03.28.06
Server change
hi everyone,
My tech patron, Gavin, is changing server. So there maybe some messing for the next day. Standby…
03.27.06
Browne on McDowell
This is much better and while a good read, it is also much more salient. I particularly like this…
“McDowell has never been elected in two successive general elections. He won in 1987, lost in 1989, won in 1992, lost in 1997, won in 2002. A crucial element in how he won or lost has been how Fine Gael has fared. When Fine Gael did well, he fared badly; when Fine Gael did badly, he did well.
His vote in Dublin South East is a Fine Gael vote – or at least a large part of it is. But his recent antics may have alienated a sizeable and crucial section of this vote, for it was a Fine Gael pin-up boy whom he attacked and belittled.
It was that same Fine Gael pin-up boy who emerged gloriously from that contest, not just by winning hands down on Monday’s Six-One News on RTE1 in the debate to which he was challenged by McDowell.
More tellingly, it was Bruton’s calm and coherent demeanour which defeated McDowell’s frenzy, and later Bruton’s graciousness in accepting McDowell’s self-regarding apology. It is quite a skill to turn an apology into a swagger, by claiming he was ‘man enough’ to acknowledge he was wrong.
Actually it was merely half an apology, for McDowell failed to withdraw the brazen conceit and belittlement in the remark: “Deputy Bruton is knee-high to me in terms of anything that he’s ever managed to do for this country” etc.
Waters on McDowell
John prolongs the entertainment for us – hilarious (I think unintentionally) column today. I love this bit
“It seems obvious from his general behaviour and increasingly frequent outbursts that Mr McDowell is afflicted by some kind of progressive emotional malaise, at the back of which may lie a deep sense of disappointment, even despair. Several clues to the source of this condition were to be observed in his recent speech to a PD event in Waterford, in which he likened the present coalition administration to a sandwich. “It’s not the more bulky bread which gives a sandwich its taste,” he declared. “Rather, it’s the meat which gives a sandwich its flavour. . . I have to say that I find the focus on who will be the next taoiseach to be significantly overblown. If the history of the last 35 years has taught us anything, it is that the most important party in a government is not the senior party but the junior party. The larger party may provide the taoiseach, but the junior party provides the essential direction of the government.”
This provoked much commentary focusing on the political implications, but none on what it told us about the emotional state of the Minister. One requires no more than a casual knowledge of Freud to comprehend it as a cry for help, a vainglorious protestation that says more in its subtext than its superficialities. His choice of metaphor suggests that Mr McDowell feels not merely trapped but trapped by lesser entities. With his high-protein PD colleagues, he feels squeezed by thick wedges of simple carbohydrates. But even more interesting is that he referred to a meat sandwich rather than some of the more exotic sorts of fillings – lentils and brandy butter, avocado and tulip – one would expect to be consumed in his own constituency. Here we find a hint as to the Minister’s disaffection: despite his trumpeting of the self-importance of the PDs, he feels himself party to a hang sangwich.”
hee hee.
Motorway Madness
I must confess, I know I should be outraged by the gangland madness on the m50, but it is actually so mad, it’s funny. From the Irish Times…
“Gardaàbelieve more than 20 shots were fired by a gunman using an automatic weapon at a car carrying two Dublin drug dealers and three female associates on the M50 in the early hours of yesterday morning, writes Conor Lally. The attack, linked to a drugs feud, took place when four masked occupants of one car repeatedly opened fire on a second vehicle as both cars sped down a five-kilometre stretch of the State’s busiest road just after 4am.”
It’s like one of the early scenes in LA Story (Steve Martin on the highway….). I see Joe Costello was reminded of something similar..”Labour justice spokesman Joe Costello said the situation regarding armed crime in Dublin was “reminiscent of gang warfare in east Los Angeles”. Joe must be more familiar with LA than my goodself..is EAST LA the same as West Dublin?
