The ideal Christmas present: Jude: Level 1

Hah! It was a cunning trap, all along! For a long, drowsy year I seduce you with poetry, philosophy, art and economics (OK, not many of you are very seduced by the economics...) All is bliss, and  then, when you have been lulled into lowering your guard... I pounce! And in the great tradition of the internet, I try to sell you something! Hah hah hah hah hah hah!

So anyway, Jude: Level 1 is great (look at these reviews!) and if you haven't read it yet you should. I wrote it in my own blood, you know. As Jesus said: Greater love hath no man than to lay down years of his life writing a comic novel in cafés, so that his friends might laugh. (This is slightly misquoted in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, in John 15:13, as the café in which Jesus was speaking was noisy.)

Jude: Level 1 also makes a great Christmas present for certain kinds of weird and twisted friend, and I think you know who I'm talking about. You've got at least five of them. They'll love it, the sick individuals.

If you're in Britain or Ireland, it's in most good bookshops (or they can order it). But, wherever you are, there's the www.amazon.co.uk option. (And thanks Liz, for telling me that amazon.co.uk will take orders from the States. I hadn't been sure. Amazon.com can't sell it yet, for copyright reasons.) Amazon.co.uk will even giftwrap it for you if you like, and include your personal message, and send it straight to your friend's door, wherever they are. In fact, Jude: Level 1 makes an ideal present for a nostalgic, possibly tearful Irish friend far from home. It'll reassure them that they were right to leave, thus saving their Christmas. And possibly their life, damn it. Do it now!

France, Berlin, Plymouth

I've been in France for the past couple of days, working on a really interesting potential stage version of Jude: Level 1. More on that, er, next year probably. It's far, far too early to talk about it now. (But shag it, I'm all excited...)

And after touching down briefly in Berlin, I'll be off to sunny Plymouth, where I read on Tuesday, November 13th (2007), as part of the launch of Short Fiction, a handsome new book/magazine/thing published by Plymouth University Press, and edited by Anthony Caleshu. I've a couple of very, very short pieces in it, one called "Latin Lover" that comes in  at a brisk 100 words exactly, and another called "Three Monkeys", which sprawls over an expansive three hundred words.  More on that launch and reading here...

If you're in the area (that's Plymouth, England, down the left-hand edge of Europe...), it's free, and I gather I'll be reading with Kevin Barry, author of the splendid There Are Little Kingdoms, which just carried off the Rooney Prize. (I hope he reads the one set in the amusement arcade.) Come one, come all.

So I'll try and tell more tales of Berlin porn, answer questions about the Irish language, recommend great books for teenaged boys, and catch up on all the other things I need to do around the website late next week... Enjoy your weekend...

Pornography and Literature

(OK, this one is going to be as short and snappy as a stepped-on daschund...)

I finally finished editing my porn film at seven o'clock this morning, having worked on it all night without a break. Which was great, except the deadline for delivery of the finished edit had been midnight...

But hey, this is a Berlin  porn festival! Transgression is where it is at. BREAK that rule. SPANK that buttock. OK,  DON'T spank that buttock...Deadline? What deadline? It turned out several other film-makers had missed it too.  A couple of phonecalls, and a drop had been arranged. All was well. Then, just trying to output a finished edit took all day (looooong technical story), and I missed two more deadlines. A new record! I am the champion! I finally handed the tape over to Gaia outside Kotbusser Tor U-Bahn station, near midnight, in a scene gloriously reminiscent of any spy film you've ever seen set in Berlin. There had been a lot of urgent phonecalls, changing trains, running up steps, searching the darkness for someone in a specific outfit... then the hurried handover, and away she rushed to put tomorrow's programme together...

So my little film will be shown tomorrow (well, later today...), Friday 26th of October, around 6.15pm, in the Kant Kino 1, on Kant Strasse, as part of Cum2Cut's Kurtzfilmprogramm. It's called The Last Porn Film, it's five minutes long, and I'll tell you more later. All part of the big Berlin Porn Film Festival.

