Noir in Ireland—The Guards

Ken Bruen, in THE GUARDS, creates a character in Patrick Taylor so real I could sense his very presence as I read. In fact, I know real people less solidly authentic than Patrick Taylor.

Taylor is an ex-guard (cop, in the American idiom) from Galway who segues from the force into drinking and works as a kind of private investigator. The Irish are ambivalent about the “Garda.” In fact, Bruen tells us, there is an old Irish saying: “if you want help, call the guards. If you don’t want help, call the guards.” The people of the auld sod are not too keen on PI’s, either. Taylor tells us that during the Troubles, the hatred that developed for informers was so intense and long lasting that private investigators, with their job of uncovering secrets, are still painted with the same hateful brush.

Bruen has the classic insubordination problem all hard types do, perhaps especially the Irish. The tone of the book is set early on when Taylor, still a guard, pulls over a well-connected speeder in spite of being warned not to. The arrogant s.o.b. taunts Taylor with the words “do you know what is going to happen now?” Taylor says he does, and then punches his tormentor in the mouth.

I can’t help but think that some of Taylor’s attitude comes from having been under the thumb of both the British and the Catholic Church. When a friend of Taylor’s dear old Ma (who takes a close second to a murderer of young girls as the most unattractive character in the book), a priest, calls Taylor irreverent, Taylor responds, “No, I’m not. I’m just not reverent about the same things that you are.” I loved that one. And while I’m at it, here’s another: “There’s God and there’s the Irish version. Not that he doesn’t take an interest, but he couldn’t be bothered.”

Taylor can be seen as a kind of Irish cliché, if you don’t listen closely to what he says and does. Yes, he’s a brilliant, lyrical, and sometimes self-pitying, drunk. But he is also a voracious reader, a kind of philosopher, and he has a love for his friends that seems to come out of nowhere to surprise him into acts of great kindness, and even acts of great violence. The most impressive thing about Taylor to me, an unusual thing in any human being, is the level of self-awareness he possesses, even in the depths of his alcoholism. He knows he is a self-pitying and self-destructive fool, and he knows that the booze parades as the cure when it is, at the least, one of the causes of all his troubles.

Bruen is an absolute master of an idiom all his own, even though it has its roots in American crime novels (which the character constantly reads and references, along with poetry and philosophy), and he has a kind of perverse and grand persistence about him in the face of all that Irish corruption, violence and poverty that is truly astounding. He loses large chunks of time due to beatings and blackouts, but after the fashion of a classic Irish fighter, he never takes a backward step.

Early on in the novel, a woman named Ann Henderson (a client with whom Taylor starts a relationship, knowing it is a bad idea, but like with punching cops, he says what the hell, and a woman to whom he foretells his sabotaging of said relationship) asks him to help prove her daughter Sarah was not a suicide.

Taylor quickly discovers that Sarah was killed, partly through reading her diary, an experience that the surprisingly sensitive Taylor finds very painful. I don’t know how Bruen channels teenage-girl prose, but he does. Taylor’s reaction makes you think all his drinking and wisecracking stems from how painful he finds the world sober and quiet. He fears the depth of both his empathy and his sadness.

A wealthy businessman has killed Sarah, and the Guards (including Taylor’s old partner, now a fat and vicious and complacent Lieutenant) are protecting him. The book is not about a search for a brilliant and elusive killer, however. The killer Taylor is going to bring to justice is a perverse and somewhat pitiful one. Taylor, for all his endurance, is not a mastermind in all this. Most of the detecting is done by a computer savvy friend of his who finds the links between all the players on-line. In fact, all Taylor really does is manage to piss people off with all his questions. And get beaten and stone-drunk.

The mystery of what happened to Sarah is not at the center of the novel. The novel is about friendship and the hope for redemption, and the quest to find something meaningful to do and say in a meaningless world. Taylor and his drinking buddy Sutton confront one of the wealthy guy’s underlings, who admits what is going on and taunts the two of them that they will never bring him or his boss to justice. Taylor hits the man, who falls and hits his head on a coffee table and dies. Taylor is remorseful, but Sutton is electrified by the whole thing, so much so that Sutton goes out and almost burns to death a punk who has been going about lighting winos on fire.

If Sutton is the devil on Taylor’s shoulder, Taylor’s bartender Sean is the angel. He doesn’t push Taylor towards sobriety, but when Taylor indicates he would like to know which direction it is in, Sean is eager to point the way. Sean can see that Sutton is a bad actor, and even Taylor sees it after he is forced into detox (he is sent there towards the latter end of a blackout in which he and Sutton took part in some mysterious mayhem and which Taylor comes out of with an uncharacteristically full wallet) but whether Taylor will reject Sutton and the booze is never certain.

