The First Day of Spring; chapter one.

Yesterday I finished my novel and pretty soon I'm going to read another; I jest, of course but I have finished the first draft. Now I'll give it a few days and start all over again.

At the moment I have written 73,116 words and I suppose when I do the next draft it will be more.

It's called The First Day of Spring; my last novel had three or four changes of title but I think I like The First Day of Spring already.

The story is about two Irish women - mother and daughter – and is set in Ireland. The daughter, Nuala, never knew her mother, Gertie, and knows very little about her and when her father, Eddie, dies she sets out to find out about her.

It's set in the 1940s and 1966; the year England won the world cup and there is not mention of it in the novel.

Anyway, here is the first chapter and I hope you like it.

On March 8th 1966 Nelson's Pillar, in O'Connell Street, Dublin was bombed. The statue, itself, came falling down together with Nelson's head which, for one hundred and forty eight years, had nestled on top of the pillar one hundred and thirty four feet from the ground.
The explosion, which was carried out by a rogue element of the Irish Republican Army, the IRA, led by Joe Christle, a qualified barrister and socialist revolutionary, didn't cause any damage to O'Connell Street and there was nobody injured but a taxi, parked nearby, was destroyed. Two days after the timed explosion the Irish Army Engineers blew up the plinth and broke many of the windows in O'Connell Street and the rubble from the monument, including the head of Horatio Nelson himself, was taken to a dump near the North Wall.
For a student prank, Frank Dolan and six other students stole the head and leased it to an antique dealer in London to grace his shop window; it was also used in a television commercial shot at Kilkenny Beach and made its stage début with the Irish traditional music band The Dubliners at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin.
The students eventually gave it to the Lady Nelson of the day and it is now in the Gilbert Library in Pearse Street Dublin.
Thirteen days after the explosion, on March 21st, the first day of spring, Eddie went for his annual visit to the pillar.
Eddie was the widower of Gertie and the father of the seventeen year old Nuala and he would visit the pillar every year to commemorate the day he first walked out with his late wife.
Nuala was born and lived in Ballybough Dublin in a little street called Poplar Row. Some people might say that poplar Row was actually in North Strand or even Fairview, but the people that lived there called it Ballybough. At one end of the street there was a block of flats called Ballybough House; now why would they call it Ballybough House if it was anywhere else apart from Ballybough?
Ballybough has a history of being a place where prostitutes hung out and had the nick name of Mud Island at one time; when Sean O'Casey's play 'The Plough and the Stars' was presented at the Abbey theatre the audience booed and rioted when he introduced an Irish Catholic prostitute to the proceedings; the audience, who said there was no such thing as a Roman Catholic prostitute, had obviously never been to Ballybough!
For most of her life Nuala lived with her granny and granda in a house in Poplar Row only visiting her father who lived in Ballybough House.
All of his working life Eddie had worked as a barman; once upon a time he had aspirations about owning his own bar but when Gertie died he just carried on working to put food on the table and pay the rent.
His work mates said the life went out of him as soon as he lost Gertie and he lived a solitary life in his flat just going through the motions of life.
He would sit in his chair and think of the days he had spent with his blue-eyed beauty walking through Fairview Park, going out to Dollymount or once in a while taking the bus to Portmarnock.
He worshipped Nuala but didn't like to have her near him as she reminded him so much of Gertie.
He was a good barman, having served his time, and he could mix any kind of drink from any part of the world you would wish to name.
If you want a Guinness in Dublin you ask for one and you will be given a pint; the barman will put about one third into a pint glass and let it 'settle' for a few minutes; for a good pint of Guinness needs to settle and Eddie could pour a really good pint; however, he hadn't taken an alcoholic drink of any kind since losing Gertie.
Dubliners have travelled to other countries and seen how they treat Guinness and sometimes have drunk something else rather than see their beloved black stuff being treated like any other beer.
An Irishman walked into a pub in Birmingham, England, and asked for a pint of Guinness, one day, only to see the excuse for a barman put a pint glass under the 'Guinness' tap and press a button; this opened the pipe and dropped a pint of Guinness into a glass; dropped being the operative word as this had as much to do with pouring and caring for a pint of Guinness as throwing a pint of paint at a canvas and calling it art; people have called this art, of course, just as the people from Birmingham used to call that drink a pint of Guinness; they were both wrong.
Of course if you only wanted a half of Guinness in a half pint glass you would ask for a glass but if tourists would ask for a half pint he would know what they meant and give them a glass with as much care as he would give to a full pint; a half in Dublin usually meant whiskey.
After Gertie died he changed jobs – or changed bars more like – and took a job in a bar closer to home where as well as going to work he could go to mass most days.
He was thirty seven years of age when he went on his annual pilgrimage to the pillar and on that day he died; people thought he was drunk but you will know from reading the above that he wasn't. He was standing near where Nelson's Pillar used to be and looking up to where he figured Nelson used to stand.
As he looked he thought he could figure out the exact spot where they stood on their first date and he was sure, as he looked, that he could see a bird hovering at the spot in the sky where he had stood with Gertie, and as he tried to follow the flight of what he thought was the bird he wandered out backwards still looking up and thinking of Gertie, as the bus travelling to the airport went over him on that first day of spring.