I am stunned and gutted that I'll miss the screening, but it coincides with my reading in Loughrea at the Baffle festival. I console myself with the thought that missing the Berlin festival screening of my porn debut because I'm in Ireland reading from Jude: Level 1 at a distinguished and eccentric literary festival at least shows that I'm wasting my days in interesting ways.

Is that the time? Bed... 

Author returns, alive, from the Dromineer Literary Festival!

Well, I'm back in Berlin after six days in Ireland. Verrrrrry tired... But happy.

The excuse for the trip was an invitation to read at the Dromineer Literary Festival, on the shore of Lough Derg, in  the heart of Tipperary, and therefore Ireland, and thus the universe. The festival was great, though at several points I wasn't sure if I'd survive it. I spent a good chunk of my childhood only a few miles away from Dromineer, and "The Orphan and the Mob", which I planned to read, is set just up the road and (with its pissed-off priests, pissed-on politicians, rampaging farmers, murderous orphans and burning orphanages) does not perhaps project the image of Tipperary of which Fáilte Ireland approves.

It turned out I was reading alongside Andrew Nugent, a white-haired monk of the order of St Benedict, and Prior at Glenstal Abbey.I wasn't quite sure how a seventy-something senior monk would react to the brutal deaths by coat-hook, boiling lead etc, of the Brothers of Jesus Christ Almighty. But it turned out he had been a trial lawyer before he was a monk, and he writes murder mysteries full of savage killings, so he was fine about it.

We read to over a hundred people (they had to get the emergency chairs out of storage, and wipe the dust off them, always a good sign). I read "The Orphan and the Mob", and it went down... No, I shan't drag out the suspense. It went down REALLY well. The audience got all the jokes and local references, and laughed even more than the audience at Charleston (in distant Sussex, far from the centre of the universe) the previous weekend. It was an advantage that most of those listening in Dromineer were familiar with, say,  Ardcroney, and had sampled its many wonders and delights. So a mention of it wasn't just a name; it summonsed in them beatific visions of the petrol station, the graveyard, the grass growing on the roof of Mick Reddan's house, and that huge rough cylindrical stone that cows scratch against (in the field at the bottom of the hill on the Nenagh side of Ardcrony)...

Great Q&A session afterwards too. Energetic, slightly terrifying, and thus enjoyable. It got off to a fine start when a man in a tweed jacket stood up and said that, as a Cloughjordan farmer, he felt he had to ask what I had against Cloughjordan farmers. I said I'd nothing against them, and that I thought they came out of the story particularly well. Didn't I describe them as sophisticated, and into Radiohead? It was hardly my fault they were beaten to death by orphans.

(Later, in the bar, a woman leaned over and whispered "Sure, that man isn't a Cloughjordan farmer at all. He's a Borrisokane farmer." )

 
 
Afterwards, I signed a reassuringly large number of books. One of the last to come up was a giant red-faced priest, who introduced himself by saying "I am a great admirer, a GREAT admirer, of Eamonn DeValera... and I am the  Priest for Puckane Parish... and I must say..." He leaned in closer, till our noses were nearly touching... "I enjoyed myself enormously! That was marvellous stuff! We're proud of you! Keep it up!"

I signed Father Slattery's book with a trembling hand. A mighty man. His brother, Martin "Speedy" Slattery used to teach me (though what subject I cannot now recall, as I was paying no attention at the time). Education was a simpler business back then. He would hit me with a hurley, and I would threaten to take him to the European Court of Human Rights. Ah, those were the days.

Julian Gough in the Guardian, and at Small Wonder. (Busy week for the lazy lad.)

I wrote a piece in today's Guardian about the increasingly pervy relationship between the short story and the novel. Feel free to read it, comment on it, ignore it, as you wish.

Why was I writing about the short story, you ask, given that I know bugger all about it?

Because on Saturday, September 22nd, at 4.30pm, I'm reading at the Small Wonder festival with James Lasdun, last year's winner of the National Short Story Prize.

Allow me to plug it shamelessly, because it is run by good people, and the Guardian forgot to print the festival dates or website address at the bottom of my article... Small Wonder is the only festival devoted entirely to short stories, and it runs from 19-23 September, at Charleston near Firle, East Sussex (in England, which is part of Europe...)

