… to Bill Flanagan. Bewitching as ever. You can also download the pdf.

 http://www.bobdylan.com/conversation

“I gotta say, when I see it hung, I’m pleased.”

24 hours before the opening of his latest exhibition, Guggi, born Derek Rowan, reclines in an office room in the Kerlin Gallery, mere yards from where the fruit of his last few years of work adorns the walls.

“It’s a strange thing,” he says, “you don’t really know the exhibition you have just done until you see it hung.”

Guggi looks exactly like what he is: an ex avant-garde rock musician turned painter. Lean, with shoulder length hair and lupine features, he appears significantly younger than his 50 years. His paintings eschew the fireworks, flamboyance and shock-theatricality one might expect from a former Virgin Prune. No abstract expressionist action paintings or Bosch-like horror shows here. The work is simple, contemplative, Spartan. Vessels are his vessels: still life studies of jugs, cups and bowls, painted on board instead of canvas, and of late adorned with interpolations of text that look like the remnants of some lost Soviet dialect. This is his fourth exhibition with the Kerlin, located on Anne’s Lane, off South Anne Street in Dublin. A flip through the price list tells the casual browser that one of these paintings can be yours for anything up to 28,000 euros.

“I used to be a vegetable man when I was a kid,” Guggie says, “and the way the way I try to price things is the same as a bag of potatoes is priced in the corporation market: supply and demand. And the reality is, art is no different to a bag of spuds. So I try to get the pricing right, whereby the demand is a little bit greater than the supply. And the few quid that you don’t take in, that you could’ve, turns to a little bit of excitement. Whatever the market price determines your work is worth, you have a duty to your gift to get that, because if you don’t get it somebody else will. It’s all incredibly secondary to the art, but you can’t help notice things.”

What kinds of things?

“Just to give you an example, I had people coming up to me for so long saying, ‘I would so love to own one of your paintings but I can’t afford anything – I don’t know why you can’t do something small that ordinary people can buy.’ So I did these little oil paintings on canvas-board, and I said, ‘I’m gonna keep the price right down and put three or four in the gallery in a group show, and anybody that can’t afford to buy a big painting, if they really want one, they might like one of these.’ The four of them sold immediately and went to public auction a few weeks later for twice the price. That was a very cheap way of learning an important lesson.”

As the former member of a band of self-styled subversive artists, what’s Guggi’s take on the Biffo on the Bog controversy, whereby artist and schoolteacher Conor Casby came under fire from the Fianna Fail power bloc, and indeed the Gardai, for planting nude caricatures of Taoiseach Brian Cowan in the Royal Hibernian Academy and National Gallery?

“I thought it was a bit harsh. The artist probably didn’t do it for terribly bad reasons, I mean, it was a very good caricature. I really think the baddies in all of it are the newspaper that printed it and made a big deal out of it. They made the mountain out of the molehill. The lady whose newspaper it was in was on the Late Late Show giving painfully stupid, obvious answers: ‘We have the right to report the news, we think it’s newsworthy.’

“And in the light of him (Cowan) being a family man with daughters and so on, I thought it was wrong. Not on behalf of the artist, because it was well enough done to convince me that it was worth doing, I thought it was incredibly well executed. But about two days after that I saw part of the image in, I think, one of the Sunday papers. It didn’t show him actually sitting on the bog, but it did show part of the top half of him, I think, holding a toilet roll. And then somebody had done some naked thing of Bertie (Ahern), probably just for the same article, and it was dreadfully badly executed, absolutely clueless.”

One of ten Rowan siblings reared in the northside of Dublin, Guggi is self-taught. When asked if artists compensate for lack of formal training with an exaggerated approach to discipline, he says, “I do have what you described, but I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t formally study painting. While I would accept that for some painters it’s absolutely correct to study it formally, I really believed at a young age that it wasn’t right for me.”

By way of illustration, he recalls being enrolled for Saturday afternoon art classes by his mother when he was 12 years old. After Guggi had spent about an hour and a half sketching a still life study of a glass or a bottle, the art teacher used a heavy pencil to go over the lines he’d drawn, changing the shape of his composition. Guggi bristled at the imposition.

“Now it might have been my naivety,” he admits, “but I actually thought mine was so much better than his, and I didn’t want to draw like him, I wanted to draw like myself. And I think it was at that moment in time I decided, ‘I’m never gonna do this again.’ I was very sure I didn’t want to go to Art College.”

Instead he found a surrogate family in the form of the fabled Lypton Village collective that spawned the Virgin Prunes and U2. Part teenage gang, part secret Surrealist society, its members included Bono, Edge and Gavin Friday. A remarkably close-knit lot, their friendships have endured for most of their lives.

