The Midnight Court

You Are Mighty part 2

2006-07-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

For those of you coming here looking for info on You Are Mighty, the inspirational website for putative ass-kickers, I have revealed all here on my new blog.

Change of Address

2006-05-19T11:16:00.000-07:00

Fiddle de doo fiddle de dee, it's a Wordpress life for me. New digs for the Midnight Court, but as it's exam time the beautification will not be underway for a week or two. With thanks to blacknight who donated blogs to the Irish Blog Award nominees. Sings* A whole new world, a new fantastic point of view...

Next up, Land Law

2006-05-17T11:17:00.000-07:00

Managed to fight down the rising sense of panic yesterday - horrible tantrum at one point - and by 3 a.m. had covered four topics for this morning's exam. My helpful girlfriend drilled me extensively on the disciplining of the Judiciary, so I managed to parlay that into an eight page epic in the Dining Hall. I gave them short shrift. I got up at 6.30 a.m. to cover an "alternate" just in case the gods had it in for me and managed to get a pretty sound knowledge of the doctrine of precedent into my thick skull by 8.30. Then a quick shower, brekkie and on the bus down to the Inns. Shockingly, one of the guaranteed subjects was not on the paper, so I basically could have gone to bed last night at 1.30 instead of slaving over it like a gombeen. Something tells me the class was getting a dose of its own medicine off the lecuturer. What I like to call the "stupid question brigade" and she didn't exactly see eye to eye, although to an extent there was a pair of them in it. Well, they fucked things up royally for all and sundry. I have a note from my last lecture which says "There is a pattern on the papers, just go with that" as a direct quote. The pattern was juries/courts/juries/courts, except this year it went juries/civil and criminal legal aid! The canons of interpretation also made an appearance for the first time ever, despite a note in the exam report to the effect that "one student confused this with the presumptions of interpretation, which was not asked". That basically left anyone with a prepared question on the presumptions of interpretation with half a question. Thankfully, yours truly had no room in his memory banks for all that latin and lecture notes revealed that I didn't make it in those days, so I had four questions which I was quite happy with, and was spared vicarious liability for the torts of my classmates. My hand is very sore, which is worrying. I don't know how I'm going to make it through the next four exams plus all that note taking. It's hard to believe that ten years ago, I had to sit two three-hour sessions a day during the exam season. It's kind of scary that the old bod is protesting and I still so tender of years. It might be something to do with being left-handed. Apparently, we push the pen across the page, and sort of grind the nib down into the paper. Certainly, my hand was stuck in a claw-like state for about 20 minutes after I left the hall. I've tried to hold it lightly - as I have when playing the guitar - but I can't get the knack. God, please don't be arthritis, you bastard. Next stop, the horrors of Land Law. This time, I really am going down in flames. Speaking of flames, is Blazen Hazen the new "I kiss you"? It is dearly to be wished that the answer is yes!

Oh Dear

2006-05-16T04:33:00.000-07:00

I'm frantically going through my notes from Introduction to the Legal System looking for detailed information on the original jurisdiction of the courts. According to my note from the first lecture "full set of notes enough to pass - no extra reading required". Woo hoo, you might well say. She couldn't have said fairer than that. Unfortunately my concentration appears to have lapsed quickly and two lectures later, all I have on the page are some doodles of a Hawker Hurricane shooting down an FW190 (I know, I know. As if!) and some people in sunglasses and cowboy hats, and what appears to be the first paragraph of a planned and particularly cliché 70s style science fiction paperback, written in the trademark beautiful script I can only achieve using a HB pencil. It reads:

There are few things beyond the clouds which cannot be obtained below them, but men, ever restless to seek pastures new and faraway hills, have hurled themselves at the firmament and gunned the engines of their atomic ships in the directions of Alpha Centauri and Betelgeuse, and yet other suns around which were thought to make their stately orbits planets of surpassing riches and unknown treasure; new worlds to conquer. They forgot the weeping Alexander who so many millenia ago knew that there were no more such worlds, that Man is in essence alone with himself. That men are alone with themselves. And if they did not know it before, many were they who discovered it in the cold no-place, the vast nothing among all stars, and they closed their minds to reason and went mad.

That's the last time I read Isaac Asimov when I'm supposed to be thinking about my future. Oh why, Lord, why?!

Quote of the Day

2006-05-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

Just finished Criminal Law today. Think I did enough to pass. Anyway, treated myself to a copy of Knights of the Dinner Table on the way home; an hilarious RPG magazine/comic book. I don't do the whole Dungeons and Dragons thing myself (primarily because I have no friends), but I have whiled away many's the happy hour in front of Baldur's Gate, hacking and slaying my way up and down the Sword Coast and trying desperately to level up some no-spell motherfucker of a Mage as his hit points are repeatedly clubbed away by trolls. Today's KotDT mag features a chucklesomely negative review of the current Battlestar Galactica series (which I haven't seen much of but am prepared to be favourably disposed towards as a matter of reaction) by someone called Noah Antwiler. It contains the following withering appraisal of Galactica's Viper jocks who:

...are about as combat effective as Communists in a Chuck Norris movie.

Well, I thought it was funny. Observant BSG watchers will have recognised Cmdr. Adama as Gaff from Blade Runner, which Mr. Antwiler points out is a good thing as he will need all his blade runner abilities to "retire" the Nexus 6 Cylons which are ruining the show. Emo bonus for all AD&D and X-Men nerds. Sing along now:

I've got the Dungeon Master's Guide, I've got a 12-sided die, I've got Kitty Pryde, And Nightcrawler too, Waiting there for me, Yes I do.

Enjoy. Next stop for me, the Irish Legal System. Wish me luck.

Hip Hop Thursday (Re-format)

2006-05-10T10:38:00.001-07:00

Yo, cop! What it is homies? Drop the verse. Word. Back in the day, a posse of homeboys rolled straight outta Compton with some seriously ill flava which they laid down in a gangsta vernacular that belied a deep intellectual communion with the human condition itself. Fifteen years after the appearance of 1992’s seminal The Chronic galvanised post-modernist scholars internationally, a fresh interpretation of the classic track, Bitches Ain’t Shit (but Ho’s and Tricks) by pasty beanpole and emotional hardcore composer, Ben Folds, provides the perfect opportunity to revisit in a less febrile academic atmosphere the critical context which gave birth to what appeared prima facie to be a remarkably jejune hip hopera. If it achieves anything (and the enlighened listener will concede that it achieves much), Folds’ exploration of Bitches succeeds in throwing into stark relief through its use of “gangstacoustic” patterns of melody the essential pathos of the narrative Dr. Dré, Kurupt, Snoop Doggy Dogg and Dat Nigga Daz inhabit as the song plays out; a pathos obscured with pointed deliberation in the deployment of “street” posturing and the sinister - now nasal, now gutteral - tones with which the “raps” are delivered. But how did we get to here from there? Studio-quality audio here.

Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks, So, lick on deez nutz and suck the dick, Gets the fuck out after you're done, And I hops in my ride to make a quick run.

The novice critic might well be tempted when confronted with a text like this to appeal to the theoretical tools provided by FR Leavis and his New Criticism, but this approach is unlikely to be fruitful since a literal construction of the words as stated might lead one to the erroneous conclusion that Bitches is somehow a facile, confused, unfocused and aggressive work which could never be admitted to the canon. To illumine the authorial intent requires the application of the more “teleological” tools of the deconstructionists, which approach it is obvious from even a preliminary “reading” is fully in keeping with the artistic project conceived by the rappers themselves. The clues are in the language used. Dr. Dré is too well informed an artist to be unaware of the basic structuralism of Saussure which holds that language is a social product and that, therefore, the social aspect of speech is outside the speaker’s control. According to Saussure, then, language is not a function of the speaker but is passively assimilated from society. Speaking, or “rapping”, as defined by Saussure, is a premeditated act, however. Dré knows this. In fact, he embraces the underlying structural truth of Saussure’s insight by using highly charged, socialized, prejudicial and sexed “words” (bitches, ho’s, tricks) which he communicates to his audience though a violated, necessarily learned, grammar (gets out after you’re done, I hops in my ride). But the Dr. is also too well informed, as we shall see, to be unaware that Saussure himself had begun to recognize the limits of structuralism in his final working years and started to develop an identifiably post-structuralist perspective on the interaction of language and meaning according to which:

1. poetic language adds a second, contrived, dimension to the original word. 2. there is a correspondence between elements, in both metre and rime. 3. binary poetic laws transgress the rules of grammar, and 4. the element of the key word (or even letter) may be spread over the whole length of the text or may be concentrated in a small space, such as one or two words.

