Reviews in brief: Stop Me If You've Heard This One; The Shape of Things Unseen; and Take Six
Stop Me If You've Heard This One by Kristen Arnett (Corsair, £20)
The opening scene of this novel features a clown escaping through a bathroom window after sleeping with a woman at her child's birthday party. Her tool of pleasure? A magic wand. It is almost an achievement then, after such an energetic beginning, that what proceeds is a drag. Arnett's third novel follows lesbian Cherry, and her clown persona, Bucko, in their quest for artistic excellence, as she navigates the death of her clownish (but not clown) brother and her challenging relationships with her mother and her mother-age girlfriend/mentor. As a comment upon gender and sexual identity, late capitalism and its impact upon art, the novel proves somewhat interesting. However, if what you are seeking is a story to engage and move you, look elsewhere. This airless novel will leave you feeling like the drooping rose of a burnt out clown.
– Brigid O'Dea
The Shape of Things Unseen: A New Science of Imagination by Adam Zeman (Bloomsbury Circus, £25)
Adam Zeman is a neurologist at the very forefront of research into the science of imagination, the focus of his third book. Taking his readers on a tour of their inner lives, Zeman draws on (sometimes) familiar scientific concepts to unlock the various workings and wanderings of the mind, including the 'maladies, remedies and extremes of imagination'. Terms like pareidolia and aphantasia are explained through anecdotes and literary allusions; Zeman has a particular affinity for the Romantic poets. In thinking about thinking, Zeman encourages his readers to let their minds wander, to interact with the book's various questions and quizzes. The Shape of Things Unseen, which oscillates about the main axis of human creativity, is accessible, memorable, and, quite frankly, imaginative.
– Emily Formstone
READ MORE
Take Six: Six Irish Women Writers
, Edited by
Tanya Farrelly
(Dedalus, £11.99)
In this powerful anthology, Tanya Farrelly curates six distinct voices exploring the fractures of contemporary Irish womanhood. The short stories span dystopian futures, where daughters are outlawed, to quiet acts of voyeurism, all threaded with emotional tension and ethical ambiguity. Mary Morrissy's Holding On simmers like a slow trap; Geraldine Mills's XX chills with maternal defiance; Nuala O'Connor's Surveillance unsettles with creeping obsession. Rosemary Jenkinson's The Peacemaker exposes the dragnet of political memory, while Mary O'Donnell's The Creators conjures an eco-dystopia where female labour is conscripted. Farrelly's own For the Record captures the erosion of safety after adolescent violence. Take Six reveals charged moments where resistance flickers against silence, insisting on the complex realities of identity, power, and survival in a world narrowing by degrees.
–Adam Wyeth
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
5 hours ago
- Irish Times
The days of families huddling around the Late Late Show or Glenroe are gone - and that's no bad thing
By the end of the latest season of Doctor Who , it was clear the BBC 's once high-flying franchise was on life support. Ratings had collapsed. Lead actor Ncuti Gatwa was keen to move on to Hollywood. Whatever the television equivalent of urgent medical attention is, the Doctor needed lots of it. The real surprise, though, was that the decline of the Doctor went largely unnoticed. There had been widespread speculation among hard-core Whovians that the BBC and its international partners in the franchise, Disney +, were considering pulling the plug on the Tardis (the eventual twist was far more shocking, with former Doctor's assistant Billie Piper revealed is to be the new custodian of the venerable blue police call box). What was most telling, however, was that, amid all the online chatter, nobody in the real world much cared. The entire saga of the Doctor's rumoured demise and the character's bombshell resurrection in the guise of the former Because We Want To chart-topper passed without comment – in contrast to the widespread anguish that had attended the cancelling of the series for the first time in 1989. Billie Piper in the final episode of Doctor Who. Photograph: James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios Such has been the pattern in recent decades – and not just in the context of time-travelling British eccentrics. Contrast the present-day television landscape with that distant time when The Late Late Show on RTÉ ranked as unmissable viewing. Or what about Montrose's perpetually okay-ish soap opera Fair City, which once held the entire nation in its thrall - including when it aired Ireland's first on-screen kiss between two men in 