Calvin and Hobbes, Ten Years On

It's been ten years since Bill Watterson drew his last Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip. There's a lovely tribute to the cartoons in this morning's Washington Post, to celebrate the release of a deluxe Complete Calvin and Hobbes, available in all good bookstores. Bill Watterson would have made a mint if he'd ever permitted merchandising, and he never has. Amazing.

An Spailpín Fánach's All-Star Team of 2005

The evenings are dark, the skies are grey and we're still one month away from the autumn rugby internationals. If that's not time to pick An Spailpín Fánach's All-Star Gaelic Football team of 2005, I don't know when is.

Stephen Cluxton (Dublin); Ryan McMenamin (Tyrone), Francie Bellew (Armagh), Paul Clancy (Galway); Anthony Lynch (Cork), Kieran McGeeney (Armagh), Séamus Moynihan (Kerry); Seán Cavanagh (Tyrone), David Heaney (Mayo); Ross Munnelly (Laois), Brian McGuigan (Tyrone), Stephen O'Neill (Tyrone); Stephen McDonnell (Armagh), Owen Mulligan (Tyrone), Colm Cooper (Kerry).

Interesting choice, no? How surprising to see Cluxo between the sticks, for a start - generally, if your correspondent went looking for a typical jackeen, he'd be looking behind bars, plural, sooner than he'd look under the bar, singular, but Cluxo had a very fine season, not least when he made many heroic saves in a doomed effort against Tyrone. And best of luck to him.

Those of you who read my condemnations of football violence during the year will react with either the raising of the eyebrows or the knocking of the knees at the terrible aspect of my fullback line. Well, there it is, that's the face of the modern game, and there isn't a full-forward line in Ireland that wouldn't double their scapulars at the thought of encroaching on those buckaroos' territory. Paul Clancy is a surprise, not least as he didn't play in the corner in the Championship, but Galway laid the foundation of their Connacht title on the man-marking job Clancy did on Ciarán McDonald in the Connacht Final. Given the choice between a footballer and a ball and chain merchant An Spailpín prefers to put the savage in the corner and let the footballer out the field.

Hence we have Cork's wonderful Anthony Lynch out the field at five, and that other footballer supreme Séamus Moynihan on the other wing. Neither man's Championship ended the way either would have liked, Cork humiliated by Kerry and Kerry humiliated themselves by Tyrone, but Kipling correctly identified success and failure as twin impostors - it's men like Lynch and Moynihan that remind us of how to play the game.

Kieran McGeeney is an inevitable choice at centre half-back, just as Bellew is behind him. It's very hard to think of a footballer whose influence has been as great as McGeeney's, both on the field and off. An Spailpín Fánach would have McGeeney in any team I was picking, and here he is again.

No-one's really been consistently outstanding in midfield, so a little lateral thinking came into play into making this combination. Seán Cavanagh is clearly the pick of the current midfield crop, and David Heaney was too outstanding in Mayo's Championship outings to be left out. I had very little business in starting Francie at midfield - Jack of All Trades Francie ain't - so An Spailpín Fánach displays that thing currently so lacking in the heather county, vision, and plays Heaney where he belongs, in midfield.

Ross Munnelly is just a lovely footballer, beautiful, and it's been his misfortune as a small man to play in an unusually rugged era. But Munnelly has never shown a yellow streak and gone missing for Laois, and in this age of scavenger wing-forwards, Munnelly remains true to the classicist's role of cracking them over from over thirty yards out. Brian McGuigan was outstanding at center-half forward, not as flashy as McDonald last year but has the Celtic Cross that McDanger does not. Stephen O'Neill has 5-47 in the Championship, he's in the team.

The two most deadly marksmen in the game are in the corners, Armagh's Steven O'Donnell and Kerry's Colm Cooper, and Owen Mulligan mines his current rich vein of form with his back to goal.

Unlucky to lose out? Canavan, of course, and several Kerrymen who got done unto them what they did to Mayo last year. Sin í an pheil, a mhic.

Question

An Spailpín Fánach has a favour to ask: if you were one of those people who went around last year saying that London deserved to get bombed because of Britain's actions overseas, or that Madrid deserved to get bombed because of Spain's role overseas, or that the Twin Towers strike was justified because of the USA's role overseas, could you ever drop me a mail and tell me what those poor bastards out in Bali ever did to piss anyone off? Thank you.