Dr. Dré uses each of Saussure’s insights here to inform the construction of the following tranche of rapped narrative:

I used to know a bitch named Eric Wright, We used to roll around and fuck the hoes at night, Tight than a mutharfucka with the gangsta beats, And we was ballin' on the muthafuckin' Compton streets, Peep, the shit got deep and it was on, Number 1 song after number 1 song, Long as my muthafuckin' pockets was fat, I didn't give a fuck where the bitch was at, But she was hangin' with a white bitch doin' the shit she do, Suckin' on his dick just to get a buck or 2, And the few ends she got didn't mean nothin', Now she's suing cuz the shit she be doin' ain't shit, Bitch can't hang with the streets, she found herself short, So now she's takin' me to court, It's real conversation for your ass.

Here, the key to unlocking the text is concentrated in a small “space” and confined to the two-word cipher “Eric Wright”, the “bitch” throughout the quoted lyric. Dré cleaves to the post-structuralist doctrine according to which meanings within texts are unstable and shifting. For example, “bitch” it is obvious admits of more than one interpretation as the “mike” is passed from MC to MC. Eric Wright was a Kelly Park Compton Crip who, along with Dré, was one of the original members of NWA, rapping under the moniker Eazy E. As the lyric suggests, while shit got deep as chart success followed chart success, material ease lulled the Dr. into a false sense of security. Eric it transpired was hanging with a “white bitch”, NWA business manager Jerry Heller, and conspiring with him “to get a buck or two”, that is misappropriate funds generated though the group’s musical activities. As the Dr. wryly observes of one of hip hop’s most infamous feuds, that is real converstation for your ass. Next post; "No Rap is an Island". Sneak preview:

Move up the block as we groove down the block See my girl's house, Dré, pass the Glock Kick in the do', an' I look on the flo' It's my little cousin Daz and he's fuckin' my hoe, yo I uncock my shit...I'm heart-broke, But I'm still lo'ked.

And! More exciting critical theory... "[the work] is a classic example of Woods’ recherché postmodernism and, like the work of Pynchon and Foster Wallace, is grounded in a kind of vital hyper-reality not seen since the breathless melodramas of the Victorian period. And yet, underlying the appearance of conventional melodrama is a truly fractured postmodern reality, presented as a disturbing, cinematic montage of disembodied genitalia, rolling low-riders, prison blues and locked n’ loaded Glock 9 mm handguns." Until then, we out. Peace.

2006-05-10T10:38:00.000-07:00

Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks, So, lick on deez nutz and suck the dick, Gets the fuck out after you're done, And I hops in my ride to make a quick run.

1. poetic language adds a second, contrived, dimension to the original word. 2. there is a correspondence between elements, in both metre and rime. 3. binary poetic laws transgress the rules of grammar, and 4. the element of the key word (or even letter) may be spread over the whole length of the text or may be concentrated in a small space, such as one or two words.

Dr. Dré uses each of Saussure’s insights here to inform the construction of the following tranche of rapped narrative:

I used to know a bitch named Eric Wright, We used to roll around and fuck the hoes at night, Tight than a mutharfucka with the gangsta beats, And we was ballin' on the muthafuckin' Compton streets, Peep, the shit got deep and it was on, Number 1 song after number 1 song, Long as my muthafuckin' pockets was fat, I didn't give a fuck where the bitch was at, But she was hangin' with a white bitch doin' the shit she do, Suckin' on his dick just to get a buck or 2, And the few ends she got didn't mean nothin', Now she's suing cuz the shit she be doin' ain't shit, Bitch can't hang with the streets, she found herself short, So now she's takin' me to court, It's real conversation for your ass.

Move up the block as we groove down the block See my girl's house, Dré, pass the Glock Kick in the do', an' I look on the flo' It's my little cousin Daz and he's fuckin' my hoe, yo I uncock my shit...I'm heart-broke, But I'm still lo'ked.

Things To Do in Dublin That Won't Get You Dead

2006-05-06T05:07:00.000-07:00

If any of my small band of readers isn't already doing so, I recommend they hit the Dublin Community Blog where I have just blogged about an exciting gig tonight in Slattery's of Capel Street. The Brad Pitt Light Orchestra blows into to town to blow your little minds and I, for one, will be there, completely ignoring the parlous state of my legal knowledge in the run up to next week's exams. Free musical tasters here. If you'd like to do something that doesn't involve dodging a beating in Temple Bar, I exhort you to tag along. Be there or be square, Midnight Courtiers.

Axis of Sleazy

2006-05-05T15:57:00.000-07:00

Big up to our visitor from the Islamic Republic of Iran who found his (I'm pretty sure it was a he) way to the Midnight Court dot blogspot dot com via the following search. Let's just say, it's not work safe. [Link on search.arabia.msn.com] Is this what women are looking for in a man, now? Is he expressing a commendable desire to be an industrious lover? I'd also like to thank his ISP, the Telecommunications Company of Iran, for making the visit possible. Does this mean I should blog more about the west coast rap scene or less? I can't decide.

You Are Mighty!

2006-05-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

Need a boost? Worried about those exams, that job interview, your ability to totally kick some ass? Just type www dot your name dot you are mighty dot com into your browser, turn up them speakers and you go guy, stroke, girl! www.copernicus.youaremighty.com UPDATE: In the absence of an ability to sit down and actually start the hard work of cramming for my exams, I have been playing my youaremighty music and inspirational messages at high volume while dancing around and punching the air. A much more effective tactic. UPDATE - Track is by E NOMINE off their Album Das Beste aus Gotte Beitrag und Tuefels Werk.

Hip Hop Thursday

2006-05-04T20:17:00.000-07:00

Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks, So, lick on deez nutz and suck the dick, Gets the fuck out after you're done, And I hops in my ride to make a quick run.

1. poetic language adds a second, contrived, dimension to the original word. 2. there is a correspondence between elements, in both metre and rime. 3. binary poetic laws transgress the rules of grammar, and 4. the element of the key word (or even letter) may be spread over the whole length of the text or may be concentrated in a small space, such as one or two words.

Dr. Dré uses each of Saussure’s insights here to inform the construction of the following tranche of rapped narrative:

I used to know a bitch named Eric Wright, We used to roll around and fuck the hoes at night, Tight than a mutharfucka with the gangsta beats, And we was ballin' on the muthafuckin' Compton streets, Peep, the shit got deep and it was on, Number 1 song after number 1 song, Long as my muthafuckin' pockets was fat, I didn't give a fuck where the bitch was at, But she was hangin' with a white bitch doin' the shit she do, Suckin' on his dick just to get a buck or 2, And the few ends she got didn't mean nothin', Now she's suing cuz the shit she be doin' ain't shit, Bitch can't hang with the streets, she found herself short, So now she's takin' me to court, It's real conversation for your ass.

Move up the block as we groove down the block See my girl's house, Dré, pass the Glock Kick in the do', an' I look on the flo' It's my little cousin Daz and he's fuckin' my hoe, yo I uncock my shit...I'm heart-broke, But I'm still lo'ked.

NeoConservatives at the Crossroads

2006-05-03T16:22:00.000-07:00

Every so often, I buy the New York Times, sunday edition, in Tower records to see how the other half lives. Amid the myriad supplements selling 30 million dollar apartments on 5th Avenue and the photo accompanied marriage announcements by horribly bouffant and manicured yuppies, I spotted this entertaining letter in the Book Review section. Knowing how close Charles Krauthammer is to the hearts of many on our small island nation, I thought it might be nice for those without a NYT subscription to have the opportunity to browse it. It's from one Francis "history is for chumps, fool" Fukuyama. Once again, I'm moved to plead, why can't we all just get along? *Sigh.

'America at the Crossroads' To the Editor: The overheated tone of Charles Krauthammer's letter (April 16) about my book "America at the Crossroads" suggests that he is in something of a panic that someone should hold him accountable for his advocacy of the Iraq war. He pretends that his 2004 speech at the American Enterprise Institute was an abstract, academic disquisition on international relations theory, unrelated to the momentous events swirling about at the time, and that he himself was expressing reservations about the war. This of course is nonsense; as everyone in the audience understood, he was trying to provide a theoretical justification for the Bush administration's foreign policy. Despite the small qualifications he cites, the overall tone was highly triumphalist, and he failed to address any of the obvious setbacks the administration had suffered like the growing insurgency and missing weapons of mass destruction that undermined his strategy of "democratic globalism". If anyone thinks I am misrepresenting the speech, they are welcome to read the 7,000 word critique of it that I wrote in The National Interest in the summer of 2004. My opposition to the war from early 2002 was not a secret; had Krauthammer done a simple Lexis-Nexis search he would have found any number of things I wrote expressing grave reservations about the war before it took place. The only thing "breathtaking" about this whole sorry affair is Krauthammer's determination to shift the focus of the debate from substance to personal invective. FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, Washington.

