A Room of One's Own

After much foot-dragging, I have finally established a permanent-ish online home. This website will host selections of my work, written and otherwise, and will be added to and expanded over time.

Bonne lecture, as the French say.

Image: Cais das colunas, Lisbon © Oliver Farry 2013

oliverfarry.com

Happy Birthday to Underachievement

Those people that regularly check out this blog will know that over the past month or so the frequency of the posts has dipped a little; working a lot more is one of the reasons for this but it has also been my intention to cut down on the blogging in favour of other writing. Posting here less often is a healthy sign in my opinion.

So my slimmed-down devotion resulted in me missing my own birthday yesterday, or the Underachievement birthday rather. Started two days after France's World Cup final defeat to Italy in order to fill a hole and, most importantly, to give me something to write at a time when the well was particularly dry, the blog has been a diversion from day one. At times it has threatened to become a distraction, especially when I started poring over blog tracker statistics, as most other bloggers will testify to. I don't plan to shut it down any time soon, though the posts are likely to remain as sporadic as they have been recently. If I do something silly like buy an iPhone, the increased mobility might result in a rise in posts but that would be a very sad life I'd be writing about.,

Black Book Back

Like most people that scribble things down, my notebook is one of the few things that I cannot stand losing, yet it happens to me far too often. Yet I usually get it back when it does. My current Moleskine has led as charmed an existence as the hero of a Jerry Bruckheimer production, having been lost three times in the past three months, and each time finding its way back to me, twice courtesy of strangers who work in cinemas and once courtesy of my sister, who found it on the floor of the Bernard Shaw on Dublin's South Richmond Street after a night's drinking just before Christmas. The latest person to return it to me was somebody who found it in the Gaumont Opéra cinema a few weeks back, lost after a screening of Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (ironic, given that the black book of the film's title looks very like a Moleskine). French people are particularly good for returning items of little monetary value but of real personal worth such as notebooks - much more so, I regret to say, than Irish people, who are, in my experience, more likely to toss it into the bin on finding it. I owe the person who returned it to me today a wee present by way of appreciation and I should also be a bit more careful when leaving the cinema in future.

A Wordie In Your Ear

Seanachie, in a particularly slothful mood, will catch a ride on the back of Eamonn Fitzgerald's always-entertaining, if politically-outré Rainy Day blog for his next post, which concerns a wonderful invention that is but two weeks old, namely Wordie, a web resource conceived and launched over Thanksgiving weekend. The concept is for users to post their favourite words, 'like flickr but without photos' and there are links to other lexicons on the web, including a wonderful visual thesaurus. This is great fun and is yet another of those brilliant web inventions to which one can lose half one's life. The hell with it, sometimes the www is more fun than real life. Limerick neocon Eamonn has an interview with Wordie creator John McGrath on his blog. Meanwhile among Seanachie's postings so far are 'afflatus', 'phalanx', 'comestible', 'gobshite', 'muppet', 'overhead' and Geoffrey Chaucer's beloved obscenity, 'cunt'. If you are offended, you should be.

Nothing About Nothing

In the search for extra modes of income, I came across ads on writing websites looking for people to write copy for commercial websites. The pay is pretty awful ($7 per 400-word article, and some others pay as little as $2 for the same) but there is a large workload per week so I decided if I could master the format I could start knocking them out in less than half an hour, and make decent supplementary cash. Perhaps it would be good writing practice, writing huge amount of copy to set criteria; I even had some conception of myself becoming a macho Stakhanovite hack, unflappable in the face of fearsome labour, like Gary Cooper's architect working in a quarry in the film version of The Fountainhead.

When I attempted the first of the trial assignments that were sent me though, I soon wilted. I was asked to write 400 words on www.elitebodykits.com, mentioning key words five times throughout the passage. There were various other strictures, all of which are designed to provide a final text that is bland and barely informative in a sale-pitch way. A big disadvantage for me was the fact that I know nothing about 'body kits' and even if I decided to ad-lib the copy would be shot down for inaccuracy. After brooding over 80 words, completely lost, for over an hour, I gave up. Writing something about nothing has never held any fear for me; in fact, it's probably what I'm best at, that old school-detention assignment,"write ten pages on the inside of a golf ball" is grist to my mill. Writing nothing about nothing however is beyond me. I imagine there are people that do hundreds of these sorts of things, at an equally incredible rate, every week and earn a decent living off them. I dop my hat to them, in some way they are better men (and women) than me. I started the week envying (and admiring) the great Grigory Perelman, for his genius and his nonchalance in declining the Field's Medal (as featured in the film Good Will Hunting). I am now in awe of people much more ordinary than him.