Never mind the mbalax

I dug out half a dozen cassette tapes I bought a few years ago and have been scanning the web trying to find ways of transferring them on to CD. There is software you can download for free and cables can be bought cheaply, but even in these times of credit crunch I keep thinking it would be simpler to take them in somewhere and get them copied.
The problem with this is that the tapes are blank cassettes onto which music has been recorded. A company which specialises in transferring material from tape to CD might object because it would put them in breach of copyright laws. However, the cassettes were bought at a street booth in a market in Africa where the practice of simply taping albums and selling them to customers is widespread.
I've been listening to African music since the late 1980s when I went to see Zimbabwean group the Bhundu Boys in the Mean Fiddler in London. I'd heard them on John Peel's show on BBC radio but not really taken that much notice of them.
Being tall and gangly I'm not a natural dancer - all arms and legs, creating a health hazard for those standing nearby – so I try to avoid it. However, that night at the Mean Fiddler I found myself writhing into all sort of contortions with the tripping, jangling, guitar-driven sound known as 'township jive'.
I bought a couple of albums on vinyl, and later CD, but they never really captured the energy of the live show. Never-the-less, I was more inclined to listen to African music when Peel played it rather than waiting impatiently for the Dead Kennedys or The Fall.
After a couple of years in London I moved to Madrid and my musical tastes broadened even further – not so much in terms of Flamenco, which I don't mind, but more in Galician folk music and, I have to admit, some very dodgy Spanish pop.
I also used to frequent a tiny little salsa bar called Club Ombu, which was still there in Calle Santa Ana, not far from the Prado, last time I looked. This opened up another musical genre for me and led to quite a few minor injuries among the mostly South American clientele who attended after they got to close to the flailing limbs of the geeky Paddy in the middle of the dance floor.
After moving back to Ireland I started buying into the musical genre now known as world music, which basically covers everything from North African 'Rai', Cuban 'Son', Siberian throat singing, Bollywood soundtracks and even African-Irish fusion.
I've a fairly extensive record collection (1,000 or so CDS) and I'd say maybe a quarter of those are by artists who are singing in a language that I don't understand.
West African music is my speciality, particularly from Senegal and Mali, but touching into the Arabic-influenced sounds of North Africa as well. Orchestra Baobab, Youssou N'Dour and Baaba Maal from Senegal and Malian artists Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabaté are fairly mainstream in terms of world music aficionados.
Tuareg nomads Tinariwen are romanticised as rebels who roamed the Sahara Desert with guns and guitars strapped to their backs, trying to establish a separatist state while listening to the music of Bob Dylan. Their albums combine harsh guttural vocals and tribal wails with punk-inspired guitar riffs and their live act has been described by Andy Kershaw (another BBC radio DJ who sadly seems to have fallen on hard times) as the closest thing he has ever seen to the Clash.
Three years ago myself and Sinead went to Gambia in west Africa and had vaguely planned to travel to Dakar, the capital of neighbouring Senegal, to take in some live music. However, we were told it would take days to get there by bus and the cost of hiring a driver and car for an 18-hour trip was prohibitive, although we did cross over into Senegal for a couple of days of getting bitten by mosquitoes in a mangrove swamp.
Back in Gambia I'd a list of Mbalax (Senegalese Lation-infused rock, with elements of soul and African rhythms) artists whose music I wanted to get hold off and so got our regular taxi driver, Yanx, to drive us into Banjul. Yanx - a dreadlocked reggae fan - had the most battered taxi in Gambia and a journey with him was always an adventure. On the first day we were stuck in a huge tailback of cars and he tried to cut past it on the hard shoulder until he saw the road was blocked by soldiers.
"Aw shit. It's the president," he moaned as he almost collided with a couple of Daimlers and their outriders who were speeding past on Gambia's only tarmac-ed stretch of road. Fortunately we weren't shot.
Yanx took us to a couple of stalls before he was happy with the price that I was going to be charged - I think the real rip-off guys were going to charge £1 per album while Yanx secured me the much more reasonable 25p, although he was muttering about how terrible it was that I should be ripped off in such a way simply because I was white.
The owner of the music booth went through my list, ticking off the albums he had, shaking his head at others and saying they were really old and that he didn't stock them any more. "Come back in an hour," he said ripping open boxes of blank tapes and slotting them into the machine before recording them off an original.
So me, Sinead and Yanx wandered off to sit in the shade for a while and have something to eat. No doubt the artists who made the albums resent the loss of royalties that such a practice means for them, but Yanx said it was better for them to get their albums heard by as many people as possible to ensure that they get a good crowd when they play live.
When we got back I was handed over my purchases with nothing but the artists’ names written on them - Es Lo, Super Rail Band, Etoile de Dakar and Le Super Cayor. There was no track listing and so I was never even really sure what the names of the tracks I was listening to were.
Since then our previous stereo packed in and we bought a funky new one last year with DAB radio, iPod port and CD player but no tape deck and until today I’d nothing to play my African cassettes on anymore. For now I’m sitting here listening to Es Lo through Sinead’s headphones on a walkman which I had to borrow from my Da but I reckon I’ll have to try to come to terms with the technology to transfer them to CD before the batteries run out.