The World Cup.

Well there we are; England move slovenly into the last 16 of the World Cup (pun intended) and the USA streak to it and should be proud. I didn't watch the England match but watched USA v Algeria and it was very exciting; lots of goalmouth incidents all end to end stuff and after watching England's two boring games can you blame me?

The big problem with the football generally is the standard of play all around; where are players like Pele, Maradona even Nobby Styles you may ask – well they are all there. There are loads of players with the skills of the past greats – not Georgie Best, I'm afraid – but they have developed further skills; acting skills, diving skills, shirt pulling skills all the skills that the game of Association Football, soccer for short and known to the world as just plain football, just doesn't need.

It's almost impossible for a player to dribble the ball for any length of time without either getting tripped up or making a dive when a defender comes close; there they are rolling on the grass with agony and pain on their faces only to jump up two minutes later as soon as the free kick has been awarded or the defender has been given a yellow or even a red card.

And where do they get the referees from?

Every world cup as long as I can remember have used piss poor referees; we can see it as soon as the first game starts with bad off-side decisions, goals being disallowed, fouls being called that are not fouls and the general momentum and flow of the game being interrupted by referees and linesmen with no nous or experience.

The referees in the English football league are excellent with good reputations and in depth training. I know a lot of fans of the Premier League there might not agree with me but even they would have to agree that the difference between the refs in England and at the World Cup is vast.

I don't advocate bringing in replays on television cameras for disputed fouls and you can never reverse decisions after the game is over but something has to be done about it.

My opinion is not worth a plum nickel, I know, and most of the time I am like everybody else who has an opinion about football – I don't what I'm talking about. I accept this just as I accept that everybody from a child in the street to the drama critic of The Guardian is free to criticise me and my profession as an actor so let's have some free flowing football shall we.

Another thing I don't like about the TV coverage – and this seems to be general these days – is that I have a regular sized TV; I somehow don't want a wide screen TV dominating my life and I am satisfied with what I have so when it comes to watching football on TV I like to see close ups of the play. Not close ups of the players faces or even faces in the crowd, which they are also overdoing, but close ups of the players skills.

I know they have to take the wide shot so we can see the moves, and players running off the ball, but it seems they spend too much time on the wide shots so we can see the banner advertising surrounding the field of play. They are not seen at the ground, like they are seen on TV, as they are computer generated into different languages, but how can you see the intricate skills when the camera is so far away?

Have a look next time you watch a match and see the steadicam operators running up and down the touch lines – why doesn't the director use their shots more?

And who's going to win the World Cup? Who knows - and he's on first base!!

Happy Bloomsday

As I mentioned the other day here is the Bloomsday episode from my novel; the novel has a new title and cover as above; yes I am the model for the picture which is a self portrait.

Alfredo has been on a sun deck at night looking at the stars; as he is searching for inspiration he hears six gun shots in the distance and tells his friend when he arrives; they chat:

Excerpt from Alfredo Hunter; the Man with the Pen. By Chris Sullivan.