It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Dylan

"I knew a man, his brain's so small,
He couldn't think of nothing at all,
Not the same as you and me.
He doesn't dig poetry.
He's so unhip that when you say Dylan,
He thinks you're talking 'bout Dylan Thomas,
Whoever he was.
The man ain't got no culture,
But it's alright, Ma, everybody must get stoned."

Paul Simon, "A Simple Desultory Philippic," 1966.

By the time the wide world over realised that Bob Dylan was a prophet, Dylan had moved on from the prophet business. By the time Blonde on Blonde came out in 1966, the Dylan mythos, so neatly parodied by Paul Simon on Simon and Garfunkel's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, released a month or two before, had begun to cannibalise itself. When people went to record stores the Bob Dylan they were looking to buy was the spokesman-of-a-generation Dylan, the Dylan that wowed Newport in 1963, the God-on-our-Side Dylan, the Dylan that was blowin' in the wind. That Dylan wasn't there anymore; it's hard to say if that Dylan was ever really there in the first place.

The great Liam Clancy made the point in that marvellous Martin Scorsese documentary on BBC2 last night that in the early sixties folk scene, Dylan acted as a lightning rod for that folk movement's hopes, fears and ambitions, and people saw in Dylan a reflection of just what they came looking for in the first place. How much of anything other than people's own reflected ambitions was ever in Dylan in the first place is very difficult to say, but a reasonably educated guess might posit: not much.

It is entirely possible that the Voice of a Generation went to New York like a many footlight-dazzled youth before him - he didn't know what he wanted to be exactly, except that he wanted to be a Star, and he knew that he had to go to New York for that to happen. He didn't sign up for preaching, he was just there to the play the guitar and sing.

Dylan writes vividly of the picaresque adventures of his arrival and early years in New York in Chronicles, the memoir that came out last year to the acclaim of the Dylan generation, who had heard news from Elba at last and received it ecstatically. The most fascinating thing we learn about Dylan from reading Chronicles is just how much Bob Dylan despised being in the Bob Dylan business; by the late 'sixties Dylan himself was thoroughly fed up with the whole thing, and admits making awful records that his Church would then waste kilowatts and kilowatts of mental energy trying to figure out, recounting with glee just how many brain cells they'd burn just trying to figure out the title of his 1970 record, New Morning, actually meant. What is Bob trying to tell us now? Where is our message?

It's in the phrases that Dylan's strongest claim to greatness lies, and as a phrasemaker Dylan has few equals. However, by the time Dylan had been crowned the spokesman of his generation, he had less and less to say to anybody. Dylan's greatest message song is God on our Side, a song that stands out in any company - the two most famous of his message songs, Blowin' in the Wind and The Times They Are a Changin', are so simplistic that even a bearded and sandaled hippy priest would have his doubts about including them in a folk Mass for the Young People. Those songs are lyrically poor in the extreme. Dylan's great songs of his golden period in the mid-sixties, the eighteen months that spanned the release of his three greatest records, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, all sound fantastic but very few people know what they mean. An Spailpín Fánach, for one, hasn't a rashers, and he's willing to bet that old Bobby himself hasn't much of a clue either. But they certainly do sound pretty.

Desolation Row is one of Dylan's great songs, chiefly because it's a electric-folk song that sounds like it's slumming it from a opera - there are not many of those around. But what makes Desolation Row as a song isn't the lyric; it's those two lovely guitar riffs, the Spanish-sounding climbing one at the start, and the one that comes in at the end of each verse, that makes you feel like you're being slapped, but in a good way.

In the lyric, the imagery sings beautifully and sounds gorgeous (for what is a song but a collection of sounds?), but the words make no sense at all. A very great man and a friend of An Spailpín used to include Desolation Row in his sets when he took his guitar up on stage, but he told me it was practically impossible to remember the words, as nothing followed anything in any sort of order.

The talking heads on Mark Lawson's Newsnight Review couch last Friday were all aquiver at the thought of a Dylan documentary "by" Scorsese, but it struck me that that nice young Mr Friction was only being polite, while the more elderly members of the panel were desperately hoping that their youths were not in vain. They turn their lonely eyes to him as the nation did to Joltin' Joe but Dylan has long ago moved on. The Voice of a Generation is actually its Cheshire Cat, with nothing left but his simile. The carpet, too, is moving under you, and it's all over now, baby blue.