1996. Or in November 2001, when 800,000 viewers tuned in to the soap to see abusive sociopath Billy Meehan beaten to death by the son of his partner, Carol. People were talking about it at the bus stop and in the pub (back when the pub was a place we frequented in numbers). Even if you wanted to, you couldn't get away from bad Billy and his bloody exit. READ MORE Those days are clearly long over. According to RTÉ, some 280,000 people watch Fair City each week (with more tuning in on RTÉ Player). But when last did you hear someone discuss a Fair City plotline – or even acknowledge its existence? It's still out there, and fans still enjoy it, but to the rest of us, it's gone with Billy in the grave. The fracturing of television audiences has long been a source of dismay to those who care about such matters. In 2019, Time Magazine fretted that the end of Game of Thrones would be 'the last water cooler TV show'. That same year, author Simon Reynolds despaired of the great geyser of streaming TV and how it had deprived us of unifying cultural milestones. With so much entertainment jetting into our eyeballs, how is it possible for any of us to hold dear any particular film or show? 'There is,' he wrote in the Guardian, 'always something new to watch… an endless, relentless wave of pleasures lined up in the infinite Netflix queue.' More recently, Stephen Bush wrote in the Financial Times that 'everywhere in the rich world, the era of truly 'popular culture' is over'. This, he posited, 'is bad news for modern states, which are held together to some extent by the sense that we are all part of a collective endeavour ... the decline of shared viewing is eroding shared cultural reference points'. The death of monoculture is generally presented as a negative. Weren't we all better off in the old days, when Biddy and Miley's first kiss in Glenroe held the nation transfixed, and the big reveal as to who shot JR was a global news event that pushed trivialities such as the Cold War off the front pages? But is that such a loss? It's easy to look back with nostalgia, but the age of the monoculture was the era of having everyone else's tastes forced on you. Consider the great cultural tragedy that was Britpop, where lumbering, flag-waving Beatles cover acts became the dominant force in music. Liam Gallagher (left) and Noel Gallagher of Oasis. Photograph: Simon Emmett/Fear PR/PA Those bands never really went away, and some of them are back in force this summer – asking you to pay an arm-and-a-leg for the privilege of a ringside seat (or, indeed, a seat miles away). The difference is that today, you have the option of not participating. Instead of going to Oasis in Croke Park, I'll be in London watching the K-pop band Blackpink. Thanks to streaming and the general fracturing of popular culture, I can, moreover, essentially put my fingers in my ears and pretend Oasis doesn't exist. Thirty years ago, that option was not available. They were everywhere – in the summer of 1996, it felt as if Wonderwall was stalking us. But because mass entertainment has splintered, you no longer have to feel as if you are being followed around by Liam Gallagher every time you leave the house. It is also important to remember that the monoculture is still occasionally capable of making its presence felt. Let's go back to The Late Late Show, which, according to the latest statistics, is watched by about 400,000 people. That may be a long way off the annual Toy Show spectacular, which in 2024 drew 1.6 million viewers, but it remains a national talking point – every bit as much as Billy Meehan getting his just deserts. Adolescence. (L to R) Stephen Graham as Eddie Miller, Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller, in Adolescence. Photograph: Netflix © 2024 The same effect can be seen in streaming. Granted, the extraordinary response to the Stephen Graham drama Adolescence , which streamed on Netflix earlier this year, was in some ways a product of a moral panic more than an epoch-defining cultural moment. But while the show had some astute points about misogyny in our schools, its depiction of what it's like to be a 13-year-old boy was painfully wide of the mark. Still, it did capture the public imagination. And maybe there will be a similar response to series three of Squid Game, which was released on Netflix this weekend. So it isn't as if we aren't capable of bonding over our favourite TV shows any more. It's just that such instances are far rarer than they used to be. But is that a bad thing? Nowadays, we are free to follow our own interests, rather than having someone else's forced on us. And when we do come together, that moment of shared excitement feels all the more precious. The water cooler is dead; long live the water cooler.
