Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

"Lota folks hurtin' back home right now"

In the middle of a three-hour, barnstorming concert last night in Munich's Olympiastadion, the inimitable Bruce Springsteen switched from cheerful to solemn and said "Lota folks hurtin' back home right now" as he introduced The River, which contains the sobering lyrics, "I got a job working construction for the Johnstown Company / But lately there ain't been much work on account of the economy." No doubt, the Boss had been told before going on stage that the 21st-century US economy had shed a shocking 467,000 jobs in June.

This was the ideal opportunity for a courageous Rainy Day to have shouted out, "Where is the stimulus, Bruce? You campaigned for Hope and Change, remember!" But fearing what thousands of manic, Germanic Obama cultists might do to such a heretic, we let it go. Still, someone is going to start asking questions soon. As Camille Paglia pointed out in Salon last month: "Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo. All the backtracking and spin doctoring in the world will not erase that major blunder, which made the new president seem reckless, naive and out of control of his own party, which was in effect dictating to him from Capitol Hill."

So, the next time Bruce Springsteen comes to town, he'd better not try the "Lota folks hurtin' back home right now" line or he'll be gettin' a helluva hecklin' here. Guess that's me committed to buying another ticket, then. Talking of hard times, the highlight of last night's concert for us was the heartbreaking This Hard Land. Dylan would be proud of him here.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 3 July 2009 at 1:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Getting to know bing

If bing displays more frogs, Rainy Day might be moved to bing more often. In the greater scheme of things, this won't matter very much to the competing engines, but headlines such as "Microsoft's Bing Search Wins Share From Google" suggest that the tectonic plates of search may be shifting, even if ever so faintly. Still, bing has an awful lot to do to catch Google.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 2 July 2009 at 7:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hot at Wimbledon

Phew! What a scorcher! But despite the record temperatures, Andy Murray made it to the semi-final of the All England tournament. Murray, by the way, is not English — he calls himself "Scottish, but also British". Three years ago, he was quoted as saying he would "support anyone but England" at the 2006 World Cup and got tons of hate mail as a result. It was all a tabloid fabrication, said Murray, who points out that he is quarter English with some of his family coming from Newcastle and that his girlfriend, Kim Sears, is English. Covering his options, he supports Hibs and Wolves. Cool!

Andy keeps cool with the help of four friends

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 1 July 2009 at 7:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Balkan eyewitness

First, two episodes from recent European history as documented by Human Rights Watch:

9 September 1998: The bodies of thirty-four people, including both ethnic Serbs and Albanians, were found in an artificial lake near the village of Glodjane.

26 September 1999: Serbian special police forces massacred twenty-one members of the Delijaj family, including women and children, one as young as eighteen-months-old, in Gornje Obrinje.

So much for fact, now let's turn to fiction. Outside Priština, old men and women, young children, too, 26 in all, are herded into a truck, the doors are sealed and the vehicle is driven into a lake. But there is a witness, a young girl, and Jack Solomon, a former London policeman now working in Sarajevo for an NGO identifying the dead of the Balkan Wars, is determined to track her down. That's the core of The Eyewitness by Stephen Leather.

What starts as a search for answers, soon turns into a dangerous obsession that takes Solomon into the dark heart of the Kosovo economy. It turns out that the place is the European centre of the sex slavery trade. Groups of young women are sold at public auctions to pimps, who then traffic them to Rome, Berlin and London and keep them enslaved indefinitely as they generate huge amounts of money for their "owners". And everyone, from the local police to the employees of the international aid agencies, is in on the act as Solomon discovers.

Stephen Leather has created an original and highly-readable novel with The Eyewitness. The Balkans, with all their brutality, are authentic and his take on the NGO industry, with its idealists and its cynics, is convincing. Best of all though, is the realism of his characters. When Jack offers a young prostitute in London a chance to escape from the trade, their conversation goes like this:

"Jack, it's all right. I choose this life, I wasn't forced into it."
"That's not true," said Solomon. "If you had money, you wouldn't have to do what you do."
"And if you were rich, would you do your job? Would you spend your time telling people that their loved ones are dead?"
"It's not the same," said Solomon.
"To me it is," said Inga. "We do what we must to survive. Neither of us takes pleasure in what we do, but we do it, and we make the best of it."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on at 6:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

John le Carré: The thrill is gone

We are inclined to think that the end of the Cold War was a time of beginnings. Certainly, it was the beginning of liberty for the millions freed from communist oppression; it was also, famously, the beginning of the end of history. Or so some thought, anyway. But the collapse of the Berlin Wall also ushered in a lot of finales. For gangster states like East Germany, tyrants such as Nicolae Ceausescu and for the functionaries of Radio Free Europe, then housed luxuriously in Munich's Englischer Garten, the party was over once the Iron Curtain came down on the whole sordid show.

