Free Sex Chocolate in a Church in Dublin
/I want to invite you to a hooley in Dublin. It should have everything - Wine! Food! Poetry! Song! Book-burning!
Free Sex Chocolate, in a dusty bookshop near you. Probably under the counter, in a brown paper bag.
If you can’t be in Dublin yourself, tell your Dublin friends: This Thursday (Sept 30th, 2010), at 6.30pm, Salmon Poetry present Free Sex Chocolate in the Unitarian Church on the corner of St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin. (There's a map here.) I’ll be reading a few poems (and perhaps even singing an old Toasted Heretic song or two) from the pulpit. (Neil Farrell, former drummer with Toasted Heretic, and the co-writer and producer of all our albums, will officially launch the book.)
This is a golden opportunity to drink free wine while simultaneously soaking up a bit of culture, going to church, and sorting out your Christmas presents early. (I will happily sign copies.) Probably the most useful and spiritually beneficial hour you will ever spend.
It’s a double launch, so the poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin will break a bottle of champagne over the head of the wonderful Rita Ann Higgins, whose book of essays and verse-memoir, Hurting God, is so splendidly controversial that every copy has already been pulped, a week before publication! (Read all about it in today’s Irish Times…) Don’t worry, you’ll be able to get the slightly amended version, with some lines taken out & names changed, on the night.
Fair play to the Unitarians for letting us use their church (which is still fully functioning as a Unitarian place of worship, masses and all). Ah, the anointing of Irish writers as a new priestly caste (which I wrote about recently) is almost complete!
Oh yes, the book… Free Sex Chocolate contains the best poems I’ve written over the past few years, and all the Toasted Heretic lyrics (which were my attempt at a new pop poetry, back in the day). I may as well end with a poem from the book… this is the Internet, and you are Modern! Fast! And In A Hurry! So I won’t give you one that’s long, depressing, or hard chewing (those ones are best read from the book itself, by candlelight, in the bath.) This one was written in a café in Berlin (Sankt Oberholz, on Rosenthaler Platz, if you’re interested), during the 2006 World Cup…
Goal
They have installed the tiny goalposts
In the stand-up pissers
The tiny orange football
Is hanging by its thread,
Above the anti-splash mat,
Greener than the real grass.
Builders and philosophers
Blast it in the net.
Even when our cocks are out
It’s football that we think about.
The final is on Sunday
At home, the wives are wet
They know that we have secrets
It’s worse than they suspect.
(From Free Sex Chocolate, Salmon Poetry 2010)
And remember, if you buy a novel, the novelist merely shrugs. But if you buy a book of poetry, the poet eats! A shoe is bought for his barefoot child! So if you can’t make it to Dublin, but would like the book anyway, you can get it direct from Jessie of Salmon Poetry here, or buy it from Amazon in the UK, or Amazon in the USA. Poems and songs are peculiarly personal, far more so than novels, so I’d like to hear what people think of the collection - or, if you were once a Toasted Heretic fan, what hideous memories of an ill-spent youth are triggered by the songs... You can tell me what you think of the book, the band (or anything else), by writing to me at my secret email address, which is juliangoughssecretemailaddress at gmail dot com.
As we used to say in the playground, see you next Thursday…