Flann O'Brien

Not that plot is the first, second or even third thing you'd read Flann O'Brien for. His journalism as Myles na Gopaleen might even be the best writing he did.

As I have said in another thread, I am personally very partial to The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor, a work which I recently saw dismissed as hack work by some critic (Wm. Gass, if I recall correctly), but who also was predictably enthusiastic about ASTB and 3rdP.

I must demur from his opinion, however positively stated it may have been. While The Hard Life is not mined from precisely the same vein as his better-praised books, I find it deeply humorous, and the keel of it just as deep and well-laid as his best. I would describe it as a hard, strong grasp upon the nose of his native land, followed by a steady anti-clockwise twist. Perhaps Gass has none of the Irish in him and couldn't see the full quality of the humor or how well aimed it was.

Joyce wrote Dubliners and Portrait before Ulysses and the Wake, setting this up as the normative sequence or progression in the eyes of critics. O'Brien started right out with ASTB and only later wrote Hard Life, which sequence then gives critics a wrong impression of regression because it doesn't match Joyce's way of doing things. The only O'Brien book that merits (in my opinion) that rap is The Dalkey Archive, his last and sadly, also his weakest work.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Best-Myles-Gopaleen-Paladin-Books/dp/0586089500/sr=8-1/qid=1157491681/ref=sr_1_1/202-3526781-5273426?ie=UTF8&s=gateway

I'm very curious to know if my co-workers were feeling it (book club discussion on Wed., I think we're going to go to an Irish pub for propriety's sake).

Updike on Flann:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/02/11/080211crbo_books_updike

hmm

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1401097/

I heart Brendan Gleeson but really??? Am not at all sure.

yeah likewise. vanity disaster project.

well, prob not disaster but certainly can't see it shining

worse case scenario it's a crap film you won't have to see. gleeson is a great actor anyway.

I haven't watched the show, but wasn't there renewed interest in Flann when the TV show Lost mentioned The Third Policeman?

Only saw In Bruges the other week and was strongly reminded of The Third Policeman. It's still mostly brilliant tho.

I've seen the 60s movie of Ulysses btw and it's not dreadful, just pointless.

I'm excited, actually - like In Bruges.

This is quite exciting in a way!

Trying to work out what can be BAD about such a thing, I think it is that it (the bad film, when it's bad) somehow supplants and displaces the great book, in the distracted public memory or something, even though you don't want to let this affect you and may affect to ignore it entirely. And esp this is bad if the film is very different in plot etc.

But then such bad things are not that bad, compared to life's really bad things.

And the film might not even be bad.

I will say that the project doesn't seem utterly impossible, but the chances of success seem fairly remote. A lot of things happen in ASTB; it often bursts with life and incident. And ASTB has a certain coherence, achieved through its consistent tone and playfulness. But a coherent plot is nowhere to be found and was never contemplated by the author as a necessity.

In order to "work" as a feature film, ASTB would almost certainly require the imposition upon it of a more coherent plot, including both a first and a final act. Once you have imposed a coherent plot, you have probably driven a stake into the heart of the book.

I wish them well.

He could go the Naked Lunch or Tristram Shandy route and make it a film about the book, since it's often a book about books itself.

i am reading the third policeman, which i have not done before.

gj

incredible book imo

yeah it is a good one

I was at a bookseller's convention once and the dalkey rep there (the book's publisher) said that this was the publisher's highest selling book by far because it was featured for 3 secs in the show Lost

i've read lots of compendium myles na gcopaleen stuff but never his longer works, and am going in blind tbh.

enjoying it v much so far

i would like to point out that i've not been prompted by lost, tbf. there's been a lot made of o'brien the past few weeks in the irish times due to the centenary of his birth and it seemed time

at swim two big bottomed birds all over the newsie wewsies

i'm unpacking queen, o'brien, obviously my own post and, bizarrely, whiney g

Did i miss or misappropriate anything

i like how i was v confident in predicting gleeson's failure to produce a satisfactory filmic version of a book i haven't read upthread, vmic that

lol

mathers-like refusal of everything

Third Policeman = awesome
Poor Mouth = much less awesome

Thought this revive would be about the 100th anniversary: http://www.irishtimes.com/indepth/100-myles/

ATSB is my favourite book of all time but for my shame I have never read anything else by FO'B. I do have an unread copy of An Béal Bocht lying around somewhere...

well the centenary was involved alright

Read 'miles of myles' maybe 15 years ago and always meant to look further but tbf robert jordan happened and y'know yourself.

