In light of our recent separation, I have decided to take a vow of celebacy for a year and blog about the experience. Here is day one. http://bymyselfny1.wordpress.com/

“We are all born mad, some remain so.”

Widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century Samuel Barclay Beckett was born on a Good Friday, the thirteenth of April 1906, in an area called Foxrock on the southern side of the city of Dublin. The Beckett’s were not a poorly family, Samuels father was a civil engineer, a job that afforded young Beckett with his own private tennis court out the back of the house and an education at the Portora Royal School up north in County Fermanagh, the same school Oscar Wilde had attended a half century before him. He was a first rate athlete and played cricket for Dublin University.
After graduating from Trinity College in 1927 he taught college briefly in Belfast before moving on to Paris to Lecture on English at l’ Ecole Normale Superieure where he was introduced to another young Irish writer by the name of James Joyce. The two men became close and Beckett helped Joyce researching his stream of nonsenseness, Finnegan’s Wake. Beckett’s first published work was an essay defending Joyce’s work method.

After Beckett spurned the advances of Joyce’s daughter Lucia who was suffering from schizophrenia the relationship between the two men became strained. Beckett returned to Dublin to lecture at Trinity College but the life was not for him and within the year he had retired. But he was writing. In 1931 he published a critical essay on Proust and after the death of his father entered psychoanalysis for two years attending in that time a lecture given by Carl Jung a lecture that would influence his later work most notably Waiting For Godot.
Over the next five years Beckett continued to write and travel Europe, having his first novel rejected and a small book of poems published.  He wrote another novel Murphy which would be published in 1938. But Beckett’s ongoing relationship with his overbearing controlling mother culminated in a falling out that sent Beckett off to Paris again at the outbreak of the war where he said famously that he preferred “France at war to Ireland at peace.”

Soon after arriving back in Paris he and Joyce began to make the rounds again supping brew in the cafes of the left bank where Beckett met and had a brief dalliance with the wealthy young American art collector Peggy Guggenheim. The romance was brief and shortly thereafter Beckett was seriously stabbed in the chest after an altercation with a pimp. Joyce being more familiar with this terrain than his old friend organized a private room for Beckett at the hospital and helped him through his recovery.

Another person who showed up to help nurse him through his recovery was a thirty seven year old woman named Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumeshnil whom he had met briefly before. Suzanne would be by his side for the rest of his life, supporting him, helping him get published.
After the war Beckett settled in Paris and continued to write. Jean Paul Sartre published a short story Beckett had submitted not realizing that Beckett had only submitted the first half of the story. Simone de Beauvoir then refused to publish the second half of the story after the mix-up was brought to light.

 But it was the play Waiting for Godot that would finally put Beckett on the map after the play was published in 1952 and performed shortly after to critical success in Paris in 1953 when Beckett was forty seven years old. The play went on to London a couple of years later but was panned by the critics but in New York they loved it and the Irish critics shared their adulation. One critic at the time wrote, Beckett “has achieved a theoretical impossibility- a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats.”
Beckett was a star, television, radio, and cinema soon followed, his work was suddenly being watched both sides of the Atlantic.
Beckett and Suzanne were married in a secret service in 1961 even though Beckett was also having a relationship with a woman called Barbara Bray who was a script editor for the BBC, a relationship that also endured until his death.

After Beckett won the Noble prize in 1969 he became reclusive withdrawing from the onslaught of attention the title brought with it. He would remain in seclusion with Suzanne for the rest of his life. Suzanne died on the seventeenth of July 1989 suffering from emphysema and possibly Parkinson’s disease, Samuel Beckett died on Dec 22 that same year in a nursing home. The two are interred together Cimitiere du Montparnasse in Paris under a single headstone that in keeping with Beckett’s final wishes that it be “any color, as long as it’s gray.”

