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Irish Independent
18 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Wexford author Colm Tóibín awarded prestigous honorary degree from Oxford University
On Wednesday, June 25, Tóibín was awarded the honorary degree of Doctors of Letters for his contribution to literature and journalism from the University of Oxford. The degree honours individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of literature, the creative arts, and humanities. The university outlined the long list of accomplishments that made him eligible for the coveted award. "Professor Colm Tóibín, FRSL is an Irish novelist, writer, journalist and academic. He currently serves as the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. Professor Tóibín's work has been widely recognised and shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. His novel Brooklyn (2009) was also adapted into an Oscar-nominated film. Professor Tóibín is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was appointed Laureate for Irish Fiction 2022-2024 and in 2023 was awarded the Bodley Medal,' they said. Being awarded at the private ceremony alongside him was Dame Jacinda Ardern, Lord Melvyn Bragg, Clive Myrie, Professor Serhii Plokhii, Professor Timothy Snyder, Sir Mo Farah, Professor Robert S Langer and Professor Erwin Neher. On the morning of the ceremony, the heads of colleges, university dignitaries, holders of the Oxford degrees of Doctor of Divinity, Civil Law, Medicine, Letters, Science, and Music, and the honorands assemble, in full academic dress, in one of the colleges, where they enjoy Lord Crewe's Benefaction. They then walk in procession to the Sheldonian Theatre on Broad Street. The University dignitaries enter the theatre in procession; those who are to receive honorary degrees wait in the Divinity School where they sign their names in the Honorary Degrees Book. They are then escorted into the theatre by the Bedels. Once the proceedings have been opened by the Chancellor, each honorand is introduced by the Public Orator with a speech in Latin and admitted to his or her new degree by the Chancellor. The Orator then delivers the Creweian Oration on the events of the past year and in commemoration of the University's benefactors. In alternate years the Professor of Poetry delivers the second part of this speech. For over 100 years All Souls College has hosted a lunch after the ceremony for the honorands, their guests, and other senior members of the collegiate University and the local community. This is then followed by a garden party hosted by the Vice-Chancellor.
Irish Times
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Collected Poems by Gerard Fanning: Elliptical, at times cryptic works built on mood and atmosphere
Collected Poems Author : Gerard Fanning ISBN-13 : 978-1943667154 Publisher : Wake Forest University Press Guideline Price : £19.99 I hadn't come across the late Gerard Fanning's work before encountering it whole, as it were, in the shape of this Collected Poems. It comes with helpful apparatus – a foreword by Gerald Dawe, an afterword by Colm Tóibín – a contemporary and friend of Fanning's at UCD – and an interview with Fanning and Conor O'Callaghan. All of these angles are helpful, perhaps even essential, to the new reader of his writing. These poems are elliptical, at times cryptic; they mostly don't so much perform as talk quietly into their shirt sleeves, operating in an air of manila envelopes and uncompromisingly referential Europhilia; they're lit by a sort of coastal glare, and often feel as if they're squinting under exposed scrutiny. Tóibín rightly says that poetry wasn't – for Fanning – Auden's 'memorable speech', and these are poems built on mood, atmospheres – his avowed Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon admiration hint at his wide range of references, from film and literature to something more playfully esoteric, more guardedly private and coded. He was a government man, a life of 'benign Glengarry Glen Ross', in his own words; on the road, and on the right side of intrusion. On the page, too. If the early work from the 1990s has an abiding flavour it's one of withdrawal and departure, a sort of whistling chilliness, looking for – as per one of the best of his early poems An Evening in Booterstown – 'a pale permanence'. READ MORE He has something of Tom Waits to his titles – often proper names, recognisable or otherwise, are thrown around; we're located but we're left out a little too – this is a poetry of overhearing, eschewing careless talk, or the loose lip. [ From the archive: Poet and Rooney Prize winner Gerard Fanning dies Opens in new window ] At times in the first books he can exclude us entirely – one feels the need to ask for a primer, or Rosetta Stone, for some of his piled-up enigmas, but later he seems to relax into a more open, approachable clarity. Rhyme comes in, but by Slip Road his language as a whole is, largely, more open, more parseable – poems like These Days allying a new clarity to an encroaching sense of creeping dread, spotlighting a melancholy undertow that was always there, tidal like so many of his landscapes – 'I will be sent for, soon, at night'.