The All-Ireland Final, 2005

Tyrone 1-16
Kerry 2-10

For the past three weeks, the nation has been hearing that this All-Ireland final was to be Kerry's coming of age. Kerry hadn't faced a Northern team in their 33rd successful All-Ireland campaign last year - Derry don't count, you know - and so, by dispatching Tyrone, Kerry would once again be returned to their undisputed and regal throne.

Except for the fact, of course, that nobody seems to have told the Nordies that this was the agreed script. The first six minutes were as advertised, with Kerry slashing through the Tyrone backs, brave Cooper leading in the van. As well as a typically effortless point, Cooper set up Dara Ó Cinnéide's opportunist goal - a goal the under-rated Ó Cinnéide did very well to score, with a Tyrone man attached to his back like a limpet - and the gloss was beginning to return to the Kingdom's ermine.

And then, slowly and inexorably, Tyrone started to reel the Kerrymen back. The time between Kerry's last score and their next grew longer and longer, as Kerry found it harder and harder to find their men, and their men found it harder and harder to find the posts. The swarm defence was in full operation, as the Tyronemen mercilessly and clinically choked the life out of the Kerry attack, just as any defence aspires to doing. Sometimes Tyrone had only three men in the Kerry half of the field, the rest having retreated to bail water where-ever the pressure was at its utmost among their rearguard.

And then, with the game past the half-hour, came a mortal blow. Owen Mulligan jumped high to flick a ball back and into the path of the onrushing Peter Canavan. Goal. Kerry got a point back, through Dara Ó Sé I think, to give themselves hope, but they still went in at half-time three points down and with much to ponder.

In the half-time radio analysis, Ray Silke implored Jack O'Connor to put someone in at centre-half forward to act as a focus of an attack that was now getting swamped and smothered, but it seems that O'Connor was not as inclined to tune in to Radio One as An Spailpín Fánach. No change was made in the Kerry divisions at the half, but Mickey Harte took off Canavan for Tyrone. Canavan had been outstanding, and Harte was always going to bring him back for the last ten minutes. It's hard to go into battle without your best guy, but Harte knew that effectively losing a substitution by taking off Canavan to bring him back again made more sense than for the Canavan to ask for one more effort from his 34 year old limbs in the sixty-eighth minute, and for his limbs to be unable to reply.

While Canavan watched from the Hogan Stand shadows, the Kerry attack was looking increasingly forlorn. Mike Frank came on with twenty or twenty-five minutes to go, but no ball came to him - the fight was being lost further out. Tomás Ó Sé scored a fortuitous goal with five minutes to go to give Kerry a lifeline, but this too was shredded and cast to the winds by a Tyrone team who really wanted it more than Kerry did. Kerry thought since their win last year that they had caught and passed the Ulster Revolution; the fact is that Ulster have moved on further again from where the Kingdom had mentally marked them, and the greatest football county in Ireland is off the pace once again.

As I stood on the Hill watching a Tyrone win become more and more inevitable, I wondered if this was what it was like in 1960, when Down outgeneralled Kerry and shut down Mick O'Connell, the greatest midfielder in the history of the game. We are now on the verge of a new epoch in the game, and it's now time for the GAA, the President of the GAA, the DRC, the Central Council, Liam Mulvihill, Congress or who-ever it is that's supposed to be in charge to decide how they want the game of football to be played in the 21st Century. As it's played now, with this strange nether-world existing between what's foul play in the book and what's foul play in actuality, someone is going to get seriously hurt because no-one can agree when a punch is a punch.

Tom O'Sullivan of Kerry got a yellow card for punching Tyrone's Brian McGuigan in the second half. Striking or attempting to strike is a sending-off offence - why didn't O'Sullivan walk?

Several reasons. Firstly, it seems that a punch isn't actually a punch, a punch qua punch if you like, if the player "didn't really mean it," or "isn't a dirty player." The other reason is the "what goes around, comes around," school - after five or ten minutes of play, just when Colm Cooper was threatening to tear Tyrone a new botty just as did Mayo this time last year, he was stretched at the foot of the canal end posts, literally under the nose of the one of the umpires. If a Tyrone man had lamped Cooper, then it's jungle justice for a Tyrone man to get belted as well, and the referee to ignore the second belt if he didn't punish the first. So what happened the Gooch?

