We open with a close-up of a young woman’s face, shot from below. She gazes downward into the camera, her light brown hair hanging so low as to almost touch the lens. Her eyes are wide with what seems a kind of maternal solicitousness. When she speaks, she does so very quietly and softly, with a mild European accent that is difficult to place. “Hey, sweetie,” she says. “Do you feel a little bit better?” She touches the lens—the viewer’s face, your face—with a gentle finger. “Yeah, you’re having a fever, hun. I just have a little bit of a wet towel. I’ll just put it on your cheeks a little bit, and your forehead, okay? Yeah? OK, sweetie?” She turns away from you for a moment, and when she turns back, she has a blue facecloth in her hand; with this she sets about gently dabbing and wiping your poor, fevered little brow. It is no fun being sick, she tells you. But she wants you to know that you, her sweetheart, are going to be okay. For a further 13 minutes or so, these moistly whispered reassurances continue, until finally the screen goes black, and the whispering fades to silence.

Read the rest at Slate

About six months ago, I bought an iPad through the online Apple Store. Some three or four business days later, a DHL guy appeared at my door and presented me with a rectangular package. I signed for it and carried it into the kitchen, where I selected from the cutlery drawer a knife sufficiently sharp and sturdy for the job of slicing open the formidable carapace of packaging. I removed the white plastic DHL bag, then made my way through the outer husk of plain cardboard to the compact tabernacle of the Apple packaging proper. As I did so, I became aware of a voice in my head. This voice was briskly self-assured, astringently American; it spoke not to me, but through me, and the words it spoke were these: Okay, let’s go ahead and unbox this sucker.

Read the rest at The Dublin Review

By the time I arrived at York Hall Health and Leisure Centre in Bethnal Green on Sunday, the Boring 2012 conference had been underway for about an hour, and I was concerned that I might already have had more than enough tedium for one day. Due to a combination of Irish fog and English gales, I had spent 90 minutes sitting on a runway in Dublin and a further 40 or so circling Heathrow as the plane awaited a landing slot. The irony of my morning—that I was subjecting myself to the boredom and frustration of air travel in order to attend a conference dedicated to the most boring topics imaginable—was not lost on me, but as my flight looped repeatedly over greater London, I was too bored and frustrated to properly appreciate it.

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On a drizzly late September night, about twenty people are seated in a circle in a small bookshop in Notting Hill. A dapper young man named Alex has just stood in front of the group and animatedly delivered a long, banal anecdote from his childhood about hijacking a home movie of his older brother playing violin for their parents. His story, punctuated with grandiose physical gestures and culminating in an overwrought violin-playing mime, is one of the last in a succession of similar efforts from the assembled group, as part of a workshop entitled “The Art of Rhetoric”. Giles Abbot, one of the workshop’s two teachers, is praising Alex’s story and delivery when one of the other attendees, a Romanian woman named Madalina, leaps out of her seat and begins shouting at Giles: “This is complete bullshit! How can you tell him he’s an engaging speaker when he’s terrible? I’m sorry but this is absolute bullshit, this whole thing.” She whips her coat off the back of her chair, very nearly lashing her neighbour in the face with it, and charges for the door, which she slams so hard behind her that the shop’s front windows rattle momentarily in the bemused silence.

Read the rest at The Racket

I didn’t find out about sex through my parents sitting me down and talking me through the basics. There were, thank God, no children’s books elucidating, through combinations of colored illustrations and chummily frank captions, the preposterous mechanics of what happens when a Mummy and Daddy love each other very much. As I suspect is the case with most children, I found out from my peers. My initial induction arrived, specifically, by way of a dirty limerick. I was nine or ten years old. I don’t have that many vivid memories from childhood, but this I do remember very clearly. I only heard the rhyme once, but it has stayed with me. As I recall, it was during a lunch hour in which we were all confined to the classroom, more than likely due to rain. One of the kids from one of the poorer neighborhoods, who was the youngest of seven or eight children in his family, announced that he had a funny rhyme which we all might be interested in hearing. It went more or less exactly as follows: “There was an old woman named Schneider/Who spat in the eye of a spider/The spider got thick/And took out his dick/And said he was going to ride her.” (“To get thick,” by the way, is Irish slang meaning to get angry, rather than to attain an erection, as the context of the rhyme might be thought to imply. “Ride” is probably self-explanatory, and will be a term well known to anyone who has read even a few pages of Roddy Doyle.)

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The Millions

My relationship with John Banville is a strange and unnatural one. In some odd sense I can’t quite identify, I often think that it might even be an unseemly one. A few months back, I finished a Ph.D., having written my thesis on Banville’s fiction. It took me about four years to complete, which means that over that period—at a rough calculation along the lines of a 42 hour working week and a 50 week working year—I spent something in the region of 8,400 hours engaged in activities that were directly Banville-related. 8,400 hours: that’s basically the equivalent of an entire calendar year spent reading his novels, thinking about them, reading and thinking about other academics’ opinions of them, formulating my own opinions, and thinking of clever things to write based on them. There’s nothing remarkable, of course, about a person spending a non-trivial portion of his or her life writing a doctoral thesis about the work of a single writer (university English departments are full of such misfits) but it is presumably fairly unusual for a person to spend four years writing a doctoral thesis on the work of someone who is not only still living and writing, but doing so within a couple of minutes’ walk from where that thesis is being written.

Dublin is a fairly small city. While I was working on my thesis in Trinity College, it wasn’t unusual for me to leave the library to go for a sandwich somewhere and to pass Banville on the street. It happened more than once that I would be having lunch and he would enter the restaurant and sit down a couple of tables away, or walk past the window with his fedora, his large and quaintly flamboyant scarf, and his mysterious canvas carrier bag.

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The Millions

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”—Blaise Pascal

“What’s the point in going out? We’re just going to wind up back here anyway.”—Homer Simpson

The novel is perhaps the most housebound of all art forms. At both ends of its supply chain, there is a fairly strong imperative to stay put. There have always been writers who practice their profession in unusual locations, of course, just as a certain amount of reading is always going to be done on the move—on buses, on trains, on planes. But the literary exchange is, for the most part, a sedentary one. Writers tend to hold up their end of the deal by sitting at a desk and staying there until the book is written; readers tend to hold up theirs by sitting still, book in hand, until it is read. “The novel,” as Martin Amis once observed, “is all about not going out of the house.”

Read the rest at The Millions