When Sean is run down in the street, the wheels come off for Taylor, and in a big way. He goes on a great binge, loses Ann, misses Sean’s funeral, and wins a huge bet he placed on a long shot. He spends a lot of the money on the people he has betrayed, drunkenly attempting to make amends for things he did while drunk, and is going to go to England when he finds out who killed Sean. I won’t spoil it by telling you who it was, or how Taylor deals with it, but like his plan to go to England, whether what he does redeems him or makes him worse is open to interpretation.

I applaud Bruen’s courage in creating a morally ambiguous hero, and one who is painfully aware of how compromised he is.

Bruen is doing more here than creating a great character—he does great things with the English language. Ironically Bruen, even as he uses English with such precision, uses Taylor to speak out for Gaelic, which Taylor calls Irish. Taylor tells how as a child he originally learned the Lord’s Prayer in Irish, and then had to re-learn it in English: “I never could get over the feeling I was safer in Irish.” Taylor longs for that lost childhood like only an Irishman can, turning a musing on the vinegar smell of fish and chips into something poetic: “It smells like the childhood you never had.” And in Bruen/Taylor’s language is the Irish sense of irony, too: “I dunno I was delighted or jealous, both probably, feeding off each other in the Irish fashion.” And finally, the sense of humor—when a true believer tells him that a storm is coming, Taylor asks “are you being Biblical or informative?”

It’s all great stuff, and I can’t wait to read another Patrick Taylor novel.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Onward and Upward: The Gallison Exercise Program

Self-improvement! Am I still at it? You would think, considering the towering stack of to-do lists in the corner of my office (dating back to 1972), that I would have got wise to myself by now. But, no. Although I canceled my gym membership last month when I noticed how seldom I showed up, I am still at it.

Here's my latest plan. I bought an exercise bike and stuck it in my office.

Now, everybody tells me, and you're going to tell me, too, that riding on an exercise bike is so boring that I'll give it up in a week. But I tell you what. The bike is only half of the plan. The other half involves the Metropolitan Opera, which offers an online subscription service. You have to see this. For fifteen dollars a month (way cheaper than a gym membership) you can see any or all of 500 plus operas. Here's a link to their catalog of offerings.

Look at this stuff! Traviata! Contes de Hoffman (two versions)!

So the big idea is to get on the exercise bike and pedal away while I watch the world's greatest operas. So far I can do five or six minutes at a stretch, enough to see an aria and a bit of recitative, but I plan to get fitter and fitter.

Some of you will be unable to understand the attraction. Bah, you will say to yourself. Culture. Well, I don't like culture either, but grand opera isn't culture, anyway not in my book. It's drama, all wrapped up in gorgeous music, beautiful costumes and imaginative sets. The modern singers are fine actors and attractive people as well. Nowadays with the subtitles anybody can figure out what's happening onstage. Try it! You can have a week for free. Maybe you can work out while watching it.

Here's the sort of thing you can see, though this is Anna Netrebko on YouTube.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

A Very Short Book Tour

I have several friends who are writers and know that usually they need to promote their own books. In the early 1990s I contributed an essay to a collection called “The Book Group Book.” I was paid a very modest fee for my efforts and thought no more about it.

Then one day the editor of the collection called me and asked if I would promote the book at two local book stores. Well, the book stores weren’t so local. I lived in Philadelphia; the bookstores were in the Scranton area. I was bewailing this fact to a friend of mine who then said, “Oh, I can take you to Scranton. We’ll spend the night before with my parents in Elmira.”

I called the owner of one of the bookstores who was delighted to hear I would make the trip.

“Do you have any pictures of yourself you could send?”

“What kind of picture are you talking about?” I asked.

“Well, eight-by-ten glossies are the most effective.”

I started laughing and could not stop. My response to her request did not win me any friends. I have formal portraits of myself as a 17 year old from the three different schools I attended during my junior/senior year of high school, but had only snapshots otherwise. I did have an urge to send a picture of Danielle Steele, but resisted the impulse.

About an hour later the owner of the bookstore where I would actually appear that weekend called.

“I don’t want to oversell this event to you.”

“You don’t expect much of a turnout other than foot traffic, right?”

“As long as you understand,” she said.

