Pursued by a Bear

  • McCann wins National Book Award

    November 19, 2009 @ 11:00 am | by Fiona

    I always wanted to be able to say that, and now I can, thanks to Colum McCann, who won the prestigious National Book Award  for fiction last night for Let The Great World Spin. For his book about a young Irish man and the characters he meets in 1970s New York, McCann goes home with $10,000, a funky bronze statue, and some serious swagger, given that he now joins the ranks of previous winners like Jonathan Franzen, Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, E. Annie Proulx and John Updike. Not bad going. And speaking of awards, John Banville made another shortlist this week . . .

  • Thaoghairising etc

    November 18, 2009 @ 12:11 pm | by Fiona

    Attended my first evening of Chaos Thaoghaire, a storytelling and games night with an imaginative impetus, encouraging tall tales, creativity and cunning (i.e. cheating). Though our team didn’t win the coveted Chaos Thaoghaire belt (despite managing to fool several of our competitors with our spooky story about the ghosts of Rose Hall in Montenegro), we did get to hear some cracking stories, the highlight being Sunday Tribune journalist Una Mullally’s eerie tale that involved Michael Jackson, a Dutch castle owner, a medium from Blanchardstown and her grandmother’s nightdress. . . . These elements combined, believe me, were a helluva lot scarier than the individual components may suggest. Those interested in signing up for future events should high tail it to www.chaosthaoghaire.com.

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  • Updater

    November 13, 2009 @ 5:15 pm | by Fiona

    Saw: My first ever 3D experience at Cineworld last night watching the heartwarming Up. A moving human story of one man and his lifelong dream was no less real and universal for its magic and fantastical elements. I fancy one of those collars for my dog Lola, too.

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  • Update

    November 10, 2009 @ 7:14 pm | by Fiona

    Reading Wolf Hall: So far so well observed, though I wish I didn’t already know what happened in the end. Will reserve judgment until I finally reach the long-awaited (for so many reasons) end.

    Seen An Education: wonderful performances, though memoir-based films always make me suspicious. Was Lynn Barber really so astute and worldly, with such intelligent comebacks to deliver her elders, at seventeen? I had such high expectations that I was inevitably disappointed in little ways - and spare me the montages, please - but Rosamund Pike was truly delightful, and Alfred Molina gave a moving turn as Barber’s astoundingly naive father).

    Heard Nothing new and worth commenting on, of late. Feel a bit musically bored, in fact. Any recommendations?

    Noted The brouhaha over the lack of women authors on Publisher’s Weekly’s ten best books of the year. Your thoughts?

  • Offset your weekend, and your carbon footprint will follow

    November 6, 2009 @ 12:34 pm | by Fiona

    So, Offset has already kicked off and I’m only getting to post about it now. What can I tell you? It’s been that kind of week. It may already be too late to attend this three-day conference in Liberty Hall bringing together illustrators, graphic designers, street artists and the like, among them Scottish artist David Shrigley, the illustrator Serge Seidlitz as seen on MTV, and American artist Tara McPherson as well as squillions of other fabulous speakers and creative doodlers. Lookit: it’s already started, and tickets are as hard to come by as Willa Wonka’s golden versions, so I need those who snarfled up tix to report back here with all the information about what the rest of us missed. In the meantime, ahem, I’ll be off to the launch of this new book by one of my esteemed colleagues (disclaimer: yes, I know him. What with him being my colleague). If it piques your interest, read an extract here. Otherwise, enjoy le weekend.