I think An Béal Bocht would be a lot funnier to someone who spent many, many years mastering the Oirish Tongue via the solemn study of several dozen memoirs written by simple villagers from the Gaeltacht, whose like we shall never see again, I might add, nor, belike, their little curraghs and wee piggies.

i think i could dig it, istr a couple of scenes he wrote lampooning eg synge, o'casey and poss. yeats's depictions of prataí munching ochóners that were on-the-mark

I have not encountered a MILES OF MYLES.

i think that was it, at least

I think An Béal Bocht would be a lot funnier to someone who spent many, many years mastering the Oirish Tongue via the solemn study of several dozen memoirs written by simple villagers from the Gaeltacht, whose like we shall never see again, I might add, nor, belike, their little curraghs and wee piggies.

― Aimless, Monday, October 10, 2011 1:56 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i think it does a good job of giving you an idea of the object of its parody in its own form? i certainly enjoyed it, myself, more purely than i did the two nominally great novels

it seems there was never such a book as 'miles of myles'. How sinister.

I'd read several of those Gaeltacht memoirs prior to reading The Poor Mouth, though all of them in English translation to be sure, so I missed whatever clever wordplay O'Brien may have inserted in the original language.

In each cabin there was: (i) one man at least, called the 'Gambler', a rakish individual, who spent much of his life carousing in Scotland, playing cards and billiards, smoking tobacco and drinking spirits in taverns; (ii) a worn, old man who spent the time in the chimney-corner bed and who arose at the time of night-visiting to shove his two hooves into the ashes, clear his throat, redden his pipe and tell stories about the bad times; (iii) a comely lassie called Nuala or Babby or Mabel or Rosie for whom men came at the dead of every night with a five-noggin bottle and one of them seeking to espouse her. One knows not why but that is how it was. He who thinks that I speak untruly, let him read the good books, or the guid buiks.

ya i knew that auld fella surely he was a strong fine gael man the same buck.

this may be heresy and i suspect it's an exceptional case, but did anyone not particularly enjoy "at swim two birds"?

i found parts of it funny but other parts just kinda read like madcap paddywhackery...and actually like a very irish mockery of anything/everything. in a bad way though, sort of anti-intellectual.

there's a bit of talk about it here -
Let's have a heated debate about At Swim-Two-Birds
I'm not a huge fan of it. idk if it's anti-intellectual - it's sceptical about students (& yes, o'brien's always ready to take a pop at that kind of intellectual life), but lots of its parody is more than affectionate - like I think he's trying to have it both ways with the Finn Mac Cool stuff and bardic poetry, writing something rather lovely while having fun (I don't think he pulls it off) - all the 'pint of plain' business coming right afterwards is meant to be a bit dismal & cloddish as well as funny (that O'Brien thing again of loving & recreating irish speech patterns, while seeming to be in despair at being stuck on an island with all this plain ppl nonsense (yet never making an effort to get away.))

I think his love for Joyce shows what he doesn't want to just mock - not something intellectual, exactly, but intelligent & imaginative labour.

well it's just cynicism, isn't it? Not even anti-anything so much as sceptical of what's behind it or where it'll end up. It's hardly a peculiarly irish trait but it's fairly deeply embedded in the national culture imo.

i dunno, i don't think it's cynicism. it's more sort of mockery, nudge-winkery. i really like the pint of plain stuff. i read "the death of virgil" about the same time as "at swim..." and i sort of was like "well classical references are actually pretty great".

i agree unlikely he was majorly hateful about that kind of thing, but sort of like "let's have a laugh at this stuff come on lads" is a bit irritatingly irish.