Boston Globe
12-06-2025
- Boston Globe
Veteran Broadway actor Richard Topol on hanging with Larry David — and that time his car was impounded
If you could travel anywhere right now, where would you go? I've been dying to go to Machu Picchu. I'd like to do the few-day hike all the way up — something about the combination of a vigorous climb through forests and highlands to reach the top of a mountain, where you find an unfathomable man-made structure, seems like the magical pairing of natural beauty with human creation. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Do you prefer booking trips through a travel agent or on your own? Depends on where I'll be going, but my sister-in-law is a travel agent and I often like to go through her. Advertisement Thoughts on an 'unplugged' vacation? I'm headed to the High Sierras in California for a week of backpacking in August with three of my college buddies. Can't wait. Unplugged for sure. What has been your worst vacation experience? Can I let you write about this? My girlfriend and I were traveling back from Canada in her old VW bug, and we got stopped at the border because we looked young and scruffy — or at least I did. It was during [the elder] George Bush's 'war on drugs.' I had one joint in my backpack, and they took us out of the car and searched everything. When they found my joint, which my girlfriend begged me to throw out the window before we got to the border, they impounded the car, and we were stuck at this isolated border station in Vermont. Luckily, they said we could buy the car back, and it was an old VW, so its Bluebook value was only $250. The Border folks had to drive us 20 minutes to the nearest town so we could withdraw that cash from a bank and buy the car back. The most expensive joint I never got to smoke. Advertisement What is your favorite childhood travel memory? So many. Maybe my favorite was our road trip from the Adirondacks through Canada to Quebec City, Montreal, and the Thousand Islands to Toronto, or the summer where we swapped houses with a family in Richmond just outside London. Do you vacation to relax, to learn, or for the adventure of it all? Yes, yes, and yes. What book do you plan on bringing with you to read on your next vacation? I've been trying to crack open both Colm Tóibín's 'The Magician' and Michael Chabon's 'Summerland.' The former seems just the right kind of intense and the latter the right kind of magical. If you could travel with one famous person/celebrity, who would it be? Larry David, with whom I worked on Broadway in his show 'Fish in the Dark.' He might complain a lot, but we'd get to play at all the best golf courses, and he'd make me laugh, even if our flights are delayed, our food never comes, or our luggage gets lost. Advertisement What is the best gift to give a traveler? Advice on the best places to eat, where they are going. Seriously, remember not to over-plan so much that you can't be open to the new world right in front of you. I think you are asking for a tangible physical thing, but I think this is more important and useful. What is your go-to snack for a flight or a road trip? I do like a few clementines or some fresh fruit because there's just so many tasty salty snacks out there that are hard to say no to. What is the coolest souvenir you've picked up on a vacation? A beautiful handcrafted wrought iron water basin with a mirror that my now wife and I picked up on the vacation in Italy where we got engaged. What is your favorite app/website for travel? I just Google everything. What has travel taught you? That the world is a big beautiful planet filled with magical places, interesting people, and incredible history. Get off your butt and be inspired; learn and grow from experiencing it. What is your best travel tip? See the previous answer and the answer to the question about the best gift to give a traveler.