. . .. . . . . . . he said: “Bloomsday is next week. You got anything planned for next Friday?”
“No.”
“I want to go to an Irish theatre group at Fountain and Fairfax. They’re doing some of Ulysses. Do you want to come?”
“Yes” I said.
I knew that people walked around Dublin on each June sixteenth to celebrate Bloomsday and visit all the bars that were mentioned in Ulysses, which took part on that famous day but as with Saint Patrick, it didn’t seem important to me when I lived there but in Los Angeles it was different.
“There’ll be helicopters here soon” but he was wrong.

Chapter 5

Alfredo didn’t like the production at the Bloomsday celebration: I could see that. I liked it as they performed pieces of Ulysses that I knew: one was an excerpt from the Nighttown episode, which made me laugh. I looked towards Alfredo, as I laughed, and his face seemed to be in pain. When one of the girls was doing a monologue a newspaper critic shouted out:
“Speak up Gertie, I can’t hear you!”
I could tell he was a critic as he was sitting with a clipboard on his lap and when he spoke Alfredo gave me strange look. He thought it interesting that we could see up the girl’s frock as she sat doing her monologue and he whispered to me:
“Are we supposed to be seeing next week’s laundry?”
I laughed!
The street lights were out when we left the theatre. Some kind of major electrical outage as it also affected the traffic lights at the junction of Fairfax and Fountain Avenues so we couldn’t even see the hands in front of our faces. Not that we had our hands in front of our faces but if we did we wouldn’t be able to see them. We had to risk life and limb to cross the street.
Alfredo took it as a kind of omen.
“What do you see?”
“What?” I replied.
“The stars! Look up.”
We both looked up and it was a clear night. There were a few cars around and they were too busy trying to cross the Fairfax-Fountain junction to worry about two pedestrians, but Alfredo didn’t take his eyes away from the stars as he crossed Fountain to the north side.
“Look, at that” he said, and he stopped walking. He had spotted something in the sky. Something that affected him emotionally which was in his voice as he almost recited:
“The lights in Los Angeles went out on Bloomsday!”
We looked up the hill towards Sunset and everything was black. Usually, when traffic lights fail in Los Angeles, the red light flashes and the rules of the road change to that of a four-way-stop. I mentioned this to Alfredo:
“That is one of the most telling things about the Americans” he said “or maybe just the Angelinos. In an emergency they click into ‘emergency mode’ – plan ‘B’ - but then, on the other hand, it shows me that they are fucking brainwashed.”
They didn’t do that this night though. Everything was in darkness. I couldn’t really see him, as we walked, so his deep Dublin accented voice seemed to come to me through the darkness.
I had only been in Los Angeles, indeed America, for six months so everything was still new to me but with the eyes of a novice I could see things that the natives probably didn’t see and which I would cease to notice eventually.
“They only use one word for everything “he said. “Did you not notice that gobshite on the door at the theatre?”
I had asked the fella on the door, at the theatre, if there was an interval and the fella didn’t understand me. He was supposed to be an Irish-American but was probably standing as close to Ireland as he had ever been so his word for interval was intermission.
“Oh! Do you mean intermission?” he had said.
This would happen on many occasions as I got to know the language of America realising, eventually, that it was a language made up of words and phrases from the rest of the world and the American Indian languages. Because the majority of the people who used English were American their use of it would influence the rest of the English speaking world and in time would wipe out many languages leaving just one. The one left will be the American English Language with its one word for everything lowest common denominator limited vocabulary language. These thoughts went through my head more often than I wanted them to after Alfredo had pointed them out to me but not on this night; the night of the Bloomsday blackout. My vocabulary was limited enough without having it limited even more.
Alfredo mentioned the Indians as we traced our way along Fountain Avenue in search for his old car.
“This is what it was like for the Indians,” he said “This is how dark it was for them. You never see an Indian here and this is their country. The white man came along and fucked them off to oblivion but you know” and he stopped walking again, “can you blame them for not wanting to fight at night? The poor bastards! The poor fuckers kicked out of their land to make way for the settlers. You should read about the trail of tears or, to translate it from the Cherokee, ‘the trail where they cried.”