03.26.06
Writing Memoirs
The other ST, Sunday Tribune had some good stuff today. Richard Delevan had an interesting take on A&E. But I also really liked Nuala O’Faoilean today. Unfortunately I missed the programme about her during the week but M. told me it was very powerful. She spoke of her parents neglect of her youngest brother and said that they effectively murdered him. The surviving siblings clearly took offence. But from what Nuala said, they actually DID neglect him, like, didn’t feed him properly and let him wander around the town. Anyway, she appears to be regretting her interview.
The copyright police can stick this one in their file too..another cut and paste so that subs (but a free one at least) can be avoided…
ATELEVISION programme involving me and the family I come from went out on RTE a few nights ago. I saw an advance mention of it which made out that it was going to be all about my . . . long-ago and relatively unexceptional . . . sex life. But if anybody turned it on expecting sex they must have been sorely disappointed. I saw the programme on DVD this week and I’m not entirely sure what its main theme was. But whatever it was, it wasn’t anything to get titillated about.
ÂÂ
I thought it was going to be one in a series of programmes about the family . . . anybody’s family . . .
and the important things that happen within families. One unusual thing about my relationship with my family is that I wrote a memoir which I thought no one would read, but which in fact exposed my family’s flaws and sorrows to a wide audience. Not many families have to put up with that. But many families do have one person who breaks a silence, or speaks out in some way, or in some way describes and defines a family which up to then had no agreed-upon identity. But a family hangs together by remaining undescribed, so that each member can see it and themselves in relation to it in whatever way suits them best. The member who disturbs this comfort is asking for trouble.
It’s not even a question of keeping a family’s secrets . . . though that’s what’s on most people’s minds when they think about getting their life stories down on paper.
In a couple of months, I’ll be leading a writing-in-the first-person workshop at Listowel Writers’ Week and I bet that topic comes up in the first hour; how do you tell the truth about what happened to you without hurting or betraying other people? Should you change names? Should you leave the worst out? But even if you say nothing but good things about the people in your memoir, even if its tone is positive and humorous and sweet . . . like, for example, the book of autobiographical sketches by Deirdre Brady, who is a sister of my own . . . you can still get into a kind of trouble.
The writer can hardly give more than a small bit of attention to this person or that. But the person in question has always felt themselves to be large, and has a sense of their relationship with the writer as having been large and vague. It shocks them to see themselves encapsulated.
What’s more, reading personal material by people you know is an uneasy business. The author doesn’t seem a bit like his or her self. The author seems, frankly, a bit phony. The interesting thing is that if you read some of your own old letters you’ll get the same impression of your own self. You yourself will seem faintly phony. And that’s because experience is too complex to be completely described in writing, and writing is a matter of picking and choosing, and the person who’s doing the writing is an abbreviated version of the whole person in real life.
Memoir is artful, however simple it may seem. Memoir edits both what it writes about and the person who writes it.
Lots of people, therefore, have a quarrel with the memoirist. But when those people are family members . . . siblings, perhaps . . there is rich potential for further offence.
Let’s say the author describes a long and loving relationship with his or her parents.
Well, that’s going to stir up demons in the brothers and sisters who feel themselves to have been less loved.
Let’s say your story is the story of a determined climb to the heights of a brilliant career. Will the stay-at-home siblings feel judged by that? And what about the family habit, unconsciously designed by the group to keep everyone in their box, of designating one member as, say, a show-off, and one as a joker and one as authoritative maybe because they’re the eldest and another as childlike because they’re the youngest. On the page, these callous but handy abbreviations, used by the family for its own smooth operation, lose all the irony and nuance they have in conversation.
I could go on. What about the fundamental fact that no two people remember any incident in exactly the same way? That never happened. It did. It didn’t. So-and-so never said that. He was my boyfriend, not yours. She never really liked you. Et cetera. And what about the reputation of the family? What about the fallout for the others, facing their neighbours and friends and in-laws and colleagues, if one member of a family strips it bare in public? Memoirists seem so selfish to the people they drag in their wake. This, no doubt, is because they are selfish . . . though that itself is only shorthand for their having a need to be heard and to shape how they are heard which is really deep and imperative, or they wouldn’t risk their relationship with the most important people in their lives.