“My friendship with Bono goes back, I think I was four and he was three, he lived across the road,” Guggi says. “We were attracted to each other, all of us when we were young kids. In our early teens we met Gav and were fascinated by this other oddment on the street and realised we weren’t the only ones. One thing we probably had in common that a lot of kids maybe didn’t have was the importance that we put on friendship. And I guess looking back on it all we might have all been a bit lost.”

Guggi was the first to break from the Virgin Prunes fold to pursue art as a vocation. And while his mates devoted themselves to music, they never completely abandoned the visual arts. Before embarking on his solo career, Friday took a sabbatical to paint, while Bono used the medium as therapy to offset the pressures of the Joshua Tree sessions. They shared a studio throughout 1986. One wonders how the dynamic of the friendship changed within the context of painting – did they now regard Guggi as the master?

“I think they might have described it like that, but I certainly wouldn’t have seen it like that. I mean, the marks that Gav makes on a canvas with paint are very different to anybody I’ve ever come across. I don’t think I would have been any influence. He didn’t care about how you did it; he just knew the colour that he wanted and the mark that he wanted to make. Bono might have said to me, ‘What do you think about this?’ but while he would ask me, he’d never take my advice. But that was a wonderful experience for me, because painting with your mates, I think any situation that you find yourself out of the norm, and you’re painting, in some way stands to you.

“We had an exhibit in the Hendricks Gallery, it opened on the 12th of January 1988. I think my first solo show in the Kerlin Gallery was about 1990, and that would have been the start of trying to paint as an adult. Anything that went before showed technical understanding and good craft, but I don’t think it said an awful lot more than that. And I suppose it’s what you decide to do with the craft that is in some way part of you.”

And what Guggi does with the craft is bestow significance upon apparently humble objects. His paintings evoke an almost Buddhist regard for the correct presentation of commonplace things – a bowl of rice, a jug of water, a cup of tea.

“I’m a great believer in, if a stroke isn’t needed in a painting, it can’t be there,” he says. “But when the background starts to come together and you see how the jug should be shaped and where it should be placed and at what angle and what colour it should be, there’s a huge amount of information that can come across in what can seem like an extremely simple painting.

“This is what’s fascinating me more and more, and with the wooden paintings, they allow me to be a lot more immediate and more instinctive, and even if I change my mind regarding a mark that I wanted to put on it, I’ll paint over that, but you can still see the mark coming through, so the history of the thinking that has gone into this is still apparent. The very fact that I felt so strongly about putting it there in the first place I think should be represented in the finished result, it becomes part of the background, which means I was right, but I wasn’t right in the way that I thought I was. And that is what these paintings are about in some ways: that every mark is an honest one.”

…in the form of man.

Massive Attack’s Live With Me, featuring Terry Collier.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSxui0uFr…

“In October 2008, before his death, (JG) Ballard’s literary agent Margaret Hanbury brought a manuscript from Ballard with the working title Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life to the Frankfurt Book Fair. The physician in question is oncologist Professor Jonathan Waxman of Imperial College, London, who was treating Ballard for prostate cancer. While it is in part a book about cancer, and Ballard’s struggle with it, it reportedly moves on to broader themes. Hanbury is in conversation with publishers.”

Tyrone-born author and poet Nick Laird’s second novel Glover’s Mistake might masquerade as a cosmopolitan psychodrama with one foot in the internet and the other in the art world, but don’t let that put you off. It’s really a beautifully written novel of manners every bit as politely savage as Barry Lyndon or Age Of Innocence, transposed to 21st Century London.

“I was trying to do something a little bit like that,” Laird, a dark, quietly spoken 35-year-old, says over morning coffee in Brooks Hotel in Dublin. “I wanted to make it like a small chamber drama. The first book (Utterly Monkey) I felt was too much stuff: too big, too fast, too silly, too comic, and I wanted to slow it all down and make very little happen and give a wee bit of room to the style more. I’m interested in writing sentences, and the style in the first one seemed tacked on top of the story.”

It may sound silly when authors talk about writing sentences, but it’s at a sentence level that Laird’s magic happens. A poet to the core, he is the master of the perfectly plucked image. A weekend-bound businessman wrenches his tie off like he’s pulling a cobra from around his neck. Early evening in December is collapsed into “the hour when the newspapers were skimmed and ineptly folded like road maps, abandoned on the vacant seats of tubes and trains and buses.”

Laird, who currently teaches creative writing at Columbia University in New York, where he currently lives with his wife Zadie Smith, is being a little hard on Utterly Monkey. A first book should be overambitious. Plus, it’s no small achievement to charm the notoriously draconian New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani, who praised its pace and style, likening it to a (good) Guy Richie film. But Glover’s Mistake is a whole other story, one that has the same relationship to love as an atheist does to god.

