Nostalgia

You can check out any time you like. . .

by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment on You can check out any time you like. . .

My mother was a creature of routine.  Every Saturday afternoon for over 30 years she would go into Dublin to do her shopping – including going to Magill’s delicatessen on Johnson’s Court, where she bought salami and coleslaw, exotic delicacies for us in late Sixties Ireland – and then on to six o’clock Mass in Clarendon Street church.  One day in the mid 1990s, dank and drizzly, I too was in town and thought I’d offer her a lift home given the weather.  I stood at the end of the church as the faithful streamed in so I would catch her on her way in and tell her I’d collect her once Mass was over.  

Two decades earlier, aged 20, I’d abandoned my religion, a late decision for someone of my generation.  It was a process I found very painful.  I missed the transcendent  “otherness” of the rituals and the soothing sense of community that religious observance provided. (As a child, I’d perversely always looked forward to the most arduous aspects of the Catholic rites e.g. the long services associated with Easter Week, for example, which went on for days in a darkened church, the statues swathed in purple crepe while the bells fell silent. I’ve found nothing since to match the theatrical solemnity of the Good Friday ceremony.)

But as a young woman I couldn’t be doing with the rules, particularly with regard to sexual behaviour.  As a practising Catholic, I was still going to regular confession throughout my late teens.  This became a round of admitting to all sorts of nefarious (for my confessors) sexual activities and then promising I wouldn’t commit them again. I also knew of course that I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, keep good that promise, so I was caught on a treadmill of consistently making what was known as “a bad confession”.  It took me a long time to solve this Catch 22.  I didn’t want to be à la carte Catholic; with the absolutism of youth, I  wanted to live out my religion, no half-measures.  Then like a lightning bolt –  a moment of epiphany I’d call it wearing my secular hat – I hit upon the obvious solution. I would give the whole game up. 

My mother was bitterly disappointed – the first of her brood to leave the church. She didn’t rant or rail, didn’t argue with me or try to change my mind, but she took it as a personal failure.

Ours was a religious household. Strictly enforced, though I didn’t experience it that way as a child.  It was just how things were.  Sunday Mass was attended as a family, no exceptions.  The daily Rosary was the same. My father escorted us to weekly Saturday confessions, making sure we did our duty. He was an anxious, dutiful believer.  During Lent he would measure out his one full meal and two collations with a weighing scales at the table.  He once went to confession and when the priest asked if he had any general questions about his faith, he admitted he found it hard to pray. The priest replied tartly that if he found it hard to pray he’d find it a damn sight harder to get into Heaven. Cold comfort for the conscientious.

It wasn’t just the observance of the rituals that were sewn into family life.  The language of the Bible  infused the everyday, frequently finding its way into domestic dramas, even though it took me many years to recognise the source.  If you were late struggling out of bed in the morning, my mother would greet you with – “the dead arose and appeared to many” (2 Samuel :1-27). If you’d disgraced yourself in some way, she might berate you with  “how the mighty have fallen”. (Matthew 27: 52-53)

Matters of faith often cropped up in family discussions, the parables, in particular. My mother had very firm views on them, usually linked to our behaviour in the future – what we might do, or what we might fail to do.  The parable of the Prodigal Son was often invoked. Don’t expect the fatted calf here if you make a mess of your lives, she would warn.  She was a widow by then and the responsibility of rearing four of us alone was a heavy burden.  She was keen for her children to go out into the world and become financially independent.  She’d provided a good grounding, offering educational opportunities to a higher level than she’d had, and she felt there was no excuse for us. 

The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard was another sore point with her. Though by no means a socialist, she was outraged at the injustice of the late coming workers getting the same rate as the ones who’d slaved all day in the fields.  But it was The Parable of the Talents that really foxed her, perhaps because it couldn’t be so unambiguously applied to our personal destinies. Furthermore, in her cautious heart, she would have backed the third servant in the story, who is utterly disowned for playing it safe.

 For the uninitiated the Parable of the Talents, according to Matthew (25: 14–30), tells of a master leaving his house to travel, and entrusting his money to his servants, or his slaves, depending on the version you read. The first servant was given five talents, the second, two, and the third received only one. (In money terms a talent was equal to 6000 dinar.  The daily wage at that time was approximately one dinar, so one talent was the equivalent of almost 20 years of labour.) After a long absence, the master returns and asks the servants to give an account of what they have done with the talents. The first and the second servants have doubled the value of their money by investing with bankers. The third, however, has buried his. 

When the third servant pleads his case he gets short shrift.

 “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.” 

But his master replies: “You wicked and lazy servant! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest.”  He orders the third servant to hand over his talent to the first servant who had already made a profit of five talents.  “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless servant, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ (Weeping and gnashing of teeth also featured in my mother’s admonitions to us.)

On the face of it, the parable seems to be an unapologetic endorsement of aggressive capitalism and usury. (This from the same chap who drove the money-changers out of the temple.) If you see the talents in financial terms, the punishment meted out to the third servant seems excessive. He safeguarded the money, didn’t he?  Even if you define the talents as natural abilities (or God-given gifts if you’re a believer) rather than currency, the moral of the tale still seems to be – monetise, monetise, monetise.