All over the world people are sitting quietly writing their memoirs as if their stories are their own. They’re wrapped up in themselves.
It won’t dawn on them for a long time that a family is a collective property, as well as an individual one. This is hindsight on my part, of course, but I see it now.
And I see why there wasn’t a television programme on this subject on RTE last week, and why I doubt there ever will be. Recklessness can only go so far.
*btw, Richard, like me, usually posts his column to his blog, but its not there just as I write. I see he is busy with a new baby!
Energy
We ran out of oil on Thursday and none will be delivered until tomorrow. The weather resumed its miserably wet and cold habit so I was dreading the weekend. I came up with the following tactics:
1. Put on a jumper. This was surprisingly effective.
2. Lit the fire. Hadn’t been bothered doing this before. That smokless coal is great stuff.
3. Put an extra blanket on the children and tucked them in well.
4. A hot water bottle for my little feet getting into the leaba.
5. Finally decided, that to hell with the cost and impact on my minimalist decor, I am getting big thick curtains on the french doors. We are losing way too much heat through them. And I am not totally averse to getting one on the front door either.
And guess what? We’re grand! Should have done even a little of this all winter instead of paying a fortune for oil. By coincidence it’s the Green party conference this weekend and I heard much talk of how we will meet our energy demands. Ireland I think is buying energy quota so we don’t exceed our Kyoto limits. The talk is all centered how we can get enough energy to service us. How about we reduce our energy demands? Do we really need tropical heat levels in the house all the time? I’ve sent for a statement of how much oil we did use over the last 12 months and how much we paid per litre. I intend to reduce that by 50% next winter.
How internet fills the void of meatspace in rural Ireland
An improbably large and malevolent looking sheep glared at me through the window. The sky darkened. It was only noon, but I put the lights on. The wind whipped around our house at the end of the cul-de-sac. The children slept. My husband was on a business trip, while the bitterly cold weather imprisoned us. I hadn’t seen anybody in three days. Panic rose within me. I ran to the computer and logged in.A quick check in the window of my Instant Messenger (IM) revealed that just one of my contacts was online. Whether he was actually at his desk at that moment was another matter. Hallelujah! A response! I shared my little freak-out and he offered a virtual pat on the back. Within minutes I was giggling and typing as we shared the trivial and tragic minutiae of our respective days. I couldn’t see him or hear him, but he was there.
 |
Eventually, he had to take a call and one of the children stirred, but for the rest of the day I could pop in and out and read his messages and leave some for him.
Others came and went, sharing links to interesting articles, cracking jokes about the headlines on the news sites we watch. There were several replies to the latest post on my blog — www.sarahcarey.ie — which contains my daily thoughts on everything from politics to washing powder. I sighed at some and laughed out loud (lol in the online world) at more.
By day’s end, I still hadn’t seen anybody in “meatspace”, but I had communicated with at least a dozen people. I was stuck in a house in rural Ireland, but was socialising around the world. Strangely, it was only with men. There are women online, but most appear to have little inclination for the virtual life.
E-mail, blogs, IM, Skype, emoticons, RSS feeds — who would have thought these would become my life online as I lived in the middle of nowhere. Housewifery is a lonely existence and I am a people person. I’m sure it’s weird and technically unhealthy, but I have found the internet to be an incredibly intimate experience. There are guys I half-knew in college with whom I am now great pals. There are people I’ve never met who express concern for my mental health when they occasionally observe it disintegrate on my blog. And on the IM window in the corner of the screen there are names and little icons so I can see who’s out there to pull me back when the edge seems frighteningly close.