Everyman by Philip Roth

Philip Roth takes on a subject in Everyman that most people spend their lives trying to avoid thinking about. Death haunts the nameless narrator. Like everyone else he dreads it and tries not to think about it but a series of medical setbacks throughout his life means he is often forced to confront it.
Everyman opens in a Jewish graveyard in New Jersey where the narrator's family have gathered to lay him to rest.
Despite a successful career in advertising the narrator managed to alienate many people during his life. His two sons from his first marriage never forgave him for abandoning their mother.
His brother can not understand why the dead man had become so distant from him in the latter years of his life. His second wife had left him because of infidelity.It is only the narrators’ daughter from that second marriage who really mourns him.
Much of Everyman reads like a medical directory describing the conditions which strike down the narrator, how they affect him and the medical procedures that he undergoes to treat them.
We are also given a rundown of the various ailments, often terminal, that afflicted his parents, one of his ex-wives, former work colleagues and neighbours in the retirement village where he spent his final years.
"Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre."
He resents the fragility of his body and the way that it can interfere with the act of living and becomes increasingly resentful about his older brother who remains robustly healthy and has never spent a day in hospital.
Despite his preoccupation with his poor health and ultimate demise the narrator manages to life a full if flawed and bitter life.
He resents his sons for resenting him and not trying to understand that he left their mother because the marriage was unbearable to him.
He regrets the hurt he caused to his second wife and his daughter by having an affair which ultimately led to the break-up of that marriage, only to be followed by a disasterous marriage to a woman who is half his age and unable to cope with the narrator's deteriorating condition.
He spends his final years alone after moving from New York in the wake of 9/11 fearing that his life and those of everyone else in the city are at risk from further attacks.
A recurring setting is the Jewish graveyard, in which he will be eventually buried, where he attends his father's funeral and visits again just a few weeks before his own death.
There is no speculation about what happens after death. Roth's narrator abandoned Judaism just after his bar mitzvah when he was 13 and despite deteriorating health and time spend on life support machines death to him is simply the end of life after which nothing but the decay of the human body happens.
Standing in the cemetery by his parent's grave, and listening to the narrator's stream of consciousness we are told: "The flesh melts away but the bones endure. The bones were the only solace there was to one who put no stock in the afterlife and knew without a doubt that God was a fiction and that this was the only life he'd have."
Although the novel is not an easy read it is in someways a necessary one and even quite liberating.
As John Lennon sang: “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” And however much we try to deny it death is the inevitable consequence of life.