“Do you speak Cherokee?”
“Don’t be a gobshite.”
“I’ll try and read something about it” I said.
He laughed at this: “You’ll need to read a lot of books by the time I’m finished with you.”
There seemed to be a complete lack of traffic along Fountain Avenue, so our way wasn’t even lit by the headlights of cars. The neighbourhood was not the safest of places to be at that time of night and the thought of being stuck up by somebody with a gun crossed my mind a few times. The lack of cars also made it very quiet, which wasn’t natural for that part of town.
Alfredo’s car seemed to be parked further away than I had imagined and I didn’t know where we were.
“Do you know where we are?” I asked “Do you know where we’re going?”
“Follow me” he said striding forward like the wagon train scout he thought he was.
As he walked ahead we could see in the near distance the glow of a cigarette butt. He started to walk real fast when he saw it, leaving me behind, and when he got closer we could see it was a girl. He slowed down and waited for me and she said “Good night for a party, boys?”
Alfredo gave her a strange look then turned to me and said “Nighttown!”
He giggled as we walked on and said “Did you see the instinct of the survivor? I put space between us. I surrounded the enemy.”
Him and his imagination!
I couldn’t understand why there was so little traffic and when we turned into Ogden Avenue it got even creepier; all the houses with their lights out and a few people standing in the front gardens. There were more trees in Ogden, which made it a lot darker, and some of the people were leaning on the trees or sitting on the tree stumps. They were mumbling to each other, which was strange: normally when Angelinos want to talk they talk out loud and don’t care what time of day or night it is. They laugh out loud, shout and scream, if they feel like it, no matter who is trying to sleep or get some peace. This time it was weird. It was as if some bomb had exploded and we were walking through the aftermath of a holocaust. We walked passed people smoking dope, we could smell it, looking at us as if they were in a dream and we were reality stopping by. But we didn’t stop by we looked and made our way to the car which Alfredo seemed to know the whereabouts of all the time. When we had almost reached Sunset Boulevard we got to the car; clipped to the screen was a parking ticket.
“Fucking place,” Alfredo said as he ripped it from under the wiper, “getting a parking ticket at ten-o-clock at night!”
I looked around at the darkened street “Look over there” he said.
“What?”
“Over there – look at that tree.”
There was a very strange shaped tree on the other side of the street.
“I think it’s a jacaranda tree” he said “but look at the shape. It’s two jays; James Joyce!”
I thought it looked like two esses but he saw two jays.
Three people from the street were standing around it. They had put a couple of candles on the horizontal bits which they frequently used to light whatever it was they were smoking. It seemed to light the tree up.
“If that’s not an omen I don’t know what is. We are in a street named after a poet . . ”
“Who?” I said.
“Ogden Nash.”
“How do you know this wasn’t here before Ogden Nash?” I said.
“I don’t!” he said “but what you don’t know doesn’t mean shite. We are in a street named after a poet, on the night of the Bloomsday blackout and the tree we are looking at is shaped like James Joyce’s initials.”
“Or Sarah Siddons” I said.
“Who?”
“Sarah Siddons: the English actress.”
“What a load of shite – I’m inspired and you talk of an English actress.”
He didn’t say anything he just looked at the tree as if it was the second coming; the people around it looked over at us. One was a woman of around fifty five who was sitting on the kerb; she had black heavily made up eyes, with the mascara running down her face and long black hair and when Alfredo opened his window she looked over at him and said “Farinelli!” When she said this she clenched her open fist as if she was castrating Alfredo.
He laughed as he started the motor.
“What was that about?”
“There’s a movie playing in West LA called Farinelli about a castrato.”
“The trail of tears?”
“Yes” he laughed “it would certainly make your eyes water.”
He got the parking ticket and kissed it then he flung it into the back of the car.
“But I’m inspired” he said “I’m inspired.”
“How come you know so much about Indians?” I asked.
‘You should know. The Indians are like the Irish. Like the Irish before Christianity hit Ireland; in any case I’m a John Ford fan.”

James Joyce, Bloomsday and Shakespeare.

It's going to be Bloomsday this week – June 16th – and on Bloomsday I think I'll put up here on the blog the 'Bloomsday' episode from my novel Alfredo Hunter; the Man With the Pen.