But there are other readings.  One might see the talents as neither money nor natural gifts but as the Gospel message itself. The master is Christ who is about to leave his disciples but will be coming back, just as Jesus’s followers believed the Kingdom of God was close at hand. The servants who double their profits represent those whose belief has “matured” in his absence.  The keepers and expounders of the faith, in other words. 

Equally, though, couldn’t the parable be seen as a critique of the economic system of masters and slaves at work in first century Palestine?  Perhaps we’re being gently nudged to consider the position of the hapless third servant becausehe challenged his master, and thus the whole rotten system.  He could be the equivalent of our modern day whistleblower. Matthew does not make any valued judgement on the justice of the treatment meted out to the third servant. He merely states the status quo, or the terms and conditions, if you will, of a life in faith.

No less a poet than John Milton also worried away at the meaning of the parable in his famous sonnet, “When I Consider How my Light is Spent”.  The poet queries whether God will judge him harshly because his talent – the gift of sight, is “lodg’d with me useless”. 

“Does God, exact day-labour, light denied?” he asks, remembering the harsh treatment of the third servant. The answer he comes to is that amassing wealth to prove one’s worth is not the only way to serve God.

“. . .who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

(The stand and wait line was another proposed by mother when she was in comforting mode – showing her range of quotable wisdom.)  

We think of the parables as being moral messages simplified for an unsophisticated audience, but were they instead complicated layered narratives, where the real meaning was deliberately left ambiguous and wide open for reinterpretation? If the dinner table discussions in our house prove anything, they show what good stories the parables were, giving room for speculation, debate and argument. 

However, the Morrissys were immature believers. (We were not alone in this.  How else to explain how tightly the institutional Catholic church held the Irish nation in its grip?  For so long we were like easily-led children, cowed by authority, yearning for rules and regulations, and craving certainty.) When we discussed the parables around the table, we related to them primarily as stories about real, concrete situations that we were trying to apply to our lives, rather than narratives replete with metaphor and symbolism. 

That said, the parables were one of my first introductions to fiction – before I could read, I heard them in church being told and retold, and then being talked about at home. They were an early grounding in the art of narrative.  So though I may have left the institutional church behind, the resonance of these stories stayed with me as I found my second great vocation in life – writing – which perhaps is the secular substitute for my erstwhile religious devotion. Another version of the talent parable.

Nothing from childhood is ever really lost, something I tried vainly to explain when I informed my mother I had “lapsed”.

Which brings us back to that wet day in the 1990s when I stood at the end of a Dublin  church waiting for her.  When she arrived and saw me standing there, her face broke into a beatific beam. 

“You’ve come back!” she said.

Half a lifetime fell away and we were back at the fork in the road where my loss of faith set me on a different path to hers. 

I had to disappoint her for a second time.  Though equally I could have said – I’ve never really left. 

This post was written as part of the Kaleidoscope 111 project, hosted by the Irish College Leuven and curated by Dr Hedwig Schwall, in which over 30 Irish writers were invited to write about Faith, Spirituality and Art. The contributors include Anna Burns, Lucy Caldwell, Jan Carson, Mary Costello, Wendy Erskine, Vona Groarke, James Harpur, Mary O’Donnell, Billy O’Callaghan, Joe O’Connor, Wendy Erskine, among many others.

See – https://kaleidoscope3.efacis.eu.

Photograph:
Sharon Hahn Darlin, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The World of Twenty-Twenty Vision

How blue was my Danube

by Mary Morrissy1 Comment on How blue was my Danube

Works of fiction often have a soundtrack – music you might have listened to while creating them, or popular songs you’ve used to identify the time period of a piece. When writing a story from my recent collection, Twenty-Twenty Vision, on the theme of hindsight, I had to choose a piece of music for one of the stories set in Germany in the late sixties.  In the story an unlikely couple – a middle-aged German woman and an Irish teenage boy – end up dancing together to a record in the woman’s living room. She is the mother of the Irish boy’s German pen pal – hence the location. They don’t have a language in common and the dance fills up the dumb, awkward silence between them. So the question was – what music would they dance to?

Immediately, I reached for “Games that Lovers Play” an album of romantic love songs by composer and conductor James Last.  It was a sentimental decision, for reasons that will become clear.

James who, I hear you ask? No longer a household name, but he once was. Think of Andre Rieu but in the Seventies. Last was a German composer and big band leader – see how old-fashioned that sounds – with his own orchestra. He sold an estimated 200 million records worldwide with 65 of his albums reaching the UK pop charts. 

He had longevity if not widespread respect in the music world. His final performance was in 2014 at London’s Royal Albert Hall where he had performed 90 times during his lifetime. He was distinctly MOR – his brand was easy listening and he was derided by critics as being the king of elevator musak.

But in 1970, he became my father. I mean, of course, figuratively.  This is not a paternity suit in the making. Even if it were, I’d be ten years too late – James Last died in 2015.

While he was making it big, my biological father was trying to educate me into classical music.  I was 12 and stumbling through Royal Academy grades on the piano but what he was aiming to impart was a more discerning musical ear. The education was in its early stages and already I sensed that my preference for the lighter, schmaltzier side of the classics – I had a musical crush on the Blue Danube waltz – was probably a disappointment to him.  