When the first reports of layoffs at the big publishing houses started to make news late last year I comforted myself with the fact that it was merely a reflection of a battered economy. Jobs were being slashed across the board everyone was struggling to make ends meet it was only natural that cutbacks would have to be made. When the storm passed, I assured myself, and the economy regained its composure, the publishing houses would bounce back with renewed vigor and all would be well with the world once more.
This was a big concern for me in the closing days of last year as I was about to see the publication of my first book. After twenty years of failed attempts I was finally at the starting gate. This was no time for trouble in the publishing world.
By the end of January I was reading the news that the last bookstore in Laredo Texas would close its doors. I felt the first pang of fear; what if this really was the beginning of the end of the book business as we know it. The kindle had arrived and the rumors were circulating that maybe we didn’t need books anymore. Here was a device that could fit an entire library of books into a pocket of your backpack. I began to notice commuters with the device on the subway. These were harmless technophobes I convinced myself, geekazoids, who just had to be seen with the latest device. It wouldn’t last. This just wasn’t natural. People need to hold a real book in their hands, right? Wrong. Within a matter of days there were as many commuters in any given subway car reading from the device as there were people reading actual books. Overnight it seemed the stigma of screen reading had vanished.
Then two weeks ago Steve Jobs appeared, the Willy Wonka of the tech world, brandishing his latest life-changing, must-have-it-gadget, the i-pad; a slim biscuit of a thing little bigger than a Wonka bar. Here was a reading device you could flaunt. This sexy little book killer was so seductive it would have people reading Joyce who’d never held a book in their hands before. People whose only contact with paper before now had been when they reached for something to wipe themselves with would be ordering Dante’s Inferno just so they could show their friends that they owned it. Wasn’t that the point of having all those books lining your walls in the first place; so people could see how smart you really were? Well now you could bring your library to dinner, to the movies, to a nightclub. With a tap of your finger on that magical screen you could produce the ultimate fashion accessory; the entire works of Shakespeare. You could snort coke off this thing in a bathroom stall while reading the Wall Street Journal.
Yes here was the final death knell I’d been fearing. Jobs had delivered the axe. The publishing world, as we have come to know it, is crumbling.
On its first day off the rack the iPad sold 300, 000 units. That’s 300 000 potential book library assemblers in one day. The possibilities for a publishing revolution are enormous. Within twenty four hours there were 250 000 e-book downloads on the i-pad alone.
Five years ago we had heard these same stories circulating in the music industry and we all know how that turned out. The iPod basically shuttered the compact disc business overnight. Here in Manhattan we watched aghast as one music store after another pulled the pin. You don’t need a compact disc anymore than you need an old vinyl (unless of course you are a collector of artifacts) when we want music we simply download it. There is no escaping the fact that sooner rather than later the book business will succumb to this same fate. Let’s face it books are on the verge of extinction. It is the inevitable progression of evolution.
Which brings me to my point. I have been an avid book collector for most of my adult life. I’ve attended book reading and signing events around town for the last twenty years. It was a way of meeting the author, of getting a good look at him/her up close and personal. To hear the words in the author’s own voice and if I was lucky to offer a few words of thanks, maybe get a picture taken and yes get my copy of the book signed.
What happens to all that when the bookstores close? What happens when the latest Don DeLillo tome is released only on e-book. What should I have him sign then, and where? Yes of course the big guys will still get a gig at the 92nd St Y. We’ll still be able to pay forty or fifty bucks to see James Paterson interview Stephen King about what a drag it is being a gazillionaire, but what about the little guy, the new guy in town, ME. Better still what about the first time author who’s still out there right now hunting for an agent? Where will he take his book on tour, that’s if he can find a publishing house that will bother to give his book a physical release at all?
These questions may seem a little apocalyptically inclined but ten years ago how many of us would have predicted the current state of the music industry. Most musicians I know who have been on the scene for the past twenty years are learning to accept and adapt to the challenges of this new frontier. Some are even excited about the prospects of finally eliminating the middle man, no more agents and record companies to finance. For every dollar earned for a hit on i\tunes they are pocketing roughly 80cents. No more bending to the latest demographic, indeed many are feeling free for the first time in years to create music they actually care about. You tube, MySpace, facebook and twitter are the new publicists in town.
Fifteen years ago I heard that Allen Ginsberg was going to do a rare reading in Paterson New Jersey. I took the afternoon off work and drove out there with a friend. Here was an opportunity to meet one of the great literary icons of the last century. On our way there my friend informed me that Ginsberg had been diagnosed with cancer and that in all likelihood would not be with us much longer. I was shocked and saddened to see how frail he appeared and when I approached him to have him sign a copy of my book I felt a little pathetic at bothering this old man when he obviously wasn’t in the best condition for socializing. He was distant and gracious, barely more than registering my presence. I drove home feeling like a vulture that’d swooped in to peck at his still twitching carcass. He was dead within a matter of months.
Since Orangutan was published in January I too have been educating myself in the vast new array of networking tools at my disposal, now I have a facebook page and a MySpace address, I have a website where I blog occasionally, I even post clips of my latest readings on You Tube. I have come to know other authors through their networking sites also and I am realizing that in many ways it is a much more effective medium for learning about the lives of those we read. Just this morning I was looking through a fresh batch of family photographs that the author Nick Flynn had published on his facebook page and I was touched to see how happy he was with his daughter in these little intimate snapshots. I too have daughter much the same age and occasionally I will do the same thing (post a few pics of her on my facebook page) and even though it is more revealing in many aspects of who I really am, I feel much less vulnerable than I would standing in front of a room full of a hundred or so strangers. In a sense, I am free to expose myself but I am also protected somewhat in case there’s a vulture out there waiting to tear a lump out of me too.
I will be heartbroken if we lose the bookstores, they are a source of sustenance for me, and I will be forever a little hungry without them and I will be devastated if the physical book form disappears completely but most of the new generation who are finding authors and musicians they love and follow today are unfettered by the history I bring with me to these artifacts. By the time my daughter is in her teens Mister Jobs will have probably figured out how to download the entire library of congress directly into her memory bank for less than the price of a cup of coffee. You won’t read a new book you’ll inject it or drop it in pill form.
For now I have decided to keep buying the books that I love. I will take them with me into the future so that one day when people are sick of losing their entire libraries to a computer virus my daughter will have a library at hand. A room full of history, actual books with their own personal histories and stories and once in a while when she opens one of those books her face will brighten with a sense of wonder as she leans in to examine what that author has scrawled there in his own feeble hand, maybe a few words to her father.