*Shakes head sadly.

Do not go gently...

2006-04-29T14:32:00.000-07:00

After much hoo-ing and ha-ing, several contested votes, a court case and, not least, a scary reference to civil war, Silvio has conceded defeat. Looks like it will be a bit of a "we haven't gone away you know" situation in the Italian parliament where it's avowed that the feck-acting will continue as the right fulfils its "moral duty" to bring down the government, promoting instability at this delicate juncture for their economy and society. Why is that the right gets on everyone's case about duty while it is liberalism which has to do the decent thing in times of crisis/delicacy and bite its lip as the morally and credibility bankrupt on the right go about the business of fucking things up for everyone except their cronies?

Anyone heard of the Tallaght strategy or the regular and shrill attempts at moral blackmail from the government benches that any criticism of their appalling policies will hurt the economy? In the States, the Democrats have been cowed and brought to the brink of schism on foot of blackmail about the great civilisational war with the guys with hook noses and schimitars.

Sorry, you can't criticise us until it's over. You know, because of, um, patriotism. When will that be? It's open ended. We think never. Ask Mark Humphreys.

It doesn't make any difference if you do bite your tongue, these guys have no interest in actually doing the right thing. It only makes it worse for when you have to come in and pick up the pieces at the end. Re Italy, just how moral these characters are is thrown into stark relief by their [unsuccessful] nomination for President of the Senate. Former PM and all round creepy guy, Giulio Andreotti, is the one-time "finest political mind in Europe" and a man who, literally, got away with murder. His conviction for Mafia membership was escaped only on foot of the Statute of Limitations. As much a mafioso as any of the Dons Corleoni, his nomination indicates that the dark days are far from over for Italian politics as far as the Berlusconis of this world are concerned. According to investigating magistrates back in the day, Andreotti's denials that he was bossom buddies with the Sicilian Mafia were:

incomprehensible and absurd, disproved not only by the most elementary logic, political and other, but by concrete evidence.*

Somehow, I doubt people will be too quick to invest their money in Italy while things continue to hang so much in the balance. *Midnight in Sicily (London 1996) pg 233.

E for Emo, M for My Space, V for Vendetta

2006-04-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

So, like, emo is huge right now on the You Tube/My Space matrix. Is it the start of Huxley's Brave New World or a heartening insight into the creativity and humour of young people today? All I know is that when I see parkour, those kids on YT who totally shred the gee-tar, robot dance in a jaw-dropping manner, do ninja stunts and generally rip the piss out of themselves and the world, I'm sorry my adolescence took place before the Web, broadband and digital cameras. I'd like to see stats on how many YT videos have a single bed as the backdrop. Certainly, the teenage bedroom today is a forum very different to what it was when I was locked in there with my Squire Strat, 12 amp Peavey, Pixies albums, Jim Morrison haircut, mirror and well-thumbed copy of Catcher. TCAL points out this morning that You Tube is spending one million dollars on bandwidth per month, in essence underwriting the sea-change in Internet use which is currently taking place. The above is pretty cool too and reminds me that I won free tickets to V for Vendetta at the Irish Blog Awards. I mentioned it at the time and said I really enjoyed the flick, but never got around to doing a full review. James Wolcott correctly pointed out that the shrill insistence on the right that the film was "bad" indicated that its themes were cutting a little close to the bone. V works as art, genre flick and political polemic and is a top companion piece to Syriana, which I thought was subtly profound on the interconnectedness of things. One is reminded of the army of morons on the IMDB message boards who say things like "Sideways is a bad film because that guy drinks alcohol all the time and the other guy is unfaithful to his fiancé. And they were all divorced and everything." I guess I missed that day of Critical Theory 101. Still, you expect more from the New Yorker and the NY Times. My only issue with V for Vendetta really (apart from Miss Portman's typically inadequate performance) was that it unnecessarily has the gub'ment engineer with appalling cynicism the circumstances which allow it to introduce a totalitarian dispensation. It's a cop out. Depriving us of our freedoms and civil liberties because of security threats is just as wrong when those threats are genuine and external as when they're manufactured. In a free society, it's up the citizenry to suck it up to a certain extent whether they feel threatened by urban youths or implacable and deranged fundamentalists. And I've read Martin Rees. It's too easy for educated, middle-class conformists to make free and easy with the liberties of others by succumbing to hysteria in respect of their own particular interests. It doesn't cost them anything. I wonder where the You Tube kid got that mask...

Dublin Community Blog

2006-04-28T04:53:00.000-07:00

I'm delighted to have become a contributor to the Dublin Community Blog. I know it's very fashionable to knock the place, but I really enjoy living here and am looking forward to posting about all the things there are to do and see on the horse-dunged cobbles of the metropolis. Of course, the city has it's problems and it is inevitable, given my propensity to indulge in what was referred to in Sideways as "neg-head downer shit", that I will tap the odd irate posting into Wordpress. Check out the blog and maybe even think about how, as the play of Dublin life goes on, you too might contribute a verse. Summer's here and the city is coming alive.

In the meantime, I leave you with my biography cum apologia as a Dublin Community contributor:

Copernicus is a Dublin-based civil servant and law student (at least until after he fails his forthcoming exams) who has lived in the capital for five years and two and half months.

Although he was born a startlingly beautiful child in the National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street Dublin 2, Copernicus does not consider himself a Dub. Not a wet week in the world, he was transplanted post haste to Munster where he was reared on the creamiest milk produced by contended Fresians on a cud of lush Golden Vale grass, fatted on Kerry lamb each spring and derived many boyhood-enhancing minerals from the swift, clear waters of the Shannon whose music may be heard in crystal cadence over the rocks at Doonas Falls below the ancient Limerick keeps and raths of his Norman and Gaelic forebearers.

On attaining a tender but serious three years of age, he entered Tullyvaraga Playschool to begin a programme of education which continues unabated some 29 years later at the Honorable Society of King’s Inns. However, he has always been a poor scholar and continues at his books more in hope than expectation.

Copernicus maintains blogs at The Midnight Court and Cruiskeen Eile and as made guest contributions to Fústar dot org to relate dark tidings on freemasonry, Christmas monsters and the inscrutable doings of the wee people. He received a best commenter nomination at the 2006 Irish Blog Awards and he would have won it too if it wasn’t for these pesky kids.

Despite an aristocratic mein and sedulously cultivated patrician air, Copernicus prides himself on being approachable and often condescends to respond enlighteningly to those members of the lumpen proletariat who comment on his posts.

Zugwanged

2006-04-22T16:30:00.000-07:00

My new best friend and rocket ship co-pilot, Frank Neary of the Land of Ireland speaks of his great love of Money (the book, not the legal tender) in comments on foot of a reference here t'other day to the Clive James chat with Martin Amis in the highly recommended Talking in the Library series. The comment thread prompted the following labyrinth of thoughts:

I have Money around here somewhere but still haven't got around to reading it. I really liked London Fields when I read it as a callow undergraduate in Galway and there is much to enjoy in the Moronic Inferno collection of essays, especially on the porn industry. (I may be getting my wires crossed, but he definitely writes about his visit to the San Fernando valley somewhere.) I picked up his collection of criticism, The War Against Cliché about the same time as I picked up the Hitchens collection, Unacknowledged Legislators, [this book is a typically handsome volume from the Verso imprint, by the way] both of which are great reading, even though the Hitch's politics are now somewhere to the distant right of his brother's. Who'd have believed that would happen a mere six years ago? I'm bound to say I may be unique among Irish bloggers in having seen Saturn 3, the sci-fi film written by Amis and starring the bizarre triumvirate of Farrah Fawcett, Harvey Keitel and Kirk Douglas. I'm happy to be proved wrong by fellow sufferers. Amis was also hired as a writer on Mars Attacks. Fuck knows why. When I was a gruesome adolescent I read the Riverside Villas Murder by Amis pére, the tale of a gruesome adolescent who gets seduced by an attractive, bored 30-something housewife, which I really, really liked. Can't quite remember why...