(To this day, one of my guilty pleasures is to tune into the New Year’s Concert from Vienna where the Blue Danube and that other Strauss standard, The  Radetzky March, are always played as an encore accompanied by loud clapping from the highly-coiffed, well-heeled  patrons. This year, in a departure from tradition, the first-timer conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic for the new year gig, French-Canadian Yannick Nézet-Ségún, leapt from the stage and patrolled the aisles conducting both orchestra and audience while flaunting a set of powder blue sparkling fingernails during the traditional set-piece.)

My father was an auto-didact where classical music was concerned.  Here was a man who had bought Donizetti’s Lucia de Lammermoor not because it appealed to him, but because he felt he should appreciate it and he trained himself to like it by assiduous listening.  It was that kind of assiduity and concentrated listening he was trying to instil in me. Although he never quite weaned me off the Blue Danube, we had progressed on to Elgar’s Enigma Variationsand Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave and he was even threatening some opera on me, when he fell gravely ill and died.  It seemed the end of the road for my musical education. 

Eight months later, there was an LP among my Christmas presents – from my mother.  It was James Last’s Classics up to Date Volume 2, which showed on its cover a smooching couple in soft-focus dressed in dinner suit and evening gown. I’m pretty sure there were champagne glasses involved too. My mother knew nothing about classical music and I’ve no idea how she set about choosing James Last for me.  Perhaps someone in the record shop had advised her.  

My father would have turned in his grave if he’d heard Last’s versions of the music he revered. He’d have cringed at the quickening of the tempos, the driving modern brass and drums section, the plucking guitars, the insidious tickety-tick of the high-hat, and the female humming choruses added to some of the tracks. Listening to it now, I hear only the transgressions, and sense the thinning and flattening effect of all this fussy orchestration. 

But then, the 13 tracks in Classics Up to Date, Volume 2, which I played until I had practically worn the vinyl out, formed, for good or ill, the foundation stone on which my musical taste was built. Although I don’t still have the LP –  how is it, I wonder, that we let our most treasured sentimental totems slip through our fingers? – some of this music I still love today.

There’s Mendelssohn’s Andante for Violin Concerto in E Minor, Dvorak’s Slavonic Dance no 10, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 21 in C major, (otherwise known as Elvira Madigan), the Presto from Beethoven’s 7th,  Bach’s Ave Maria, Schubert’s Impromptu No 2 in A flat, Borodin’s Prince Igor, and, of course, the piece de resistance – or at least, my piece of least resistance – the Blue Danube waltz.  

Each one of these tracks was a portal to further discovery, leading me further into the riches of the real thing. The album marked the resumption of my musical education and for a brief season, James Last stepped in and, however remotely, became my father.

Photograph: James Last being presented with three gold discs at a concert in Kiel in 1970. Photograph Friedrich Magnussen .https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bandleader_James_Last_in_der_Ostseehalle_(Kiel_47.718).jpg

News and Events

Scraping the bottom of the barrel

by Mary Morrissy3 Comments on Scraping the bottom of the barrel
Peter Finch in the film Network: Like him “I’m mad as hell!”

A top pick job for me, the LinkedIn algorithm promised. The firm was seeking fluent speakers of Irish English to record 15 short audio clips featuring natural greetings and voicemail-type messages. You’d be paid the princely sum – wait for it – US$15 for your labour. To add insult to injury, the recordings would be used to help speech recognition systems and AI language technologies. Reader, I saw red.

I had just discovered that all four of my novels and three collections of short fiction had been “scraped” – that is the term for digitally stealing copyrighted work – for training AI bots. Needless to say, no money had changed hands, and the only information I had about the pirating was that it had taken place. I’ve still no idea by whom.

Data mining by AI corporates is widespread and up to now, totally unregulated. Luckily, for us, there is evidence that a fightback has started in the US.

In August, a court challenge taken by voice actors became the first case involving AI to be settled – of a total of 48 copyright lawsuits in train. In Vacker v. Eleven Labs Inc, the actors claimed that Eleven Labs Inc had cloned their voices digitally without their permission. In another landmark case in September, the giant tech company Anthropic settled a class action taken by the Authors Guild in the US for illegal downloading of hundreds of thousands of books to train large language models (LLMs).

To avoid further litigation, Anthropic agreed to compensate authors from a $1.5bn settlement fund for work that had been pirated. Depending on the numbers claiming, writers could be paid $3,000 for each copyright infringement.

I discovered by chance that I was one of those authors. But there must be many Irish writers in the same boat, although to qualify for a payout your work must have been registered by your publisher with the US Copyright Office before Anthropic stole it.

“In practice,” Conor Kostick, writing on the Irish Writers Union website, explains,” this means that only Irish authors who have signed agreements with US publishers are likely to be included. And even then, not all publishers (by a long way) registered the works with the US Copyright Office.