Irish Times
7 hours ago
- Irish Times
An Irish woman's life in the circus: ‘It's six months of living, eating, working, crying and laughing together'
'Pie and mash today,' calls the cook behind the ad-hoc kitchen that has been set up in a car park in Hereford. It's 4pm, dinner time for the performers of NoFit State , who will be going on stage in the small English cathedral city at 7.30pm. Gracie Marshall, the only Irish member of the circus company, has been given a bag of Tayto crisps – useful extra carbohydrates – by Adam Fitzsimons, who has come over from Galway International Arts Festival to see what technical aspects of tonight's performance might need to be tweaked for NoFit State's headline run in the city next month: it's bringing the show, Sabotage, plus the company's distinctive mushroom-shaped tent, to Nimmo's Pier, in the centre of the city. I'm sitting at a picnic table with Tom Rack, who is artistic director of NoFit State, and has a long, full beard. He was one of the five people who started the company in 1986. 'We were juggling and roaming around in the summers, and then in the winter we came together to make shows for schools, so we could avoid getting proper jobs,' he says. 'We fell in with a chap with a big top, back in the day of local-authority festivals and events, and he realised if he hired the five of us we'd drive the lorry, and do the workshops, and do the shows, and work the bar, and that was our introduction to the big top.' READ MORE Where did the name of the company come from? Rack laughs. 'It was the 1980s, and there was a Moscow State Circus, and the Chinese State Circus, and we were just a bunch of long-haired reprobates. NoFit State was a joke, but it stuck.' Rack is the sole remaining member of the quintet still working in circus, and roaming the land. Their circus, like most these days, is animal-free. They have an office base in Cardiff, rehearse in March and April, and then tour during the summer. How would he describe their type of performance? 'It's so far removed from traditional circus,' he says. 'It has traditional skills and tricks and excitement, but instead of being a traditional succession of acts it's a completely theatrical experience: a rollercoaster of a show. It's called Sabotage, but who are saboteurs, really? The misfits, the outcasts, the asylum seekers, the drag queens, the gender fluid. In Sabotage they are telling their stories. And we don't have a big top, because we're not a traditional circus.' The NoFit State big top It may not look like a traditional big top from the outside, with its muted ecru canvas, but it looks a lot like one inside. It's perfectly round, with circular seating all in jolly pink, as is the interior of the tent, where someone is tuning a violin. 'There are no bad seats here. It's a democratic space,' says Rack. It's true. Every tier of the 700 seats has essentially the same view of the ring. Marshall, the Tayto recipient, comes to join me on one of the tiers. It's still a couple of hours to showtime, and the company have a little downtime before getting rehearsal notes and warming up. The 30-year-old grew up in west Co Cork, near Rosscarbery. She's in her fourth year with NoFit State, specialising in hoop work and handstands. 'I did a lot of dance classes when I was younger,' she says. 'Then, when I was 16 and in transition year, I wrote to a circus dance company in LA' – Lucent Dossier Experience – 'and asked if I could do an internship with them.' They said yes, and Marshall went out for a month, which must rank among the more unusual transition-year placements. By the time she came home she was convinced this was the career for her. 'I told my mother that I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue with ordinary school; I wanted to go to circus school.' So she moved to London, did some training there and then came back to Cork for more training, at the city's Circus Factory . After that, as for any freelance artist, there was a jigsaw of grants and courses, including money from the Arts Council and training in China, Ukraine and Austria. 'It was really uncommon to leave school at 16,' she says. 'But I was so sure that I was going to do it, that there are other pathways in life.' Gripping: Sabotage. Photograph: Mary Wycherley Has Marshall ever been asked to talk to transition-year students about creating a career in such a singular field? No, she says, but she'd love to. 'I started off as an aerialist, with hoops,' she says. 'I got really injured in a fall; I injured my hip. It wasn't fully dislocated but enough to ground me. So I made up tricks with hoops. I fly a lot.' The circus trucks include two bunk wagons, where the company members and technical staff sleep. 'I feel like it's really community based,' she says. 'It's a supportive environment and everyone takes care of each other and supports each other – six months of really living, eating, working, crying and laughing together.' At 5pm the tour manager, Rebecca Davies, gathers everyone in the centre of the tent for notes and warm-up. Some people are flopped out on a black mattress; one is doing his make-up; a few others are rummaging in a suitcase and reassembling white plastic flowers that get pulled apart during each performance. We're used to the wildlife. Foxes come in at night and steal our costumes Davies runs through the assembled nationalities for me. 'Irish, Welsh, Argentinian, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, English, Scottish.' Everyone gets their notes, most of which are technical. Someone is blocking someone else while up one of the four tent poles. Catch this a different way. Remember to exit at that point. The company also has a live band, and performers in the ring slip in and out of musical roles too. There's no such thing as having only one talent. This is a ensemble company through and through. What are the challenges of running a two-hour show such as Sabotage? 