by any of the characters as a tool, but is rather a phenomenon which has to be endured, like the weather. Sometimes the unreality is not metaphysical, but behavioural. Examples would be the transformation of humans into rhinoceroses in Eugene Ionesco’s play of that name, or the unsettlingly narrow reactions of Kafka’s characters to the extremity of their experiences. Second, a spare, lean style, low in topographical description and in modifiers, where characters’ appearance is seldom mentioned, adverbs are shunned, and anything which resembles fussiness or euphimism or cliché is subject to a rigorous test for survival in the finished text. Third, an avoidance of the strictly culturally specific –always a generic city, a generic man or woman, a generic country at ageneric present time to be preferred to, say, a Catholic Irishman in Dublin in 1916. Fourth, an identification with the underclass, with people in trouble, with people with disabilities or little money or an abrasive disdain for convention which makes them into outsiders wherever they are.

Spoon - The Gimme Fiction interview

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:29:16 +0100

Spoon - The Gimme Fiction interview:

From the TMO archives - an interview with Spoon’s Jim Eno:

The Spoon maxim for making records is, says the softly spoken Eno, “only put on the record what needs to be on there to make the song better