“If you were pirated, used for AI training, but not registered with the US Copyright Office. . . don’t despair,” Kostick says. “There are European legal battles to come with these companies, ones which if we win, we all stand to benefit from. And the precedent of the Anthropic settlement makes it much more likely that in due course all of us will win compensation for the theft of our works”

These cases represent a head-on collision between so-called business”ethics” and the creative impulse. They’re a warning to the corporate world – writers’ and artists’ work is for sale, not for plundering. The creative arts are not just fodder for imitation content, but a unique and compelling way of being in the world.

Professor of Creative Writing at Yale and an author herself, Megan O’Rourke, writing in the New York Times in July, put it this way:”When I write, the process is full of risk, error and painstaking self-correction. It arrives somewhere surprising only when I’ve stayed in uncertainty long enough to find out what I had initially failed to understand. This attention to the world is worth trying to preserve: The act of care that makes meaning — or insight — possible.” 

It would be difficult to put a price on this kind of artistic concentration. The likes of Anthropic – and Eleven Labs Inc – didn’t even bother to try.

Writers often bitch about publishers and their advances, but in the publishing model, the concept of paying the artist is still, generally, part of the deal, no matter how paltry the sums may be. But with the AI giants, our work is valued so little that they don’t see the need to pay for it. And they’re using it to train AI systems that aim to replace our individualised creativity with deep fakes mimicking the very work they’ve mined for nothing.

If that isn’t the epitome of late capitalist greed and hubris, I don’t know what is.

So, no, LinkedIn, I won’t be taking up that top pick job so that some AI bot can undermine my livelihood and compromise my artistic authenticity. Not for 15 dollars a throw. Not for anything.

Check this link to see if your work qualifies for compensation – https://secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/lookup/.

Fiction

Postcards from Covid

by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment on Postcards from Covid

When Covid was receding in 2022, I began looking at my back catalogue of stories and realised, to my surprise, that I’d written enough for a collection. Short stories can creep on you like that. Unlike a novel, a collection of short fiction grows and accretes over years, and usually isn’t the product of one singular bolt of inspiration. (Bolts of inspiration, I’ve found, are pretty thin on the ground, even with novels.) So if you’re a short story writer, you’ll always have a couple on the boil, or more accurately, simmering, in the background.

During the pandemic, I’d begun writing flash fiction – stories between 100 and 1000 words long – which is a growing niche area in fiction. My original plan with Twenty-Twenty Vision (The Lilliput Press) was to alternate more traditional short stories with a scattering of flash to create a looser mosaic of narratives.

The original manuscript was significantly longer than what has ended up between the covers here. The mix of short and flash just didn’t fly with publishers – lots of admiration for playing with form and stretching the definition of what a collection was, but not enough for them to offer publication.

In the face of rejection, I had to go back to the drawing board.  The first decision was to abandon the notion of mixing flash with short fiction. This was a real pity, as flash stories are energising and energetic, but perhaps sometimes a bit too “soundbytey” when read in large numbers together.  Reading a whole collection of flash together can lead to literary indigestion – like being offered a whole lot of canapés but no main course at a restaurant.  Mixing the two seemed like a good way to counteract this effect, to expand the readership for flash fiction and to enfold it into the general tradition of short storytelling.

With the flash excised from the collection, I had a dozen or more stories left. Many of them had been written pre-Covid and I hit on the notion of revisiting some of the characters I’d written about before to see how the pandemic had treated them.  So the collection contains many twinned stories – characters seen both before and after Covid.

For anyone writing short fiction, which I’ve always considered to be like ‘news from the front’ in the literary world, it’d be absurd not to include Covid. How could you ignore one of the most world-altering experiences of our current century that had happened to you but not in the world of your characters? So in Twenty-Twenty Vision, as the collection gathers pace, the pandemic creeps in.  

Now five years on from Covid, we seem to be ready – or perhaps finally able – to look at the pandemic in its entirety. Up to now we’ve been concerned with surviving and recovering, getting over it and getting on . Now perhaps we’re ready to confront the trauma of the pandemic and to consider its long-term effects on our working lives, our social lives and in our intimate lives.

Which is where the stories of Twenty-Twenty Vision come in. The characters are all of a certain age – close to my own – so the three Rs are greatly in evidence –  retrospection, recrimination and regret. They’re looking back and seeing their mistakes, inevitable for anyone hitting their sixties. And then Covid arrives. And although the theme is hindsight – the 20/20 vision of the title – it’s also a vision of those early days of the pandemic. 

The characters are dealing on the hoof with the Corona Virus – as it was called way back then, remember? e.g. Marie uses Covid restrictions as a cover to drop her best friend whom she suspects of having an affair with her husband; Olivia recognises she’s been staring love in the face her entire life in a queue at a vaccination centre; lockdown gives Adrienne an out after she forms an obsessive attachment to a young woman at work; Carmel can’t forgive her husband for his bankruptcy even after he becomes one of the pandemic’s early casualties.  

Short stories are a notorious hard sell in the publishing world. It seems generally accepted that people don’t read short fiction and that’s mirrored in sales figures. It’s a fact that has always amazed me in the era of the short attention span. You would think short fiction would be the ideal commuter read, the perfect length ( 2-4000 wds) for the screen-addicted. But them’s the statistics.