Geography, children, the oppressive busy-ness of work, obligations to family and in-laws — they all erode the friendships of our youth. It’s just so hard to sit down and have a decent chat these days. When you do meet up, there are drinks to be bought, meals to be ordered, and other people to interrupt a private conversation. The logistical nightmare of socialising can make it difficult to maintain meaningful contact with like-minded souls. It’s not so easy to stay up all night with a bottle of wine or three pouring out your heart to a sympathetic friend.
Unless, you are sitting at home in front of the computer.
We could phone each other, but I can’t handle the pressure of a telephone conversation any more. Even the ringing is a source of stress. A child has to be dropped or the dinner ends up burning or a rare read of the newspaper is ruined.
There’s also a hereditary dislike of prolonged phone conversations. My grandmother’s aversion to surplus food and unnecessary pleasantries resulted in me answering the phone and being asked without greeting: “Do you want some broccoli?” Most of my family hang up abruptly when they have achieved the primary goal of the phone call — establishing a time of a meeting or suggesting an idea for a column.
Interruptions are easily managed online. I can make a cup of tea or replace a soother while the other half in the dialogue considers my last contribution and composes a reply. If there’s a pause in a phone call, I feel an irrational pressure to fill the silence. When I panic that I am running out of something to say, I’ll arrange to meet the person, even though this will probably never happen.
A pause in an online conversation creates no such pressure. If I run out of something to say, I’ll just read something online and we’ll resume when the mood takes us. Some of these conversations have left me crying or in stitches laughing in front of the computer.
How did I end up like this? A combination of blogging and broadband I think. A blog is just a simple website that is easy to set up. The blogger uses it like a daily diary and records their views or opinions on their subject of choice, be it politics, technology or, in the case of one relation, a tour around the world. He doesn’t have to send postcards and all his friends and family can keep up with his travels. Friends with whom I have lost contact can check my blog periodically. They may be on the other side of the world, but when we do eventually meet up they’ll know exactly where I am in my life.
In America, blogging has become a political force because the lack of diversity in mainstream media has created enormous demand for quality analysis. Apart from Slugger O’Toole, a Northern Ireland-based blog, we haven’t reached that point in this country. The next general election will be the real test and at least one site, irishelection.com, is already planning to make an impact.
In the meantime, lots of blogs are like mine, random thoughts and idle observations that provide a little entertainment for the friends and strangers who stumble across it. But broadband is crucial. There is no way I’d be hooked to the internet all day if I was paying by the minute or waiting ages for downloads.
The experience is not without risk. Most people in cyberspace are nice, but some are angry and bitter and lash out in their blogs. It’s a bit like opening your front door and someone you’ve never met before but who knows a lot about you screams and storms off. I can shut the door and delete their comment, but it can be unpleasant becoming the subject of such abuse. Still, this is rare and I have made more friends than enemies.
When our seemingly endless winter finally broke on Wednesday, my hopes lifted. In the bright sunshine the sheep didn’t look so spooky any more. I seized the opportunity and loaded up the pram. On our half-hour adventure up the lane we met the postwoman, my uncle out herding, and a neighbouring farmer. Our conversations were neither profound nor deep and focused enthusiastically on the weather. But I still felt more grounded and optimistic than I had in months.
Cyberspace preserved my sanity this winter, but meatspace still has plenty to offer.
03.22.06
Blogging and privacy
Those blog awards sparked at lot of introspective, mostly shite, analysis. Here’s something quite dramatic from Salon…(I’ll do a cut and paste job cos its sub only).
Living Out Loud by Ayelet Waldman
The first inkling my husband had that I was thinking about suicide was when he checked my blog. He was in Little Rock, on the first leg of a tour that was supposed to take him from Arkansas to Alaska, back to Denver and over to St. Paul, Minn., a circuit more suited to a professional indoor lacrosse league than to a literary novelist. I’d been distracted and irritable when we spoke on the phone, but not necessarily any more than you’d expect from someone left behind with four children. The suicide essay definitely came as a shock.