Another book I quite liked as a wretched teen was Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming. Bond is a classic role model for the pathetic, sensitive youth with his cruel, sardonic edge, sexual success and ability to smoke copious, impractical amounts of cigarettes. The less said about the first two characteristics the better, but I managed to put in plenty of spadework on the third. I believe the works of Ayn Rand have a similar effect on the young, expressing, as they do, the world in an especially adolescent, ego-centric way. As any developmental psychologist will tell you (he suspects without knowing. Ed.), maturing is the process of developing in ever increasing circles from the near-solipsism of an infant's estate to the full comprehension of one's fellow beings as real live humans with their very own thoughts and feelings. Not to mention civil rights. Tobias Wolff's Old School has all the dope in this regard.

Any old hoo, in the snot-green days of my tender boyhood there lay about the house another James Bond paperback, Colonel Sun by Robert Markham. But as this one was written after Fleming's death by someone presuming to take up the 007 torch with what I considered, taking typical teenage umbrage, to be appalling cheek, I disdained to browse its contents with the gun-metal coldness of Bond himself. Imagine my surprise to find out many moons later that Markham was none other than the bould Kingsley Amis. Of course, I've searched high and low for the book since, but it reveals not its hiding place in the old homestead. At any rate, it wasn't off the ground Amis jnr picked his penchant for unusual writing projects. Speaking of nomes de plume, Kingsley's buddy, Phillip Larkin, of whom Fergal Crehan of the Tuppenceworthies blogged with his typical perspicacity recently, was no stranger to the pseudonym either. In fact and quite coincidently, I picked up only today in a city-centre bookshop Larkin's collected novels including the posthumous Trouble at Willow Gables which he wrote enmasked by the sapphic-frisson intensifying soubriquet, Brunette Coleman. I quite like this spot-the-pun review by a Mr. Jon Swan over at amazon.co.uk:

Hardened readers of spanking novels will find much to enjoy and bemoan in Larkin's Trouble at Willow Gables. Have no doubts, the former poet laureate is one of us. All the signs are there. He's good on uniforms, of course. But, more importantly, he can't help gravitating towards the buttocks of his schoolgirls. The heroine of his fantasy, typically, is a slightly plump girl with a big bottom. She enjoys her food. She is beaten with a cane by the Head Mistress. In the book's best scene she gets lost in a wood at night, tears her tight trousers at the seat, and is forced to face the morning with her bare bum hanging out. Lovely. Another girl rides bareback with no knickers. [...] His essay on schoolgirl fiction at the end of the book is illuminating. It gives all the basic elements. It should be required reading for all those hacks thinking of writing a schoolgirl spanking novel.

So there you go. If you're thinking of putting pen to paper in that noble enterprise, this information can't have come a minute too soon.

Exam Hell

2006-04-21T03:36:00.000-07:00

Things are grim here at the Midnight Court. My first law exams (Kings Inns, Dip 1) loom in less than a month and thus far I have managed to do approximately two and a half hours study (Adverse Possession and, somewhat randomly, Statutory Interpretation*). My mind was somewhat concentrated on reading this case (law suit by persistently failing student on my very own course) via a link from the excellent new suite of Irish Legal Fiction blogs (added to links) maintained by Abhcóide. Hence, I am off to spend the day in the library pictured above. I am a horribly lazy person who hates work and prefers to spend his time on the couch reading, surfing the net, watching tv, playing music, talking shite to my long-suffering wench, eating epicurean fare from boutique delicatessens (usually all at once as I try to cram experience through every sense, pore and orifice during the headlong towards the grave). Somehow, I stumbled into an amazing job some years ago which has the fantastic quality that work cannot be taken home. You go in, perform each day's newly generated tasks according to a very tight deadline which admits of no room for the procrastination which would otherwise be indulged in and go home with nothing on your mind to worry about. And I only do it three days a week. I went from an Arts degree to this, so I've never had the opportunity to develop a sense of discipline, or (ahem, more accurately) never bothered to. So, I've no excuse for now finding myself staring into the academic abyss. But that doesn't stop me from throwing myself at the mercy of my blogopeers (O sweet coinage!) Like a character out of Aesop, I've ignored the pending winter of exam discontent and pranced on sun-drenched hills, wilfully neglecting the gathering clouds, dense with case law, legislative provisions and other legal arcanum. I'm faced with a vast morass of information in six subject areas (criminal, constitution, contract, land, tort and legal systems) which I have no idea of how to go about rationalising, trimming and ingesting in anything other than a random, panicked way. As such, exam tips left in the comments section or communicated by email (theapothecaryguy at yahoo dot co dot uk) will be gratefully and hungrily seized upon, especially from former/current law students. God have mercy on my soul. *If Simon McGarr or TJ McIntyre are in the neighbourhood, I'd be interested to know if they have an opinion on the effect of s. 6 of the Interpretation Act 2005 on data protection lacunae in that it permits a court to give an updated meaning to legislative provisions to take account of technological and other developments which have occurred since the passing of an Act or the making of a statutory instrument. Not that it is necessarily a sufficiently copperfastened protection.

Grammar Are On Their Last Leg

2006-04-18T11:41:00.000-07:00

My old mucker fústar of fústar dot org fame has a top notch post today about the snooker - am watching Hendry and Bond while I jack this cyber missive straight into the matrix - which I highly recommend my tiny band of readers to check out for purposes of sporting edification. I've never had the stolid, collected, intellectual qualities required for snooker or golfing success (No, doing things simply for enjoyment is not enough, I must have victory damn it) being forced by an intemperate nature and an inborn laziness bordering on nihilism to stick to pool and pitch and putt instead. Even at that, the slightest display of skill or whiff of usefulness and I go to pieces. I can't handle the pressure. Anyway, watching the World Championship is a different story. Its is a compelling, understated appeal which even a sports dunce like me can totally deal with. Fústar prefaces his post with a quote from the superlative essayist, Clive James, to whose portal-style website a link exists yonder on my sidebar. There is much at clive james dot com to titillate and stimulate he or she who would the life of the mind pursue, not least of which is the interview series Talking in the Library in which Clive speaks to such luminous adornments of the creative world as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, PJ O'Rourke and Cate Blanchett. Don't miss his chat with Terry Gilliam. Bibiliophiles will be sick with envy at Mr. James's book-lined abode so dense with hefty tomes that it has been assessed by structural engineers as in imminent danger of plunging through the loft-style, warehouse conversions below to end up in the underground carpark several floors down. Anyway, I've meant for a while to post the following poem from Clive and Fústar's quote provides me with the perfect motive. When I intoned it aloud to my beloved, we both ended up in stitches, creased with the giggles, doubled over with belly laughs and guffaws to bate the band. It is a pleasure I would share with others. Of course, I am brilliant at reading having first formed an acquaintanceship with the alphabet almost 30 years ago. Another laugh out loud effort from Mr. James is The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered with which you should, having consumed the following, familiarise yourself instanter. Lest the impression be given that Clive is simply a gifted light versifier, faithful readers are encouraged to sit a while in his poetry section and spend time with some of his more thoughtful works. Out loud now kids, out loud. And have fun.

Windows is Shutting Down

Windows is shutting down, and grammar are On their last leg. So what am we to do? A letter of complaint go just so far, Proving the only one in step are you.

Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes. A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad Before they gets to where you doesnt knows The meaning what it must of meant to had.

The meteor have hit. Extinction spread, But evolution do not stop for that. A mutant languages rise from the dead And all them rules is suddenly old hat.

Too bad for we, us what has had so long The best seat from the only game in town. But there it am, and whom can say its wrong? Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.