Given this, Twenty-Twenty Vision will probably be my last collection of stories.  I’ll go on writing in the form – once a short story writer, always a short story writer – but after three collections, I feel I’ve come full-circle. From my first collection in my thirties – entitled A Lazy Eye – which explored a flawed, youthful vision of the world –  to the more rueful, backward glance of Twenty-Twenty Vision in my sixties. Two different perspectives, 30 years apart.

When I look at them both together now, I wonder if, despite the general consensus, hindsight is always right?

Twenty-Twenty Vision by Mary Morrissy, published by The Lilliput Press, will be launched in Hodges Figgis Bookshop, Dawson Street, Dublin on March 26 @ 6pm.

Fiction

Books and buses

by Mary Morrissy3 Comments on Books and buses

You wait ages for a bus and then three come along at the same time. The odd time it’s the same for books. February and March are a crowded bus stop for me with three publications on the trot. The paperback edition of Penelope Unbound (Banshee Press) came out in late February – in the shops now, folks, in case you missed it first time. My new collection of short fiction, Twenty-Twenty Vision, (The Lilliput Press – https://www.lilliputpress.ie ) – lands on March 20, with launches in Dublin and Cork, and hot on its heels, a super anthology from Dedalus Books featuring myself along with five other Irish women writers – Rosemary Jenkinson, Geraldine Mills, Mary O’Donnell, Nuala O’Connor and Tanya Farrelly – who edited the anthology – also being launched in Ireland in March. (Details to follow)

‘. . .a novel of great brilliance and inventiveness. . .Penelope Unbound is a masterwork.’

John Banville

‘Sharp, pitiless and heartbreaking. . . (Twenty-Twenty Vision) is a marvellous book.’

carlo gebler

News and Events

Looking forward to looking back

by Mary Morrissy4 Comments on Looking forward to looking back

This is the cover of my new collection of short stories, Twenty-Twenty Vision, from The Lilliput Press – https://www.lilliputpress.ie – due to be published in March.

The theme of the stories is hindsight. The characters revisit their pasts and grapple with late-life perspectives. It’s a portrait of a generation of women and men moving into the third age with a mixture of apprehension, longing and regret. So it’s more Mature People than Normal People.

The art work is by designer Adrian Robb – https://www.adrianzdesign.com/. The predominant use of blue might be a clue to the tone of the collection – hindsight tends to be melancholic. But there’s some grim humour here too and a bit of hilarity. Late middle-aged regret isn’t all downbeat and there are – whisper it! – some happy endings.

The title is double-edged. As the collection progresses, the pandemic sneaks into the narratives – i.e. the first year of the Covid crisis, when so much was unclear because we were so closely up against it.

Readers may not want to be reminded of a vision of the world in 2020, but for a writer of contemporary fiction, it would seem like wilful blindness not to acknowledge the Covid epidemic. Particularly since, from this distance, we are seeing the long-reaching, personal and societal costs of it.

Like the elephant in the room, it hasn’t gone away, you know.

Twenty-Twenty Vision is published by The Lilliput Press, March 20, 2025.

Fiction

Three little words

by Mary Morrissy5 Comments on Three little words

The recent story of Vicky Ball (48), the British author, whose success went viral after she tweeted about her sales at a marketing event, was touted around the maintstream press as a good news story. And on the surface, it is. A struggling author published by a small press, who suddenly hits the sales jackpot. What’s not to like? Within hours, Vicky’s post on X, which expressed her delight at having sold just two copies of her book at an authors’ event at the Galleywood Heritage Centre in Chelmsford, England, had attracted more than 24 million views and 745, 000 likes. As a result, her 2020 novel, Powerless, written during the Covid lockdown, began selling like hot cakes on Amazon.

Powerless, a thriller “with lots of twists”, shot up the Amazon besteller charts hitting number 3 on its teen and young adult fiction list. ( As a guide, to win an Amazon best-seller badge, you’d need to sell somewhere between 3,500 and 5000 copies within 24 hours.)

I don’t begrudge Vicky Ball her success. Really, I don’t. Who could not be cheered that this middle-aged teacher and creative writing student at the University of Essex has been catapulted into the literary big time in such a gloriously unexpected manner? (Although I am reminded of the words of that great American cynic, author Gore Vidal, who declared “whenever a friend succeeds, a little part of me dies”.)

But what’s really being celebrated here? Not Vicky Ball’s talent as a writer. Unless you count the power of these three words – “sold two books” followed by two grinning emojis – to transform her writerly reputation and her fortunes.

Perhaps it’s evidence of the amount of goodwill that still exists on social media that moved thousands of people to buy a book by an unknown author out of sympathy for her poor sales record. (Endearingly, Vicky Ball said she wasn’t feeling sorry for herself when she posted her X message: “I’ve done some events where I haven’t sold any.”)

We’ve all cheered at those David and Goliath stories where a small publisher gets an author on to a prestigous prize list, beating off competition from the behemoths in publishing, or those unlikely word-of-mouth successes where readers influence the success of an overlooked book by simply passing it on to their friends. But Vicky Ball’s sudden elevation has nothing to do with her work. It has to do with the power of social media. The only difference in this case is that it worked for the good not the detriment of its target.