I had begun my blog two months before, imagining that it would act as a journal, a way of taking notes on my life, and at the same time be a sort of marketing tool to remind readers that I still existed in between novels. Almost immediately I discovered in myself a confessional impulse, a compulsive need to haul open the tattered edges of my emotional raincoat and expose the nasty parts lurking beneath. I blogged daily, chronicling everything from what my youngest son ate for dinner (one spaghetti noodle, one pat of butter, and all the green, blue and pink frosting off a very large cupcake), to the Supreme Court’s dramatic shift on sentencing guidelines, to the various side effects of the medications I take for my bipolar disorder. As soon as I read something interesting, as soon as I heard something moving, as soon as one of my children said something funny, I posted to my blog.
The entry that greeted my husband on that day was a well-researched commentary on suicide rates among people with bipolar disorder. I informed my readers, among them my husband, that what I have, the milder form of the disease, has a 24 percent suicide rate. Then I wrote, “It does not help to know that one’s mood is a mystery of neurochemistry when one is tallying the contents of the medicine cabinet and evaluating the neurotoxic effects of a Tylenol, topomax, SRRI and ambien cocktail.”
The readers of my blog had no way to determine the intentions behind my entry. Was it some kind of public service announcement, designed to help people understand the seriousness of mental illness? My husband had an easier time realizing it was a cry for immediate and urgent assistance. He, however, felt entirely powerless, sitting in a hotel room 2,000 miles away with no way to intervene and nothing to do but wonder whether he should be cursing or blessing the phenomenon of the blog. He called, he made plans to come home, but it was my girlfriends who responded with the most confidence, perhaps because they had so much less at stake than he did in my stability. They formed themselves into a kind of telephone round robin, refusing to let up until I called my psychiatrist, who immediately diagnosed a problem with the dosage of my medication.
Without their help I’m not sure what the outcome of that dark and frightening night would have been. Because they read that blog post, the problem was diagnosed and solved very quickly. I have never attempted suicide, and did not then. But when I wrote that entry I was certainly engaging in what psychiatrists call “suicidal ideation.” I went so far as to plan the funeral, even deciding whether my children would attend (the older ones should, the younger should not), although I managed to keep myself from doing that online. This, the most dramatic emotional collapse of my career as a person with a mental illness, happened out in the open, in front of 1,862 people according to my site meter, and with the comment line open. The letters poured in, overwhelmingly ones of support and compassion, and even identification.
A couple of weeks before, I was interviewed about my blog by a reporter for the New York Times. I tend to approach giving interviews with the same sense of circumspection and restraint as I approach my writing. That is to say, virtually none. When asked what I made of blogs like my own, blogs written by parents about their children, I said, “A blog like this is narcissism in its most obscene flowering.” I uttered those words lightly, almost but not quite in jest, but I believed them.
As debates rage about whether bloggers are journalists, whether they need shield laws to protect sources, whether they brought down Dan Rather and are going to take over the media world, on the other side of the blogosphere the diarists and memoirists and mothers are coping with a different set of ethical dilemmas: How much of themselves should they expose online, and how easily should they indulge their urge to confess? In my case, blogging about suicide might have crossed the line.