Of course I have changed the title of my novel from The Storyteller and on Amazon.com you can see excerpts from it under the former title. In fact on Google they have the whole novel somewhere in their library of all books ever written – or whatever it's called.

Bloomsday is taken from the novel Ulysses which takes part in the day of June 16th 1904 and the leading character therein Leopold Bloom – not Leo Bloom from The Producers by the way.

James Joyce set Ulysses on June 16th 1904 because that was the day he met the love of his life Nora Barnacle; well he did not actually meet her on that day but it was the day they first walked out; it was the day she did a small sexual favour for him which might have affected his mind; he thought if she can do that for me on the first day she would do it for anybody. It wasn't necessarily true, of course – what do I know? - but it led to bouts of jealousy and anxiety from the genius Jim which would upset Nora.

They left Dublin soon after and never returned to live there again – everything he wrote about Ireland he wrote from abroad. At one time they lived in London where they married – some time during the 1930s.

There is a lot of James Joyce in my novel; number one the leading character writes a play about him, there are various references to Ulysses and the prologue is actually a pastiche of his first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. That novel starts off with 'Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocaw coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy called baby tuckoo . . .' and my novel starts off with 'Once upon a time and a long time ago it was in the city of Dublin in the land of Ireland there was a man with a pen' – and then there are other phrases I use in the prologue; Joyce talks of the world being 'a great ball surrounded by clouds' and I use that phrase adding 'as the great man once said' and he also uses the phrase a 'greasy leather ball' which I also use to denote, as he did in the novel, the way some boys from the past were forced at school into sport and I remember at school trying to head that greasy leather ball they call a football.

But even though James Joyce is a subject of my novel I don't think I am influenced by him at all. I know every writer, especially the Irish ones, feels James Joyce looking over their shoulder as they write but I am more influenced by Charles Dickens, if anybody, or even William Shakespeare. Now that might sound as if I am comparing myself to Shakespeare and Dickens but nothing could be further from the truth.

I can't remember ever learning anything at school; I never did any work at school I didn't have to and the only subjects I liked had to have a story to it – like stories from the bible; the English Literature was non existent unless you want to count Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) being passed from pupil to pupil to read out loud in schoolboy monotones and turning into Seven Pillows of Sleep for me!

So I didn't do English Literature till years later after I'd read lots of books and even been to drama school – I was a mature student studying D.H. Lawrence (surprising what one letter makes), William Golding and First World War Poetry by a teacher who loved the subject.

At drama school I was reading and trying to perform Shakespeare when I hardly knew English!! Of course I was in a lot of trouble as I hadn't heard of any of the plays or even the characters and the only way I could even understand it was by sorting out his use of parenthesis and semi colons; without sorting those out I would have been up the creak without a paddle.

I eventually did Shakespeare professionally although not as much as I would have liked to; I earned a lot of money once doing a Shakespeare play for the BBC, even though it was a small part, and when I first came over here I 'workshopped' Richard III playing Richard which went very well – I guess some of the training must have gone in.

When I write I bear in mind Shakespeare's use of the English language – again I am not comparing myself to the greatest genius that has ever lived or the two greatest novelists in the English language but I would recommend anybody who wants to write to follow them as opposed to Dan Brown.

So remember on Wednesday that it is Bloomsday; there will, more than likely, be something on near you, if you look for it, and if you are in Dublin go on the walking tour if you can; go to Mulligan's Pub in Poolbeg Street and drink a pint of the best Guinness in the world and then come back and read my blog about my two leading characters celebrating Bloomsday in Los Angeles which was based on a true incident in 1995.

you say tomato and I'll say . . .

This is for all the people in the USA and the UK who have never been to the 'other' place – you know if you've never crossed the Atlantic.

I wrote the other day about working in 'rep' in the theatre and somebody pointed out to me something that was pointed out to me years ago. In the UK when you do one play after another in the theatre it is called in repertory. If you do one play a week, a fortnight or a month it's still the same in repertory.

If you do – shall we say – three plays in the one week every week those are said to be in repertoire; just like a musician or a singer has so many songs or pieces of music in repertoire.