By responding to Vicky Ball’s plight – one similar to many self-published authors or writers published by small presses – the social media public was recognising the sheer hard graft involved. These are writers who not only have to create the content i.e. write the books, but they have to be their own marketing and PR agents, and they often have to sell the books, one copy at a time. It’s a side of publishing that’s rarely spotlighted.

Vicky Ball has become the standard bearer for that tribe. But she’s only one. There are thousands who will never get the random stroke of good luck she has. I’m not arguing against her massive boost in sales. But my reservations are similar to the argument against giving money to beggars on the street. Your coin may help the person with her hand outstretched but it does nothing to counterbalance the inequities of the system that got her there.

Similarly with publishing. At one end of the spectrum you have celebrity authors who get paid silly money simply for being famous in another sphere; at the other end you have Vicky Ball, who has to hawk her books around and sell them one copy at time. The ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots that we see in wider society, is also true of the literary world. This goes back to the 1990s when the measurement of a book’s success shifted from the literary to the financial; when accountants not editors became the final arbiters of what got published. In the press, the amount of an advance became a yardstick to judge a book’s “worth”. The circular capitalist argument came into play i.e. this book must be good because of how much was paid for it.

This monetising of literary judgement has, I believe, worked to the detriment of all writers.

Vicky Ball is exactly the same writer she was three weeks ago before all this happened to her. The only difference is that she has attracted the mercurial attention of social media and it, not her work, has “infuenced” her transformation into a marketing success.

Good luck to her! 


	


		


	

					

				Nostalgia			

				
		
My future – as a Sandwich Artist
		
			
		
					

				by Mary Morrissy6 Comments on My future – as a Sandwich Artist			

			

	
	

		
		
		








I’m of a certain age. Post-retirement, that is – though when you’re a writer, you never actually retire; you just keep doing it till you drop. I also work as a manuscript editor and literary mentor (see The Deadline Desk page elsewhere on this site. ) As a result, I have a presence on social media and, harking back to my days as a freelance teacher and journalist, my various talents are listed on LinkedIn.  When I was newly retired, I found it difficult to stop checking out job ads. Old habits die hard. It wasn’t all about a reluctance to relinquish my place as a useful member of the rat race. There was a vicarious satisfaction in looking at positions for which I would never have to submit my CV and  jobs  I’d never have to interview for.  





What joy to never again have to engage in  that  false braggadocio of the performative interview! (They say be yourself at an interview; but when I played myself, I invariably didn’t get the job.) As a retiree, scouring the job ads had the same heart-in-mouth sensation of waking up from the classic nightmare and discovering that, no, you’re not sitting your Leaving Cert maths exam again. . . naked. Followed by a delicious sigh of relief.





But since I’ve stopped being a traditional job-hunter, I’ve noticed that the volume of work I’m considered suitable for on my LinkedIn feed has expanded exponentially. Jobs that someone (are there real people doing this anymore?) or some faceless algorithm is pumping my way.





Because I self-describe as a journalist and writer, most of the opportunities I’m offered are in those fields, or in academia where I spent the last 20 years of my career. Time was – particularly post-Crash – when as an out-of-work freelancer I would have welcomed this wealth of opportunities. Lately, though, the algorithms have gone rogue, because now my recommendations include a plethora of  retail jobs in hamburger joints and fast food places. As a youngster, I worked in retail but that’s over 40 years ago. I wasn’t very good at it then and I doubt if my skills have improved in the meantime.





Supermarkets are often keen to employ more mature people, particularly on their tills. And perhaps the algorithms have been noting my age and thinking I might like a dinky little part-time job at a cash register in my golden years. Either way, it seems, some kind of weird profiling is going on.





I was pleased to see in the last week that some of the jobs were inching back towards my area of expertise – a prime example was an opening for a storyteller at the National Leprechaun Museum. . . mmn, close. I could see the logic of suggesting online tutoring work, but a part-time teacher of Hindi? But by far the strangest career move suggestion was to become a Sandwich Artist at Subway.





I kid you not. I suppose the word artist might appear somewhere in my CV or list of publications, but where the hell did the sandwich angle come in? Sure, I eat them, but that’s about the height of my expertise. I was nearly tempted to apply just out of sheer curiosity. 





What does a Sandwich Artist at Subway do? And what unique offering could I bring to the position? Dash off a few oil paintings of breakfast rolls? Craft installations using bread and assorted fillings? Do live performances with ham? Write a novel from the point of a view of a sliced pan?





The Sandwich Artist role immediately prompted images from my childhood of sandwich board men (they were almost always men).  They walked the streets strapped into a matching pair of advertising boards, front and back. Sandwich boards gained popularity in the 19th century, but they’ve been supplanted by large-scale advertising which is aimed at car-drivers rather than pedestrians, and electronic billboards which appeal to our more sophisticated visual senses. The sandwich board, on the other hand, is predominantly text and information-based. You still see sandwich boards outside establishments in the city centre, but generally not with a human attached.





Incidentally, the term “sandwich men” for the mobile human advertiser was, apparently,  first coined by  author Charles Dickens. He described them as “a piece of human flesh between two slices of paste board”. Now, with branding, we’ve all become walking advertisements. And the sandwich artists are the ones inside “creating” rolls for Subway.

