… when I’m straight.
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Tuesday’s The View is now online. Myself, John Boyne and Jeananne Crowley talking books.

“In everything any man wrote…is contained…the allegorical idea of his own future life, as the acorn contains the oak.” – Arthur Rimbaud

Strange but apparently true: songs can be predictive. They process the hidden impulses and undercurrents at work in a songwriter’s life, sort through the evidence, and make eerily accurate prognoses of what will come to pass. Perhaps the creative side of the brain, the night-side, knows what is before us, even as our waking consciousness cannot or will not acknowledge portents of the catastrophes ahead.

“Sometimes songs are postcards from the future,” Rosanne Cash wrote in a blog for the New York Times last May. “Often I have found that a song reveals something subtle but important about my own life that I was only vaguely aware of while writing, but that became clear as time went on. I wrote ‘Black Cadillac’ six weeks before a rash of deaths began in my family. The day I finished writing it, I played the completed song to myself, as a kind of last run-through to check for rhyme scheme errors and syllable scanning, and a tidal wave of anxiety started rising in my gut. I knew I had given myself a message.

“I don’t consider these postcard songs prescient as much as just coming from a source of creativity outside linear time. I am certainly not the first to notice this phenomenon in creative work. Thornton Wilder, for one, wrote, ‘It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.’”

In Nick Cave’s 1998 lecture The Secret Life of the Love Song, the singer described how the writing of ‘Far From Me’ from The Boatman’s Call didn’t just document the glorious beginnings of the love affair that inspired it, but also predicted – if not orchestrated – its inglorious decline.

“As I wrote the final verse of ‘Far From Me’ it became clear that my life was being dictated by the largely destructive ordinance of the song itself, which had its own inbuilt destiny, over which I had no control,” he said. “In fact, I was an afterthought, a bit-player in its sly, mischievous and finally malicious vision of how the world should be.”

And perhaps music presages not just the personal but also the socio-political. Earlier this year we speculated that just as Nirvana’s Nevermind telegraphed the Democrats’ ascension to the throne, perhaps Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible might, just might, augur well for Obama.

This is not the same as prophesy, which, as Greil Marcus observed in his book The Shape of Things to Come, is as much about the past as the future, just as most future-dystopian novels – Orwell’s Eastern Bloc parable 1984 comes to mind – are about the time they’re written in rather than a time foreseen. No, songs are more psychological. They emanate from the murky realms of Freud ‘n’ Jung. A songwriter unwittingly composes the source code for his or her imminent future.

So be careful what you wish for, but be doubly mindful of what you write.

The strange tale of Vincent Molloy, aged 7.

PM will be on The View panel on RTE 1, this Tuesday, November 25, talking books. On the slab: Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, the new Sony Reader gizmo, and the Fenton Gallery’s lavish tome Representing Art in Ireland. He’ll also be selecting his favourite books of the year: The Arrival by Shaun Tan and The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders.

“Before fatigue brings boxers to the boiler rooms of the damned, they live at a height of consciousness and with a sense of detail they encounter nowhere else. In no other place is their intelligence so full, nor their sense of time able to contain so much of itself as in the long internal effort of the ring. Thirty minutes go by like three hours.”
– Norman Mailer, The Fight.

Rollins, from the Huffington Post:

“Northern Ireland. I have been to Northern Ireland many times and it’s always been a great experience. I have only been there for a day at a time for a show and then onto the next place. The people are very friendly and it’s one of the better audiences you’ll get on a tour.

In all my visits there, I have never asked anyone about the history of the place, not wanting to bring anyone’s blood to a potential boil. That being said, I have always been curious about Bloody Sunday, The Troubles, the IRA and what all that means to the people of Northern Ireland now. Depending on who you ask, the IRA (Irish Republican Army) were heroes fighting for the freedom of Northern Ireland or just criminal thugs who should be locked away or worse. It was an interesting concept to me, that some may see this group as patriots pushing back against an oppressive occupation. Some might say that’s what’s happening in Iraq at the moment.

I went to Northern Ireland to get a better understanding of what the last few decades had been like there and where things are now — if there is peace or merely a cease fire. To be honest, I had no idea what we would get. What we ended up with was some of the most intense interviews we have ever conducted. By day we would travel and conduct interviews from all sides, trying to be objective and allow different points of view to be aired. By night, I would get e-mails from people who knew I was in town with very opposing views urging me not to believe what had been said by the ones they disagreed with. The whole experience was extremely heavy. Meanwhile, the countryside was beautiful and the food was great! I am still trying to get my head around all the things I saw and heard on this trip. I hope that what we present with this program will provide some perspective and inspire some thought.”

Henry Rollins: Uncut from Northern Ireland
Friday, November 21st at 10:30pm EST/PST
IFC (Independent Film Channel)
A new Rollins documentary/live stage show every Friday night through the month of November only on IFC.

Friar Murphy will be appearing at the Dublin Writers’ Seminar on Friday November 21 at European Union House on Dawson St, Dublin. He’ll be reading from John the Revelator, alongside Julia Kelly, author of With My Lazy Eye. Kick off is at 12, following a talk and reading by Tenderwire author Claire Kilroy.

“Manuel Torre, a man who had more culture in his veins than anyone I’ve known, on hearing Falla play his own Nocturno del Generalife spoke this splendid sentence: ‘All that has dark sounds has duende.’ And there’s no deeper truth than that.

“Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art. ‘Dark sounds’ said the man of the Spanish people, agreeing with Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini hit on a definition of the duende: ‘A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.’

“So, then, the duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.”

From Lorca’s Theory and Play Of The Duende, the 20th century’s greatest discourse on the dark art of music.

… and Nancy sings.