WITH MANY a merry cry of Shave a bullock , I leap from the Cz na Mara train wherein I had been royally entertained by three screaming toddlers for three hours into the light refreshing rain of the dear wesht.
Moments later I am in the downstairs bar of the Great Southern Hotel watching the snooker on the big screen and eating the burger and chips the girl from the Arts Council couldn t finish. Shortly afterwards I am upstairs for the festival launch where one of the speakers tells us, We re in the next century already. While digesting this (more successfully than the burger) I am joined by ace Scottish poet Don Paterson whose second collection, God s Gift To Women, I have brought along for him to sign. His own latest gift to a woman, twins, has kept him awake for the last six months.
While he inscribes his name I ramble off to inscribe my own in the visitors book. NAME/ADDRESS is no problem but COMPANY gives me pause. Rita Ann Higgins, local poet, has written No-one . In the end I put Bad and look up into the big brown eyes of the gentleman in whose little grey home I am to reside during the subsequent culturefest.
In less time than it takes to drink as much free wine as I can, we are in the Festival Club in Brennan s Yard where the man in front of me turns around and proves to be a famous novelist. I m sorry, I say, I didn t recognise the back of your head. I ll have to show it to you more often, he replies, turning back to the bar. And so the long night wears on.
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Next day I show up at the Town Hall Theatre to catch TV pundit and poet Tom Paulin reading from his latest collection The Wind Dog a wind dog being a fragment of the rainbow left hanging in the sky (for all you Trivial Pursuit fans out there). This is what Paulin terms a Cento. A cento is a collection of fragments linked by commentary, such as Eliot s The Waste Land. In the extract he reads I spot Masefield, McNiece, Kipling, Joyce, Yeats, Swift and Mahon. I enjoy this so much I buy the book. You ought to buy it too.
Two hours later I attend a reading by Vincent Woods, author of the Druid Theatre hit, At The Black Pig s Dyke. The best thing he reads is a cycle of poems about a man maddened by his identification with Christ. At one point however he refers to a scarecrow Keeping the crows off the turnips . For all I know crows may be crazy about turnips, but I have never seen one go near a vegetable. I asked top sculptor Eamon O Doherty (whom I met later in a pub) about this and he told me that as far as he knew crows plucked out sheep s eyes When they aren t looking . I was thinking of buying a turnip and hanging it out the window in the remote local inhabited by my host to see if it attracted any crows. Then a passing novelist remarked, For the love of God will you shut up about turnips. Who cares what crows eat? I m going mad I tell you, mad. So I didn t bother.
Later that evening Tom Paulin turns up again at the Irish Times Debate chaired by Mary Holland, subject: Is there a Northern Irish culture? . The other performers are top painter Felim Egan and Advisor to David Trimble, Stephen King. Overcoming the temptation to ask Stephen where he gets all those great ideas for horror stories, I fall into a light doze after about an hour of fairly inconclusive interaction. There was, as someone later put it, No blood on the stage or anything.
The Nobel prizewinners being busy, this year s hot ticket was Professor Germaine Greer. Her lecture The Impossibility Of Non-Fiction is packed to the gills. The professor certainly knows how to work the crowd and plays it for laughs. This body was made of white wine. I do not carry a handbag. I have no use for an external uterus.
Tall at the lectern, she resembles nothing so much as Alistair Sim playing the headmistress in the Belles of St Trinians. Arms akimbo, spectacles flashing, she gives it to anyone who had included her in novels or newspapers hot and heavy. The question she least likes being asked is What s Clive James like in bed? She would answer that sort of question in private, she says, not that she had slept with him anyway. Salman Rushdie is all annoyed at her too, because she advised him to deny The Satanic Verses. The text is there, she explained. It ll be there in cyberspace. Now he will not speak to her.
Anyhow, the burden of Greer s talk is that one cannot impose narrative pace on life and, as the text is durable and the flesh passeth away, what remains is a lie. Still staunchly feminist ( I have put millions of woman hours into my work ) she elects to take questions from the applauding throng as follows, I ll take the first two questions from women. Then from a man. As she warmed to her task, Oz broke through Cambridge occasionally and before she left the stage I wouldn t have been a bit surprised if she d begun bunging Gladdies to the happy possums below. A nice night s entertainment.
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Other things I really enjoyed at Cuirt were the extract from Tommy Tiernan s first (as yet unpublished) novel, in which the protagonist finds himself shooting an attack dog in both buttocks in a canal; top author, broadcaster and journalist Andrew Graham Dixon s slide show about the Renaissance, and, not least, his own excellent story about getting locked into the Bishop of Guildford s lavatory, kicking a hole in the door, falling backwards while extricating himself and landing on the washbasin, which broke off flooding the room and finally shouldering down the door and entire frame before going on to the vestry to give a talk on Vandalism in the Early English Church .
Dixon made Medici and their artisans live. His account of Sigismondo De Malatesta the only man aside from Judas Iscariot to be guaranteed a place in hell by an exasperated church was more interesting than all the history lessons I ever dozed through. Plus which, he turned out to be a diamond geezer in real life and quite the life and soul of the Festival Club. I bought a copy of his A History Of British Art and so should you.
But don t put your copy where Julian Gough can spill a pint on it.
Congratulations to last-minute first-time Director Helen Carey for smoothing my path (and everyone else s) through this maze. And thanks particularly to James C., Dolores, Mary (for the crash), Mattie and Trish (for the crack) and Jennifer (for the hair).