	


		


	

					

				History			

				
		
Lament for a Landmark
		
			
		
					

				by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment on Lament for a Landmark			

			

	
	

		
		
		








I miss her.  I’m talking about the recently demolished R and H hall grainstore on Cork’s South Docks. (Notice, I’ve gendered the building.  Even though most vertically ambitious, skyscraping structures are considered male, R and H Hall has always seemed female to me – a big, blowsy mother ship.)  No one could accuse her of being beautiful.  Functional, maybe, but not beautiful. Built in the 1940s as a storehouse for grain feed, she has loomed over the docklands for over 80 years, most of them working, though in recent decades she’s been empty and heading towards dereliction. The demolition work started in January and it’s taken over four months to bring the mighty Amazon down.





Her giant silo towers stood at 33m (for comparison’s sake, the Elysian tower, Cork’s tallest building is 71m) and were made of concrete and steel.  This mode of construction was celebrated at the time but for most people it’s the sheer size of R and H Hall that impressed – or repelled. 





The National Built Heritage Service noted that, beyond its “utilitarian design”, the significance of the grain mills lay in its visibility from many parts of the city, its height and scale serving to define the commercial docks area of the city. (The National Heritage people considered her an “it”.)





Her monolithic presence stood like a large piece of industrial furniture declaring Cork as a working port city. (As well as the helpful sign, Port of Cork, on the island where the river splits.) But like the “You are Now Entering Free Derry” sign at the entrance to the Bogside, that distinctive R and H Hall logo marked a definitive border, a crossing into the People’s Republic of Cork. 





The building has always split opinion. From an “abomination” to “majestic”. For some, it was an eyesore – though one Cork resident interviewed as the building was coming down conceded that “at least, it was our eyesore”. A child  – with imaginative vision – saw it as Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Others thought it was “cool”, but it wasn’t clear whether they meant the building or the destruction of it.





The downing of R and H Hall was a slow business.  Behind the high walls, the giraffe neck of a huge crane with toothed jaws crunched its way through the walls with what seemed like carnivorous glee.  It seemed an oddly laborious way to get rid of the place, but in the end as a fan, it gave me a chance to get used to the idea that soon there would be a blue sky view when sitting having a drink in Goldbergs pub straight opposite. 





I’d imagined at first that they might blow up the Old Lady of Kennedy Quay and I rather liked the idea of it being crushed in one explosive fell swoop.  It’s not something you see every day, though in pre-September 11 America, the controlled demolition of buildings was often turned into a spectator event.





In Richard Ford’s novel The Lay of the Land, set in the year 2000, the aging hero Frank Bascombe and his buddies go on an expedition to watch the downing of an old hotel in Asbury Park on the New Jersey shore. In reality, the hotel still stands, but in the novel. Ford renames it and then tears it down by implosion.





“Black smoke gushes from what must be the hotel’s deepest subterranean underpinnings, her staunchest support. . .Her longitude lines, rows of square windows in previously perfect vertical alignment, all go wrinkled, as if the whole idea of the building had sustained, then sought to shrug off a profound insult. . and then rather simply, all the way down she comes, more like a brick curtain being lowered than like a proud old building being killed. Eighteen seconds is about it.”





I’m glad in the event, that R and H Hall went the slow way. 





It gave admirers  like me time to adjust to her loss, and a chance to glimpse her complicated innards and to marvel at just how ambitious a building she was.  Not so marvellous for the residents of Park View, the terrace that sat for decades at her feet. For them she was a brooding shadow-maker, a greedy light-stealer. 












One of the effects of urban clearance is that it creates a kind of amnesia.  Who remembers what preceded the aforementioned Elysian?  I saw that demolition happen and now I have to work really hard to imagine what it replaced. (A post office depot, and before that a rail terminus, by the way).  Will I be struggling in years to come to remember R and H Hall?  Somehow, I doubt it.





She has seared herself on my inward eye so I’m not likely to forget.  I’m not the only one. The landmark building has appeared on posters and photographs. Currently, there’s an exhibition of images of her at the nearby Marina Market, where a number of visual artists are already commemorating the place almost as soon as the dust has settled. 





The Silo Building which will replace the Hall grainstore will have the same footprint and will reflect the industrial characteristics of its predecessor, according to the developers of the site. Although the structure was not suitable or safe enough to repurpose, it is hoped that a sculptural piece will be installed on site using some of the rare grain-drying, conditioning machines and grain hoppers rescued from the demolition.  The same goes for the trademark signage that was taken down and preserved.  (Just like the Anglo-Irish Bank logo which now features as a social-historical artefact in the National Museum in Kilmainham, Dublin  – though not with the same painful associations.)





But while these modernist, deconstructed nods to legacy are welcome, none of them  make up for the original which lorded it (or is that ladied?) over the city in all her brutalist glory. 





Did I mention that I miss her?





My most  recent publication is in  Cork Stories from Doire Press – 18 stories from and about Cork. https://www.doirepress.com/books/fiction/cork-stories










Photographs:  Dan Linehan, Reddit and Colbert Kearney. 