My blogging has been cathartic; my self-exposure served some kind of purpose, but there is no doubt that it exacted a cost. One of the problems was that there are a whole lot of people huddled under my particular dirty raincoat. There is my husband, a gracious and good-tempered man, and one who has himself wrestled with the self-exposure business. More important, because they are more defenseless, there are my children, two boys and two girls, ranging in age from not quite 2 to 10 years old. I have always used my children as material in my fiction, and even occasionally in essays, but never with the immediacy demanded of a blog. My daughter shouted at her father, “You like being mean to us; you’re nothing but a hatred machine.” Half an hour later, it was in print online. The children are not allowed to read my blog — they are still young enough that I can monitor their computer use with relative ease. Frankly, at this stage they are far more interested in Gaia online and Muffin Films Web sites, but there will surely come a day when they will Google themselves, find my blog and both be furious with me for having stolen their lives and humiliated at the extent to which I have laid open my own. I told the New York Times reporter that blogging was “payback for driving back and forth to gymnastics all week long,” but I don’t really believe that. As much as I despise carpool, I wasn’t trying to exact some kind of complicated revenge for having been forced to spend too many hours in a minivan.At the same time, I was becoming convinced that all this blogging was having a deleterious effect on my writing. It was more than the hours I was spending posting to my blog, reading my comments page, reading other blogs, and checking my site meter. As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful. The fictionalized scene I ended up with was often unrecognizable from the actual event that had been its progenitor.But in the months I had the blog, I was spewing as fast as my family was experiencing. My initial idea, that the blog would act as a kind of digital notebook, was not panning out. Once the experience was turned into words, I found that it was frozen. The fertile composting that I count on to generate my fiction was no longer happening.
In the introduction to the collection of her New York Times columns, Anna Quindlen wrote about the challenges of “Living Out Loud,” writing life as it is happening. If producing a regular column is living out loud, then keeping a daily blog is living at the top of your lungs. For a couple of months there, I was shrieking like a banshee. I realized in the wake of my online suicide note that for the sake of my family and my fiction, I needed to turn down the volume a few notches. I needed to give up the blog.
At the same time, the experience of writing about my daily life, about my reactions to contemporary events and politics, about my children and husband, was satisfying, not merely therapeutically, but creatively. I enjoyed attempting to rise to the literary challenge; I even took a sort of pleasure in occasionally failing. While I did not want to continue blogging, I did not want to give up that part of the experience.
I hope to strike a balance with this column. Here is an opportunity to give shape to my musings, to capture some of the immediacy of blogging, but also to force structure on my thoughts, to search for meaning in, rather than just express, emotions.
My children — Sophie, Zeke, Ida-Rose and Abraham — will still find themselves subjects of my columns as they were subjects of my blog. This is inevitable, I’m afraid. I was once on a panel with a novelist who claimed that while she stole liberally from her parents’ lives and those of her friends, she never wrote about her children because that “wouldn’t be fair.” I’m sure my children will one day envy that mother’s scruples. At this point in my life and my children’s, I experience so little that is entirely separable from my identity as their mother. Mothering consumes not just the bulk of the hours of my day but the majority of my emotional and intellectual energy. Were I to declare that part of my life sacrosanct, I would have much less to say. I want to write about being a mother and about them precisely because they are such a large part of who I am. But I will no longer be writing about them just because they have said something amusing, or because they happen to look cute in their matching pajamas. I can’t promise not to invade their privacy, but I can promise to do it more thoughtfully, and, I hope, to more meaningful an end.
Cold comfort to a 7-year-old, I know. While my son Zeke knew that I was in a fragile emotional state during the period before I wrote the suicide post (it might have been the constant crying that gave me away), he was not aware of the extent of it until he overheard someone discussing what I wrote. He did not react then, but I knew there was something wrong. I sat him down and explained what had happened, that I had been taking the wrong pills and that my doctor had fixed my medicine. I asked him if there was anything he was afraid of. He looked at me, his deep blue eyes full of unshed tears, and said, “I am afraid you’re going to kill yourself.”
The same exhibitionism that allowed me to write the post in the first place allowed me to make the mistake of talking about it within his earshot. First I hugged him, then I told him that I knew why he was afraid. I told him what a good doctor I had and how careful we were now to make sure nothing like this ever happened again. I also told him what to do if he ever became frightened: He should talk to his father, call one of his grandparents or, if he was really scared, call 911. This is a child who once called the police because his older sister changed the television channel, so I am confident he will be able to act in a crisis, but I am also adamant that he will not need to. I promised him that I would never, ever hurt myself. A rash promise, perhaps, but I do my best not to break my promises to my children. And I don’t intend to start with this one.