Maeve was born in Ranalegh, a suburb on the south side of Dublin on Jan 6 1917. Her father, Robert Brennan, was an Irish nationalist deeply involved in the republican upheaval of the time. For his involvement in the 1916 rising he was originally sentenced to death but the sentence was changed instead to a prison sentence. Maeve was born while he was in Prison. After his release he continued working for Sinn Fein and after a few more spells in the can he was eventually given the job of Irelands first ambassador to the US. The Brennan’s moved to Washington when Maeve was 17 years old.
Maeve by all accounts was an alluring beauty. She carried herself with a wild and dazzling air of indifference. Everywhere she went men were smitten. After studying English at the American University in Washington she moved to New York where her father pulled a few strings to help get her in the door as a fashion copy editor at Harper’s Bazaar. But like all young writers then and now she had her sights set higher up the literary ladder. She persevered and before long she had managed to publish a short piece in the New Yorker.
Soon after, William Shawn offered her a staff job at the magazine. Maeve had landed the role that would come to define most of her public and private life. She started writing amusing little social observances under the pseudonym, The Long Winded Lady. She was widely read and in the literary orbit of The New Yorker she became a minor celebrity. The story has it she fell hard for the theatre critic Walter Kerr who broke her heart when he ended their romance to marry someone else. Maeve had barely begun to grieve the loss when she had set her sights on the resident New Yorker rogue/writer St Clair McKelway.
The pair were married for a tumultuous booze soaked five years after which Maeve really knuckled down and wrote some of her best short stories. She was a serious writer striving to make her mark in the masculine literary world of the 40’s and 50’s America. William Shawn admired her work and her spirit and began publishing her short autobiographical stories on a regular basis, but just when she was beginning to finally see the fruits of her efforts Maeve began exhibiting signs of mental illness. She struggled for years to battle the encroaching madness but her alcoholism only served to exacerbate an already deteriorating sense of self.
Over the next ten years she would bounce from one flop house to another down west 42nd even sneaking in late and sleeping in the bathroom stalls at the New Yorker offices until she eventually wound up homeless in the streets. William Shawn tried in vain to keep her on at the magazine payroll long after she was producing any work worth paying for. On more than one occasion she could be seen, her makeup and hair askew, handing the money he had just given her to passing strangers, hookers and drug addicts, along 42nd Street.
An elderly lady I met recently who was close with Maeve at about this time described the horror of meeting her in the street around Times Square and bringing her into a café to try and coax her into eating only to have Maeve break down and howl in the restaurant like a wounded animal until they were asked to leave. Maeve would disappear then and resurface intermittently looking for money or a place to stay but it was a battle she wouldn’t win. Maeve was eventually committed to St Lawrence Hospital where she remained until she died a virtual unknown in 1993 at the age of 76.
Since her death Maeve Brennan has gained a new readership many being newly introduced to her story through the biography, Maeve Brennan by Angela Burke (2004). Burke suggests that it was Maeve who was the inspiration for the character of Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. If only the latter half of Maeve’s life could have been so romantic, unfortunately for Maeve there would be no Hollywood ending.

Taken after I first arrived in NY 1988.