“It’s a dark wee book,” Laird admits. “I get so fed up of people saying there’s no characters they like in books in general. Some of my favourite books, there’s no one in it you’d like to actually know, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not good books. I kind of like David anyway!”

That’s the unsettling thing. The reader only gradually realises what a sad and sneaky character the main protagonist David Pinner is, and by that time we’ve come to empathise with him way too much for comfort.

“You’re supposed to corrupt the reader,” Laird says with a laugh. “If you recognise base impulses in the character within yourself, then you’re in some way implicated. Everyone has their little moments of jealousy or anger or duplicity. Books in which heroes are heroes are children’s books really.”

Laird’s novel also raises the rather scary idea that there now exists a generation of nerdy maladjusted loners who spend their lives addicted to blogging, myspacing, Facebooking, Twittering and surfing for porn. The abyss is online.

“Absolutely. I was thinking, what could I write about that couldn’t have been written about ten years ago? Not in a zeitgeisty way, but you always think, ‘What is happening now, to my people?’ And the Internet’s changing everything. You can sit in a room and have some form of connection that is mediated, and in a way it seems to lack consequence because of anonymity and these various shields that are put up in terms of distance. And I think the book suggests that these things always have consequence, whether it’s what it does to you, or for other people. David has been compromised in lots of ways by it.

“All the impulses anyone has, which in another time you couldn’t follow up on, the Internet has allowed you to become obsessive about. Googling your ex, commenting on websites, looking at pictures and accumulating friends on myspace, pornography, whatever it may be. You objectify yourself as a thing, so you give yourself status updates in the third person and then you send this image of yourself out to other people. It’s a presentation of yourself, which we all know about now we’re so attuned to advertising and everything else.

“Whenever I was living in Kilburn I found I could not work, my concentration was just getting shot by the Internet, constantly looking at property websites, checking my email, and eventually I got a pair of nail scissors and cut through the Internet cord. I could not fuckin’ do it anymore – but now I’ve got wireless in this flat in New York. I think the Internet has become this wee guy sitting, tapping on your shoulder the whole time, and you have to try and banish him.”

It’s also a new area of intrigue, one with grave potential for false intimacy and deceit. Despite the technology, it’s a very human subject.

“Yeah, because it’s what it’s doing to humans. And the answer is it’s changing the way they read, the way they focus, the way they understand things, the way they skip from thing to thing. To sit and read a book now is difficult for some people. It’s a weird machine for indulgence of every kind; it’s very dangerous. And it’s changing the nature of how we speak to each other. My wife had a Blackberry for a while there, and it was deadly. It was the first thing she looked at in the morning, the last thing she looked at at night, and every fuckin’ meal she would be on it, and I’d ask her to turn it off and she’d say, ‘I just have to do this thing.’ And then we had an argument and she threw it against a wall and broke it. I’ve never been so glad. And she herself will now say it’s great that she doesn’t have it, she feels freed in a way from it. You’re always on a leash, people can tug you when they want to.”

Shades of Wim Wenders’ Until The End Of The World, in which people become addicted to watching recordings of their dreams on hand-held monitors. They’re only freed when a rogue satellite knocks out all telecommunication systems, and they learn to heal themselves through storytelling, a return to narrative. A traditional and maybe sentimental idea, but…

“I was about to say, that is a such an old trope, and it’s a good trope, but nothing is more interesting to people than themselves. And even Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, this idea of something of something that’s so attractive and amazing that once you go towards it you’re sucked in and you can’t get away. The joke that’s so funny that it kills you. Or even those Ring movies, the idea of a new technology that’s so compelling that one is drawn into it. I’m sure there’s an old myth that has the same kind of thing.”

The story of Narcissus perhaps?

“It’s Narcissus. Of course it is. It’s Narcissus. You look at your own reflection in the water – which is exactly like looking into a laptop – and next thing you’re rooted. We’ve solved it!”

Glover’s Mistake is published by Harper Collins.

… is now online. Friar Murphy joined columnist Ann Marie Hourihane and Irish Times online editor Hugh Linehan to discuss Armando Ianucci’s debut film In the Loop, Dennis Kelly’s play Love and Money, Nick Laird’s book Glover’s Mistake and Dublin Made Me, the new CD by Liam O’Connor and Sean McKeon.
Stay tuned for our recent interview with Nick Laird.

 http://www.rte.ie/tv/theview/

Caroline Walsh in the Irish Times

John the Revelator has been shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2009 alongside Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, Hugo Hamilton’s Disguise, Deirdre Madden’s Molly Fox’s Birthday and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. The winner will be announced at Listowel Writers’ Week at the end of May.

“By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive Truth.”
– Yukio Mishima

… You make my heart sing.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–N9klJXb…