FURTHER to the Waterstones/Channel 4 list of 100 Books of the Century, mentioned here last week, I was intrigued to read Germaine Greer's verdict on the results. Asked to comment (in Waterstones' in house magazine, no less), she felt that the list "seems to have been compiled in defiance of the intellectual establishment."
Is that good? Well, "as a fifty seven year old lifelong teacher of English, I might be expected to regard this particular list of books of the century with dismay. I do. Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1964 and encountered a tribe of full grown women wearing puffed sleeves, clutching teddies and babbling excitedly about the doings of hobbits, it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the 20th century. The bad dream has materialised.
"Apparently the late 20th century reader has a penchant for any kind of fantasy - infantile, macabre, sadistic pornographic, pseudo scientific, supernatural or tortuous." Somehow I don't think that's quite what Waterstones expected when they solicited her opinion.
ANYWAY, so much for the hundred best. What about the hundred worst - or at least those books that received just one solitary vote of approval from among the 25,000 people who took part in the Waterstones poll?
The Observer published the latter list last Sunday, and while it doesn't really mean anything, nonetheless it makes for mildly intriguing reading. Who, you may wonder, voted for Buzz Aldrin's Encounter at Tiber? And was it the same person who voted for Buzz Aldrin's Men From Earth? What nerd thought that The Internet Starter Kit for Mackintosh Users Manual was the finest book of the century? And in what time warp was the person who chose Good Housekeeping's Cookery Compendium for 1956?
Only one Irish book features on this latter list - Sean Hughes's The Grey Area, which, when published, wasn't even regarded as a book of the week by most people. It just goes to show, though quite what, I'm not so sure.
SEAMUS HEANEY may have won the Nobel prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year, but he hasn't yet received the ultimate 1990s accolade - a rock album devoted to him.
Such is the honour (or, if you like, indignity) that's about to be bestowed on W.B. Yeats this coming Monday when Grapevine Records release Now and in Time to Be, an album of rock songs derived from his poems.
Among the performers participating in this tribute are Van Morrison, The Waterboys, The Cranberries and Shane MacGowan (all the Olympians), and they'll be applying their musical talents to the words (lyrics, we call them in the business) of "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven", "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death", "Under Ben Bulben", and other knockout poems. There'll even be a track featuring the main man himself as he recites "The Lake Isle of Innisfree".
This is supposed to be further proof that, as some pundits keep telling us, poetry is the new rock `n' roll. They instance the popular demand for Auden after John Hannah recited one of his love poems in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and they instance the success (however that's gauged) of Poems on the Subway, Poems on the Metro, Poems on the Underground and Poems on the DART.
They also point to the fact that more poetry is being published than ever before. Indeed, Peter Forbes, editor of the British magazine, Poetry Review, earnestly asserts that "these days poetry can more than hold its own against popular song". Really? Not in terms of sales, it can't.
And one should bear in mind that such claims are being made in an age that doesn't choose even one book of poems for Waterstones' top hundred and that sees fit to describe Noel Gallagher and P.J. Harvey as poets.
A real poet, Michael Coady, will be giving a reading in Kilkenny's Butler House next Thursday at 8pm. If you don't know this Carrick on Suir man's work and if you live in the Kilkenny area, you'd be well advised to go along. If you do know it, you won't need such advice.
THERE are fine poems by David Wheatley, Nessa O'Mahony I and Damian Quinn in the latest edition of Asylum Arts Review, produced in Tralee and aided by Tralee VEC, FAS and the Arts Council. There's also some interesting prose and a striking Pauline Bewick cover.
And, if you've a mind to, you can peruse the magazine's most prominently displayed piece, a call by Margaretta D'Arcy for the impeachment of President Robinson. Yes, that's what I said: impeachment. Ms D'Arcy, who over the years has collaborated on various works with Marxist playwright husband John Arden, accuses the President of all sorts of betrayal of Irish women (abandoning them to "slavery, serfdom and destitution" - that kind of thing), and does so in a manner so stridently over the top it would be laughable if it wasn't so tiresome.
I don't know why the editor of Asylum decided to publish this daft tirade, though I do know Ms D'Arcy will deem my puzzlement the typical stance of a middle class male oppressor of free speech. Not free, actually: Asylum costs £4.