Their website with all the info is *here*.

Lots of interesting writers will be there: Monica Ali, Lucy Ellmann, Esther Freud, Etgar Keret, James Lasdun, Yiyun Li, Jon Snow, Colm Tóibín, Fay Weldon...

My hot tip for Small Wonder (apart from me and James Lasdun) is Lucy Ellmann and Etgar Keret, 7.30pm on Thursday. Should kick literary ass.

Prison, murder, fork-lift trucks, whisky and milk.

The more eventful life gets, the less time available to blog about the events. This tension is at the heart of blogging: running a well-crafted and frequently updated blog is best suited to a mildly depressed person who hasn't left their  house for a month.

I, as you can probably tell from the long silence, have been cheerful, and out of the house.

Since last I posted, I have been in Her Majesty's Prison, Birmingham,  performed at the Latitude Festival in Suffolk,  passed a few days in a Buddhist retreat centre in Cavan, met up with old friends in Tipperary, Galway, Dublin, Bray, Kildare, London, and Berlin, had interesting conversations with cocaine smugglers, drunken novelists, monks, and marine biologists. I have been awarded a Monaghan GAA medal, been photographed lying on the pavement in front of the GPO on O'Connell Street, and invited to write articles, kiss strangers, and play football. I have peered into the bulk storage tank of a milking parlour, been handed a large Celtic Cross in a Leitrim pub (made by a senior IRA member while interned in the Curragh during World War Two, out of matchsticks taken from the floor of that pub and sent to him by his mother), and fed home-made treacle bread.

I have passed through shrine rooms, paddling pools and X-ray machines. I have looked up Damon Albarn's nose. I have chatted with the delightful James Franco (Harry Osborn in the Spiderman films). I have failed to answer several hundred emails. I have stagedived at  three readings. I have read, written, and edited. I've had an article published. I have had a novel reprinted. I have been reviewed, interviewed, and body searched. I have lost my temper. I have brushed my teeth.

I have officially launched a novel in Filthy McNasties pub in Islington, signed hardbacks all day in a warehouse in Littlehampton, and tried to track down mysterious parcels that were sent to me in Berlin while I was away, and returned by Deutsch Post to their mysterious senders.

I have gone speeding in the tallest forklift truck in the world. 

I have drunk strong whisky (Laphroaig quarter cask, 48% alcohol by volume when bottled, barrier filtered, single Islay malt), and used strong language. I've drunk milk, and spoken mildly.

I have picked a fantasy football team, and read the poetry of Matthew Sweeney, and of T. S. Eliot, and of Dr. Seuss.

Friends of mine have married, sold cattle, broken their noses, and given evidence in murder trials. 

I have slept (but not enough, not enough) in tents, five star hotels and fields. On couches, floors, beds,  futons, and grass.

I've watched the Atlantic advance up the beaches of Salthill, and liquidity retreat from the markets of the world. 

I'll try to post something about some of it sometime but the future is arriving faster than I can process the past. 

Galway Advertiser reviews Jude: Level 1! Wild celebrations in Gough apartment! Neighbours call police!

Well, if you've ever lived in Galway, as I did for twenty years, this is THE BIG ONE. Oh, the Irish Times is all very well, the Washington Post has its charms, the New York Times... (hmmm, let's not go there, girlfriend...), the Observer is good and well, and the Guardian is very nice... but the Galway Advertiser review is the one that has you holding your breath. Everyone that you know, everyone you will casually bump into for the next month, will have read it.

And the Galway Advertiser verdict is in on Jude: Level 1... and it's good!

Here's how it starts:

"Jude: Level 1, the hilarious new novel by Julian Gough, is a tour de farce, a comic chronicle of the history of the Irish psyche which takes the reader from the middle of the 20th century to the post-Celtic Tiger ennui of today, at breakneck speed. "

I may well be sticking that on the back of the next edition. Very happy. Very proud. I can safely show my face in Galway at the Arts Festival (I'm reading there on the 24th of July).

Read the rest here....

Me Waffling On At The Eleventh Hour

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.