With fame with beauty but mostly with sex. Listening back, it’s startling how obsessed with sex the songs are. By night, I wrote lyrics saturated in that literature, and that philosophy (name-checking Isherwood, Aristotle, Nabokov, Yeats…) And also saturated in the hormones of youth.
These days, I write novels (like Connect), and children’s books (like the Rabbit & Bear books, illustrated by Jim Field), and oddities like the End Poem (the peculiar narrative that ends the computer game Minecraft).īut I learned how to write over 30 years ago, as the singer with Toasted Heretic.īy day, I studied English literature and philosophy in UCG (since rebranded as NUI Galway). On the launch date, I log into the Spotify for Artists app (where musicians have private access to the streaming statistics for their works), and I can see Another Day, Another Riot begin to roll out around the world, timezone by timezone: “Released in 19 out of 178 countries…” As Heraclitus would undoubtedly have put it, had he had the music streaming service Spotify on his iPhone “You cannot listen to the same stream twice for you are not the same person, and it is not the same stream.” And so, now, I find myself both Cervantes and Menard, one foot either side of this 30-year-wide abyss.
The effect those words have on the reader has been completely transformed by the passage of time between the two Quixotes. In the great Borges story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, an early 20th-century writer and polymath, Pierre Menard, writes Don Quixote again, word for word: and, though every word is the same as Cervantes’ original, it is an utterly different book.
The results of the experiment are occasionally unsettling. What do they mean, wirelessly and weightlessly streamed as digital bits to my bluetooth headphones, in 2021?
What did those songs mean, pressed into the black, aromatic, hydrocarbon grooves of a vinyl LP, at the start of the 1990s? To release the same album, twice, 30 years apart, is to perform a most peculiar A/B test. On that date, to celebrate her memory, and the memory of old heretics everywhere, my former band, Toasted Heretic, rereleased our cult third album, Another Day, Another Riot. May 18th was the 300th anniversary of the burning at the stake, by the Spanish Inquisition, of the oldest heretic in Europe ( Maria Barbara Carillo, age 95 burnt in Madrid). (This piece first appeared in the Irish Times, on May 20th, 2021.
0 kommentar(er)
