“In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.”
– Samuel Beckett

…is now online.
Friar Murphy joined Nadine O’Regan and Senator David Norris in casting a beady eye over the Anvil documentary, Philip O Ceallaigh’s The Pleasant Light Of Day, Solemn Mass For A Full Moon In Summer at the Project, and the Hughie O’Donoghue exhibition at the IMMA.

 http://www.rte.ie/tv/theview/

Cathi Unsworth reviews J the R for the Guardian:

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar…

And Kate Saunders for the Times of London:

 http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/t…

The god-like Shaun Tan is coming to Dublin!

 http://www.childrensbooks.ie/index.php?o…

Here’s Tara Brady’s HP feature on J the R:

 http://www.hotpress.com/archive/5271669….

Cheryl Morgan gives us a shout-out here:

 http://www.cheryl-morgan.com/?p=3883

As does dovegreyreader:

 http://dovegreyreader.typepad.com/dovegr…

Thanks to all!

Reading prose aloud is a skill one never anticipates having to learn when first sitting down to spin a yarn. It’s a whole other art, beholden to ineffable laws of musicality, rhythm, oratory and performance. Many’s the writer who’s been approached after a reading with the admission, ‘Ah, now I understand what you were banging on about!’ At a Faber event in October, certain ladies and gentlemen of the London publishing trade confessed to yours truly that passages of John the Revelator made a lot more sense when rendered in a quasi-Wexford accent.

The oral tradition far precedes the written one. Before we ever learned to inscribe hieroglyphics on the wall of the cave, we communicated through grunts and gesticulations. The shaman and the seanchaí dominated the tribe’s hive mind before the printing press or telecommunications. Revivalist preachers lived and died by their ability to set fire to the holy texts. The west African griot held the mantle of original outsider artist, a poet-singer with a licence to speak the unpalatable truth, but in return had to forfeit his social identity and live on the margins, to the extent of being buried apart, upside down in a dead tree.

Books were written to be read, not heard. But the template of the text can also be used as a springboard for a sort of incantatory music. Sure, there have been god-like writers who were godawful readers of their own work: Yeats and Eliot to name two. But Dylan Thomas became a star in America through lecture tours that exploited the sonorous splendour of his plummy Welsh lilt.

Having heard a writer deliver the work in his own voice, you never experience it in quite the same way again. The Beats excelled at spoken word performance. Kerouac’s prose takes on indelible echoes of the jazzy, exultant whimsies of his recordings. Ginsberg employed the laws of the Om, Jewish liturgy and Blake and Whitman’s long-line rules of deep breath punctuation in order to turn performances of ‘Khaddish’ and ‘Howl’ into full blown operas.

Burroughs is my favourite: his cracked, sardonic reading of ‘Thanksgiving Prayer’ harks back to Bierce and Twain, and the Hal Willner-produced Dead City Radio might just be the greatest spoken word album of them all (Willner’s excellent Edgar Allan Poe tribute album Closed On Account Of Rabies, featuring Gabriel Byrne, Iggy Pop and Diamanda Galas amongst many others, is also a treasure, a baroque, gothic audio film).

There’s nothing quite so satisfying as a meaty story interpreted by a powerful orator: the audiobook of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, read by actor and Vietnam veteran Richard Poe, is a tour de force. Sean Penn’s take on Dylan’s Chronicles is another feast for the ears.

The book industry, stricken by recession panic, might do well to open its own permanent recording wing. Harassed commuters starved of reading time turn to the audiobook as a means of making the car journey pass faster. Radio plays and abridged book broadcasts still far exceed their public service remit in terms of audience numbers, especially when streamed online. And let’s face it, everybody loves a bedtime story.

“There is… among the Indians a heresy of those who philosophize among the Brahmins, who live a self-sufficient life, abstaining from (eating) living creatures and all cooked food… They say that God is light, not like the light one sees, not like the sun nor fire, but to them God is discourse, not that which finds expression in articulate sounds, but that of knowledge (gnosis) through which the secret mysteries of nature are perceived by the wise.” – Hippolytus

Friar Murphy will be appearing on Ryan Tubridy’s RTE radio show in the morning to discuss British poet laureate Andrew Motion’s recent exhortations for folk to read the Bible.

Also, if anyone knows Ms Sorcha Fogarty from Cork, please thank her for the postcard she sent to Faber & Faber with the kind words about the book on the back and excellent photograph of a scared rabbit sculpture on the front.

Delighted to report that, after five weeks on the shelves, J the R is still selling strong - number 11 in the wholesaler’s charts, 13 on the Dubray site and 14 in Hodges Figgis. Great to see it jostling for position alongside Malcolm Gladwell, Stephanie Meyer, 2666 and Obama!

Book Depository interview

 http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/intervie…

Herald Feature

 http://www.herald.ie/entertainment/hq/re…

Here’s the Culture Northern Ireland interview with Friar Murphy, conducted last Wednesday.

 http://www.culturenorthernireland.org/ar…

And here’s the podcast.

 http://www.culturenorthernireland.org/me…