i'd stil classify even the mockery as cynical but yeah it wasn't poisonous, just a bit of roughhousing. Wasn't he renowned as the scourge of the lit&deb in his day at ucd?

i think like all curmudgeons there are a few knee-jerk conservative positions that probably struck him at one time as being particularly clever or insightful or challopsy and which hardened into pure unbending grumpiness, the kind that would make you wince if he were actually saying it to you. i particularly remember him coming back, again and again to the idea that "people who demand equality are always the people who least deserve it" or somesuch poisonous phrasing of this sentiment

that said i love the guy; even these issues i have with him are like what oliver wendell holmes described as reassuring prejudices, that one can rub one's back against, the way a cow rubs his against a tree.

i spend fifteen years in therapy and a dude on the internet nails it in one sentence

while seeming to be in despair at being stuck on an island with all this plain ppl nonsense (yet never making an effort to get away.)

He couldn't get away. He was doing pretty well for himself as a young man in the civil service, but suddenly had to support a family of 12. His brother says doing that was his greatest work.

Despair at being stuck, yes. Reading his biography killed a lot of the funniness for me.

is jem casey's much-admired hackery for the working man not close to sean o`casey?

Yes, I think that's the most direct inspiration for the character.

ty pf!

Might read this again, slower

What, this thread? It's worth it.

ASTB

Just re-read the thread, and the others on FOB and STB

Im assuming the f. mcewe post was pinefox. genius.

Man, I don't even think I have a copy of ASTB anymore

I left my copy open and they all got out

:D

at swim two big bottomed birds all over the newsie wewsies

― nakhchivan, Sunday, October 9, 2011 5:46 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Today of all days

ever read this book, darragh? its quite flann-esque

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c7/SombreroFallout.jpg

no but more than happy with recs ta

The most unexpected book to remind me of the 3rd policeman was the cyberiad by lem. Could they have been aware of each other?

I'm only about 20 pgs into ASTB, but is the wordiness (in the "always use a big word when a smaller one would do" sense) supposed to be a parody of how a wise-ass college student would write?
― Jordan (Jordan), Thursday, 7 September 2006 12:47 (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Amongst other things, yeah. Also a certain Irish addiction to gigantism (also mocked in the "Cyclops" chapter of Ulysses) akin to the "everything's big in Texas" mentality. And folk tale exaggeration in general.
― Why does my IQ changes? (noodle vague), Thursday, 7 September 2006 14:17 (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

reading again, astb and thread, and I came to note that Finns opening maundering on music that is good to ear is surely a play at Austin Clarke, and while reading the above I was p struck (nagging at me as it was anyway, having just read it) that the gigantism, the repetitions of metaphor/comparison points in the first Finn section are very likely direct plays at the similarly bounded earthiness of the source material

sorry phone swallowed that post...

anyway reading what ppl, especially Ronan, disliked about astb up thread, idk might it make a difference in reading it to consider the breadth and deftness and adaptability in aping so well all of these Irish literary styles that seems, to me anyway, to be happening here. I'm sure there's more I missing besides, perhaps woof or pf or someone could suggest a full list of the lampooned in the work.

Has anyone read this? http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/cr%C3%A9-na-cille-%C3%B3-cadhain-s-squabbling-corpses-revived-in-english-1.2154852

i don't read novels in dialect

I read 'em with my bowl of Froot Loops and cold milk.

good day for authors named flann something on ILB

have never heard of that, but looks interesting... shades of dostoyevsky's bobok

bought this recently

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/15647100441380L.jpg

That is definitely in the right spirit

good day for authors named flann something on ILB

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51GzumJh2kL.jpg

i'm 60 pages into the third policeman and somewhat drunk. flann o'brien is the holy grail

An excellent primer for astb but I maintain my position above, you need to read a bit of Sean O'Casey et al first

Kind of an ideal state of being imago has going there, tbh

all noted

https://i2.wp.com/www.onegreenplanet.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/coconut-flan1.jpg?fit=1200%2C750

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/d/d1/1984burton.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20131102231148

this shit is acatalectic
a-c-a-t-a-l-e-c-t-i-c

It's catholic fyi

It wasn't Catholic enough. He became afraid of it.