(Clive James 2005)

La vita é bella

2006-04-11T04:44:00.000-07:00

As the Italians tot up their ballots and ponder, no doubt with relish, the vista of a potential recount, The Midnight Court takes the opportunity to treat readers to the following perspicacious exerpts from Luigi Barzini’s explanation of how to succeed on the Latin peninsula. Having recommended his book, The Italians: A Full-length Portrait, in Sunday’s post, I decided I’d better form a closer acquaintanceship with it myself. And I’m glad I did. Luigi’s voice is a compelling one; liberal, pragmatic, generous, wholly in tune with the condition of being human, not to mention scholarly and mature. One instinctively trusts his menchly, measured tone, which is reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s better moments but without the postmodern tics, even while suspecting that some of his strokes are that little bit broad. My only caveat is that The Italians was first published in 1964. Still the Italy it depicts is recognisably the one on which Silvio Berlusconi and his henchme…, er, political allies are fighting to maintain their grasp. (Lest Irish readers in the uber-modern Tygger polity dare to feel insufferably smug about those crazy eyeties and their impossibly opaque politics, they should note the following example of our own facility with obscurantist power broking. Reading an interesting article on some aspect of the legislative process recently, I googled, as one does, its impressive barrister author, a former official in the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, Mr. Brian Hunt, and found his informative profile page at Mason Hayes & Curran. He is the consultant at the firm who “advises clients who have concerns about proposed and existing legislation, and the various ways in which they can seek to contribute to the shaping of that legislation.” To seek to contribute to the shaping of legislation sure sounds like a noble, thankless task; the patrician practice of succeeding generations of gentle plutocrats and not remotely a euphemistic description for special interest lobbying and an engagement with influence peddlers. I hasten to add that Mr. Hunt is certainly not doing anything wrong here, either morally or legally. He’s applying his hard-won knowledge for the benefit of his clients and employer. But the choice of language is interesting, to say the least.) Starting with a brief survey of la famiglia, the most immediate of the ever-increasing circles to which the wily Italian belongs, Barzini considers the pattern of competing, inter-leaved groups in that society, not least - but then again not the greatest - of which is the State itself. And there are wheels within that wheel too of course:

In Italy, powerful groups know no other limit to their power than the power of rival groups. They play a free-for-all game practically without rules and referee. Of course, the law is allegedly supreme; the apparatus of a quasi-modern State is visibly omnipresent, with its props, cast of characters, costumes, titles and institutions, but there are important differences between such dignitaries and organisations and what they are elsewhere. Each branch of the State machinery in Italy is in reality a mighty independent power which must struggle sometimes for its existence, and usually for the prosperity of its protégés and subjects against all other rival branches of the State machinery: they fight savagely at times, but more often surreptitiously, exactly like private pressure groups, for a larger place in the sun, a bigger cut of the budget, more employees, a higher rank and wider prerogatives for their leaders.

The reference to costumes reminds me of the Italian railway station and the impact on it of the important concept of the bella figura. Maintaining the bella figura goes far beyond the bourgeois English notion of keeping up appearances and makes it next to impossible to distinguish an Italian platform steward from an admiral in command of an entire naval fleet. festooned, as such an officer must be, with epaulets and dripping in gold braid. As both Berlusconi and Prodi will be well aware:

The Prime Minister himself must have private backing of his own if he wants his orders to be obeyed, backing within his own party, within the bureaucracy, and within the Church (if he is a Christian Democrat) as he can scarcely depend on his constitutional authority alone.

The law in Italy is notoriously complex and contingent, more often used as just another weapon in the armoury of power than as an instrument of justice and deployed not so much with a view to achieving the immediate end of a litigious battle, but of tying up one’s opponent, shackling his resources and distracting his attention:

Some sort of protection is therefore necessary for everybody. Even the little men with no ambition need ample help merely to be left alone.

And so:

[A] man must choose what group to join. The range is rarely very wide; nobody is entirely free; his background, tastes, class, talents, character, ambitions will narrow the field still further. There often is, however, a moment in a man’s life in which he must take a chance and make up his mind. Some associations he can join are old, powerful and nation-wide. Some are village groups. Within the vast associations, there are again other cliques, one inside the other like Chinese ivory balls, among which a man must skilfully find his way.

In Ireland, we call this Fianna Fáil. As with the average cumann member:

When dealing with an Italian it is always prudent to know exactly where his loyalties lie, to what clique, association or party he belongs, who protects him, who are his friends, and from whom he derives his power. Naturally, there are no handbooks listing such indispensible information. The man will often hotly deny his allegiance.

Midnight at the Dark Heart of Silvio

2006-04-09T06:59:00.000-07:00

As Dick O’Brien of the back seat drivers pointed out this week and Sky News has been eager to inform viewers all day, Silvio Berlusconi has delivered himself of some pretty choice remarks lately. With opponents characterised as morons and bollockses and phone-sex girls turned to in the lonely watches of the night for, er, polling data, the bould Silvio would appear to be feeling the pressure. Hardly surprising for a man who arguably turned to electoral politics to steer the agents of the state away from the murkier corners of his commerical empire. With the Italians going to the polls today and tomorrow, the Midnight Court expects Irish bloggers will be taking an interest in Europe’s most boot-shaped nation state and to forestall any bewilderment has decided to come to the rescue with a modest reading list. My own slight familiarity with the place has its origins post-graduation in the mid '90s when I followed a good chum to the Mezzogiorno to teach English amid the sassi di Matera, the caves and limestone grottos of Basilicata which represent Europe’s oldest continuous habitation. As long-haired, beardy Celts we achieved instant fame across at least 50 square miles of the rural south as the “barbaroni Irlandesi”. Nice. Living in Italy is demanding stuff. The Irish smoker’s biological clock, for instance, must be realigned on arrival to avoid running out of cigarettes afternoon after afternoon, just as the horrific longeurs of the siesta kicks off and he finds himself wandering streets devoid of all life but creepily wolf-like wild dogs, making forlorn encounter with firmly-shuttered tobacco shop after firmly-shuttered tobacco shop. Dealing with a certain cast of Italian employer is a constant headache too, as it will be more important to him – this type will always be a "him" – to establish that he is furbo (the fox) while you are fesso (the fool), maintain his bella figura, and pursue a policy of divide and conquer among his employees than to encourage the creation of a productive atmosphere in which happy workers are eager to meet challenges and bask in the rewarding glow of a job well done. As he reaps, so shall he sow when it comes to his bottom line alas. So what is going on over there at all at all? Why is the Italian economy in the toilet, its dependants bobbing about down there waiting with appalled trepidation for someone (the Chinese they reckon) to yank the chain and send them spiralling down the U-bend of socio-economic oblivion? If you’d like to know, you could do a lot worse and spend far more unproductive hours than to read the following tomes. The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones is a useful, easy-to-read and relatively up-to-date introduction to Berlusconi’s polity in the period leading up to the Parmalat scandal, on which the book’s various insights throw prescient light. Toby’s most pertinent insight is that in the post-war period until quite recently, there existed in Italy a state of near civil war between left and right which almost reached its apotheosis in a military coup behind which lay a shadowy freemasonry. You couldn’t make it up. Appetite whetted, you’ll want to get a bit deeper into the origins of the mystery and so your eyes must turn to the south and the detailed, wonderfully rendered observations of superlative travel writer, Norman Lewis. Lewis was an intelligence officer during the Second World War and his diary of a year in the Italian south in the midst of the conflict, Naples ’44, will be one of the finest, most interesting books you ever read. Lewis returned to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies after the war to produce perhaps the definitive work on Cosa Nostra in The Honoured Society, a book which continues to go a long way towards explaining modern Italian electoral politics and which will horrify along with Jones’ book on the proportion of economic activity in the state which is controlled by the Mafia. That statistic in turn explains a great deal of the dysfunction in the Italian political economy. It’s a bit of a nightmare. Among The Honoured Society's more delightful episodes is the almost incredible tale of the Mafia monks of Mazzarino, whose Franciscan abbey was the base of operations for prostitution, murder, extortion, orgies and other refinements of a less than Christian nature. And a bonus for bibliophiles who pick up the Lewis books is that they are published in the most beautiful paperback editions of all time by the Eland travel imprint:

All our books are printed on fine, pliable, cream-coloured paper. They are still gathered in sections by our printer and sewn as well as glued, almost unheard of for a paperback book these days. This gives larger margins in the gutter, as well as making the books stronger.

Having read the foregoing, your tongue will be hanging out to know how the Mafia and mainstream Italian politics continued to interact to the detriment of the plain people of Italy throughout the 70s and 80s. Football fans will also find out what happened to Diego Maradonna during the Napoli years. Midnight in Sicily by Peter Robb contains all this and much more as he surveys art, food, history, travel and Cosa Nostra. Readers will have noticed that the books set out thus far are all written by non-natives. Fret not, I have two more recommendations for the Midnight Court faithful, The Italians , by Luigi Barzini and The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The first is a book to which Robb and Jones refer and which is regularly spoken of as the definitive work on the subject. While it’s in my library, I still haven’t gotten around to doing anything more than dip in and out of it. I can tell you that it has an utterly charming and informal, chatty style. The Leopard is one of the great works of world literature. A posthumous publication, it was written by a Sicilian nobleman, the Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa, who laboured on it quietly as his House finally gave way to entropy. And it rocks. It chronicles the decline of the Sicilian nobility and one particular form of feudalism only to see it replaced with the different patriarchy of the Honoured Society. For the benighted inhabitants of Sicily, it is the mere trading of one yoke for another. Irish readers of these books will, I think, be struck quite forcibly by the parallels between our own little island and Sicily and between the Mafia and the republican movement, which are both instructive and cautionary. As Lewis points out:

No mafioso sees himself as a criminal, and the Mafia has always been the enemy of petty crime – and therefore, to a limited extent, the ally of the police, both in Sicily and the United States…It can be regarded as a form of primitive human society that has somehow survived in the modern Western world; its cruel laws are those of tribesmen exposed to continual danger who can only hope to survive by submitting to the discipline of terrible chieftains. The capo-Mafia considers himself a lawgiver, concerned with the welfare of his people, and prides himself on watching over the advancement of deserving juniors in the organisation with the assiduousness of the master of novices of a relgious order…He is self-righteous and full of justifications.

