Both very gutteral the two of them…
A mostly inward weekend. During much of it I was working my way through the backlog of podcasts from the New York Review of Books. I’d subscribed on iTunes and made the mistake of adding all of my missed ones to my iPhone at once. They took up a lot of room so I determined to plow through them. while there was a lot of blather, I was also rewarded by the experience of listening to John Ashbery read as series of poems, and making an easy way through what has always seemed to be spiky and bewildering on the page. So much so that I began to get the jokes, and found myself laughing out loud on the subway a couple of times.
The most recent p-cast reminded me of a writer who has meant a lot to me since I first encountered him in college: Flann O’Brian, or more precisely Myles na Gopaleen, author of the column The Cruiskeen Lawn, which with the writings of S.J. Perelman marked the alpha and omega of my idealized post-adolescent snark. Consider this example.
Our current time is so saturated with the trappings of satire that real satire cannot gain purchase; we don’t need the satirist to kick over the sandcastle of our beliefs because we’ve already demolished them ourselves. But both of these men knew how to write funny, to think aslant and be willing to leave their readers puffing along behind them, without dropping breadcrumbs like “Why is it that when ever I go to the DMV…” Their humor is work fueled by devastating invention and assumes a level of conversance at least as high as that demanded of the reader by Ashbery.Tough to imagine the mind of of the editor of the Irish Times when faced by the latest piece of Cruiskeen Lawn copy, especially since it often required special illustrations or typographic arrangements that would have played hell with the page layout.
In the podcast that put me back in mind of na Gopaleen, the idea was tossed out that the column, taken as a whole, was a work that stood alongside the best of O’Brian’s novels and made me think further about what could be the experience of this blog, were I to apply myself to it with some devotion.
www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/show/25
www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/show/27
Oh by the way: Dalkey Archive Press (named after a Flann O’Brian novel) is one of the best presses out there. So why not buy stuff from them directly? Also I think it was my friend David Henderson who introduced me to O’Brian.
Tags: books, daily photo, humor, Myles na Gopaleen, NYRB, podcasts, reading