Art Kavanagh

“You don’t always have to stay in your lane. But try not to drive completely off the road into a damn flute store!”

Ah, so “stay in your lane” is a driving metaphor. Without thinking about it, I seem to have been assuming it was from swimming. A Brief History of the Flute in Popular Music

Because of my age I qualified for free bus and train travel a few months ago. Now, I regularly catch myself singing the beginning of Jethro Tull’s “Doctor Bogenbroom”:

I’ve one foot in the graveyard
And the other on the bus …

When the Haughey payments became public knowledge, some joker commented “Ben there. Dunne that. Bought the Taoiseach.” 🤣

Ben Dunne dead at 74

This is the 78th post in Talk about books, marking the end of its 3rd year. Unfortunately, the post isn’t one of my best: I start by saying I don’t know the poetry of Seamus Heaney as well as I should, then go on to prove it! The last word or the first claim: Notes on some of Seamus Heaney’s poetry

I’m not as familiar with Seamus Heaney’s poetry as I ought to be. When he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1995, I was beginning the final year of my BA in English, so I might have been expected to pay more attention to him than I did. I have a hardback copy of his New Selected Poems 1966–1987 (1990), which I may have bought around that time, certainly not much later.

A S Byatt has died, aged 87. I liked some of her novels (Possession, Still Life) very much and disliked others (The Biographer’s Tale 📚, Babel Tower) almost as intensely, and found her short stories a very mixed bag. I’d love to read a comprehensive account/assessment of her fiction.

When they say, “This call may be recorded for monitoring and training purposes”, I say, “Thank you!”, and click the record button.

Quentin Stafford-Fraser

I always think that Gary Oldman looks even less like “a bullfrog in a sou’wester” than Alec Guinness did! Gary Oldman as Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, soldier, Spy

Here’s a fascinating and amusing long piece about aggressive literary agent Andrew Wylie, aka “the Jackal”, who temporarily broke up the friendship of Julian Barnes and Martin Amis, and persuaded Henry Kissinger that he needed “legacy management”.

Noah Smith has been taking a penetrating look at what’s going on in the Irish economy and has unearthed a few surprising facts: How Ireland got so rich

Ireland is also part of a small, elite club of countries that is richer than its 19th-century imperial overlord, along with South Korea, Poland, the Baltics, and a few others.

I’d never seen Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation🍿 but read something recently about its 20th anniversary and decided it was time. I watched first 15 minutes and just realized to my surprise that I don’t like Bill Murray. I know he’s given many good performances but I’d rather not watch ’em.

I’ve just posted in Talk about books about Daphne du Maurier’s collection of “long” short stories, Don’t Look Now and other stories 📖

Until last year, I hadn’t read anything by Daphne du Maurier. I knew the outline of the plot of Rebecca, had seen the 1970s tv adaptation with Joanna David and had heard part of a radio dramatization of Jamaica Inn. I may have been left with the impression that du Maurier’s fiction was good source material for film, television and radio, but that there was no very pressing reason to read it.

For some reason (?!) I’ve been watching random episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip this morning. I really don’t like Aaron Sorkin’s writing very much but there’s no doubt that Matthew Perry knew how to deliver it.

I have Safari on my phone set up to load Wikipedia pages in Reader View automatically. But I can’t expand the headings in Reader View!

I bought an old DVD in a secondhand shop yesterday, to rip the movie for my iPad. As I was paying (€1), the woman said “It’s 2 for the price of 1”. I didn’t think there was another DVD I wanted but eventually settled on Matrix Revolutions. Today, I found that I’d got the extra disc only, no movie!

When Substack introduced Notes, I said I didn’t know whether I needed a Twitter alternative but that Notes might be it. Starting to think that I really don’t need it. I’m going to stop posting to Notes for a few weeks, see if my blog posts get fewer views and, if they don’t, delete Substack account.

The latest post from Talk about books, even later than usual (which is becoming the norm when I’m writing about Salman Rushdie) narrowly avoids discussing in any depth his 1999 novel, The Ground beneath Her Feet 📖. Shifting ground

I had planned to write a post about Salman Rushdie’s 1999 novel, The Ground beneath Her Feet, but I’ve been reluctantly forced to conclude that I haven’t yet absorbed it sufficiently to be confident in saying much about it. It’s a turning point in Rushdie’s fiction, it marks a change of direction and I haven’t quite been able to make up my mind in which way it leaves him pointing. (More than once in the novel, Rushdie jokes about “disorientation” meaning “loss of the East”.

… Google’s defense, which is that it’s not Google’s access to more data that keeps Google leagues ahead of competitors in search, it’s “brilliant people, working tirelessly to improve its products.”

If Google has brilliant people working tirelessly to improve its products, why are its search results getting worse? Ars Technica via Charles Arthur, The Overspill

There’s a little book festival in Westport this weekend. I’m a bit tempted by the Séamus Heaney event but maybe the €25 charge would be better spent on a book or two about him. Also, there’s no evening bus to where I live and I’m not sure the weather will allow me to cycle home 🤷🏻‍♂️

I got the previous Talk about books post out on time (i.e. on the Wednesday) for the first time in several months. But already I’m slipping again. Today I’m writing about 📖The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999) and, as always when I’ve written about Rushdie’s fiction, it’s taking appreciably longer than I had allowed for. It’s worth taking time over, though, as I hope will be clear when I do eventually get the post out (probably on Saturday).

I just looked up “negative space” because I couldn’t figure out intuitively what it might mean, and now I’m really puzzled. How is this different from positive space, or even just “space”? I assumed it might mean jamming elements together or making them overlap, but apparently it’s the opposite.

Safari on my iPhone keeps loading completely blank pages — not even a “can’t find server” message — for every page I try to visit. I’ve never seen this behaviour before and I don’t like it.