Fin Keegan

My play Grace of the Median, a comedy of Hiberno-American errors, gets a public reading, with actors, in the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, on July 19th at 1pm:

I am an Irish rock. Whoever treads on me–Norman or Gael, peasant or prince, child or crone–is all one to me. Civilization itself is but five minutes old in my day-long life; the British Empire, the Irish Republic, Eurovision, the blink of an eye…

The event, produced by Painted Filly Theatre Company, is free but ticketed: you can reserve a seat through the Project Box Office: (01) 881-9614. More details HERE

Image: ‘The Road to Ragged Mountain’ by Chris Seufert on Flickr

My short story “Ursula’s Ghost” is in Crannóg Magazine’s summer issue (affording me the great pleasure of reading it at the launch event in Galway). The piece is a spooky little number about a returned emigrant with blood on her hands…

Was she thinking of the man she had just killed? No. She was back living in Ireland after twenty years away in America and, perhaps to take her mind off things, was idly flicking through the changes she had found.

What had she noticed? The cracked pavements, with their teeming weedlife, for one; washing lines and lace curtains; the smell of rain and the sight of rust; the smokers stooped about doors; the Slav and English accents everywhere; the stone and the grey and piped music and yes the damp, the mist, the rain.

You can get a copy via the Crannóg website.

Image: ‘Welcome, ghosts’ by The Devil is in The Details on Flickr

I just got some nice reviews of my short play Sing, Hibernia, courtesy of the excellent Painted Filly, the theatre company which produced the piece at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, a little while back.

All credit, while I’m on the subject, to Director Duncan Molloy and lead actors Sarah-Jayne Quigley and Colm O’Brien, all of whom did sterling work: I was whisked off after the performance by family and friends and wished I could have shaken them all by the hand.

Here are some choice quotes from the papers:

Fin Keegan’s Sing, Hibernia is the brilliant one, an exuberantly satiric and acid-edged jab at the pleasure-sated offspring of the Celtic Tiger. A couple lie in fine clothes, literally eating the heads off each other with spoons, while a line of black-clad servants–”our friends from the accession states”–leap to push the shuffle button on their iPods and clean stilettos with a tissue.
-Daily Mail

The sardonic zenith has to be Fin Keegan’s riotous Sing, Hibernia which somehow manages to send up middle-class drug-taking, attitudes to immigration and globalisation, all in a rich Synge-like English.
-Metro Dublin

The Irish Times also made a passing reference in its review of the evening to “Fin Keegan’s amusing Celtic folklore update”

Image: ‘Broadway’ by Timothy Neesam on Flickr

Recent riots in the Dublin suburb of Finglas and a teenage double suicide in my own county underline the responsibility we all have to help our young people grow up to become responsible, productive, and happy citizens. (Meanwhile, in my old home of Las Vegas, the radio station where I worked was hit by bullets following a post-school fracas across the street.)

The kids are not alright. An essay by Paul Graham examines adolescent unhappiness: his thesis, in a nutshell, is that because of the way we organize Western societies now teenagers are denied the experience of real and meaningful work in their teens. Money quote:

If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do.

But the problem is not that we choose to institutionally educate our children: the problem is how we teach them.

The trick is to teach our young their subjects as meaningful tools to live a better life. Literacy, numeracy, history, geography, and creativity can all be taught in a practical and useful way that has (and is perceived by the children themselves to have) direct benefits for themselves and their community.

Would the children of Finglas be so quick to destroy their environment if they had actually worked, through school, to determine it, say by planting trees or contributing to planning decisions? I do not think they would.

Paul Graham: Why Nerds are Unpopular: paulgraham.com, Feb, 2003

Image: ‘Halt’ by New York Observer on Flickr

My political satire Utopia Closes is currently was recently a semi-finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. The winner will be decided by reader response. You can download a sample chapter at

www.amazon.com/dp/B00121WDG0

The best reader review will be given a $2000 token by Amazon so, beside my undying gratitude for your support, you may get a free shopping spree!

Came across something today you don’t often see: an obituary written by a dead man–or, more accurately, an obituary whose author (Douglas Johnson: 1925-2005) predeceased his subject (Julien Gracq: 1910-2007) by two years.

Gracq was a contrarian French author who shunned the fame and honours garnered by his work. His best known book is the war novel Un Balcon en Foret [A Balcony in the Forest]. According to the obituary, Gracq had his doubts about the style-cult which marks modern literature in France and…

believed in the importance not so much of style but of form. As his example, he gave the sayings of the countryside. Many of them are about the weather. These sayings are accepted. No one seeks to verify whether they are accurate. It is the form that makes them authentic.

Johnson: Julien Gracq: French novelist who refused the Goncourt The Guardian, Dec 24th, 2007

Image: ‘Death Applications’ by Raphco on Flickr

Here’s what Google makes of “Fin likes to”:

Fin likes to read coffee-table picture books about the railroad in the 19th century…

Fin likes to sit in the space between the wall and the bed…

Fin likes to stare longer than decorum permits…

Fin likes to be and knows he is alone because he is “different”…

Fin likes to rasp through the skin of cucumbers…

Fin likes to get all the way down by my feet…

Fin likes to be poked with a stick…

Fin likes to get the job done when he is on hot pursuit of the criminals…

If only André Breton had lived to use the Internet.

Image: ‘Found 16mm’ by N°1 on flickr

The “Classical Irish Island”, according to archaeologist Paul Gosling, is “replete with…

• a megalithic tomb
• a hilltop cairn
• a medieval parish church
• the site of a watermill
• a smattering of ringforts or coastal promontory forts, and
• a number of miscellaneous hut and house sites”

He is hardly exaggerating: the average Irish square mile, like the average Irish soul, seems to teem with the workings of a long human history.

Reference: The Mayo News, Oct 9th, 2007

Escapism is a vital aspect of all art, indeed of all entertainment from the Dukes of Hazzard to the Second Viennese School. But Art only endures insofar as the work in question (sometimes accidentally, as in Casablanca) stirs up fresh insights into who we are and what, as human beings, we are capable of.

Similarly with life. Though our recent move to the West of Ireland undeniably involves escape, it will only succeed if fresh challenges are raised, fresh insights attained–and fresh failures endured.

Such is Life…and Art.

Onward!

KNPR called me up for my first week impressions of Ireland, where I recently returned after 14 years away. You can hear or download the interview here.