Which is a polite way of saying "full of shit". Recognise anyone? Of course, the Mafia has moved on since the 60s and 70s, with the vast fortunes of the heroin trade finally breaking the “bonds of honour” among this particular set of theives. Still it’s useful to remember that throughout its history, the Honoured Society has numbered among its brothers doctors, lawyers, politicians, noblemen, priests and shepherds. In fact, it has been eminently respectable and thoroughly corrupt and corrupting. We’d do well to remember the lesson as we continue to normalise various relationships within and without certain bands of brothers here at home. Italy is a wonderful place, of course. Napoli is magical, Pompeii awe-inspiring, the Greek ruins of Sicily breath-taking, magnificent and transporting while up and down the length of the boot are museums and churches filled with important and beautiful art. Its people can be inutterably charming and, my God, the ice cream! But boy does it have its problems.

John McGahern Passes Away

2006-03-30T05:10:00.000-08:00

It has just appeared on Ireland.com that John McGahern has passed away suddenly at the Mater Hospital in Dublin. Mr. McGahern was one of my favourite writers and of course one of the country's finest literary voices. His short stories are a masterclass in symmetry and meaning and his recent Memoir reminded us that at its best, a literary work should not only reveal to us something of the human condition, where the particular illuminates the universal, but should also be a prose poem. I was thinking only last night as I browsed the works of another of my favourite writers that it wouldn't be long before people of our generation began to say goodbye to the artists whose new works we've looked forward to seizing on with gluttonous excitement. Artists who were producing as we came of age and who continued to produce and inform as we grew into our adult estates. And I thought "it will be strange to find that I have started to become upset at the passing of individuals I didn't know at all". Well, I'm a little bit upset today.

________________________________________________

UPDATE: The Boston Globe carried an interview with McGahern two weeks ago which explained that he could not travel to America because he was receiving treatment for cancer. While I'm at it, the pages of a recent edition of the Irish University Review are devoted largely to the great man and the Dublin Review also carries an article about Memoir (not to mention a fine short story by Colm Toibin and a very sobering but enlightening piece on the Ferns report).

Tut tut

2006-03-27T14:08:00.000-08:00

I notice that a couple of the blogosphere's most adolescent and daft contributors have decided to blacken my name on their websites, merely for disagreeing with their points of view. Of course, the fact that comments I've posted have been deleted means it is impossible for independent persons to make up their own minds. It is quite disgusting in the circumstances that wulfbeorn's attack implies vague and sinister reasons behind his decision. Richard goes straight for the vicious lie and accuses me of leaving regular invective on his site, which isn't true although I have pointed out a couple of his more hypocritical flights of nuttiness in disapproving terms. His site of course is littered with personal attacks, and most bizarrely includes a lengthy post about the need for the gloves to come off more in Irish politics. It is actually breathtaking to see how it doesn't even occur to him, a person with pretentions to influence public policy, to square this with his own hysterical reactions to robust criticism. Richard's attack on my anonymity is particular hilarious as he condemns mine in one breath while cheering on the, er, anonymous wulfbeorn in the next. Regular readers of his mental drivel will, of course, be familiar with this level of "analysis". I'm particular disappointed in wulfbeorn, who let us remember has recently added yet another scary nutjob to his ever growing sidebar of dementia - Daniel "Prince Charles has secretly converted to Islam and by the way chaos in Iraq is what America wants" Pipes. While nearly everything wulfbeorn knows is wrong, I always enjoyed going back and forth on the arguments on his blog. When he went into hibernation I expressed the pious hope in an email that he hadn't been offended by my robust engagement with his views and he responded in a civilised manner, even saying he looked forward to arguing with me when he came back. I even said something nice about him on gavin's blog. The love didn't last long, unfortunately. Well, I hope they enjoy the sound in the echo chamber when they've finally policed all alternative points of view out of their tragic, torture apologist, politically and economically illiterate bubbles. Meanwhile, back in the real world, we can get on with addressing the politics and economy we've actually got here in the Republic of Ireland, a member state of the EU, a political geography factoid which appears to have been entirely lost waaaay over there on the loony fringe. Happily, my banning coincides with a personal pledge to cease reading the horribly compelling (in that Leprechaun in the Hood way) nonsense these whinging mummy's boys have been spouting. It behooves us, as responsible citizens who face the various challenges of global warming, globalisation, terrorism, European integration, infrastructural deficits, educational deficits, house price inflation, social disintegration etc. etc. to begin to make positive contributions to mainstream discourse, rather than to point out the hypocrisy and irrationality of arguments on the distant right. Whenever I despair at reading some fresh rabid horror on Sillyman's Notes, I need only think of the generality of Irish people to get my blood pressure back down again. If they knew what was being written with a straight face on the Interwebs, they'd never stop throwing their eyes up to heaven. Anyone who has attempted to engage these punters will of course have realised that rather than pause, contemplate the ways in which their arguments are undermined by the facts and adapt their positions to the contingency and nuance of life, they simply ignore and misrepresent what has been said, add in a little spurious ad hominem rubbish about commie malcontents and carry on regardless. This approach, of course, deserves contempt rather than earnest engagement. For the record, I am not some crazed, anarcho-red malcontent but a liberal, educated, middle-class professional. And unlike some, I don't live at home with my parents while poo pooing the poverty of opportunity of the gruesome oiks at the bottom of the social ladder. I don't recognise the ultra right assessment of what constitutes left on the political spectrum as having anything to do with the reality of socio-political history in Ireland, or Europe for that matter. And I'm pretty sure, as one in a unusually strong professional position to observe, that 99% of the electorate wouldn't recognise it either. On a final note, I'm sure I'll see these gentlemen around Dublin some time, at which point I hope they have the moral courage to justify their villainous character assassination to my face.

Sua Culpa

2006-03-20T03:25:00.000-08:00

Kudos to the producers of the Late Late Show who took an interesting theme and presented an interesting set of guests to the nation on Friday night. Top honours go to Brendan Gleeson for his impassioned expression of the rage many - though not nearly enough - people in this country feel about the state of the health service. The panel discussion with Joe Duffy, David McWilliams, Eamon Dunphy and Gerard Mannix Flynn, however, was poorly overseen by Pat Partridge and as a result was not nearly as useful as it might have been. Still, the impression overall was that perhaps things are starting to change in the Celtic Tygger and people are ready to begin to question what one might call the management of our prosperity. Alas, that most baleful Irish political disorder, populism, was on display at every turn during the discussion. Dunphy was particularly disgraceful and when Pat detected the mood of the audience as encouraging of Eamo's hectoring drivel, he too decided to pretend he was there to stick it to the Man. As a result, instead of observing a timely, necessary and sober debate on where our society needs to go from here, we were treated to an unedifying scramble by the middle-class, establishment gentlemen - Pat and Eamo being remunerated at a rate perhaps ten times the industrial average - on the panel to position themselves as ordinary, daycent Dubs. Interestingly and tellingly, there was not one woman or non-Dubliner on this segment of the show. Only David McWilliams had the decency to characterise this as populist posturing, but he wasn't permitted to get a word in edgeways. While in no way endorsing his citizen charter thing - I'm certainly not signing it - at least McWilliams was prepared to understand that as a privileged and educated citizen, he has a responsibility to help shape his society and to contribute to the debate in a mature fashion. The others were interested only in gratifying their egos by banging on about how wonderful they were for standing shoulder to shoulder with the man on the Clapham Omnibus. It tells you a lot about how in love with themselves these gentlemen are that they think people want to sit through their smug, self-promoting rants instead of to have the barometer of our society assessed by important media professionals. It's worth noting in passing that Mannix Flynn who said he was "on the streets" trying to make a living is in receipt of Arts funding of at least two different types despite telling the Late Late audience that he doesn't get any grants. Check out Bob Byrne's free comic for details. Dunphy and Partridge, establishment media figures with significant audiences, played the usual Irish game of pretending that the establishment is someone else. Fianna Fáil has been at this since time immemorial despite being in Government for the last 20 years, excepting the two years of the Rainbow Coalition. The Taoiseach's recent remarks to the effect that "life should be life" are a case in point. I always think of Joe Walsh who headed up the Department of Agriculture for almost 20 years, which is incredible in a parliamentary democracy. A civil servant could have started his career under Joe as an eager young graduate and now be the Secretary General of the Department or at least SG in waiting. It would be an unimaginable state of affairs in business and it hasn't exactly been a wonderful period for Irish agricultural, diversity etc. Gleeson's anger about the state of the health service was timely and it is good that someone public has finally seen fit not to be polite about it. It should be remembered that at the start of its 20 year run at Government, Fianna Fáil burdened the Irish people with a nightmarish level of debt and, in order to help pay it off, set its eye on the hospital service budget. They have had 20 years to sort it out, but instead have consistently suggested that it has nothing to do with them. In the meantime, our small, open, EU economy has benefited substantially from the progressive improvement of global trade conditions, but the unprecedented prosperity this has brought has been very poorly managed. If the bad times come again - and price of shares is sufficiently divorced from the turnover, profitablility and asset holdings of the companies in which they are held for that to be a distinct possibility - we will have done nothing to position ourselves to ride them out. Our hospital service is a disgrace and our infrastructure remains poor due to the initial failures in constituting the NRA, the piecemeal development of roads and the failure to redress underfunding of the railways. Tertiary education is disgracefully underfunded (I have never been able to understand why society shouldn't pay to create - as opposed to perpetuate - its middle-class who pay more taxes and are in a position to add value to and administer the economy and State) as is education in disadvantaged areas, and Government remains too centralised. Without proper broadband roll out and a Western Corridor (Cork-Limerick-Galway) ballast to the bloated Greater Dublin nightmare, an economic downturn will have much more severe consequences than it should especially as property prices will end up falling in a time of rising interest rates. Alas, the Late Late could have started this debate, but it didn't and apart from Brendan Gleeson calling Michael Martin a moron, the Government got off very lightly.