I had a great time in Elmira. My friend Clare’s parents were warm and welcoming and acted as if I was the wittiest person they had met in some time. I always feel warmly toward people who laugh at my jokes.

“I know you’re forty, Stephanie, but don’t be surprised if my mother tucks you in.” said Clare.

Sure enough, later that night I woke and found Clare’s mom checking to see if I was warm enough and if I needed anything. Next morning we had my favorite breakfast, Eggs Benedict.

Clare then took her father and me out to Mark Twain’s grave and somewhere I have pictures of the two of us standing in front of the tomb. The Elmira leg of the adventure was the high point.

Clare and I drove to Scranton and went to the book store. The owner could not have been nicer or more welcoming. I munched on cookies and drank punch. Two people showed up to talk to me. One was a woman who thought she could sign up for the book group to which I belonged. She left when I told her the book group met in Philadelphia. The other interested party was an English teacher who came by to chat and Clare took a picture of the store owner, the English teacher and me looking as happy as if we were participating in the literary event of the year. (I do feel naturally elated when I’m around books.)

I got a call later from the lady who wanted the glossies.

“You’ll be coming back up to appear at my branch of the store, right?”

I did then explain to her that while I had had a swell time at her partner’s store, I couldn’t spare the time to do a second trip.

“Well, it’s true you weren’t much of a draw.”

Oh, well. It’s always good to be reintroduced to the concept of humility.

© 2015 Stephanie Patterson

The Bling Ring—“Reality” Comes to the Movies

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that the rich are different from you and me (assuming you and I are not of the moneyed class). Hemingway is reported to have replied “yes, they have more money than we do.” The five teenagers who run around Los Angeles stealing money, drugs and clothes from the houses of rich celebrities in the movie THE BLING RING aren’t rich, or celebrities. Or very bright, for that matter, as they brag to their friends about what they have done and get caught on security cameras, which makes it about as easy to catch them for the police as it apparently is to score ecstasy or coke at a party in the Hollywood Hills—any party in the Hollywood Hills.

Mark, the lone male member of the gang, tells a reporter from Vanity Fair (I thought she was his shrink at first) that he did it because he never felt he was handsome enough, and the pretty girl who ran things manipulated him. He rails against the way we have an obsession with celebrity even as he relates he has 800 friends on Facebook.

Nicki, played brilliantly by Emma Watson, tells the camera that we are indeed a shallow culture, obsessed with appearances, with shiny surfaces, and then mentions the website people can access to read about how she is dedicating her life to changing the world (perhaps by giving seminars on how to be treated as a person of substance by demonstrating an absolute lack of substance).

What sickened me was that the ghetto kids in the rap music these ciphers listened to, the role models for these moral and intellectual Neanderthals stealing handbags and-high heeled shoes, these ghetto youths would have gotten hard time for selling a little weed, while the Feeble-Minded Five broke and entered and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars and got ridiculously light sentences. It was almost like they were executives at Enron, for Christ’s sake. I agree with Hemingway—they are no different from you and me, or at least not different from any other criminal or morally retarded person—they are just self-absorbed to the point where they don’t see any reason to discharge any responsibility towards their fellow human beings.

One of the interesting things about the movie is that it is based on real life. Real, as in reality, as in Reality TV. The movie, I think, is satirizing the cult of the celebrity and our obsession with what celebrities may be really like. Ignoring the fact for just a moment that pointing cameras at people to find out what they are like is about as useful as opening the refrigerator door to see if the light is on, I couldn’t help but think that to the kind of people that who watch Reality TV without any sense of irony, the subtleties of satire are lost. They are about as sophisticated as those people who observe Professional Wrestling with not a jaundiced eye, who take their flying suplexes with nary a grain of salt.

The “real life” numbskulls that perpetrated the crimes and served purely nominal jail time for them surely lacked such discernment themselves, or were so cynical they didn’t care. I imagine them getting out of their Club Fed jails and eagerly watching THE BLING RING, glad that people were watching a movie about them, not knowing people like me were thinking they were the silliest bunch of nitwits ever (even including Tom Cruise, Tammy Faye Baker and George W Bush), or not caring, because any attention is good attention, and might get you a contract to sell your story to some other nitwit, who will write about you for still more nitwits to read about.

I’m sure you see the irony in all this—even as I rail against our national propensity to pay more attention to manufactured news, to the fatuous and frivolous, the ersatz important and the erstwhile significant, to whether or not Bruce Jenner is going to become a woman, to whether Jenifer Aniston will ever get knocked up, and who will do the knocking, even as I ridicule the ridiculous, I am being lured into the insidious trap these cynical entertainment types set for us—even as we rail against , we are paying attention to.