The Ecstacy of Angus by Liam O'Flaherty

Robert Graves is probably more famous for the personal mythology that he developed in The White Goddess than the poems that his muse actually inspired. It is to this personal mythology category that Liam O’Flaherty’s novella The Ecstacy of Angus seems to fall.
While much of O’Flaherty’s writing is poetic I am not aware that he ever wrote any verse but many of the sentences in this piece possess a rhythm and diction more often found in a poem.
It is O’Flaherty’s attempt at a creation myth, telling the story of “ever-youthful Angus, god of love” wandering through the land of Banba (an ancient name for Ireland) and “saving his mortal children from Crom, the dark lord of death”.
There children are not his offspring but ‘inspired’ into being by Angus, who in the same ways inspires the rest of nature to reproduce - animals, insects, fish. However, their numbers have soon grown to such an extent that there is no longer any room on Banba and people start turning against one another and fighting for territory.
Angus approaches Mananaan, the god of the sea, and asks him to give up part of the ocean to create land for people to live on.
But with words that could be found in a Gnostic text Mananaan tells Angus that overcrowding and strife in Banba is: “the outcome of your rash conceit, which drove you to the senseless task of making mortal beings in your own image, but without the fullness of your power. Restless, passionate youth, with little knowledge you undertook a monstrous labour, which required wisdom beyond the comprehension of your feverish mind.”
In anger Mananaan whips up a storm and Angus is forced to flee from the sea to shelter in a glen where he is discovered by “the fairy princess” Fand.
Fand is an archetypal femme fatale, intent on seducing Angus– although admittedly it is unusual for such women to be surrounded by an entourage of sprites who pleasure both her and her conquest during foreplay.
Like her predecessors – or maybe in terms of mythological timescales successors – Eve, Delilah, Salome, Cleopatra and Morgan le Fey, Fand’s seduction of Angus ultimately leads to his downfall.
Her sole aim was to become pregnant by him so that she should become “the mother of a host of kings”. However, Angus has been left emasculated, his eternal youth drained from him and left as a fragile old man.
He encounters another Gnostic like entity, “the Genius of Unrest” who is “neither god nor human, since I am part of the universal space, of which neither gods nor humans have yet gained comprehension”.
The Genius of Unrest, along side the Tree of Knowledge, says he will enter the minds of Angus’s offspring and “shall give him no peace”.
As he dies Angus “curse[s] with my last breath, man, whose blood shall be salt and who shall forever languish in desolate pain”.
The novel ends with the words “Hail! Genius is born.”
John Zneimer in the The Literary Vision of Liam O’Flaherty writes that O’Flaherty felt that this was what was taking part in himself.
“Genius is the quality of being possessed, being driven, being used by a more than human force,” writes Zneimer.
He continues: “For O’Flaherty, genius is above all mere complexities. It is concerned with a different realm, ‘the cold majesty of Beauty’, and to attain that all mere human pleasures and aspirations must be forsaken.”
That O’Flaherty associates himself with genius is perhaps arrogant but then he was an arrogant man and in spite of his avowed communism he was often contemptuous of “peasants” and ordinary working people.
The Ecstacy of Angus was first published in 1931, but the Wolfhound edition I picked up very cheaply online was reprinted in 1978 and includes line drawings that would not be out of place in an illustrated edition of the Mahabharat.
The language is over-flowery and probably embarrassing to those who might have been looking for something in the style of The Assassin or The Informer. However, O’Flaherty’s literary terms of reference were wide and as readers of his short stories will know he can write just an intensely about events in a rock pool on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean as he can about an interrogation in a seedy Dublin tenement.
(I couldn't find an image of the book cover so settled for this image of Mananaan for now)