Statements on the Lourdes Report

2006-03-10T05:32:00.000-08:00

The Midnight Court will shortly be moving to better appointed digs and focusing on taking a less rambling shape for itself. 2,000 word posts will be out and something a little more wieldy will be in. Today, I'm linking readers to the statement of Senator Geraldine Feeney who spoke in the Seanad yesterday of the experiences of the women who had their wombs unnecessarily removed by Michael Neary. While Ms Feeney has normally appeared as mere FF Seanad fodder, her experience as a member of the three-year Medical Council inquiry lends her statement a passion, conviction and eloquence we cannot but admire. She is not afraid in this case to tell it like it is and it is visceral and heart-breaking:

The first woman I want to talk about delivered a little baby girl on 18 August 1986. One might ask how I can remember the date; I remember it because my fourth baby, a daughter, was born the very same day in the north west in Sligo General Hospital. I was ten years the woman's senior - she was 19 and I was 29. My baby was born perfectly healthy at 7 a.m. and the woman's little baby girl was born at 2 p.m. Her baby, who was called Eileen, had spina bifida and died six weeks later. I will never forget the mother's tears and those of her husband as they told us their stories. She is still married to her lovely husband but her life is a living hell. She has been robbed of the most vital thing any woman has, that is, the facility to procreate.

The extreme degree of Neary's malpractice is captured succinctly too:

I was told by Dr. Eamon McGuinness, an obstetrician-gynaecologist who sat on the inquiry with me, that in his 30 years of practice he had carried out one caesarean hysterectomy on a woman in her mid-30s who had five children. He worked on that woman for eight hours. He massaged and packed the uterus and did everything medically possible to try to preserve it. She received 11 or 12 units of blood and, after nine hours, the doctor called in one of his senior colleagues to help with the operation. I tell this story because Dr. Neary never called in any of his colleagues to help. He proceeded to perform a hysterectomy within minutes of delivering babies.

Neary of course never spent the night with a patient but frequently lied about the extent of his efforts in chillingly contemptuous notes:

He wrote in their charts statements such as "Lucky to survive the night", "Thank God I was able to save her", "Got away with this one - baby and mother alive" and "Uncontrollable bleeding, couldnÂ't stop it, spent all night in theatre". I know that none of this was factual. Dr. Neary never spent all night in the theatre and there was never any uncontrollable bleeding.

The Midnight Court agrees with Senator Feeney that whatever about Neary - and in any normal State he would never have been left to develop his particular brand of medicine - the people responsible for allowing him to continue should be dealt with most severely:

The people to whom I really point a finger are Dr. Neary’s senior colleagues, the pathologists and anaesthetists, who were not and should not have been afraid to address the matter. The anaesthetists were in the delivery rooms and operating theatres and saw there was no raised blood pressure or increased pulse rates and they knew the women would not die in 15 or 20 minutes. The pathologists who examined the uteri and sent them back to Dr. Michael Neary saying no abnormality could be found in them have many questions to answer.
The “three wise men” sent to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital by the Irish Hospital Consultants Association - Drs. Prendiville, Stuart and Murphy - issued a report giving Dr. Neary a clean bill of health, as implied in Judge Harding Clark’s report. She adduced that they did so out of congeniality and compassion for Dr. Neary. They must have told her so. Shame on those men. If I had a stronger word or if I were permitted to use offensive language in this Chamber, I would certainly use it in respect of them. Shame on them.
If a man had a minor procedure carried out on his reproductive organ and he emerged from the operating theatre minus that organ, there would be outrage. It might happen once but would never happen 188 times. The women in question were vulnerable and were robbed of their internal reproductive organs. There is no other word but “robbed”.

We are all to blame. Tribunals of inquiry should not blind us to the fact that we continue to be happy to live in a society in which the first reaction on seeing something untoward happening is "Oh fuck. Do I not need to know this." Sean Fortune is another example of a man allowed to abuse his position of trust because the people around him, including agents of the State, were paralysed by the refusal to take responsibility.

While we like to joke as a nation about our inability to complain in restaurants, the sobering fact is that we all ignore the petty venality of our social and political structures, which refusal to take responsibility is far more insidious and, ultimately, dangerous than rampantly criminal corruption involving brown envelopes and the like. The criminal justice system can take care of things like that if they come to light, but anything covered by a spurious "code of ethics" in this country is a dead loss. A code of ethics seems essentially to be a licence to break its particulars. It is suggestive of a polity in which appearances are much more important than reality. The sanction is the humiliation of being caught, but never any genuine loss. Having read Ms Feeney's contribution, readers might also like to read Senator [Dr.] Mary Henry's remarks as a member of the medical profession which was found so wanting in this case. The irony of her remarks on the imposition of a certain "ethos" in our hospitals will not be lost in a nation which has made piety something of an art. Or maybe they will.

Stay Tuned

2006-03-06T05:45:00.000-08:00

Last week was a tough one and it left me quite dazed and exhausted by the weekend; a weekend which co-incided with the visit of herself's crumblies to our bijoux, minmalist pad. I also spent the weekend pickled in claret and chianti which left me disinclined to blog. There has also been the somewhat ironic problem of constant broadband internet access through work, college and my domestic connection and as there is a neverending supply of lovely text to devour online, I seem never to be away from the computer, which is not good. The veins and nerves in my right eye have begun to flutter and pulse lately from what I suspect is overexposure to computer screens and a failure to get a reasonable level of kip. But last night I fell asleep amid the cushions and goose down pillows of our low-backed japanese chaise at about 11.30 p.m. and, having been relocated by my kindly girlfriend, gave myself unto the arms of Morpheus until 11 a.m. this morning. Consequently, the Midnight Court is rearing to go.

It is time to get down to serious law blogging and as such Midnight Courtiers can expect forthcoming posts on Mooting (the moot court is a mock appeal which pits student counsel representing appellant and respondent clients against each other on a point or two of law), litigation on virtual property held in online fantasy (RPG) worlds, barriers to entry to practice at the Irish Bar and, if we are feeling especially ambitious, the need for a Second Republic, French style. Today, I'll be pointing courtiers in the dirction of the American "blawg" May it Please the Court on which are posed occasional legal teasers based in real life US jurisprudence. Today's poser is quite a toughie but will be of compelling interest to anyone who's concerned with balancing the rights of victims and those accused of crimes. Let us not forget that the criminal law is not simply a matter for discussion by law students, academics and practitioners but every member of society. In fact, Eamon Leahy SC implies the emphasis is quite the other way around in his article Crime and Punishment; Rehabilitation or Retribution:

Donning the gown of advocacy does not remove the responsibility of citizenship. Lawyers, no less than any other group in society, have a duty to constantly question the criminal law. We have a duty to question its substance, its intentions, its operation and its consequences.