Irish Times
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Thomas Mann's 150th birthday present to Germany and the world: a warning from history
Thomas Mann and James Joyce never met in life but, especially in death, found much in common. Both were writers of challenging fiction who ended their days in self-imposed exile in Zürich. Both are buried there, at opposite ends of town. During their lifetimes their respective homelands rejected them first with mockery, then hatred – Joyce's works were banned, Mann's burned. After decades of posthumous apathy, both were resurrected by their homelands for praise and monetisation purposes. Just 10 days before another episode of Ireland's Bloomsday malarkey, Germany is celebrating Thomas Mann's 150th birthday in a state of nervous jubilation. A new, hefty biography heads the long list of books, while critics and essayists have delivered fresh prophetic framings for Mann's major works in the present. READ MORE Is modern Germany and Europe, some wonder, heading back to the Zauberberg (Magic Mountain)? Mann's 1924 novel tells of a healthy young engineer, Hans Castorp, who visits a friend in a Davos mountain-top clinic only to succumb to its self-indulgent charms of introspection, hypochondria, disease and death. Running through the book, two polar-opposite patients - one a humanist democrat and the other a fascism-adjacent communist revolutionary - debate 'power and law, tyranny and freedom, superstition and science'. Mann was channelling the debates that dominated his world a century ago - and ours today. [ The Magician by Colm Tóibín: Beautiful, sweeping exploration of Thomas Mann's life Opens in new window ] For German writer Thomas Wiedermann, who wrote a novel based on the author, the Zauberberg is 'about a pre-war world, a burnt-out society … where the smallest spark is enough to make the world explode'. A century on, he fears the modern world is 'not repeating [the past] but at least mirroring it'. Others see worrying contemporary parallels to Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks, drawing on his early years in the northern city of Lübeck where he was born on June 6th, 1875. This debut novel, published when he was 26, sweeps the reader through the rise and fall of a wealthy merchant family whose business is built by the first generation, managed by the second and ruined by the third. Last February, the Neue Zürcher daily suggested Switzerland was suffering from third-generation 'Buddenbrooks syndrome', happily living off the family fortune, 'studying art history, working less, retiring earlier'. Rather than citizens, the NZZ argued, 'the Swiss have become consumers of their own state'. Similar arguments can be heard in Germany, trapped in a never-ending recession, and a recent warning from Chancellor Friedrich Merz that holiday-loving Germans 'need to work more'. Mann won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 for his work, packed with universal, timeless themes that are finding new relevance and attention today. His 150th birthday today became a dual celebration of sorts. [ Opens in new window ] It marked the reopening of the fabled villa that Thomas and Katja Mann had built in California's Pacific Palisades. It was purchased and restored by the German state a decade ago - but it's a miracle there is even a house left. Last January, as wildfires raged through nearby Santa Monica and edged into Pacific Palisades, villa staff raced through the house, snatching the writer's handwritten papers, paintings and beloved Goethe complete works - but had to leave behind thousands of personal mementos and rare books. Much of the neighbourhood was consumed by fire but the worst damage to the Mann villa was a thick coating of soot on the facade, which has been scrubbed and repainted for Friday's party. Mann knew personally how quick disaster could strike. He was on a lecture tour of Europe a month after Hitler took power in 1933 when he decided not to return to Germany and settle in Switzerland. His denunciations of the Nazis from there saw them revoke his citizenship and burn his books. After their invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Mann resettled his family in the US. Asked by a reporter there how he felt living in exile, Mann replied: 'Where I am is Germany! I carry my culture within.' It was here that Mann produced his perhaps most relevant works for our time. Not novels, but accessible and urgent essays and public lectures about democracy, its strengths and its enemies. In 1938, with Europe on the brink of war, Mann warned radio audiences that the greatest danger to democracy was the fascination and novelty of fascism. His observations carry eerie echoes today. 'Once [fascism] has subjugated the body through fear,' he warned from personal experience, 'it can even subjugate thought.' In 1943, with war raging in Europe, Mann warned, again on the radio: 'It is a terrible spectacle when the irrational becomes popular.' He eventually returned to Europe in 1952 but settled in Zürich, shunning Germany. His countrymen had never forgiven him – for fleeing, for surviving the war under Californian palm trees, but most of all for his BBC propaganda broadcasts into his homeland. Many Germans who convinced themselves later they they knew nothing of the Holocaust resented how, even in far-away California, Mann knew as early as 1942 of the mass murder of Polish Jews using poison gas. It was, he warned, 'an expression of the spirit and attitude of the National Socialist revolution'. Even worse than him knowing: he knew they knew, a point he kept ramming home. In another broadcast he lectured the Germans, literally, about the terrible irony of their situation: a dictator dangling before the noses of a people he viewed as 'cowardly, submissive and stupid' a bright future as a 'race destined for world domination'. In an open letter, published four months after Germany's capitulation, Mann insisted he would not return to a 'stupid, empathy-free' German people who 'would like to pretend that 12 years never happened'. The final kick came with his remark in the letter about the Allied bombings of German cities: 'Everything must be paid for'. No wonder, then, that his eventual return to Germany in 1949 was a chilly affair. Many Germans saw Mann as a traitor, even more so after he visited East Germany to accept a literary medal of honour. Two years later, learning that Mann had resettled in Switzerland, the Frankfurter Allgemeine daily denounced him as 'an exponent of an aversion to Germany that goes as far as stupidity'. Germany fell out of love with Mann but eventually warmed again to him in the 1980s. Mann didn't live long enough for that reconciliation - nor to fall back in love with America. A decade after taking US citizenship in 1944, Mann was dubbed a 'suspected communist' and brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee. There he heard himself described as one of the 'world's foremost apologists for Stalin and company'. A chastened Mann warned his adoptive homeland that, with its embrace of witch-hunts and 'loyalty checks', it was 'well on [its way] to a fascist police state'. To his diary, Mann confessed he was 'shockingly touched by the dwindling sense of justice in this country, the rule of force'. Given that, it doesn't take too much effort to imagine what Thomas Mann would have made of German-American president Donald Trump. As for his literary legacy: given that he died exactly 70 years ago, Mann's works enter the public domain next January to join fellow former Zürich resident James Joyce. Brace yourself for the mash-up, Chat-GPT fan fiction: Leopold Bloom on the Magic Mountain, anyone?
