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    Transcendent Dylan (June 2011)

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    Mama, You Been On My Mind triumphs under scrutiny. By John Waters I wouldn’t, in normal circumstances, go so far as to assert that any of Bob Dylan’s songs is his best. That would risk being too big a statement.  But if you put a gun to my head this very moment and demanded that, on pain of death for getting it wrong, I name his best song, I feel I would have a fighting chance of surviving if I mentioned Mama, You Been On My Mind. The strange thing is that I don’t think of it as a song. It’s deeper than that. Of course, there are versions of it that turn it into a song, including some horrendous duets Dylan did with Joan Baez. But there is a version in existence in which the song lives in a different way, as something more than the sum of its parts, as something so special you have to wonder why it is only to be found in one apparently throwaway version on the Bootleg collection, just one of many interesting tracks that got left to one side. The sleevenotes with the Bootleg Series tell us it was recorded in the middle of 1964. They also mention the several versions Dylan was to do with Baez – when Dylan would “ham the song up unmercifully”; and the solo version Baez released – ridiculously called Daddy, You Been On My Mind –  on her 1965 album, Farewell Angelina. The solo recording that features on the Dylan bootleg was presumably made before this, perhaps in 1964 or even earlier. The note also mentions several other versions of the song that Dylan recorded or participated in. One, a “rather ponderous version as a Witmark demo with piano accompaniment in the summer of 1964”, another with George Harrison in 1970, in a New York session of which nothing was ever released.  We are told that he performed the song live several times. If you search for it on YouTube, you get people who sing the song and don’t tell you it was Dylan that wrote it. You get people who sing it so badly that you wonder why they bother. You get Dylan and Baez cheerfully murdering it.  You get a Johnny Cash version in which he inexplicably changes the lyric, including the opening line, arguably the greatest in all of popular music, for reasons unstated but worth speculating about. But if you want to hear Dylan sing it as it was meant to be sung, you need to get the Bootleg Series and expect to be playing nothing else for a week. Dylan wrote, recorded and released lots of songs.  Many of them are carried by stories or statements or riddles or simply clever hooks that make you wonder about the immense sense of irony that resides within this man, this poet, this seeker, this joker. For half a century he has been standing on the edge of the world looking in, reflecting or refracting some things that caught his eye, uttering them in ways that always suggest a stab at truthfulness, then moving on as though unsure what he has done. Almost none of his songs are finished, and some are no more than begun. Some of them seem to go on forever and others seem to end before they get to the chase – containing “too much and not enough”, as he put it himself, coating their subjects in words as though to convey the inadequacy of description. But this song, this statement, this riddle, this joke, has something more in it than the others.  It has Dylan in it in a way that the rest of his songs do not. Dylan is a storyteller, a creator: there is no need for him to be present in his songs, and there are no reasons for us to jump to the conclusion that we have glimpsed him in any or all of them. At any given moment it might be him or not, probably not. There is a character in this song, but I don’t suggest this character is Dylan.  It might be, but it doesn’t really matter. The voice is Dylan’s and he gives this voice to the character as he does in many other songs. There is a baldness and clarity to the delivery that suggests it is Dylan talking.  His voice carries none of the affection it sometimes has when he is trying to find the right pose or attitude for a song. Anyone who has read his autobiographical work, Chronicle, will know that he likes to lay false trails and blow up existing understandings. But there is a trueness here that is difficult to avoid. His voice is up close in a way that it rarely is. It is as though he has stopped to get real, if only for a few moments. The song, if it can be called a song, is great because it is not a song. There is no real hook to hide behind. It has no chorus, just the repeated title line. Moreover, the song is itself concerned with laying false trails, about the duplicity that lies behind the word and the note and the face and the name. Deep down, he has said more than once, nobody’s got a name. And yet the song that is not a song is, in another sense, banal. It is a kind of love song, on the surface of things a throwaway afterthought about a relationship that ended some time ago. Except that it is not throwaway. It is not an afterthought. It is a cry from deep within the heart of one who has loved too much and lost not just the love but also the capacity to face that loss. It is the plea of someone whose life has been stilled by the fallout from desire and the encounter with its limits.  It is a song about the way human longing has the capacity

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    Poetry made prose at Drumcliff.