OK I got to the guessing-names bit that Father Ted obviously ripped off and was dissolved in laughter on the tube. I wonder how much of Father Ted is just reconsidered O'Brien...

Great holy suffering indiarubber bowls of brown stirabout!

Music tie-in here.

I think it's more likely the novel steals from Ted tbh

well was a rug ever pulled

Have read ten pages of ASTB and it is obviously some kind of personal grail

the list of birds alone has me forever

well, yes

the maritime wren!

read, my child, and learn of the marvels it contains

FOB seems to specialise in these extended bravura sequences where all literature else is cast into a pyre. in 3P it was the underground chamber and i'll be beggared if the cress-green cress of the full seventh of that book's length that is the confusion of the tellings of finn, shanahan and lamont doesn't figure somewhere in the reckoning of which is ASTB's. unless somehow it has greater in store

I don't exactly understand that comment. Can you explain further?

I recommend THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF FLANN O'BRIEN, though not as a way of preserving any mystique.

Myles na gCopaleen’s collected columns are the best, but I read The Third Policeman a while back and it was honestly one of the strangest things I’ve ever read. I need to read it again.

By that I meant that pages 58 through 91 of ASTB make for a truly astonishing passage. I was speculating as to whether the book will have greater in store for me during the remaining course of its pages, of which I have now read 104.

Are you deliberately taking years to read this novel?

Savouring every syllable.

third policeman might be the most terrifying book i've ever read

obvs a masterpiece, as is astb

Page 104 has heralded the beginning of a section concerning a Pooka and a Good Fairy that is threatening to drown all that precedes or follows it in mirthful frenzies

love the running articles towards the start of 'the best of myles' collection, which begin with him proposing a business where he roughs up rich peoples books, so that people think they've been read, and gets more absurd each week until dublin society is being terrroized by social blackmailers

Ordered this just now cuz of this thread (Penguin Classics ed.)

The Myles stuff is incredible! I started re-reading his stuff last week, he was my favourite author for a period

If you chance to read The Dalkey Archive you will see large parts of 3rd Policeman, slightly mutated and used slightly differently.

I love the novels but never quite got into the Myles material, especially the bits not written in English.

One time I was reading At Swim-Two-Birds on the subway and an old man next to me asked me what I was reading. I mutely showed him, and he said "ah, that's a foine book. I also recommend the Dalkey Archive."

I looked over at what he was reading. It was Hamlet.

Only later did I realize that I should have said "That's a good one too. I also recommend Romeo and Juliet." What's Irish for l'esprit de l'escalier?

'a pint of plain is your only man' iirc

Ha, exactly

wow lol

Can’t believe I didn’t mention An Béal Bocht - so so good and always accurate, esp in these Brexity times when we are really all Jams O’Donnell.

Obvs his greatest achievement was writing these masterpieces while employed in the civil service though.

And mostly pissed iirc

The Brother is one of the greatest comic creations of all time.

I want to compile every proverb in this book and maybe poll them. A leg that is in halves is a slow pilgrim

Orlick's bathroom break is probably the funniest two pages in print

The brother was givin out about the seals. ‘Tumblers’ he called them. The brother says all them lads should be destroyed.

The Plain People of Ireland: Another day gone and no jokes.
Myself: Yes, curse you.

The conclusion of your syllogism, I said lightly, is fallacious, being based upon licensed premises.

ive zero requirement for this rather natty hodges-figgis special hardback of astb but for 6.50 it's hard to justify leaving it here in the sale rack

Which one? It’s not on their site.

https://i.imgur.com/51ykimp.jpg

and now you even know where im sitting

Oh it is on there - it’s £10. Gorgeous edition.