Ask an Irishman to name five great Irish writers and nine out of ten times he’s going to mention Behan.  Behan, Behan, Behan, God do we all love our auld Brendy stories.  They might even tell you one about him arriving in Canada and he sees a billboard near the airport that reads “Drink Canada Dry,”  “So I did.” says he.  But ask any of them to give you a brief synopsis of any one of his books or plays and you’ll see a sudden switch in their demeanor, the hand reaching for the face, the thumb rubbing of the chin, the puzzled wrinkling of the forehead, for in truth most of them only know the name, they’ve heard he was a great writer or something to that effect, but that’s about the height of it, but at least they are aware that he was one at all and a writer of some notoriety at that.  In fairness that notoriety has done our good Mr Behan little harm over the years, it has secured his place in the Irish literary pantheon forever, although, if you ask me, had he not the oversized drunken personality to accompany his words few of us would remember his name today.    So who was Brendan Behan?

Brendan was born in Dublin (through no fault of his own), on Feb 9 1923.  His father was a house painter and his mother was a devout republican, a close friend of Michael Collins no less.  It’s rumored Brendan got started on the bottle early, the story is that his grandmother took insult to a passerby remarking on eight year old Brendan’s drunken appearance, “Isn’t it terrible ma’am to see such a beautiful child deformed.” the stranger says.  “How dare you,” granny snapped back, “He’s not deformed he’s drunk.”  That same year he published his first poem “Reply of a Young Boy to pro-English Verses.”  A drunk Irish writer at eight, the poor bastard never stood a chance.

By the age of thirteen Brendan had left school to become a house painter and shortly thereafter signed up with Fianna Eireann, the IRA’s youth organization. At sixteen Behan headed to England on a solo (and unauthorized) mission to blow up the Liverpool docks, he was arrested and sentenced to three years in Borstal.  In 1942 at the age of nineteen he was tried for the attempted murder of two detectives in Dublin at a commemoration ceremony for Wolfe Tone.  He was sentenced to 14 years in Prison and served time in both Mountjoy and then the Curragh before being released on amnesty in 1946.  A year later he was back inside for attempting to free another republican out of Manchester Jail. 

Behan’s jail time would supply most of the material for his writing career, his boozing would do the rest.  He wrote his first play “The Landlady,” while still in Mountjoy.  But even after his release from prison he still felt trapped, he wanted to escape the confines of Irish culture to free himself creatively. Interestingly enough about this time he met Patrick Kavanagh the two drank together quite a bit and Behan even volunteered to paint Kavanagh’s  flat for him, famously saying later that the flat was such a mess, knee deep in a soup cans, empty whiskey bottles, and old newspapers that it was the only flat he’d ever had to “wipe his feet upon leaving.”  The two men would remain at each other’s throats for most of their careers, Behan referred to Kavanagh as “The Fucker from Mucker” and in turn Kavanagh refused to stand for the Irish National Anthem, (it having been penned by none other than Behan’s uncle Peadar Kearney)  Sick of it all Behan moved to Paris in the early 1950’s but he was already drinking heavily and spent most of his time there simply trying to survive and finance his binges.  He returned to Ireland and in 1954 received his first big break with his play “The Quare Fellow,” The play started in “The Pike,” in Dublin and went all the way to the West End putting Brendan well and truly on the map.

But with fame came more money for booze and Behan went at it like a dog to a wet bone.  Over the next six years he would do most of the writing he is remembered for; the play “The Hostage”  1957, and then his autobiographical novel, “Borstal Boy.”  of which the 1950’s literary critic Kenneth Tynan wrote “”While other writers hoard words like misers, Behan sends them out on a spree, ribald, flushed, and spoiling for a fight.” Behan was now a major voice and a major Irish drinker.  As his fame swelled so did his liver.  He threw himself though the last few years of his life with complete alcoholic abandon.  He developed diabetes and staggered drunkenly through a series of diabetic comas and seizures.  He visited New York where he stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, roaring and singing though the lobby at all hours and up in his room dictating the forgettable, “Brendan Behan’s Island” and “Brendan Behan’s New York.”  These were lazy attempts at a paycheck, he was too drunk and ill by now to even hold the pen.  “I am a drinker with a writing problem.”  He said famously.  But in fairness  he was it’s reverse also. 

In March 1964 Behan collapsed at the Harbor Lights Bar, he was shipped to Meath hospital in central Dublin where he died 20^th March 1964.  He was buried at Glasnevin Cemetery where he received an Irish Republican Army funeral.   He was 41 years old.