What's interesting about May it Please the Court is that the problems posed there are ones it is likely the Irish law may soon have to face itself. Not only do we share a common law legal system with the US but, not least on foot of our shared language, our society is as heavily influenced by it as by Britain's. On 26 November last, MIPTC posed the question of whether or not a stabbing incident should be re-enacted in court, which raises all sorts of questions about prejudice, the prosecution's approach to and understanding of its job and the influence of sensationalist journalism on the legal process. Again, qua Leahy:

The criminal law reflects a facet of civil morality. To have any rational justification it must remain contemporaneous.

It's worth noting at this point that a number of unrepealed post-Norman statutes remain on the books in Ireland and Midnight Courtiers might find it amusing to read through this list of them and supply the comments and opinions about these laws which are encouraged by the Office of the Attorney General here. As the Irish Examiner puts it in its recent article on the review and repeal of antediluvian statutes:

THE way to prosecute a thief? Tie the suspect to a millstone, deep him or her in water, and if they sink, they’re guilty. And no, this is not Taliban-style justice, but Irish law.

One might be forgiven for thinking that Road Traffic enforcement which appears to concentrate on motorways rather than on the more dangerous secondary routes is based on the statute from the year 1342; (16 Edw. 3) c. 3 Officers Ride in Force, with a View to Fees. Sadly, however, the fate of William Nugent in 1449 who on foot of (27 Hen. 6) c. 17 was fined 20 marks for failing to build a castle at Dardistown in Meath, and had his letters patents (i.e. planning permission) annulled has not been met among those contemporary developers who have been facilitated to hold banks of land with putative PP in spite of the provisions of the Planning and Development Acts.

On the other hand, I think it is possible to be too contemporary, especially where the result would be to reflect the populist mores which seem sadly to be in the ascendent of late. What is of concern however is a point echoed by Mr. Leahy who says:

Few in society could give a comprehensive list of the activities proscribed by the criminal law. Fewer still could state the potential sanctions adhering to those proscribed activities.

But which was earlier stated eloquently by the then DPP, Eamonn Barnes, at a meeting of the Incorporated Law Society in Killarney in 1989. Mr. Barnes addressed himself not least to the regrettable, continued influence on the Statute Book of Victorian draftsmen and said:

[W]hile with experience a criminal lawyer can find his way with resasonable confidence through the jungle, the criminal law remains an impenetrable mystery to the avearge citizen. And this should not be so, particularly when one of the fundamental propositions on which we operate is that ignorantia juris neminem excusat (ignorance of the law is not a defence).
The law, especially the criminal law, should be clear and accessible to all if all are liable for breaches of it. The scourge of legislative amendments, of amendments of amendments, or substitutions, insertions and deletions and of cross-referenced definitions has made the task of ascertaining the current status of some offence and penalty sections a nightmare.

The Midnight Court is inclined to agree and, furthermore, to identify the problem across the Statute Book and in every area of the law. There has been little momentum for change in the 16 years since Mr. Barnes made his statement and the legislative process remains unsatisfactory and the law inefficient. As such, the Midnight Court will aspire to be informed by the sentiments he expressed. As society and the economy become increasingly complex, diverse and exponentially larger than they have been previously, the legal and legislative communities will be forced to respond and address matters with which they have thus far appeared reluctant to engage.

It is difficult to see, for example, an expanded corporate and business sector continuing to put up with a courts system so inefficient that it permits the briefing of so few barristers. Of which more anon. Suffice it to say, the number of practitioners in the Law Library has only recently exceeded the number who had a living from it prior to the famine and in the time of well-got advocates like Daniel O'Connell, which tells you as much as you need to know about the state of the economy over the last 150 years.

Barely a wet month in the game, I responded to MIPTC on 26th November (the court having allowed the stabbing reenactment the question was whether "the facts [number of wounds inflicted] have that kind of an influence on the ruling):

It seems there are plenty of facts on which the prosecution can happily rely to convince a jury without the need to resort to penny-dreadful theatrics. This kind of prosecution could become a real problem in the States and elsewhere - populism has spread like wildfire in the west - if the Peterson trial as captured by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade in The Staircase is any indication. While Peterson looked pretty guilty, I think a lot of lawyers would agree he should not have been convicted on relevant facts, evidence and points of law.
The methods of the prosecution suggested a regard for personal vanity rather than for the law. Surely, it is better to protect the procedures of trials in due course of law - and by extension any innocent person who may undergo them - than to secure a conviction at any cost. Furthermore, allowing into procedings evidence like Peterson's gay liaisons and a death from the past, especially one which had not resulted in indictment, and the Wright courtroom re-enactment suggests a prejudgement of guilt. The courtroom demonstration has only been allowed to go ahead due to the extreme and horrible circumstances of Mr. Wright's death. That suggests the facts have already been decided, which cannot but influence the jury who are, of course, there to decide those facts. A court-permitted play of Mrs Wright killing her husband will doubtless suggest to the jury that the fact of murder is not really at issue.
It seems the prosecution are playing to populist sentiment and outrage at a woman's killing of her husband. I don't see a place for moralising in their job myself. Judges aren't immune to popular sentiment either - we are definitely in a period in which politicians seem to do well with ideas which suggests that criminal justice procedures protect evildoers when they are actually strict because the sanctions imposed on conviction are so awesome. Of course, people nowadays don't seem to think that terms of imprisonment constitute an especially awful punishment.
When the rules are bent or changed for what one might consider a justifiable end, it is only a matter of time before an unscrupulous or corrupt person in a position to do so uses the new dispensation for personal gain and wilful abuse. Then innocent people get screwed.

On a first-aid course I attended recently, the instructor explained that multiple stab wounds suggestive of a crazed frenzy on the part of the attacker are actually the result of the panic induced when the victim fails to go down on the first blow. You can fight on having been stabbed quite a few times, which is obviously not as good an idea as playing dead, as in "ugh, knife-wielding attacker, you got me, your work here is done...I fall, unthreateningly, to the ground". I think that's relevant to the Wright facts.

Today, MIPTC has a tougher problem but I encourage Midnight Courtiers to tackle it here. As we saw recently in the Wayne Donoghue trial, the place of the victim in the criminal process is extremely pertinent in Ireland at the moment. There is also the issue of the treatment of women as both victims and witnesses in cases of rape and sexual assault, the pendulum on which seems to swing backwards and forwards all the time. In brief, the facts are as follows:

A sixteen-year old, now 20, was [allegedly] gang-raped at a drunken party in Chicago in 2002. She was drunk, too, and apparently unaware of the sexual activity. The gang rape was videotaped, and at the trial of the defendants the tape was entered into evidence this past week. Not surprisingly, the woman has not watched the tape, and she doesn't want to watch it.

The defence attorneys submitted that they wish to cross-examine her and that this would require the woman to first watch the video tape. They wanted the court to force her to do so. The law on this is unclear as the matter has never arisen before, but given the current state of a certain segment of male society, the frat mentality and the backlash against feminism it may well arise in future over and over again.

At first, the trial judge agreed with the defence and when the woman refused to comply with his order that she watch the tape, threatened to hold her in what we would call contempt in facie curiae and put her in jail. However, he has now changed his mind and so the question must stand to be considered again in the inevitable appeal if the defendants are convicted. Shamus Twomey (no doubt one of our own, Midnight Courtiers) quotes in an article for the Chicago Sun Times John Corkery (another Mick?) acting Dean of John Marshall Law School who says the question will be:

Were they significantly impaired in their ability to cross-examine and impeach the [woman] . . . or to bring out some fact that they couldn't otherwise get by the judge's ruling not to force the woman not to watch the tape?

The article is well worth looking at if you're interested in formulating a response. And don't forget Article 38.1 of the '37 Constitution which states:

No person shall be tried on any criminal charge save in due course of law.

A sentence which contains multitudes, as you can see from the instant case. The MIPTC poser:

You might be tempted to focus on the traumatic effect of watching the tape instead and to the exclusion of the Constitutional rights to confront and cross-examine your accuser, but don't be tempted, and don't react with a purely one-sided viewpoint. You're in the position of an appellate judge, and you have to balance these two issues. Which one do you give more weight? Who wins? Can you fashion a remedy where there are no losers?

The Midnight Court is puzzling over its answer. What say you?