Irish Independent
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Wexford students invited to follow in Colm Tóibín's footsteps and enter revived opera festival essay competition
Wexford People Today at 23:00 After a hiatus of over 50 years, the students of Wexford are once again being offered the chance to share their thoughts on the Wexford Festival Opera, and to win a generous cash prize of €250 plus publication in the Festival Supplement of the Wexford People. Wexford Festival Opera is running an essay competition for its 74th anniversary. Inspired by the theme for this year's event, Myths & Legends, the subject of the essay is: 'Wexford Festival Opera – A Myth or a Legend?' All senior cycle (TY, 5th and 6th year) students in County Wexford are invited to participate. The Festival last held an essay competition in 1972 which makes a revival more than overdue. Back then, the title was 'Wexford Festival Opera – Vanity or Prestige?' There were four prizes and a young Colm Tóibín was among the winners. Where are the remaining three winners? Or, indeed, the other entrants? WFO would love to hear from anyone who knows anyone who entered, or was placed in, that competition. Best of all would be to find copies of those essays! A long list of writers hail from Wexford, a tradition celebrated every September since 2016 at the Write by the Sea Festival in Kilmore Quay. Whether it is due to the sea air or the extra dose of sunshine that lights up the 'sunny south east', music and words seem to flourish in this corner of the island. It is also an area rich in history and folklore which could feed into ideas for this year's essay title. How to separate myth from legend and where to place WFO on that scale is an interesting question. Does the Festival impinge in any meaningful way on the lives of younger members of the community, acquiring legendary status for them, or is that a cosy myth? The organisers of WFO are eager to learn how the senior cycle cohort views the Festival and whether, or how, it might be made more meaningful to that generation. For teachers this could be a rewarding and very worthwhile class project, especially in transition year, when several students will have the opportunity to work with the Festival. Other students may have family members who have been, or are still, involved at some level. There are many dimensions to the Festival, from the opening night fireworks to the general buzz around town, from themed window displays to the sometimes outlandish glamour of opera goers, exhibitions, fringe and community events, each offering a different angle on, or line of approach to, the subject. I rarely wish I was sixteen again but this is one occasion when I wouldn't mind reversing the years, just to have a crack at such an exciting competition. Competition Details: Wexford Festival Opera – A Myth or a Legend? All students in Senior Cycle (TY, 5th Year and 6th Year) in County Wexford secondary schools are eligible to participate. Prize: €250 Rules and Conditions 1. Entries must be the original work of the entrant and should not have been previously published in any format, online or print, self-published or paid. 2. Entries must be typed, double-spaced in Microsoft Word, 12 point, Times New Roman font. 3. All entries must be in English and submitted by email to essay@ Closing date for receipt of entries is Monday September 22 at 5.00pm. 4. The decision of the judges is final, no correspondence/contact will be entered into, and no feedback will be given to individual entrants. 5. Entrants can submit only one entry. Entries must not exceed 2,000 words. 6. Wexford Festival Opera reserves the right to publish any of the entries as full essays, or extracts thereof, to promote Wexford Festival Opera on its website and in other media.
