Julian Gough

Forgot to mention, I'll be talking about the short story, and the BBC National Short Story Award, on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, later today (Friday July 4th 2008) at the maythesweetlordhelpus hour of 7.20 in the morning. (There's a seven-twenty in the MORNING as well? Who knew?)

Totally forgot to mention it in time for anyone to actually tune in, sorry. This is not because I'm blasé, it's because I'm totally untogether (and find it hard to believe anyone would be interested in my opinion of the short story).

 I will be talking for about ten seconds, probably, so you missed nuthin'.

My site traffic counter tells me there's been a lot of visits to a rather obscure page on the Forum this week (the Good Lord alone knows why). The page discusses Toasted Heretic's 1991 hit single, "Galway and Los Angeles", so I thought I'd add these links for the various versions of "Galway and Los Angeles" available free on Youtube...

1.) The second version of the original video (slightly muffled audio, I think it was uploaded from an old VHS tape). There was an earlier, artier version of this video, which I prefer (one long take of my mouth singing, it gets hypnotic, and the lips, when closed, start to look like a leaf or an old sofa after a while), but I don't know where to find it. Brian Shanley shot the original, but the record company freaked out and wanted another version, so we shot some stills of photos by Aengus McMahon and cut them in to make this second version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BxIvxUvfIE


2.) Toasted Heretic playing "Galway and Los Angeles" live on the Late Late Show (RTE 1 television), 2007:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlSa21EmHkw&feature=related


3.) Toasted Heretic play "Galway and Los Angeles" live in Róisín Dubh, Galway, August 2005, on the Now In New Nostalgia Flavour tour... (Very dodgy one-camera version! This was an all-ages, alcohol-free gig, in the daytime, so that the band's children and the children of our original fans could come. Thus the kids doing the amusing hand-gestures down the front. We did a far more blood, sweat and alcohol-soaked gig in Róisín Dubh the night before, for adults only, so don't worry if this version doesn't tally with your memory of the Róisín Dubh gig you attended...):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BtXFOSw650


While I'm at it, this is our most popular video on Youtube... Toasted Heretic do "Stay Tonight" (off Charm & Arrogance), on the Den with Zig and Zag... in which I stand on Zig, and throw a lot of dollars in the air, Declan speaks fluent Guitar, and Zig and Zag provide rather lovely backing vocals...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4mWrMOm51E&feature=related

"I've been warned about you lot..." - Zag

That quote is from (as many of you will know, and many more won't) the 1984 hit single "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken", by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. (Lloyd Cole, back when he found it impossibly easy, before he realised it's impossibly hard.) It was good advice. As a very young man, I read Norman Mailer. I even, years later, got a new tailor. (Chris, of  Favourbrook, Jermyn Street.)

Well, Norman Mailer, Great American Novelist, died last week, and a generation of pop lyricists who were as influenced by novels as songs are looking even more thoughtful than usual. There's a lot to think about. Norman Mailer cannot be solved. Norman Mailer cannot be neatly summed up. His vices were his virtues and his virtues were his vices and his bark was worse than his bite but his bite was worse than his bark and his love was hateful and his hate was lovely, and oh didn't you just want to punch him and kiss him, Lloyd?

He was incredibly famous for a very long time, but he isn't really, now. (He will be again, after the traditional post-death, decade-long dip. And when he is famous again, it will be for radically different things, dug out of his most forgotten books.)

I saw him read in Amsterdam a few years ago, at the Crossing Border Festival, where I was also reading. He was great. Frail, slightly deaf, tiny, walking slowly with two sticks, white hair standing up all over his electric head. He read a self-deprecating piece from  Advertisements For Myself, and answered questions with wit and charm.

When goaded to (verbally) attack Tom Wolfe (who'd recently (verbally) savaged him), Mailer refused. "I think I'm the greatest writer in America. And there's maybe twenty more think the same. Novelists are an endangered species now, and when there's only twenty elk left in the world, they mustn't start trying to knock off each other's horns." (That quote is half from memory, and half from a Guardian interview of around the same time where he said almost the same thing in almost the same words... you can't do as much promotional work as Mailer did and not recycle some of the best lines.)

I wanted to go up to him onstage afterwards, and tell him something. But he was immediately surrounded by dozens of admirers from the audience, his tiny figure vanishing behind the seven-foot tall Dutch, and the seven-foot wide Americans. And I thought, he's got enough to deal with. And I'd be doing it mainly for me, not for him. Doing it to have my Mailer story. And he must have heard all this stuff so often... No, just because it's important to me doesn't mean I've the right to inflict it on him. So I didn't go up.

But if I had gone up I would have said something like...

When I was fourteen, maybe fifteen, I was reading The Naked and the Dead, in Tipperary. And I got to a scene where one of the American soldiers on patrol finds the corpse of a Japanese soldier lying in the sun, and stares at the body. And as I read the scene, and reread it, I realised that I was going to die. That my death was inevitable, and unavoidable. The knowledge was immense, direct, entirely untheoretical. It wasn't intellectual knowledge, it was physical. (I'd known before, obviously, that I would one day die, but I hadn't felt it, it wasn't real knowledge.)

And I put the book down. And for the next couple of weeks I thought about nothing else, I hardly spoke. I examined this new knowledge from every angle, I thought about the implications, I tried to work out how I should live, now that I knew that I was going to die. I was very depressed for most of that couple of weeks. And then I came to terms with it, and worked my way past it, and incorporated the knowledge into my life, and decided how I would try to live. And how I lived was better than how I'd lived before. More satisfying. More my own. And I was pretty happy, pretty much permanently, ever after.

Something like that. 

So, Norman Mailer gave me death. And I will always be grateful.

Well, this time, although I'm still saying it mainly for me, at least I'm not bothering him...

Thanks, Norman. And goodbye.

If any of you would like to avoid hearing me waffling on yet again about how great me and my book are, then don't tune into The Eleventh Hour tonight at 11pm on Ireland's RTÉ Radio 1. Páraic Breathnach,
Páraic Breathnach... a leather-skirt wearing monster of a man from Connemara, will be interrogating me for twenty or thirty minutes, at the end of which I hope he will give me the sound thrashing I deserve.

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/theeleventhhour/

No doubt the whole distasteful event will be archived by RTÉ, in a spirit of public service, and made available for the discouragement of others.