Trauma by Patrick McGrath

A psychologist who has spent a career identifying the debris thrown up by other people’s unconsciousness to trip them up in life is unable to deal with his own internal demons in Patrick McGrath’s novel Trauma.
Set in New York in the 1970s many of Charlie Weir’s patients are Vietnam vets suffering from the still unnamed post traumatic stress disorder. One of the most damaged in Charlie’s brother-in-law Danny whose best friend died at his side and who eventually takes his own life.
Charlie believes that his wife, Agnes, blames him for being unable to treat her brother and he leaves her, carrying this guilt with him.
He also feels guilty that he was never able to treat his own mother’s depression. The relationship complicated by the fact that she rejected him in favour of his brother Walt who never tried to interfere when his mother was depressed while Charlie was always at her bedroom door trying to comfort her.
“It is the mothers who propel most of us into psychiatry, usually because we have failed them,” he writes.
With all this Oedipal baggage Charlie also has to deal with a peripatetic father, who abandoned his family when Charlie and Walt were still boys, and a poisonous relationship with his brother.
Walt introduces Charlie to Nora and they begin a relationship, even though Charlie is having an affair with ex-wife Agnes, who has remarried, and he suspects Walt is having an affair with Nora.
There is a large dollop of Freudian psychology in here and McGrath explores how suppressed memories, childhood hurts and guilty adult secrets can sneak out of the dark caverns of our mind where we have tried to stash them away and forget about them.
It is an angry book in terms of how the US became involved in Vietnam in the first place but also how those who were sent there to kill and who saw their closest friends die were abandoned and left to deal by themselves with survival guilt and nightmares about the lives they had taken.
McGrath is comfortable with the language of psychology, dream analysis and mental trauma manifesting itself as physical debilitation, but his novel doesn’t get too bogged down in terminology.
I did however find myself reaching for my Lonely Planet Guide to New York to keep up with the peregrinations of the narrator. (On a sideline the last four novels set in New York that I’ve read have all used the city’s topography and landmarks to varying degrees as a central part of their narration – Trauma, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal and Benjamin Black’s The Lemur).
The psyche is a landscape for McGrath as much as Manhattan, where most of Trauma is set. Charlie feels that he is drawn to Nora because he can sense that she is psychologically damaged as well. It is this relationship, the ongoing affair with his ex-wife Agnes and the coming to terms with the death of his mother that start to prise open the fractures in Charlie’s own psyche.
While he enjoys some success in treating his patients he ignores the symptoms of his own gradual mental decline. He points them out and notes them but tries to ignore them. Inevitably he is overcome by “the nightmares, the flashbacks, the panic attack, the rage”.
Trauma is an edgy, uncomfortable novel to read. Charlie is not a character who necessarily draws the reader’s sympathy but you can’t help being carried along with him on his slowly unfolding downfall and the sense of dread that reality is slipping away and being undermined by a dark suppressed memory floating just below his consciousness.

The Bridge by Iain Banks

Iain Banks takes on the unconscious and man's need to create images to interprete what is going on there in this novel.
The narrator, Orr, is in a coma following after a high-speed crash on a suspension bridge in Scotland although what happened to him doesn't really become clear until later in the novel.
He is living on a huge bridge that spans a expanse of water dividing The City and The Kingdom. Orr has lost his memory and is being treated by a psychiatrist who has asked him to write down his dreams.
He has a comfortable flat and money, a good social life and is allowed to travel fairly extensively, although as a patient there are limits.
However, the bridge is a Kafkaesque place with a hierarchy of inhabitants and whose customs and rules Orr is never really sure about.
He finds himself being evicted and moved to a cell-like room and his income slashed and no-one is able to tell him why.
There are other hints that all is not well. When he switches on his television he can only receive images of a man wired up to a life-support machine and when he lifts his phone all he can hear are a series of beeps.
Orr searches for a library that no-one has heard of and which when he does come across it is on fire with emergency crews rushing around desperately trying to control it.
This was the only real image of a subconscious trying to deal with what had happened to it that worked for me, the rest seemed to be merely whims of Banks.
He inserts dreams, fantasy sequences and a fairly straightforward biography of the man in the hospital bed and in whose mind we are travelling.
The chapter headings are geological eras, becoming more recent as the book progresses, presumably to reflect Orr's progress from the deepest parts of his coma to just below the surface of reality.
Banks's plot gives him plenty of scope to create a world in which tall tales are told and stretching credulity is not really an issue because what we are witnessing is in someone's mind.
Its an entertaining enough read but doesn't really do justice the vastness and weirdness of the unconscious.

