AMONG the pleasures of Seamus Hosey's interview with Edna O'Brien on Off the Shelf (RTE Radio 1, Saturday) was being able to attend to the writer's words and ideas. In print interviews, the journalists (men, in particular) are so intent on capturing the essence of her presence, on documenting every physical idiosyncrasy, that it's easy to miss what she's saying.
O'Brien herself clearly takes what she is saying very seriously indeed, choosing words carefully, combining almost oratorical heights of rhetoric with a pained, softly spoken intimacy. It's as if she is making an intensely sincere, painstakingly modulated summation of the case for her defence.
The defensiveness can make her sound contradictory. Early in the interview, Hosey asked her about the labels: "the last romantic, the scarlet woman, a cross between Mata Hari and Maud Gonne ... do you laugh at them?"
O'Brien could be heard laughing along with the question, but when it was finished, she stopped and sadly declared: "I don't laugh at them," insisting "I am rather skinless." Then she moved on to a rather lovely non sequitur: "The idea of the scarlet woman is ridiculous ... I can't even dance, to tell you the truth."
"I am a terribly, agonisingly serious woman," she continued. (It's wonderful that she really speaks like this.) "The main spine of my life is lived alone, trying to get the words to do the work of all the things I feel and I believe other people in the country feel as well. I don't have much time for mullarkey."
Her thoughts on the North, on the X case, abortion ("I'm not saying ... that it's a gin and tonic") and Samuel Beckett were not exactly startling, but there was no doubting that she is in earnest.
Unless the it told a summer school recently. "I thought afterwards that I must apologise to people who knit because knitting is very hard work as well.
As for her entitlement to write about an Ireland from which she may be rather remote, she took a rare shot at humour. "If I lived in Dublin I might become a scarlet woman. I like the freedom - who doesn't? - of being able to come and go, but it's what you feel about a place that matters, and Ireland matters very much to me, always has, always will, whatever people say."
While the Ireland of Edna O'Brien's imagination may he stack in a pre modern morass, other folks are eagerly embracing a Brave New World. The surest sign of this is the culture's awestruck, decontextualised admiration of technology. Wednesday's News at One (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) had Eamonn Quinn of Superquinn in the studio to blow our minds. The chain's Lucan, Co Dublin, branch has introduced hand held price scanners that customers can carry through the supermarket aisles, thus making those nasty old queues a thing of the past.
Brian Dobson's three or four minute interview with Quinn couldn't help but sound like a plug when the questions circled around the burning issue: "Is it really that easy?" The simple matter of whether this technology would lead to staffing cuts in the medium to long term was never raised; the suggestion that this move has something to do with cost, rather than immutable "progress", was never made. The apotheosis of the computer, and of its putative "consumer nears completion.
Karen Duggan of Ballsbridge, Dublin, made pointed (as in "ouch")comments about this column in Saturday's letters page, criticising my defence last week of Morning Edition (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) and its controversial short story, I'm Running Late. Having listened to Bridget O'Connor's painful story in the company of my own children, I still maintain that programmers shouldn't (within reason) avoid complex, mature material at the most listened to time (If day just because kids might be listening - any more than news bulletins should. (The rotten provision for young people is another issue, to which I'll be back.)
However, as someone who earns a crust giving out about RTE - and calling for more public access and participation I was out line to call complainants the "little to be doing brigade". Touche, and sorry.