'Weather,' says Davies, who came to work for the company for 10 weeks 10 years ago and is still with them. 'Weather can dictate what we can do on a day-to-day basis.' In Hereford, for instance, 'we know the ground will flood, and we know where those areas are.' Sabotage. Photograph: Mary Wycherley I recall the lattice of planks and walkways laid over puddles as I made my way earlier to the tent entrance. 'It's weatherproof in terms of wind, but a tent is still a temporary structure, and enough wind will still move the tent.' They'd better have stout tent pegs for Nimmo's Pier, in a city where the Atlantic wind can shear in relentlessly at any time of the year. Whatever temperature it is on the ground, it's 10 degrees hotter at the top of the tent, where riggers and performers alike are frequently working, says Davies. She stops talking to attend to an intruder: a seagull has come in, probably looking for any dropped food. Eventually it's escorted outside. 'We're used to the wildlife,' says Davies. 'Foxes come in at night and steal our costumes ... They use them in their dens, for nests. We know it's foxes because we have motion-sensor cameras, and they go off at night. We have to get up and investigate. In Brighton a fox came into the dressingrooms at 3am. We went out and found it running away with one of the girl's bras. Another night a fox ran off with a pair of shoes.' Working for a travelling circus is 'not really a job. It's a lifestyle. You have to live and breathe the whole community. Part of it is that you want to get up at 3am to go and see what's happening in the tent, because the tent is our livelihood and part of our home.' At 7.30pm I take a seat. I wonder about the stress levels of the technicians who rig the four central towers, called king poles, and assorted gantries overhead. For the next two hours performers will climb up and down the poles, swing from them, and be suspended from unseen rigging, most of it without safety nets (although they do have harnesses). To rig the show safely, and in so many new locations, is a huge responsibility. The show starts with a remarkable appearance by Besmir Sula, a performer who uses crutches in his daily life. What he does while on them in Sabotage is worth the admission price alone. His performance is a marvel of speed, skill and grace. I feel agonised watching an aerial performer suspended by a metal ring through her hair. She does beautiful work, and is all smiles, but I can't help wondering if it hurts. I have no idea how she must train for her routine. The costumes are very Wes Anderson , shuttling between some fantasy, cartoonish world and the 1950s, with a lot of uniforms and hats. Marshall says she wears 15 costumes in the show, so an unseen element of everyone's performance is clearly the ability to change at speed. There are threads of themes through the show: political protests, riot police, huge papier-mache heads of international politicians, arrests, ambulances, casualties. At one point the four king poles take on the appearance of sinister camp checkpoints, guards staring down at inmates. As NoFit State advises, this is a show that children can watch, but it is definitely not a show made for, or aimed at, children. Despite the framing of some scenes with social protest and its effect on society, Sabotage is at its core a brilliantly creative and technical show, featuring hugely talented aerialists. In a world of AI and CGI, it's astonishing to be reminded of what the human body can achieve. Watching Sabotage in Galway, in a tent raised above the rushing waters of the Corrib, and under the mercurial west of Ireland sky, will be a very special experience. Sabotage is at Nimmo's Pier from Friday, July 11th, to Sunday, July 27th, as part of Galway International Arts Festival
Irish Times
7 hours ago
- Irish Times
From dark and witty to feather-light perfection: New poetry by Kimberly Campanello, Patrick Cotter, Karen Solie and Bernard O'Donoghue
The dark, witty prose poems that form the body of Kimberly Campanello's An Interesting Detail (Bloomsbury, £10.99) are preceded by the more formal I'd Love to Say I'd Been There. It hypnotically builds its musical repeating lines on ' ... the bells / of the churches ... heard / below the waters / of the bay' so convincingly that even the meta-statement 'this opening sequence sounds incredibly akin / to the ringing of cathedral bells' does not jar the imaginative sonic waves carrying us to the ending. There, Campanello reveals that, like the reader, she's just been reading about this too – this is a hymn to the imagination as much as history. Campanello's neat, surprising endings are a central feature of her highly original prose poems, often upending a seemingly heavyweight beginning. In Major Insights, Campanello begins with a chart showing 'an ancient king found buried with his dog, four horses, cattle and sheep'. The speaker gifted this chart from which 'Major insights will be garnered' but the recipient doesn't want Campanello looking under her sink. 