Moments and epiphanies

A Nobel laureate with lady swimmers, Beckett's Twin Towers connection, and a whistle-stop tour of the universe - Cúirt had it all, writes Tom Mathews

Maura Kennedy, programme director of this 21st anniversary bash, makes much of the "Cúirt moment", a sort of sub-Joycean epiphany when the punter, hearing a line of poetry or prose, is changed utterly and pops out immediately after the reading to buy the complete works and/or propose marriage to the author.

Of course there are all kinds of other Cúirt moments too, many involving the consumption of sophisticated adult beverages, and what with recollecting some of these and the anticipation of further such with various citizens of Galway, the latter part of the first evening is something of a blur.

"What's your favourite planet?" someone asks Dava Sobel, author of Pulitzer-shortlisted bestseller Galileo's Daughter after the reading from her latest opus, Lives of the Planets.

"Earth," replies the petite ex-New York Times science reporter. "It's the only one that will have me."

This Anne Kennedy Memorial lecture has spellbound us all. It's a whistle-stop tour of the universe, taking in the planets (including newcomer Xena and her satellite Gabrielle) by way of Lovell's Martian "canals", Greco-Roman myth, Victorian ladies who slept in moonlight for greater fertility, a friend who ate a love gift of real moondust, science fiction stories, what's wrong with NASA and a galaxy of other puzzling and serendipitous matters - even (albeit reluctantly) astrology. It seems that alien life, although sort of probable, is conditional on the survival by intelligent beings of their own technologies. Uh-oh.

The talk was accompanied by slides of the beautiful paintings of Lynette Cook, unfeatured, alas, in the book's British edition.

What makes astronomers want to do the job? Saturn's spectacular dust rings inspire a lot of them, it seems. We emerge, blinking, gratefully enlightened, into our own corner of the solar system.

Later Willy Vlautin, Reno man and vocalist with international band Richmond Fontaine, reads from his first novel, The Motel Life. "Bad luck, it falls on people every day," he tells us in a voice reminiscent of that guy in the movies who plays Elvis's pal, and whose function is to ask "How about a song, El?" of the moody king. "That's thuh only certain thang."

A different class of class act follows. A basilisk stare, the air of one convinced that being wasted is too good to be wasted on the young, a boy who never wants to grow up. Bad boy of the Booker, DBC Pierre, raffish, floppy-haired and obviously travelling on heavy fuel, is ready to take on all comers, despite the critical spanking his second novel Ludmila's Broken English has received.

With ill-concealed relish he predicts that literary English will be a dialect, and a small one at that, in a few decades. He describes his research in the Caucuses. In summer all is beauty, hyacinths, jasmine and leopards. In less-than-zero winter there is snow but no sanitation. Retarded parents rape their inbred children. Later soldiers come to repeat the process. Hopelessness is soldered into a closed circuit. Isn't life a terrible thing, thank God?

He admits his Russian accent is a bit dodgy. "Don't take the piss. I have to do the female voice as well."

How did he write his novels? Just started and took it from there. He ditched the one about terrorism because it was politically incorrect. The terrorists aren't in the Pakistani butcher's shop. It's the charity shop next door all along. Is he taking the piss now?

His next one is all worked out. It is very decadent, very dark. It is about sex on the internet. As I queue among Oranmore fashionistas and Gonzo wannabes to get my book signed, precise instructions for post-gig tipple ingredients are issued in a stentorian stage whisper.

Festival Club. Close epigrammatic talk, puns requiring a knowledge of the French language, beautiful lady poet requiring a knowledge of same far in excess of the smattering imparted to your correspondent when he was bathed at wisdom's font for 30 quid a term all those years ago.

"Now everybody's got a crazy notion of their own," as George Formby has memorably sung. As if to bear out this truism, a little man unknown to our table interrupts a lively discussion of the merits and demerits of Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God as follows.

"Yeats, the greatest poet of the 20th century, had a tower. Joyce, the greatest novelist of the 20th century, had a tower. But Beckett, the greatest playwright of the 20th century, had no tower."

We granted this.

"But d'you know what Samuel Beckett's phone number was when he was above in Paris?"

We didn't.

"Nine Eleven!"

We confessed ourselves dumbfounded.

Later he was observed engaging Seamus Heaney and Dava Sobel in conversation at a far table. They too appeared dumbfounded. My companion suggested I take a photograph with my disposable camera.

"You could caption it 'Sobel meets Nobel'," he said.

"I suppose I could at that," I replied, "if I was working for the Beano."

"I had always assumed that you did," he said, moving meaningfully toward the bar.

The sun was shining on the sea next morning and on the prom at Salthill where, thanks to the ever-inventive Tom Kenny, a crowd had gathered to watch Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney unveil and read a copy of his poem Girls Bathing, Galway 1965, set now in bronze.

Among schoolchildren, as well as many a writer and poetry fan, Heaney, smiling public man, spoke and read and twinkled, used up the "monument more lasting than bronze" gag from Horace that I'd hoped to work into this piece, and then provided the week's best photo opportunity by strolling along the beach in the company of a sextet of undines in the form of lady swimmers from the round-the-year swimming club. This wheeze, brainchild of city arts officer James Harrold, worked a treat. Heaney, more than ever the national uncle, worked the crowd.

Then the crowd thinned. The Japanese ambassador trickled off to ambass elsewhere. We had lingered by the chambers of the sea. In the hotel opposite Seamus went on signing. Outside across the way a holidaymaker stopped to read. Who said poetry makes nothing happen?

On Sunday on a pedestrianised street in Galway, a writer is hunched between life-sized simulacra of two infinitely better ones, the Estonian Eduard Wilde, and our own Oscar. On his stout-stained knee, a large canvas bag bears the legend "Charlie Byrne's bookshop". It is full of second-hand volumes, their secrets as yet unconned. As if on cue, a thin rain, borne on a soft Atlantic breeze, beings to fall. Around them, Galway goes about its business.

Cartoonist Tom Mathews' Artoon appears in Weekend on Saturdays