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    By Michael Smith. Sligo County Council and the National Roads Authority have ruined Yeats’ grave. Irish poets, learn your trade, Sing whatever is well made, Scorn the sort now growing up All out of shape from toe to top, Their unremembering hearts and heads Base-born products of base beds. Sing the peasantry, and then Hard-riding country gentlemen, The holiness of monks, and after Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter; Sing the lords and ladies gay That were beaten into the clay Through seven heroic centuries; Cast your mind on other days That we in coming days may be Still the indomitable Irishry. Under bare Ben Bulben’s head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid. An ancestor was rector there Long years ago, a church stands near, By the road an ancient cross. No marble, no conventional phrase; On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by! The most famous epitaph for a great literary Irishman is the last lines of Under Ben Bulben, for William Butler Yeats. In that poem, Yeats advocates “whatever is well made”, and disdains “the sort now growing up/All out of shape from toe to top”, while he imagines a future passer by, sometime in eternity, casting “a cold eye/On life, on death” near the poet’s imagined tomb in Drumcliff Cemetery. The poetry is tumultuously poignant; the importance of the place in time afforded Drumcliff momentous. It lends to Drumcliff churchyard universal and all-time significance. So we can assume the Cemetery and the grave have been treated with reverence, not to say imagination? The cemetery in 2010 is the child of Sligo County Council and the NRA. The half acre nearest the great man’s grave is now a tarmac car-park. It ends within a metre of the grave itself. You could put your foot on the grave and leave the other one rooted in the car-park. A hundred metres away, the new Sligo-Bundoran road channels the juggernauts of the North West on their noisy way. A constant drone of disharmony. The plaque commemorating Yeats at the entrance to the graveyard is sponsored by the National Roads Authority. Even the limestone is cut somewhat crassly and the capitalisation of “Life, Death and Eye just wrong. If ever a man is spinning in his grave (pern in gyre) it is the beloved bard Yeats, reinterred in 1948 nine years after burial in the far more favoured hilltop Roquebrune church yard in France where he died; now circumvolving within spitting distance of the tour buses and not a horseman in sight. Yeats Country beaten down. Inside the still-pleasant church beside the graveyard is a visitors’ book for comments on the Drumcliff experience. The gushing almost drowns out the traffic: “a peaceful place”, “an oasis in a world gone mad”, “I could feel the presence of the great poet” and so on. It is not, it is not and you cannot. Ne’er a fool like a pre-disposed tourist. I attended one of the, admittedly charming, Leonard Cohen weekend concerts In Lissadell over the summer. Cohen is allegedly a poet, the lyrics to his gravel-plated songs demanding, according to the comfortable demi-intellectuals who comprise his Irish audiences, reflection. I found his performances a little stage-urbane. Twice during his set that Saturday he introduced his band, stopping to praise each member in turn but somewhat disappointingly using precisely the same adjective for each member on both occasions. The “inspirational Bob Metzger”. The “irrepressible” Neil Larsen. Or whatever. The attractive, backing Webb Sisters he described as “sublime”. Twice. During his concert Cohen made clear his veneration of Yeats and quoted from his work. According to the Irish Times, “earlier on Saturday he had visited Drumcliff churchyard and paid his respects at the grave of Yeats, a poet whose work he had first read, as Cohen told his audience, ‘at home in Montreal, about 50 years ago’. He smiled his wry, rueful smile. In the visitors’ book at Drumcliff church he wrote ‘Leonard Cohen, Montreal’, and next to it a simple comment. “Sublime”. How unpoetic. 2010 (photo: James Eccles, courtesy Benedict Schlepper-Connolly)

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    Ireland’s rural pub trade is collapsing (March ’11 edn)