Joe Strummer was actually born John Mellor, but changed his name to Woody in the late 1960s when he became a hippy and only adopted his best-known moniker just before he became a punk.
In the same way that he dropped identities he also dropped, friends, girlfriends and fellow band members.
Julian Temple's biopic Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten is his latest contribution to a growing cannon of films relating to punk and its major players.
The Great Rock and Roll Swindle from 1980 and The Filth and the Fury (2000) focused on the Sex Pistols. He has also just released The Sex Pistols: There'll Always be an England, featuring concert footage from their reunion gigs last year.
Temple uses similar techniques to his earlier films to illustrate the early years of Strummer's life - animation and movie clips (If..., Animal Farm and 1984) - before dipping in to the huge catalogue of film featuring Strummer and The Clash.
An array of first-hand witnesses who appear to be seated around a campfire narrate much of The Future is Unwritten. However, there are no captions to tell you who these people are. Bono and Clash guitarist Mick Jones are easy enough but even an old punk like me struggled for a few seconds before recognising the much-filled-out Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones,
Strummer, was born in Turkey, the second son of a British diplomat and spent his early years living abroad until he and his brother were sent to boarding school in England.
In interviews he tell us that he was always a gang leader and constantly talking, as opposed to his older brother, David, who was more insular and rarely spoke. David, who became involved in a far-right group and covered his room in Nazi symbols, died by suicide when he was 19 and Strummer had to identify his body.
Strummer, who had changed his name to Woody, after Woody Guthrie, spent the next few years at art college and working in factories, as a gardener and grave digger before moving to a squat in London.
He made money by busking and in London formed a rockabilly band the 101-ers and started writing songs including one for his girlfriend at the time who went on to become Slits drummer Palmolive.
It was John Lydon who coined the phrase 'never trust a hippy' but I always saw punks as the bastard children of the hippies, often sharing a distrust of society, a belief in the individual and a do-it-yourself approach to life.
Woody Mellor became Joe Strummer in 1975 and the following year when he saw the Sex Pistols playing he left the 101-ers to form The Clash. He also left much of his dope-smoking hippy lifestyle, his girlfriend and other friends behind.
While the Sex Pistols imploded after barely 18 months together The Clash took up the punk mantle and ran with it, broadening its appeal by introducing elements of reggae.
Despite abandoning his hippy persona, Strummer had a social concious. His politics were left-wing and his lyrics were often about social injustice and world affairs.
However, there were constant tensions between him and fellow band members, particularly drummer Topper Headon – who was sacked from the band – and, later, guitarist Mick Jones.
Strummer seemed to almost resent the popularity of The Clash, particularly in the US where they became stadium headliners.
When the Clash ended up with Strummer as the only original member he eventually called it quits.
He broadcast on the BBC World Service, made a few movies and toured with the Pogues for a while, replacing Shane MacGowan as vocalist - The Future is Unwritten has footage of a young, fully-toothed MacGowan pogoing at an early Clash gig.
Legal battles with The Clash's record label meant Strummer was unable to record but when these were eventually ironed out he formed a new group The Mescaleros that despite a punk sensibility had a mellow, almost world-music type vibe. It was almost as if Strummer had returned to his hippy roots.
I never, saw The Clash, but did see The Mescaleros in the Limelight, a small venue in Belfast, in 1999.
It was memorable for two reasons - firstly the music - Clash songs White Man in Hammersmith, Straight to Hell, Bankrobber, London's Burning and White Riot - mixed in with Mescalero material.
However, I also remember Strummer complaining about the heat and asking for the fire doors to be open and lying down on stage while he sang Straight to Hell.
After the gig I went to the toilets and saw a door had been flung open to a room where the band were gathered and Strummer was lying flat out on a table, stripped to his waist and covered in sweat and while watching The Future is Unwritten that image of him kept coming back to me.
He died the following year from a heart condition aged 50. A few months before he had been joined on stage by Mick Jones during a Mescaleros gig.
The Future is Unwritten suggests that he was much more at ease with himself and had made amends with many of those he had abandoned.
However, in the year that he died he told an interviewer: "This is my Indian summer. I learnt that fame is an illusion and everything about it is just a joke. I'm far more dangerous now, because I don't care at all."