	


		


	

					

				The World of Penelope Unbound			

				
		
Nora Barnacle’s ‘buried life’
		
			
		
					

				by Mary Morrissy2 Comments on Nora Barnacle’s ‘buried life’			

			

	
	

		
		
		








Joyceans remember Joyce’s birthday on February 2, and the world celebrates Bloomsday on June 16. But despite her role as partner, wife and muse to Joyce, Nora Barnacle’s milestones rarely get a mention, even though she served as a model for some of Joyce’s most memorable creations – Molly Bloom in Ulysses, Bertha Rowan in Exiles  and Gretta Conroy in “The Dead”. March is Nora’s month. She was born 140 years ago on March 21, 1884, in the maternity ward of the Galway Workhouse.





Even though my recently published novel, Penelope Unbound,  is  a counterfactual narrative, I document Nora’s early years faithfully in the opening chapters of the book. It is only after the eloping couple arrive in Trieste in 1904, that I depart from the known truths.





At that stage, I step in and play Goddess, separating the lovers and forcing them to live their lives apart.  In the novel, Nora stays in Trieste,  works as a domestic servant and finds a new relationship.  Joyce moves on to Fiume where he teaches English at a naval academy.  He returns to Trieste in 1907, but by that time, Nora has migrated back to Dublin and has become  the owner of Finn’s Hotel.  Joyce marries Amalia Popper, one of his English language students, abandons his writing  and becomes an opera singer.  





As a result of these altered circumstances, the world around Nora and Joyce also changes. In this new reality, Ulysses is never written and Dubliners remains unpublished.





Even so, the guiding Joycean literary influence in Penelope Unbound are the stories in Dubliners.





Perhaps the most famous story from the collection is “The Dead” described by the New York Times  on its centennial publication as “maybe the finest story in the English language”. 





If there was ever proof needed how much of Nora’s life found its way into Joyce’s work, then it’s here.





The story depicts a married couple, Gabriel and Gretta Conroy, who are attending a party to mark the Epiphany (January 6, 1904) at the house of Gabriel’s aunts in a large house on Usher’s Island in Dublin. Gabriel is nervous about a speech he has to give later in the night – he’s afraid the guests will find his literary references ridiculous and pretentious. After the meal and the speech, there is music and in the story’s pivotal scene, a tenor sings “The Lass of Aughrim”. Gretta becomes transfixed by the song. Sensing her preoccupation, Gabriel enquires what is wrong and in an “outburst of tears” she tells him why the song has affected her so much.





When she was a young girl in Galway, she was romantically linked to a young man called Michael Furey. When he heard that she was leaving the city, he  had stood in the pouring rain outside her window and had sung to her.  She rushed downstairs to him and urged him to go home or he would get his death.  “But he said he did not want to live.”  At the time, he was already ill, and some time afterwards, he succumbed to his illness.  “I think he died for me,” Gretta says. 





The admission of his wife’s secret grief, about which he knew nothing, and the intensity of her feelings, both chills and haunts Gabriel. “He had never felt that himself towards any woman, but he knew such a feeling must be love.”





The story of Michael Furey chimes almost exactly with Nora Barnacle’s youthful biography.





Michael “Sonny” Bodkin, from Prospect Hill in the city, was Nora’s teenage sweetheart. She was 15 and Sonny was 18 and a student in University College Galway, when they met. According to Nora’s Galway biographer, Padraic O Laoi, she was very impressed by his “gentility and manliness” and became very attached to him..





The opportunities for courtship for teenagers were then very limited, according to O Laoi, so Nora would visit the Bodkin sweetshop at Prospect Hill and there “throw eyes” at Sonny as they “chatted and joked and passed small pleasantries”. But after only a year, Sonny was stricken with TB. He was sent to the County Infirmary but his medical treatment was not successful and he died there on February 11, 1900. He was buried in Rahoon Cemetery two miles north west of the city.





Sonny was not the only bereavement Nora had suffered.  Her first crush, aged 13,  was on another Michael – Michael Feeney, a neighbour boy she’d grown up with, who was a few years older.  At 16, Feeney contracted typhus, developed pneumonia and died in the Galway Workhouse  in 1897.





These early deaths had a profound effect on Nora. She met Joyce a mere four years after Sonny’s death, and she confided in him about it. It’s likely that she showed the him the shop at No. 2 Prospect Hill where she flirted with Sonny, when Joyce visited the city in 1909.  And in 1912 on a second visit, she took him to Sonny’s grave.





She must have also told him about Michael Feeney. It appears that Joyce combined details from both of these experiences for the character of Michael Furey in “The Dead”.





But as Brenda Maddox’ s biography, Nora, notes: “It hardly matters where he got the facts for ‘The Dead’. Joyce rearranged and patterned his materials to suit his art and his ear.” 





Sonny Bodkin was Nora’s “buried life, her past”,  Joyce wrote.





That buried life was commemorated in Rahoon Cemetery earlier this year when President Michael D Higgins unveiled a plaque at the Bodkin vault  to honour  the real-life associations that informed Joyce’s fictional masterpiece. In doing so, the president said he was acknowledging “something incredibly important” – the influence of Nora Barnacle’s “sense of recall and her sense of embedded memory” on Joyce’s life and work.





Photograph:  Nora Barnacle  as a teenager in Galway  c 1895-1900