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    By Éibhir Mulqueen The village of Annascaul on the road to Dingle in Co Kerry is notable for two distinctive pubs: one, The South Pole Inn, was owned by the famous Antarctic explorer Tom Crean; the other, Dan Foley’s, was run by a retired magician. The pub’s garish pink, blue and red façade is famous for its picture of a gas cylinder and the words “it’s an illusion”, painted on as a magician’s hologram, was a staple of the Real Ireland Design postcard series. Both venues have entertained locals and visitors over the years. But the famous epigram now hints at a deeper, more profound meaning: Foley’s has been on the books of a Tralee auctioneers for the past four years, its colours are fading and the “Guinness is good for you” enamel sign is rusting. You can still purchase the original postcard on eBay but the more recent pictures available online of a slowly decaying premises with a ‘for sale’ sign now reflect a more up-to-date real Ireland. Closure has been the fate of 1,300 pubs throughout Ireland over the past five years or at the rate of nearly one per day, as the Vintners Federation of Ireland (VFI), representing 4,500 rural publicans, points out, while the return of mass emigration in rural areas means the outlook is bleak. In the past three years alone, Co Cork has lost 90 pubs, double the number of the counties with the next greatest losses, Kerry and Galway, which each lost 46. Mayo, Limerick, Donegal and Clare have also have seen high closure numbers. In contrast, Meath and Kildare have increased their pub numbers, if only by a small number as they benefit from the numbers living on the commuter belt. Along with local shops and post offices – around 600 sub post offices have closed in the past ten years – pubs have been an essential part of village life, a meeting point for friends and a place that have delighted foreign tourists, where they felt less of a walking commodity and more of a visitor having a genuine experience. Eileen Percival, a native of Annascaul who returned from England twelve years ago to lease the South Pole, tells a familiar tale of struggle, changed drinking habits and people less willing to pay for meals. She was employing seven staff up to three years ago during the summer. “Any staff that go I am not replacing them. I am just doing it myself because I cannot afford to. Times are really tough.” The effect is not just on the hundreds of family-run businesses that kept small numbers employed over generations. Apart from reducing Ireland’s appeal to visitors, pub closures amount to a loss of a social forum, most keenly felt by single, elderly men. President McAleese has highlighted how rural isolation is now a major social problem for older men in particular. “Yeats once said that this ‘is no country for old men’. I want to be sure he was wrong”, she said at a forum on the issue four years ago while pointing out that older men are now the second most at risk suicide group after young males. In some areas this has been reversed. South Kerry coroner Terence Casey pointed out recently that in his region most suicides since 2005 were among older age groups. “We have had a lot of discussions about this at our regional meetings. What has been identified is a male group typically aged between 50 and 80,” says Ted Tierney, deputy chief executive of Mental Health Ireland. “The disappearance of the rural pub and the drink driving laws is impacting on them. “With the closure of these pubs, their only social outlet in some cases is gone.” His organisation promotes a befriending project but he also underlines the need for a rural transport scheme to run between 9pm and midnight. “If you could walk to your pub and that closes, the next one could be four or six miles away,” he says. Meanwhile, the GAA Social Initiative began as a result of the President’s talk and is a reach-out project aiming to have every GAA club participating in social activities, often in a local pub if there is no clubhouse. Seán Kilbride, project manager for the initiative, has 90 clubs involved so far and hopes to have 150 by the year’s end that involve elderly men and, ultimately, all sections of the community in GAA social activities. “We do not want to be too formulaic. We would be a reminder to clubs that this should be a natural part of their philosophy”, he says. The VFI has campaigned for dedicated smoking rooms, reduced bureaucracy and lower rates to help pub owners, while pointing out that drinking at home often creates more problems than drinking in a pub. It wants a ban on supermarkets selling below-cost alcohol, an issue also taken up by grocery group RGDATA which refers to Tesco “selling beer cheaper than water”. The pub is as much an institution in Britain and there the trend is similar. One in ten pubs has closed in the past six years and closures are still running at 39 a week, according to the British Beer & Pub Association, which is also calling for government policies to support a sector promoting community life. Elsewhere too there are similar developments due to crackdowns on drink driving and teen drinking as well as smoking bans. In France food rather than alcohol has traditionally been at the centre of French community life and there family-run restaurants and bistros, along with café and bars have fallen by the wayside, as smokers are nudged outside and the ‘le fast food’ culture takes hold. In 1960 there were 200,000 cafés but that number was down to 38,600 by 2009, according to the National Federation of Cafes, Brasseries and Discotheques. Common factors in all countries are changing habits, urbanisation, the selling power of corporations and strictly-enforced drinking laws which have turned

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    “Ireland is a disturbed child in a fantasy world”