  • Amazon’s Top 100

    November 3, 2009 @ 6:21 pm | by Fiona

    No surprise to see Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol topping the list of Amazon.co.uk’s 100 Bestselling New Releases for 2009, but what’s this? Grow Your Own Drugs at number three? Not the recreational kind, mind, but still, it’s a turn-up for the books (shocking pun intended) to find an ethnobotanist on the list, just pipping Antony Beevor no less for the bronze. According to the site, they’re the bestselling new releases based on shipments up to October 28th, and they’re quite an eclectic bunch, all told. It’s a fascinating snap shot of - well, of what exactly? Can anything be deduced from these examples (and remember, Irish Amazon shoppers get redirected to the .co.uk site too) about the state of reading in Britain and Ireland, particularly given the heartening presence of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Beever’s D-Day: The Battle for Normandy in the top ten? Or are we to deduce that the demographic that buys online is of a Beever-buying disposition? Stieg Larsson features twice in the top ten, with this baking book coming in at number ten. Which reminds me: Can we stop calling them cupcakes over here? They’re BUNS for crying out loud! And what I want to know is: has anybody out there read this James Wong book? What’s so great about it, or better-stated, why are so many people buying it? As for the Irish contribution to the top 100, we’ve got Coleen Nolan’s autobiography and the Guinness Book of World Records. Who says we aren’t a literary nation, then?

  • The weekend, and things resulting therefrom

    November 2, 2009 @ 12:59 pm | by Fiona

    Well, there’s the Impact longlist published, and with 156 titles on it, it’s hard to know why they bothered. Eileen Battersby gives her summation of the lot here, though I think I’ll wait till the shortlist appears myself. Meanwhile, there’s my interview with Marsha Hunt, whose show Brown Sugar on Jimi Hendrix opens tonight, and here’s something delicious from Salon on grammatical rules and pinning down language. “The only truly unbreakable rules of grammar and usage are the ones that, when broken, result in a genuine failure to communicate. The rest is a form of covert class warfare, and today’s usage reproofs constitute a status-protecting thump on the head delivered by the upper middle class to uppity members of the lower middle.” What do youse reckon?

  • Win! Win! Win!

    October 30, 2009 @ 5:05 pm | by Fiona

    Feeling competitive AND creative? Why, look no further! Because Some Blind Alleys is running a banner competition, with €500 up gor grabs. Meanwhile, the entry window is closing for this Fish Publishing competition, with a first prize of €3,000. Poets have a little longer to submit their entry for this , to be judged by poet James Harpur who has promised to read every single entry, masochist that he is. It’s already too late for this, however, though this hardy nation is being represented among the finalists by my namesake Colum McCann. The winner is being announced on Monday.

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  • One Hundred Mornings

    October 29, 2009 @ 12:33 pm | by Fiona

    Finally got to see Conor Horgan’s exceptional debut feature, One Hundred Mornings, last night. Though set in a post-apocalyptic Ireland, this subtle, intelligent film focuses on the human drama played out among its four central characters rather than the science fiction future of a Western world that has somehow fallen apart. Beautifully shot in muted, earthy colours, One Hundred Mornings is both harrowing and humorous, though the overarching tone is one of grim stoicism. Horgan elicits some fine performances from his tiny cast, and a cloying claustrophobia is expertly juxtaposed with a vast, surrounding emptiness. The film premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh in July, but has yet to get a general release: in case it does, I won’t go into any further detail though I’d love to witter on about the joy of a new film talent and the finer points of the flick, but if it does, and you do get a chance to see it, then do. And you don’t have to take my word for it: here’s what yon Screenwriter Donald Clarke said about it.

  • Bums on seats and other poetics

    October 27, 2009 @ 1:14 pm | by Fiona

    As Gate Theatre Manager Michael Colgan once told me, the most important thing about running a theatre is getting bums on seats, not just for financial reasons, but “for the unfortunate, vulnerable, naked, worrying, getting sick before a performance, nervous, knee-knocking performers”. Which is likely the impetus behind Take Your Seat, the new website offering free tickets and discounts to performances in a wide range of venues (the Abbey, the Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork, the Town Hall Theatre in Galway and the Linenhall Arts Centre, Co. Mayo are among those participating) to all who book through the site for a show taking place between November 9th and 14th. Basically, it’s a week-long arts and performance promotion co-ordinated by Arts Audiences and provding a decent database of what’s on where for those in search of an evening’s entertainment. There’s anything from Ibsen to Oliver! (exclamation mark essential): I’d love to know how it works for folk and if anyone has scored free tickets that way. Send us your comments. And maybe let me know what it takes to get your bum on a theatre seat these days: do you read reviews? Does a particular actor / director / playwright impel you towards the box office? Who’s going to the theatre in these trying recessionary times, and why?

    In the meantime, the shortlist for the TS Eliot prize is out and by my reckoning, there are two Irish poets on the list.

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