You woke up this morning, got yourself some Yeats.Isn't it heartening the way TV - occasionally anyway - knows the worth of the literary canon. First it was Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman turning up in Lost. Now it's Yeats and The Sopranos, writes Caroline Walsh.
In Dublin, a host of celebrities - this week including Bono, Sinead Cusack, Colm Tóibín and Jeremy Irons - are reading Yeats in honour of his birthday at the National Library on Kildare Street, while Stateside a recent episode of the long-running show The Sopranos had AJ (above) reading The Second Coming aloud in bed shortly before the series's much-hyped conclusion last Sunday. According to Meghan O'Rourke of Slate magazine, a morbid AJ, down in the dumps after a break-up, is roused from the slough of despond when a professor teaches the poem in class. "The poem's prophetic intensities move AJ to contemplate the violence of conflict in the Middle East and the general horror of a world in which the old orders are collapsing around him at every turn," writes O'Rourke.
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/ The best lack all convictions, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity", goes the famous poem. Shortly after he reads it, AJ tries to drown himself - though he changes his mind in time and gets checked into Mountainside Hospital Psych Ward instead.
Irish Yeatsians keen to analyse the episode featuring Yeats, actually called The Second Coming, and what the programme makers call his "morbidly apocalyptic poem", can do so when it hits our screens in early July. The question is: will sales of the The Collected Poems of WB Yeats - or Yeets as AJ might say - now soar?
Meanwhile, the 30-minute-long lunchtime readings of Yeats at the National Library continue on Monday at 1pm with Kevin Myers; on Tuesday with David Norris; on Wednesday with Olive Braiden; and on Friday with George Hamilton. No booking is required and it's free. The overall Yeats celebration at the library continues until June 30th, and other highlights include lectures by Terence Brown and Declan Kiberd, children's events, creative workshops and putting Yeats to music.
See www.nli.ie/yeats.
Joyce jollity moves to Trieste
If a week of Bloomsday wasn't enough for Joyce addicts they can always now head for Trieste, where Joyceans will be strolling the streets and thronging the Museo Revoltella on Via Diaz for more deliberations on the master at the Trieste Joyce School, which opens on July 1st. A walking tour of the city as Joyce knew it, and an evening of song and music at the Osteria da Marino on Via Del Ponte, are among the delights on offer, but the main events are the papers. Supreme Court judge Adrian Hardiman will talk on The Trial of 'Ulysses', 1933, while biographer Brenda Maddox, author of a life of Nora Barnacle, will talk about biography in general. John McCourt, Fritz Senn and Laura Pelaschiar are among the speakers, as is Jean-Michel Rabaté, who will speak on The Joyce-Proust Parallax, Or How to Read 'Ulysses' with 'La Recherche', and Conversely, and David Spurr on Architecture in 'Ulysses'.
The Kavanagh workshops
The 2007 writers' workshops at the Patrick Kavanagh Centre in Inniskeen, Co Monaghan, which run from Friday, June 29th to Sunday, July 1st, will be directed by novelist and short-story writer Evelyn Conlon. Conlon, who is a native of Monaghan, compiled and edited Later On: The Monaghan Bombing Memorial Anthology - published 30 years after the Dublin-Monaghan bombings - in which writers born or living in Co Monaghan contributed short stories, essays, poems and excerpts from novels. It included work by Eugene McCabe, Mary O'Donnell, Pat McCabe, Frank McNally and Leland Bardwell. Conlon also made the literary selection for Annaghmakerrig, the book celebrating 25 years of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre.
Details about the weekend on 042-93 78560, e-mail infoatpkc@eircom.net, or visit www.patrickkavanaghcountry.com.
Putting Synge in his place
"Synge and His Context" is the theme of the Synge Summer School, which runs from July 1st to the 7th in Rathdrum, Co Wicklow, directed by Prof Anthony Roche of UCD. Participants this year include Fiach Mac Conghail, Jim Culleton, Eavan Boland, Garry Hynes, Ann Saddlemyer, Nicholas Grene and Patrick Lonergan, and there's even an open-air production of Synge's The Tinker's Wedding. For more details, see www.wicklow.ie/syngesummerschool.