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    Nicola Carroll interviews psychiatrist, Professor Ivor Browne. Ivor Browne is a retired Irish psychiatrist, author, former Chief Psychiatrist of the Eastern Health Board, former celebrated and radical lecturer and Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at University College Dublin. He was a regular contributor on the Late Late Show in the 1970s and married June Levine, a leader of the women’s liberation movement. It was a second marriage for both of them. Although he was Professor of Psychiatry in UCD, he supported the student revolution in Earlsfort Terrace in ‘68, he took recreational drugs and he played jazz. He is now a regular practitioner of meditation. He was born in 1929 to a well-off family in Sandycove, Dublin, with a father who worked in the head office of a bank, He had an unhappy childhood, was educated in Blackrock College which he disliked and where he performed poorly. academically. He ended up in a secretarial college, but passed the required subjects to get into the College of Surgeons at the age of 17. He travelled around Ireland in his student days, playing traditional music for food and lodging. Despite recurring Tuberculosis, he qualified as a doctor in 1955. In 1959 he founded Claddagh Records with Garech Browne. He worked in Grangegorman Mental Hospital where conditions for the 2,000 patients were medieval. He held positions in Oxford and Harvard and brought new thinking back to Irish psychiatry including the use of new drugs and intensive one-to-one therapy, closing down old institutions and moving patients into the community where they could learn to function again. And all this time Browne was working on himself, shaking off the effects of his isolated childhood and using LSD to explore his own psyche. In your autobiography you describe society as a “boat on a river drifting towards a waterfall”. Is Irish Society perilously close to the edge now? Ireland has all the marks of an adolescent that hasn’t grown up. After nearly 100 years of so-called self-governance this country has failed to reach maturity. I can see the uncanny resemblance between the behaviour of this country and that of so many individuals I have worked with over the years in my role as a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist. Ireland’s childhood was that of a young person growing up in a poor family. Times were hard. But then there was the idealism that was around in 1916 and during the War of Independence. This idealism was sadly destroyed by the Civil War. As a nation we still haven’t recovered. With the genuine idealism that was around in 1916 and 1919, we could have gone on to develop an adult society. Over the last 30 years, we as a nation have had a choice to develop an independent identity and leave the dependance on our ‘parent’ Britain behind us. Instead we bought into a me-now-liberalism and an orgy of greed; and took on the behaviour of a disturbed adolescent who creates a fantasy world and then gets involved in drugs to sustain it. Ireland created a fantasy world which we called success and propped that up with all sorts of addictions. This can be seen clearly in our political world which is awash with alcohol. Irish society is adrift and we can’t be bailed out this time by our parents – and there is no mental hospital to go to. Economic collapse has made Ireland homeless. Do you think this collapse was inevitable? No. We missed an opportunity to ditch this rotten capitalist system before it collapsed and to take a different direction. We failed to do so. If we had any sort of maturity as a nation we could have seen this coming. The so-called developed world talks about recovery and the ‘return to growth’. I think that is arrogant nonsense and I don’t think it is going to happen. Why not? We have polluted the world in every sense. The last century was the bloodiest century ever with millions of human beings killing each other.  There has been a series of man-made disasters starting with global warming and including the recent American oil spill. Natural disasters have always happened but it seems to me things are speeding up. We are going around with our eyes wide shut. Human beings have a terrible arrogance to believe that because we have caused the problems, we also have the solutions. If you believe James Lovelock’s Gaia theory that the biosphere is something alive then it is not going to tolerate a small part like the human species misbehaving.  A healthy body will eliminate bad cells. If the planet is a living system it is inevitable that Nature is going to bring this about. There has been an enormous increase in the world’s population and it is not sustainable. I think the world as we know it is going to collapse in the next 20 years. You sound very fatalistic I don’t feel fatalistic. This has happened before in history. Many advanced civilisations have been destroyed and a small population survived. I think there are better things to come. It is through suffering and hard times that the human race will grow. Cycles have always occurred. Why do we think it’s not possible now? What do you think we should do now? We can only prepare through a spiritual life – of love – for what is coming. I am very optimistic. Where does your certainty come from? It comes from observing. Do you think that human beings are innately good or bad? I think the level of human consciousness is rising. But Capitalism is legitimised organised crime. We have gone too far now and there are no signs of us developing the political machinery to make real change. We have a leaderless society and the politicians we deserve in Ireland. The money that has gone into Anglo Irish Bank alone could have been used to build a healthy society. We could have replaced this lifestyle with a much simpler