In the mountains

I took my first walk of the new year into the Mournes on Thursday and slipped and fell three times on ice – and slid once beside a very high precipice.
Although there was a bit of hoarfrost on the ground on the way up I really didn't expect it to be quite as treacherous.
I went up a route known as the Trassey Track which starts off as a dirt road that takes you up to Pollaphouca (which translates from Irish as ‘the Devil’s cauldron’) that lies between Slieve Meelmore and Slieve Bernagh.
But two thirds of the way up I cut off to the left and started clambering up a fairly steep rocky slope to the Hares Gap.
During the warmer weather you can often see carnivorous butterwort growing between the crevices in the rock - a sticky-leafed plant in which flies and small insects become caught and are slowly devoured.
I was busy looking for signs of butterwort when my foot slid from me and I ended up arse about tit and lying winded on my back.
A raven - the harbinger of death in Celtic mythology - cawed from above me before banking off towards Pollaphouca
I hadn't gone up too far at that point and of course the really proper, sensible thing would have been to sheepishly clamber down again, drive to Newcastle and go for a walk along the beach.
But, stupid, stubborn ould git that I am I went on and hadn't gone too far when once again my foot slipped on a rock and sent me tumbling.
I thought seriously then that enough was enough but then looked up and saw I wasn't that far from the Hare's Gap and so went on, determined to take my time and pay more attention to where I was putting my feet.
Once through the gate set into the Mourne Wall I was in the heart of the mountains and I thought it was worth the minor mishaps that had left me with a few bruises but nothing too serious.
Sitting there looking down into the valley below, surrounded on all sides by the mountains I was glad I'd continued. On a day like today there would be few people up here. Just me... and the ravens.
I set off along a track known as the Brandy Pad – named because it used to be used by smugglers to bring illegal goods landed on the rocky coast that runs along the Ballagh over the mountains and inland.
It runs along the slopes that lead up to Slievenagloch and Commedagh and under a buttress-like rock formation known as The Castles.
It was here that I fell for the third time. The beginnings of a river that cuts across the path had frozen solid. I could see the danger before I got to it and slowly edged my way across it using my stick to steady myself. It was no good, my feet went from under me and once again I was lying sprawled on the ground.
I got up and tenderly pressed the newest bruises to my growing collection but I was also apprehensive now because the route I planned to take down again was very steep.
It runs from the gap between Slieve Commedagh and Slieve Donard, known as the Saddle, down along the Glen River and into Donard Wood that sits above Newcastle.
When I first started walking in the Mournes with my Dad when I was kid this steep slope was covered with scree which you had to clamber up, showering anyone coming behind you with flakes of granite.
In recent years stone steps have been cut into it which makes life much easier going up and down, except that is when running water has frozen into sheets of ice.
I tried to stay on the hoary heather but this often meant walking precariously close to a sheer drop to my left.
I was like a blind man, tapping the ground ahead of me with my stick and trying to shuffle –not an easy thing to do when you are going down a 45 degree slope.
Long before I got to it I spotted an area where the steps had frozen solid but I was so busy being apprehensive about this that I did not notice that I was walking just inches from the edge of the step. This was probably a good thing, for when my foot slipped and hovered briefly in mid-air I didn’t over react, managed to balance myself with my stick and move back a bit.
It was only then that I realised how close I’d come to tipping over a 30 foot drop. When I got to the ice sheet there was nothing else for it. There was no way I was even going to put a foot near it and so lowered myself down onto my backside and eased myself across.
Back on my feet it took another half hour to get onto slightly less precarious ground and I cursed at myself for putting myself in such a situation and then smirked, proud that I had survived.