Ditto, John le Carré. Since socialism fell apart, the master of Cold War fiction has been looking for a hook upon which to hang his world view, but whether it be Kenya, Pakistan, Panama or Turkey, nothing and nowhere is as fertile as the grim East-West battleground of ideas once was. In A Most Wanted Man, his latest novel, he has reached the end of a road that began for him in 1989. The book totters through its first forty pages in an attempt to create an interesting character, and then topples over when it fails to make itself credible. The central figure of Issa is laughable. And just as ludicrous are le Carré's efforts to turn Hamburg into some kind of crossroads of international terrorism and its opposing agencies. Hamburg is an important port city, but it is not the axis of anti-evil.

Le Carré should have written this novel in 2002. The deeds of Mohamed Atta were fresh in everyone's mind then and somewhere between the ruins of the World Trade Center, the incompetence of Germany's "intelligence" services and Hamburg's accommodation of anti-American fanatics were the components of a novel that needed to be written.

Instead, we get a farrago of half-baked beliefs about Islamism and the West that belong more in the Guardian than in a thriller. A Most Wanted Man is an unworthy end to John le Carré's writing career.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 30 June 2009 at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Honeymoon by James Patterson

Been reading a bit of fiction of late. It's the perfect antidote to the summer rain and cloud. For the first time, the list included a novel by James Patterson. In case you haven't heard, Patterson's books have sold an estimated 150 million copies worldwide and he holds the New York Times bestsellers list record with 45 Number Ones overall. According to Forbes magazine, Patterson earned $50 million from his writing between June 2007 and June 2008 alone. The back cover of Honeymoon includes this blurb: "Just imagine James Paterson's trademark suspenseful writing style — taken up a notch." Girlposse.com

I suppose it helps to bear in mind that Honeymoon appeared in 2004, when the money fever was raging. This may account for the conspicuous consumption of high-end goods on almost every page by the protagonist. The other noticeable thing is the very simple sentence structure.

Chapter 5: "That evening Nora cooked a penne with a vodka sauce she made from scratch. A tossed salad and a bottle of Brunello from Jeffrey's private celler. Dinner was served. Everything just so. The way he liked it."
Chapter 32: "The next morning, a Friday, Nora walked out of the house in Westchester and popped open the trunk of the Benz convertible parked in front."

Chapter 57: "The next day Nora drove back to Manhattan and directly to the Bliss spa in her SoHo neighbourhood. She had a carrot-and-sesame body buff as well as a hot oil massage. This was followed by a manicure and a pedicure."

And so on, and on, and on. The secret of Patterson's success is that he sells envy, not fiction.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 29 June 2009 at 7:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Running dog

"It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears' house. It's eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when think they are chasing a cat in a dream." From The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 28 June 2009 at 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Three children and hundreds of millions of fans

"Jackson leaves behind three children and hundreds of millions of fans." An epigraphic summary there of the artist's life and legacy by Ben Greenman in the New Yorker. And he adds this telling point: "There will be an outpouring of sorrow, of course, but the sorrow has been pouring out for years, ever since Jackson went from being America's (and then the world's) favorite nonthreatening pop icon to a troubled man with legal, financial, and medical troubles to, finally, a troubling man."

Well, the people's King of Pop is neither troubled nor troubling anymore, but we do hope that this short excerpt from the Missa pro defunctis by Orlande de Lassus (1532—1594), and sung by The Hilliard Ensemble, will help soothe the pain felt by all of those who shared his joys, sorrows, troubles and genius.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 27 June 2009 at 8:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

STUFF WE READ

"Lota folks hurtin' back home right now"

Getting to know bing

Hot at Wimbledon

The Balkan eyewitness

John le Carré: The thrill is gone

Honeymoon by James Patterson

Running dog

Three children and hundreds of millions of fans

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