If you mean in H&F, I haven’t been there since Bertie was Taoiseach.

hopefully youll be back before hes president wha

I see they have a vintage tractors calendar 75% off - is that what you went in for?

saturdays is H/F ----> celtic whiskey store days on dawson st, if anything catches my eye in either so be it

I've my two copies of ATSB already and that's enough to keep a man well-supplied and ready at the drop of a hat.

Both obtained upon licensed premises no doubt

Oddly I only have one.

I believe that hardback is the 2019 80th anniversary edition.

I didn't think that Darraghmac lived in Dublin.

Next to Joyce and Paul Bowles I'm pretty sure this is the author of whose work I've read the most completely.

Oddly I only have one.

I believe that hardback is the 2019 80th anniversary edition.

I didn't think that Darraghmac lived in Dublin.

― the pinefox, Sunday, 2 February 2020 20:05 (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Next to Joyce and Paul Bowles

god the stink must be bad by now

well joyce is in bronze tbf

If you only have one copy and you reread it frequently, there is a serious risk of you becoming quantumly entangled with the book, due to mollycules. You will find yourself increasingly wishing to rest on shelves. Or check yourself back into libraries. Beware.

Ports plan for Brexit Irish Sea checks

"We are still in this territory of not getting clarity from the government just yet as to how they actually see trade agreements being, because if we get good trade agreements, we won't need to have certain checks."

Never forget that tenure by sochemaunce seisined by feodo copyholds in gross and reseisined through covenants of foeffseignory in frankalpuissaunce is alienable only by droit of bonfeasaunce subsisting in free-bench coigny or in re-vested copywrites of seisina facit stipidem, a fair copy bearing a 2d. stamp to be entered at the Court of Star Chamber.

Furthermore, a rent seck indentured with such frankalseignory or chartamoign charges as may be, and re-empted in Market Overt, subsists thereafter in graund serjaunty du roi, eighteen fishing smacks being deemed sufficient to transport the stuff from Lisbon.

too real

i eat my lunch under a sketch by the great man's brother

One dilly dallying civil servant recognised another

voting 'coigny'

I have just the one copy, but it's had Premier Handling*.

*Each volume to be thoroughly handled, eight leaves in each to be dog-eared, a suitable passage in not less than 25 volumes to be underlined in red pencil, and a leaflet in French on the works of Victor Hugo to be inserted as a forgotten book-mark in each. Say, £2 17s 6d. Five per cent discount for literary university students, civil servants and lady social workers

http://www.eerpublishing.com/gallacher-bohemian-belfast-and-dublin.html

Obscure stuff, from an obscure press, but this book could be quite interesting on the postwar Flann and his Dublin.

just finished 'the hard life' - brisk and well-observed but patently weighted with what must have been the writer's own mounting woes, very little allowed to transcend except the irrepressible brother

One of the oddest things about that book is how much is taken up with the brother (Manus?) 's letters. They fill page after page. I don't think FO'B entirely knew what he was doing in that regard.

Kind of interesting about Mr Collopy's campaign and his audience with the Pope, though.

Well, the letters don't start really happening until the final third, but then oh boy. It's almost like the narrator is being written out of his own book, which I presume intentionally-done

The narrator does otoh have the pleasure of being able to dismiss the brother's reams of advice with disillusioned curtness, so there's right of reply

I do wonder if FOB harboured an as-it-happens impossible desire to move to London at this time

Myles would reminisce about Germany.

Curse it, my mind races back to my Heidelberg days. Sonya and Lili. And Magda. And Ernst Schmutz, Georg Geier, Theodor Winklemann, Efrem Zimbalist, Otto Grun. And the accordion player Kurt Schachmann. ... Beer and music and midnight swims in the Neckar. Chats in erse with Kun O'Meyer and John Marquess... Alas, those chimes. Und als wir nahmen/ Abscheid vor den Toren/ beim letzten Kuss, da hab' Ich Klar erkannt/ dass Ich mein Herz/ in Heidelberg verloren/ MEIN HERZ/ es schlagt am Neck-ar-strand! Tumpty tumpty tum.

He couldn't go anywhere, he had to support the family. The only escape was alcohol.