'I said it's not clean down there in anyone's house. I had brought lunch. I said I was hunting paper towel.' Campanello's exact deflation is particularly potent in poems describing her growing disability. One could almost miss the pain if the endings didn't bite so hard, 'If you wish I can pour you a glass of wine, but it is better if I make larger movements, like opening the corked bottle in one go. That is if I am to appear less vulnerable and more impressive, which I assume you prefer me to be.' Campanello's preoccupation with the layers of history mirror a powerful awareness of the seachanges in her still-young body, remembering her activist days, 'All those years walking great distances across capital cities during strikes. My body sliding off me like melted butter' (Ghost Walk). READ MORE Patrick Cotter's fourth collection, Quality Control at the Miracle Factory (Dedalus, €12.50), features many of his signature anthropomorphic poems – ranging from Reverse Mermaid through the identity-bending For What This Row of Rabbit Heads in My Wardrobe to the wild commentary of A Horse Called Franzine Marc, who enters the National Gallery knowing 'enough about Duchamp and Beuys to be unembarrassed when / she dropped ... an ephemeral treasure, // fluffy and fragrant. An arts journalist' speculates 'if this was meant as guerrilla art/or critical commentary'. Sometimes the surreal reveals that it is the real world that is more fantastic. The touching prose poem Crow, My Friend lists the crow's 'airdropped' presents of 'crazed creativity' that act as metaphors for Cotter's collage style, 'the feathered fish-hook ... the platinum screw from an aristo's sit-in trainset, the brass clasp from a child's Chinese casket'. And it's funny, 'The cat could not compete with the gist of these gifts', yet the crow disappears, his last message melted away in the snow. Elegy is Cotter's heart ground. In The Mare I Meet the Week of Your Death, Cotter's description of the horse expresses all the beautiful horror of fresh grief, 'Her prehensile lips form a glove ... Now she turns an eye the size of an anemone's bright / corona to blaze on me, her low gruff whinnies // like flat stones skipping across the pond of my hearing'. In Self-portrait at Sixteen, Cotter manages to hold two ghosts in one, Cotter's 16-year-old self in 1979 connecting with the 16-year-old Sarah Paddington at her 1821 grave in St Fin Barre's Cathedral. 'Later, I lit a candle for her Purgatory-dwelling / Protestant heart, at Catholic St Augustine's'. Karen Solie's deeply philosophical Wellwater (Picador, £12.99) begins in the basement where 'one is closer to God ... closer to consequence, to creatures no one loves / but the specialists' (Basement Suite). This is one of many acute Solie snippets, jostling beside quotations from writers including Rilke, Denise Riley or simply Proverbs, 'to which I guiltily return, / sliding another out of its pack, / he who troubles his household with groundless anger / will inherit the chaos that some of us / truly seem to prefer.' Restless, angry elegies for our stricken planet skewer the global economic crisis. 'To be no longer working bodes differently / for those of us who will not walk, as in the promotional literature, / upon the equatorial beaches ... Money buys the knowledge it isn't everything' (Autumn Day). Our global collective helplessness is given form and shape, held tight in lines that fall on the ear almost like a guilty pleasure. Red Spring charts the rape of the land by agrochemicals in Solie's native Saskatchewan alongside Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, 'The chemical // in the field respects the gene ... the farmer the authority / of Bayer ... who will not hesitate to make of you an example / if you insult its canola patent by growing your own seed. // Such wide confusion fills the countryside...' Towards the end Wellwater begins to climb – to the stars in Orion – but most beautifully in the final Canopy, its owlets 'peering / through their nursery window' at young Solie and her family, sitting 'on the graded dirt' below two cottonwoods who 'built their circular staircases / 80 feet high, around columns / of absolute nerve'. Miraculously the cottonwoods still survive 'in excess / of their average lifespan ... In spring / they champagne the air with cotton'. The owlets could be a stand-in for a young Solie as the set-up reminds us of Autumn Day's chilling Rilke quote, 'Whoever has no house now, will never have one'. Yet the peripatetic Solie is mostly like the cottonwoods, building her own erudite and magnificent treehouse with 'absolute nerve' from words alone. Solie writes of songs so simple you don't recognise at first how good they are – a description that fits the brief brimming poems of Bernard O'Donoghue's The Anchorage (Faber, £12.99). O'Donoghue's poems are feather-light, yet they mimic perfectly the indelible sting of our sharpest memories. [ Bernard O'Donoghue: from byres to spires Opens in new window ] The title poem's 'anchorage' is an 'iron staple / In the wall which the dog had been chained to'. The farmers of O'Donoghue's homeplace of Cullen form a 'cortège of horse floats' making their way to 'repair the loss. / But what good was that?'. When the poet closes his eyes, all he sees is 'the invisible / Last leaping of the dog'. Memory and imagination are a lethal mix here, the reader reimagining the death that haunts the poet. And O'Donoghue drives that point deeper in the pitch-perfect Lif is laene, urging us 'read the small print' and 'for God's sake to love' our lives that may have to be sent back 'if we are not ready for the high investment ... And you must not put / their pictures into albums till you're sure / you can bear the cost of items of such inestimable value.' Death, always present in O'Donoghue's poetry, stalks now like never before. People are as likely to be making hay in the afterlife (While the Sun Shines) as in his memories of Cullen, which are, of course, another afterlife – his own 'picture album'. His version of Chaucer's The Privee Theef, simple, direct and terrifying, recalls another terrific Middle English translation The Move from O'Donoghue's previous collection and this gift extends to Old Irish too. The Hide, an unbeatably fresh version of Túaim Inbir, leaps off the page. 'My dear heart, God in Heaven, / He is the thatcher who made the roof. / A house into which the rain can't pour, / a refuge where no spear-point's feared, / open and bright to a garden...' The Anchorage confirms Ireland's quietest living poet as one of its finest.
