Another post in the name of shameless self-promotion. Here’s a short video of yours truly, taken at this week’s Last Wednesday Reading Series at the Twisted Pepper in Dublin. I’m reading a new (and yet unpublished) short story called ‘Dublin Bay’. The video is slightly greenish, but this only adds to the tone of the Easter Rising-themed story, doesn’t it?
Feel free to share and send around if you think I’m hot. Otherwise, feel also free to turn up at the open mic every last Wednesday of the month, it was great fun reading there. Thanks again to the good guys at Seven Towers for having me and Joe for filming.
This video here gave me a lot today: sounds and beats, images of Jerusalem and especially fuel for my wanderlust. Created by Ophir Kutiel, who combined soundclips of Jerusalem musicians with images of the city to this neat mashup. You’ll find links to all participating musicians under the Youtube-Link.
Look, look: this is how time fucks us. Thirteen days ago, I had just stuffed my bag into the trunk of the rental car and was leaving the shiny, chromed multistorey airport car park with the windows rolled down and the tank full and my mind set on the hot autobahn and the smell of the sea. And now, after only an instance, I’m standing in the same shiny, chromed multistorey car park with the windows rolled up and the tank full, and the only thing assuring me that I really left here in the first place is a piece of Croatian cheese in my bag and the smell of sweat and salt on my shirt.
Just back from holidays, my first post here is about Sanne and Bart’s nice little media empire, Spotted by Locals.
I’m writing for the very likeable Dutch couple and their Slow Travel magazine for over a year now, and recently it took off even more: thanks to SBL, I was interviewed for RTE’s (Irish television) weekly show Capital D (which you can watch here for another ten days) about the SBL IPhone app, and also have I now become a published author in one of Germany’s biggest newspapers, sueddeutsche.de. Dank u wel, Sanne & Bart!
From tomorrow on, I’ll be on holidays. Somewhere far away without writing about it. I may jot down some notes, though. 1,5 weeks. Offline. Only reading books, drinking wine and snoozing in the sun after snorkeling. I may also sneak in an art exhibition or two. In any way, see you in a while.
“In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing gown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter among the piles of dusty paper that surround it. [...] If things are normal with him he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he’ll be suffering from a hangover.”
- George Orwell, Confessions of a Book Reviewer
That must be the image most people have when they think of the proverbial writers. And why not? People who sit on their asses hours and hours a day and imagine things they will never ever experience in their life and write these down will need an outlet, so no wonder many writers took to the bottle as their very own way of escapism.
Here’s a list of my favourite literary dead drunks – not that I’m advertising this lifestyle, but cannot hide a little bit of awe considering the way these guys drank themself to oblivion and death with determination.
Normally, timelapse-videos bore me to death. This one here however is quite entertaining and makes Dublin look almost good. And judging by how many Dublinese blogs and Facebook-profiles linked it today I guess I’m not the only one who likes it. Fullscreen, please.
I’m on the road again, all across Ireland. This time I’m helping out my friend and partner in crime Kai, who is traveling around the country under the moniker Mission Ireland, a social media / tourism campaign to promote Ireland in Germany for which Kai is the figurehead. So far, we’ve camped in Trim and visited the castle, and visited the geographical and mythological centre of Ireland, the Hill of Uisneach, where we attended a Beltaine-fire lighting ceremony as part of the Festival of the Fires. More stuff coming up soon, you can follow Kai here (in German). Slan!
A very mellow Dubliner video, portraying Lykke Ly performing in Tower Records last Saturday to celebrate International Record Store Day. It also features the former housemate of my former housemates. Danke, State Magazine.
I learned to read when I was five. Since then, I have been reading between 3-6 books per month. I have crossed rapiers with the Comte de Rochefort, barely survived the mines of Moria, and emptied bottle after bottle with Henri Chinaski. I travelled to the moon and back, sailed up the Congo on a steamer together with Marlow and defeated all of Ramona’s evil exes. All this with the help of dog-eared paperbacks read on the bus from Barcelona to Arles, spotless first editions dedicated to me by my grandparents in flawless handwriting, and blotched and tattered books from the library read under my blanker at night when I could not sleep. But.
I’ve started to write for a living two years ago. I am not a published author in the classical sense. All my writings (except a few newspaper articles here and there) appear online. But.
I do not possess an Ipad or a Kindle, but have downloaded an e-reader app for my Iphone, which has three books stored on: The War of the Worlds, A Tale of two Cities and Napoleon of Notting Hill. I consider it as a back-up, in case life finds me stranded somewhere without a book or a paperback and I’ll have to read something. But.
These last days (as the London Book Fair was happening), I’ve read loads of articles on the state of the publishing industry and printed books and the internet. In the best light I would consider myself as an emerging writer, in the worst case as someone with too much time on his hands who puts up words on the internet. But sometimes I find myself in some kind of limbo. I would give anything to see a book that I wrote appear in print, complete with a cover with my name. But ordering it via lulu.com seems treason to me, even though I have 80,000 words sitting in a folder on my hard drive. I want to follow up the traditional ways of getting a book into print, finding an agent, have my manuscript shopped around while nervously sipping beer at home. All the while asking myself “why?”, as I’m writing a blogpost that is up on the web in realtime, open for immediate feedback and consumption and not needing the added layers of agent and publisher.
So what will become of books (and new writers)? I have been a musician for over ten years, so I assume the same fate as Vinyl will befall books. Some people will still prefer the smell of second hand bookshops, will buy first and second and third editions with different covers, and will read to their grandchildren from dirty dusty fable collections. Other people who read Dan Brown and Rosamunde Pilcher will download the books to their portable devices or watch the movie-version on TV, just as they will watch the X-Factor and buy the CD. No wonder we have large bookstore-chains closing and independent bookstores opening up and growing stronger.
Will I keep writing (and reading) on, until some far far away day I’ll hold my first book in my hands, published by a publishing house that is not me? Hellyeah. Will I ever make a living from this? Hellno. But then I prefer to write copy over days and stories at night, because it makes me happy. And as long as I know where I can buy books to scrabble around in them to mark passages worth quoting and re-reading, and chat with the people behind the counter about David Foster Wallace before I bring the books home, I’m happy. I’ve never been a guy for the X-Factor anyway.
