"And what about the cutting?" asks Madeleine Schwartz of Sally Rooney’s novels, in a piece for the NYRB. Somebody had to! The question reminded me of an observation by Zadie Smith in this 2017 interview.
Read MoreDragon doesn’t speak for the entire diaspora
Ah, “the Irish diaspora”. A wild and unwieldy group of which I have been a member since 2015. Few categories of people are trickier to quantify or define. This should make us tricky to appeal to, too, but naive politicians and political hopefuls try all the time.
Read MorePining for the pool
Between June 29 and September 10, I haul a Citi bike over the East River, a body of water as beautiful sparkling as it is staid, and careen down the other side of the bridge to Hamilton Fish Park. My relationship with the park is seasonal. Just one season! Summer.
The traffic of the Lower East Side is plentiful, relentless, and something residents of New York City are more or less inured to. Secure in the promise of my destination, I enjoy a layer of insulation against the urban squall. I wind my way to Hamilton Fish and join the hopeful others assembled silently at its locked gates. Ideally, it is not yet seven o’clock in the morning.
App idea #1
GAZE is an app designed for two groups of people: those who work from home, those whose work takes them away from home. It pairs an at-home worker (a) with a nomadic worker (b) in need of a break in the vicinity of (a).
Read MoreVisiting Cuba
The string of police checkpoints outside Havana was punctuated by hitchhikers hopefully extending folded peso notes to passing cars. Our 1954 Pontiac was – for four residents of New York City, at least – at capacity, a state interpreted by waiting Cubans as having adequate space for two or three more passengers.
Read More"Seems Harmful" (2017)
New York Fashion Week, baby!
Well, I went to Cuba
On "Tonight with Vincent Browne"
Little of what we read, view, or listen to in 2017 is not studiously concocted and refined. These are banner days for copy approval and the provision of questions ahead of time. Publicists and PR handlers are multiplying in number. “Content creation” is a dispiritingly profitable business. TV sets are futuristic, clinical, and politicians and others in public life are coached like Olympic gymnasts before release into these arenas.
How truly refreshing, then, to be able to turn to a show in which a green screen glitch might shave off a piece of a jaw or the tip of a nose. How satisfying to know there exists a programme that can’t really be trained for, so rough and disorderly it can be, so engulfed by crosstalk.
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Posters of the Women's March
Colm Tóibín has a lot to answer for
Colorful addition to this recent piece for the Irish Independent.
One-word review: laddish
My mom sent me a book of Ralph Waldo Emerson essays and all I could take from it was the following perfect quote
"Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might be built to entertain him a single day."
Nicholas Pell and the times we live in
I thought the piece was a crock. But, whatever.
However. If the Irish Times is as serious about "free speech" and the alleged facilitation of constructive debate as it has purported to be, it ought to have printed the piece, unchanged, in the days after its online debut (as planned).
The failure to print is the only evidence that there was anything other than consensus at the paper as to the merit of Pell's piece and the soundness of the editorial judgment that led to its publication. Which is interesting! To me.
Ladies and gentlemen, Peter Hanan!
Accompanying my December profile of Tillerson.
Instagram "best nine"
Of course, the best nine are grainy, stupid, and hardly "liked".
Zadie Smith, recorded, on recording
"I was in Germany recently, and it was a book party with a lot of younger people in it, people in their twenties, and I noticed -- it's become more intense across the years -- people in their twenties will enter a room and then perform at you, quite radically.
Read MoreT.S. Eliot to a friend, 1921
"The whole of contemporary politics etc. oppresses me with a continuous physical horror like the feeling of growing madness in one's own brain. It is rather a horror to be sane in the midst of this; it is too dreadful, too huge, for one to have the comforting feeling of superiority. It goes too far for rage."
In memoriam
We should be sad
"To me, the result constitutes an overwhelming assault on equality, stability, and decency. It constitutes victory for an America that is self-interested and irate to the point of studied unconcern about the running of the country. "
Read MoreBringing out a tweet
Prescient observation by a star of the social media speaking circuit in Ireland.