Ray Silke speculated with Pete McGrath and Jimmy Magee on the radio that Ryan McMenamin may or may not have struck Cooper - ! - and went on to adumbrate the usual platitudes (with one eye to the laws of libel of course) that it's a man's game, anything can happen, and besides, if Cooper had indeed been struck, he had been struck under the noses of the umpires and therefore he couldn't have been struck, because - are you still following this? Good - if he had been struck, then surely the umpires would have drawn the referee's attention to this. An argument that would draw applause and cheering for William of Occam, Thomas Aquinas and all those other medieval scholastic metaphysicians, who argued about counting angels on the heads of pins. An Spailpín shall be watching the Sunday Game very carefully - just as carefully as the RTÉ lawyers are no doubt boning up on the libel laws even as a type.

If Ricey did clock Gooch - and An Spailpín Fánach's own legal team would like to point out that neither An Spailpín Fánach himself, his little corner of cyberspace, nor any of his associates, does not claim for one second that Ricey did indeed lamp Gooch - then that box was the trigger for the Tyrone revival. When you read in the papers tomorrow that the Tyrone players would have done anything for the jersey, don't forget how broad a church that "anything" covers. And platitudes about "a man's game" will not cover this shameful behaviour. Either punching is legal or it's not. The current series of exceptions, where a man isn't sent off for striking, as he didn't really mean it, or he isn't really a dirty player, or perhaps even that particular punch didn't really hurt, are shameful and cowardly evasions of duty on the part of the GAA, and An Spailpín has to wonder who's going to have to get crippled or worse before they take action.

And before I'm accused of soft Southern anti-Northern bias, could your correspondent point out that this duality about the acceptability of striking and violent play has been raised in this forum before? Thank you.

It's a good thing that Tyrone won, because the handy narrative of brave Kerry restoring the natural order by putting beastly Tyrone back in their horrid box has been broken up, and perhaps we'll now get a bit more intelligent analysis about the state of the game and the way it's currently played now that the easy explanation is denied the pundit community. It's going to be a long winter, and we could do with something to warm up debate during the long dark nights.

Oh My God! They're Killing Kenny's!

An Spailpín has to confess mixed feelings about the news that Kenny's Bookshop on High Street in Galway is to close, moving its business to the badlands of the Liosbán Industrial Estate to trade solely in cyberspace through the machinations of that dreaded Internet.

People are inclined to get precious about Kenny's - the Irish Times report this morning about the closure reads like a monody, while Tom Kenny's remarks about still being "passionate about the business" is Morketingspeak at its most pernicious - and this is an over-reaction. An Spailpín has never, to his memory, bought a single book in Kenny's, and he is a man that both buys a lot of books, and is one of those blessed or cursed unfortunates who have never quite got Galway, that Emerald City, quite out of their blood.

From An Spailpín's time loitering without intent in and around Galway's Latin Quarter, I associate two words with Kenny's bookshop, and they are "expensive" and "tourists." When one gets away to the West, when one "does" Galway, one "does" Kenny's as a matter of course. Well, yes, darling, we did visit Kenny's - yes, it is quite marvellous, and so olde worlde, don't you think? Yes, I think so too - one just doesn't see that kind of shop any more, and it's such a pity. It's so like Shakespeare and Company in Paris, near Notre Dame, so chic, so je ne sais quoi. Our youngest boy, Uirlis, was there while he was finding himself touring Europe and he said it was just wonderful, and so on and on and on and on.

No wonder the Kenny's closure was able to squeeze at tear out of Modom and the gals on D'Olier Street.

And yet, at the same time, the demise of Kenny's is a source of sadness, because it's always sad to see any bookstore go, and because we can never quite be sure what will rise in its place. Galway already has plenty of skinny-chinny-whinny-chino bars that will serve you some panini and salad and charge you nine yo-yos for the privilege, and should another develop in the vacuum left by Kenny's the city will soon reach critical mass.

While Kenny's was never the spot to buy the Grapes of Wrath for a buck-fifty, it did set a Certain Tone in the city, and in our vulgar age, there's a lot to be said for that. I'm sure many's the feckless student in leaking Doctor Martens boots and a sopping-wet overcoat wandered about Kenny's cramped spaces and twisty stairwells, looking at the signed photos from John McGahern and Edna O'Brien and Brian Friel and dreamed someday, someday. Having the launch of one's collected "web logs," or "blogs," - half bound in leather and marble paper, in octavo, bring your own booze - on the wilds of the Tuam Road just won't be the same.

The Book Trade

There was a rather depressing interview with Scott Pack, head buyer of Waterstone's bookstores, in last Sunday's Observer. Scott believes it's all about product, just as Ray Kroc did, bless him.