It seems that being a celebrity will make you rich, and being rich makes you a celebrity, which raises the questions “just what is a celebrity, and which comes first, the wealth or the celebrity?” A celebrity is an attention whore, who gets paid attention to for the wrong reasons, for no reason at all, and perhaps, in the greatest irony, because we are dumbfounded by just how desperate they are for that attention. For these goofies and goonies, leering at us from the covers of supermarket tabloids even as we leer back, any publicity is good publicity, regardless of what all those whining stars say about the need for privacy and the horrors of being pursued by Paparazzi.

So we watch Jersey Shore, congenital morons tap dancing their way across our TV screens, the background music reminiscent of whatever they played as the Titanic went down, instead of paying attention to global warming and how the very rich we lionize are raping us yet again (we didn’t learn from the Great Depression, The S & L Scandal, the Sub-Prime Mortgage Debacle, etc.)

We say shame on you to Bill Cosby? Why do we say anything to him at all? And why do we let him say anything to us? We go to a rapist who isn’t a doctor but who plays one on TV for advice on raising kids and race relations, and then forget about what the real issues were in the first place when his off screen behavior rivals that of Fatty Arbuckle. Shame on Bill? Shame on you and me.

These kids want to be street, to be victims of the man, to be ghetto (which would entail poverty and violence on a scale they couldn’t even imagine) and to be ridiculously wealthy. Well, to be “street” I would imagine you would have to do some real crime and risk some real consequences, which they hardly do, at least according to the sentences they got.

THE BLING RING, which derides consumer culture while cataloguing all the high end brands the kids steal, is about crime, but not crime in the sense I think of. These kids weren’t committing crime in the sense that they seriously hurt anyone—they were merely dopes who stole silly and expensive shit from other dopes, a kind of transfer or wealth from the absurdly privileged to the comfortably middle and upper middle class. And while they couldn’t do much damage to their “victims,” who I am sure had insurance as well as owning a few insurance companies, they really weren’t risking any damage to themselves. When you are walking black and poor down the street in Ferguson, Mo., then you are walking a tightrope without a net. In Beverly Hills, you’re not even really on a tightrope. It’s all just make believe. Like on TV.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Food, Friends, and Music: Happy New Year

On New Year's Eve we gave our standing party, one of those annual parties that dear friends have every year until the last one has crawled off to the nursing home. I like to cook for people, and so I made my famous chicken and sausage gumbo, which was as always well received. People brought things, too. Mostly sweet things, so that my doctor, who says I'm on the verge of diabetes, would frown if she saw me eating them. I ate them anyway.

Food is a powerful force for bringing people together. I was reflecting on that this morning as I scarfed up another Norwegian cookie, whose buttery goodness reminds me of the many people who have given me delicious cookies over the years, my grandmothers, my grandmother's housekeeper who used to make fat sugar cookies with a dollop of jam in the middle, my old flame who used to bring me chocolate eclairs. So many memories of food. Offer me something sweet and my heart is yours.

As we stuffed our faces the other night the musicians broke out their instruments and began to play Irish music. Bliss! I really am going to have to work out on the concertina so that I can join them next time, or at very least get the harp tuned. You can't make an ugly sound on a celtic harp. My cousin Harry built that harp from a kit. When his fingers got too sore to play it he sold it to me for the price of a sword he wanted, a reproduction of something that had been found in a tomb on the McCloskey's ancestral lands in Ireland. Harry had a very romantic turn of mind. He and his wife lived in a hunting lodge in the White Mountains with a hand-carved sign over the front door that read, "Enter in Peace or Leave in Pieces." You're thinking, a man like that would have guns. He did. He forged them himself in his smithy.

But I digress, although it isn't really a digression on New Year's Eve to be thinking of the beloved and great ones of the past. I was telling you about the party, and how much fun it was, in spite of the fact that it was a much quieter party than in years of yore. The children who once ran around under our feet so entertainingly have become teenagers, some of them quite sullen. Everyone tires early. I call it a standing party, but truth to tell only the party is able to remain standing throughout the evening anymore. The rest of us have to sit. We sat, we ate, we told funny stories, we played music or listened to it. We missed the absent ones. But it was a good party. We're all very fond of each other.

Happy New Year to you. May you have music, good things to eat and loving friends.

© 2015 Kate Gallison