In the USA that is not so; they call doing plays consecutively, one after the other, in repertoire and the three plays that gets done each week all the way through the season in repertory. Now I don't argue with the other things they say and their phrases but this time they have got it wrong.

There are lots of other things you will notice – well you might not – and the first thing I noticed was the traffic lights; they're great. When you come to the traffic lights and the lights are on red and there's no other traffic there you are allowed to nip around the corner; you can't go straight ahead or turn across the road but you can nip around the corner. Now don't you think that is absolutely fantastic? You have to stop first or you'll get a ticket but it's saves fuel and time.

I find it amazing that nobody has been over here from Europe and taken that idea back as it seems the most sensible of things.

The other thing that has always fascinated me is why things here are opposite from the things over there.

I have always known, from the movies, that when the Americans put the light on they click the switch up; in Britain to turn on the light you click the switch down. It doesn't matter does it really so why do they do it? Or we do it? Why do the two things have to be opposite?

You will know about the driving on a different side of the road and the driving position in the car being opposite but did you know that in America the back brake on a bicycle is on the right handlebar. That's something I didn't know till relatively recently.

I did worry that the controls inside a car might have been the other way around but I needn't have worried – they're the same although most of the cars are automatic.

When I first came here fifteen years ago they didn't use or even know what the word queue meant; they would use line. Not may people knew or even know now what a fortnight is.

My pal bet me that nobody in a crowded bar would even know what a spanner is – I took the bet and went around the bar asking – and lost.

So maybe George Bernard Shaw was right when he said Britain and America were two countries separated by a common language.

my blog and the theatre.

I looked back at how many words I had written for my novel last week and came to about 5,200; so that, to me, is great; I put the increase of output down to this blog.

When you do things on a regular basis you get better at it; even though I might be writing a load of shit in both places – the blog and the novel – I am getting better at it.

It was the same starting a season in the theatre; the more you worked the easier it became to learn the lines.

As you will probably know when working in the repertory system in the UK you do a new play every two weeks, or every three weeks or however amount of weeks the particular theatre advocates.

One of the theatres I worked at, in rep, was the Royal Theatre in Northampton and that theatre would put a new play on every two weeks.

What would happen is you would start the job on Monday morning and rehearse for the two weeks before putting the first play on; in the evenings we learned our lines and by the end of the second week of rehearsals we would, more or less, know the them and then after a technical rehearsal and a dress rehearsal we would perform the play to the press and public on the Tuesday evening.

Then the next morning we would start the next play.

We would rehearse during the day and do the other play at night; so when did we learn our lines?

The rehearsal day would start at around 10.00 am or at least 12 hours after the previous night's performance closed; so if the play came down at 10:30 the night before we were not allowed to start the following day till 10:30 am.

We would break for lunch at around 1:00, finish rehearsals at around 4:30 – 5:00 then have to be back at the theatre at 6:55 for the 7:30 show – we learned our lines during the tea breaks, lunch time, the time between the end of rehearsals and the evening show and maybe after the evening show and my point is he more we had to learn the easier it became. That job lasted for eleven months – I had a month off to do 5 episodes of the British TV soap 'General Hospital' – and by the end of it you felt you'd been through something.

I did that to a lesser extent at other theatres and, even though we were adequately paid, it was good training; and it's the same with writing: the more you do it the better you become.

With regards to the blog people read it all over the world and I get the benefit and the pleasure of writing it; I don't have many followers and only a few comments but I can see by the stat counter where the readers live. Some of the hits come from posts I have written months ago and many hundreds of people have read the post about Bill Sparkman who killed himself some time ago in Kentucky and a few weeks ago I had many many hits when I wrote about proportional representation and the British General Election.

Someone asked me if I know what I'm going to write about beforehand and the answer is no; I sit down to write and it kind of comes to me once I start.

So thank you everybody out there in the world – people are reading from Russia to the USA – I tried to copy the map of visitors but it won't copy properly so I leave you with a picture up there of John Wooden who was a very famous basketball coach who died over the weekend aged 99; he had a great saying 'if you fail to prepare you are preparing to fail' - or words to that effect.