This is no country for men of my intellect, but, banished to the teenage wasteland that is Oxegen, I sense the return of a new age of enlightenment, writes Ultan Quigley.
I lost a battle this week. Ultan Quigley, sinner, scribbler, sermoniser, has been banished to the Oxegen rock festival. While you scoop marmalade onto welcoming toast or batter your blameless egg, I will, no doubt, be stomping through the mud that traditionally surrounds this Passchendaele of the pointless.
This was not how I had planned to spend the weekend. Having recently encountered a dead weasel by the side of the road, I was looking forward to closing the door on the world and turning this little tragedy into a big poem. Gealbhan, my teenage daughter, was to have attended the festival on her own, but, sadly for both her and me, I got up on Wednesday morning to find four sneakered feet poking out from the hedge in the front garden. After levering a comatose Lithuanian waiter off Gealbhan's moist body, we quickly discerned that the girl had swallowed enough vodka to anaesthetise an entire battalion of the Red Army.
My partner decided the girl would only be allowed to attend the festival in the company of an adult. "If there's a gene that causes people to drink until they wet themselves and then ram their hands down a stranger's trousers, we know who passed it on to her," she spat. "It's your mess. You clean it up." So, despite desperate pleading, I have been doomed to a weekend listening to the mechanical American thumping of such modish young disco rockers as The Aphex Twins, Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers.
Now, let me make it clear that I am not the sort of parent who spends Thursday evenings making disparaging remarks about the acts on Top of the Pops. I well recall the look of horror on my father's weathered face when he encountered televised performances by favoured acts such as Bob Dylan or Barclay James Harvest. "Is that a man or a woman? That's not singing; that's just shouting," he'd say. "Get your hair cut, you stinking pansies!" Ah, even the wisest and bravest of men find time trampling them underfoot.
By way of contrast, I have always made a point of keeping up with modern rock music. Cool young bands such as The Hold Steady, Arcade Fire and Ocean Colour Scene are rarely far from my turntable. What annoys me about the current crop of electronically enhanced nincompoops is not their supposed innovation, but their pathetic inability to improve on advances made by more talented predecessors. Of course, I say nothing. I would not be listened to.
Television journalists queue up to record the bleating of middle-aged women outside screenings of Sex and the City. Newspapers carry endless diaries by children sitting their Leaving Certificates. Whole festivals - I am at one right now - are set up to satisfy the demands of lubricious teenagers. Yet the media and the government continue to ignore (or deride) the opinions of one significant section of the community. To be a middle-aged man in Ireland today is to be voiceless. A kind of holocaust of the mind is afoot, whereby the opinions of an entire generation are smothered before they have a chance to escape their metaphorical cradles.
Micheál Luchóg, my esteemed brother in poetry, put it eloquently in The Soggy Furrow: "The dying badger, flanks clawed by time, calls to the mossy trees beyond/ Only the wind, friend to the friendless, hears his farewell song." Yet, for all the pessimism of Micheál's verse, I detect a fightback. This summer, while the young and the female have been distracted by American media frippery, the New Lost Generation has begun to reassert itself. The glorious, tear-rushing rejection of the Lisbon Anschluss could not have been achieved without the efforts of old comrades from such near-forgotten organisations as The Militant People's Tendency and The Neo-Trotskyite Luxemburg Movement. Without us, teenagers might have been drafted to fight in Iran. Without us, mothers might have found themselves crying over returning coffins. Don't bother to thank us.
All season, men of a certain age, ignored at home, derided on the airwaves, have been gathering together to celebrate their worn-down, neglected prophets. Did any of the Dublin newspapers bother to report the ecstatically received concerts by Eric Clapton, Neil Young and the secular saint who goes by the name of Leonard Cohen? Of course not. They were too busy pondering the latest star of (as I call it) unreality television.
"Oh Lord! Is there no escaping that monotonous Canadian sex maniac?" my partner said as I headed out to the Cohen gig. "God be with the days when the only people who bought his records were spotty unmarriageable virgins in cheesecloth shirts." The few media timeservers who acknowledged the gig tended to echo my partner's ill-informed, sexist views. Leonard is too old, too wise and too male to compete with the tattooed drug addicts that pass for icons in this (as I call it) Age of Amnesia. Yet, as Cohen - a tower of grey intelligence - concluded his moving rendition of SoHo Blow Job No 4, some of the nation's cleverest men could be seen weeping fat, unsentimental tears. I know, because I was among their number.
After the concert, a group of poets gathered in the basement of Donal MacLacha, author of Digging the Fox's Grave, to discuss the crisis afflicting the New Lost Generation. It has recently become fashionable for young people to adopt a look of feigned disgust while perusing Aosdána's website. "Who the hell are these nonentities?" my ever-sour partner bellowed when first encountering the list. "This bloke seems to have written two poems in 20 years. Isn't that guy dead?" How dare they be men! How dare they be over 40!
Have I been asked to join the body that recognises our finest artists? When discussing an honours system it is always best to retain a degree of discretion, but I will say that I would be happy to share air with such distinguished poets as Ailéin Patraisc, Gaofar Muilleoir and Frainc Mac Spealáin. As they gathered in MacLacha's cellar, all these writers, proud members of Aosdána, were ready to celebrate the beginnings of a rearguard action.
Two months ago it was announced that the stipend paid to certain Aosdána members was to be increased from €12,000 to €20,000. This is a victory for art: Patraisc will be allowed to finish An Owl's Last Moments, the sonnet sequence he has been plotting since 1982; Mac Spealáin may finally get to begin his verse play A Rotting Horse by the Black Shore. But, more than anything else, it is a victory for the New Lost Generation. "Ho! Fling millennial peat at the cowardly, scurrying cubs," Gaofar Muilleoir wrote in The Bog Cemetery. "Fossils thrive while the living turn to palsy." As the idiot youths take the stage tonight I may find myself able to smile. I lost a battle this week. But I think I may be winning a war.
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Ross O'Carroll-Kelly is resting