Jill Dearman interviewed me for Barnes and Noble for St Patricks day and here it is. Happy St Patricks day. The pic is of Erica minding my table at the recent Manhattan Book fair. 
http://bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Unabashedly-Bookish-The-BN/Happy-St-Patrick-s-Day-from-Wild-Irish-Author/ba-p/498660

Let me start by saying I am sick of myself.  Sick of promoting myself.  Sick of seeing myself and encouraging news of myself so I have decided to use my blog page here instead to highlight Irish writers past and present.  These are writers I grew up reading and hearing about, writers whose words have tinkled the ivory keys of my own heart and left music writ there forever to hum along through blood and mind like the sound of a brook after fresh rain.  Writer number one; for no particular reason other than he has been on my mind of late is Patrick Kavanagh.   Kavanagh was born in the townland of Mucker near the village of Inniskeen, County Monaghan on the border of Northern Ireland, 21 Oct 1904, not more than a half hours drive from my own home in County Tyrone.  He was the 4th eldest of ten children raised and worked on a farm by his father, a simple man who doubled as a shoemaker.  By the age of thirteen, a voracious reader, Kavanagh was done with school and worked the farm with his dad.  He was writing poetry already but didn’t see his first piece published until he was twenty four.  He continued on the farm restlessly for the next ten years before saying, to hell with this I need to be a writer, and at the age of 34 jumped on a ship for London.  Well he didn’t last long there, with their long faces and murderous glances, he decided he’d be better off among his own crowd and five months later he returned to settle in Dublin.  He was an awful hoore for the drink, our Pat, and could be seen staggering from pub to pub down O’Connell St on any given day. But he wrote like a brute publishing his first major poem The Great Hunger at the age of 38.  It was a work that sparked immediate controversy due to it’s masturbating protagonist Patrick Maguire and was seized and banned upon pressure from the Catholic church for it’s indency.  Kavanagh continued to write and to drink so that by the time he was fifty although he’d kept writing and publishing here and there along the way he was a mess, a nasty drunk of some repute, the drink was robbing him of his gifts, “Alcohol is the enemy of creativity.”  he said.  In 1954 at the age of 50 he was diagnosed with cancer and had one lung removed, the experience shook some life back into him and he settled into a period of renewed vigor and  a more grounded period of writing, giving lectures at home and in America, he even married his long time companion Katherine and saw the publication of Kavanaghs Collected Poems, where he wrote “A man innocently dabbles in rhymes and words and finds that it is his life.”  The same year he fell ill during the opening performance of a play based on his first banned novel “Tarry Flynn” and he died a week later at the age of 63.   In Feb 2002 actor Russel Crowe, a fan of Kavanaghs, throttled the producer of the Bafta awards in London after they cut short Crowes recital of a four line Kavanagh poem, “To be a poet and not know the trade/ To be a lover and repel all women/Twin ironies by which great saints are made/The agonising pincer jaws of heaven.”  Kavanagh would have enjoyed the controversy no doubt.  He might also have chuckled that a statue of him resides now in Disney World outside the bar Raglan Road, called for his most famous and enduring poem to date.  To hear renditions of Raglan Road by the likes of  Luke Kelly, Dire Straits and my personal current favorite Sinead O’Connor go to You Tube and have a  listen, you won’t be disapointed, Kavanaghs poetry has risen from the dirt and will live on.

My good friend Chris Campion, the first guy to escape from the lock down ward at Bellevue mental institution since 1973, will do a reading tonight at Mug Lounge in the East Village. E13 and Ave A.  I will read for a few minutes and then Chris will read for a bit and if you wanted a book we’ll have a few at hand and then Chris will play a few tunes with his band The Knock Out Drops.  So if you’re in the mood to hang, come on down.  We will be there. Tues. Feb 23 2010.   Chris is the guy who introduced me to my agent three years ago without knowing me or ever having read a word I’d written.  Dec 29 2009 both our books were released in paperback the same day and then wound up sitting side by side in most stores.  Is it just me or does that seem a little fortuitous.  Life sure is a silly bugger sometimes.

This is a picture of the actual painting that the cover of Orangutan was taken from. It was painted by a good friend of mine John Hyams about fifteen years ago. The painting is actually titled Self Portrait. This is what John looked like back then. The picture of the painting I have posted here doesn’t do justice to the detail of the actual painting. I have seen a few other paintings he has done and he is an amazing artist. He is also a director. He has directed a couple of documentaries and recently got a shot at directing his first feature; Universal Soldier Regeneration. He has taken a simple John Claude Van Damme vehical and infused it with whatever heart and art he could get away with and the critcis are raving, about the movie, but in particular about John Hyams and what he has done with the movie. Take my word for it, this is a director to watch out for in the future. You haven’t heard the last of John Hyams, not by a long shot. And yes, the chimpanzee is loading a revolver.