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    Inanimate Icons of contemporary Ireland: 1 The Panino

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      For more years  than we care to remember, it has been the staple of the Irish diet. Whole generations were reared on this humble foodstuff which  cannot be found outside Ireland. But our love for it peaked in the boom and, as with all affairs, the flower of romance has begun to droop of late. And today we run the risk of losing part of our culinary heritage forever. Isn’t it time we fell back in love with the Panino, putting it at the centre of the spiffing new smart economy that we’re all so excited about? The Facts But first, the facts. For centuries, the Panino’s provenance has been shrouded in a dense mist, like the fog around Bertie Ahern. But recent research has shovelled the cold hard light of miserable day all over this traditional squashed bread snack and debunked 34 per cent of the myths surrounding it: A little history 1. The first Panino was introduced to Ireland by Sir Walter Raleigh: Wrong. We now know that this piece of black propaganda was circulated by MI6 during a long tea-break in The Troubles. In fact, the honour goes to Guido Nervi, a brightly clad fifteen-year-old from Naples. The teen smuggled a Panino into Ireland on board a Ryanair flight in 1991. But the hot sandwich escaped into the wild when Nervi (unaware of Ireland’s red-trouser ban) was viciously attacked by a group of angry eight-year-olds on O’Connell Bridge (they now work in “digital media”). The Panini, meanwhile, multiplied and went feral. 2. The Panino was invented by Giovanni Panino: Close, but no Cohiba. Certainly, the legendary Venetian explorer gave his name to the snack. But as with every aspect of our lives today, the Chinese were ultimately responsible. Legend has it that Signor Panino discovered the toasted roll during a trade mission to Western China and was so taken with the delicacy that he foil-wrapped it and carried it all the way home to Venice, from a Londis in Szechuan province. 3. Panini sales account for one third of Ireland’s GDP: This is based on old data. And even now when we no longer own 97 per cent of the world’s large cranes and 83 per cent of Bulgaria, this is a stretch. Certainly most economists agree that the figure only stacks up if you include sales of breakfast rolls and batter burgers. 4. A Panino is just a bit of old toasted sandwich: False. The Panino is both squashed and toasted – a far cry from a miserable plastic-coated “toasted special”. Some science So, now we’ve undone a few of the lies and legends surrounding  Irish Panini. But one mystery remains: What is it that makes this hot meta-sandwich such a uniquely Irish taste sensation? Here’s just a sapore of some theories which have gained currency in recent years: Famine Fear: The collective memory of the starvation endured in the Great Famine means the Irish will eat pretty much anything that’s handed to them. A sanger in the hand beats eating a bush, as the saying goes. Historians have noted that in the Post-Famine era, Irish farmers cutely moved gradually away from the potato crop and towards their nearest Spar where Panini were a more reliable food source. Symbolic Sandwich: For psychologists, the lure of Panini is more deeply rooted in the Irish psyche. Panini  – they say – are nothing less than a bready embodiment of the Irish people. Half-baked, uninspired, over-priced and easily filled with rubbish – in the Panino we see a mirror of ourselves, and everything that makes it great to be Irish. Aspirational Snack: Those in the field of sociologists have a very different theory. For them, the Panino is the quintessential “aspirational” product. Straight off the griddle and steaming hot, the Panino offers consumers a chance to bite into the swash-buckling, cut-throat world of profiteering which all of us aspired to, until last Tuesday week. Certainly, the Panino and the property market share an identical business model: First, take poor quality ingredients, add a foreign name (Westminster Downs, Westminster Panini etc.), then overheat furiously. Of course that’s as far as the Panino/Property analogy can stretch. Because as we all know, a Panino quickly cools down leaving a soggy mess that no one in their right mind would deal with. Going forward we  need to develop a new language for a Panino for a new generation. We should export it. There may be a particular market in Italy, where the IDA is already having success with another Celtic Tiger refugee, Ciabatta. Panini should become the new River Dance –  Johnston, Mooney and O’Brien white slices rendered exquisite for the twenty tens. We must save them from the fate of their abandoned European cousins, Boxty and griddle-bread.  The Panino is a displaced icon awaiting a nostalgia.

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