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February 21, 2006

In favour of using the letters page

The fiction editor of the New Yorker once got a letter from a reader demanding that Maeve Brennan write a new story for the magazine. The letter was then given to Brennan who was rather aggrieved by it, believing the request to be somewhat impolite. Brennan then wrote a reply, posing as the editor of the magazine, saying that the reader wouldn’t be getting what he was looking for because Miss Brennan was dead. She had shot herself in the back ‘with the aid of a small hand-mirror’ at the foot of the main altar of St Patrick’s Cathedral on Shrove Tuesday. "We will never know why she did what she did, but we think it was because she was drunk and heartsick. She was a very fine person, a very real person, two feet, hands, everything. But it’s too late to do much about that now."

I sympathise with Maeve Brennan and can appreciate her sentiment. In fact there is nothing more I’d like to have written this week than of my own untimely death. Of how, after a lethal cocktail of headache tablets and whiskey complete with a little yellow umbrella, I over-dosed on St. Valentine’s Day morning over my type-writer. The person who discovered me would have found a note instructing that I be buried wearing my best velvet blazer and a list of people who were not to be invited to the funeral. Yes, that is what I would have preferred to have happened but as with many things in life the preferable is not always the practical.

You see recently more and more people have been plucking up the courage to pass comment to me on this particular column. Everyone from People I Know to Strangers have been throwing their two cents in my face. Granted, none of these comments are entirely negative and so one would imagine I should be quite pleased. But I’m not. Allow me to explain it a little more clearly.

These people, the ones passing comment, are reflective of the great Irish public who in the great Irish tradition have an opinion that is deemed worth telling someone however inconsiderate telling that person may be. For example, there are a number of readers out there who have told me they like reading this column when it’s passing social comment. They do not, however and in the strongest of terms, like reading about anything vaguely humble or humorous. They can not understand why someone would want to read about a happening that they weren’t present at.

On the other side of the fence are people of the exact opposite nature in reading habits. They enjoy light humour based on real experiences but can not abide or see the sense in reading about an issue or debate about current affairs. Further more, both sides insist that I immediately stop writing the type of column that they personally don’t like and continue to write the types of column they do like. And while the bee is still in my bonnet, people suggesting subjects for columns is something I just can’t abide, especially when it’s less "suggesting" and more "ordering" and expecting to see their proposal brought to life in the following weeks paper. Or worst still the people who think I should write about something different but, amazingly, have no idea what this different thing is but insist that I should certainly be writing about it.

I like to think of this column as one might a trip to the circus. The clowns may be funny and the putting of ones head into the mouth of a lion may be serious but in general each circus is entirely unpredictable. I am the ringmaster who knows that you can’t please all of the people all of the time but that unfortunately the people themselves don’t know this. As another Irish columnist, John Waters, once said, "I write a column, on a weekly basis, and submit it for publication. If people wish to read it, that’s fine; if they like what they read, that’s great. But if not, no problem. It is not part of my job description to make myself available as an intellectual punch bag for people who have got out of the wrong side of the bed." Again I can appreciate John Water’s sentiment as I did that of Maeve Brennan’s.

The problem with writing a column for a regional paper is that you tend to live amongst a lot of you’re readers and tend to bump into them quite a lot. This arrangement leads to laziness in opinion. Whereas if you were suitably annoyed about something in a national paper this annoyance would push you to go to the effort of writing a letter to that paper as I have done on occasion. Most of the people who have made comments to me wouldn’t be bothered to go to all this effort of putting pen to paper and paper to envelope and envelope to post box. So why then do they feel so compelled to pass comment when they see me walking along minding my own business in daily life?

In my experience I’ve found that people generally find it pleasing to pass comment even though they have not put a lot of thought or effort into what they are saying and, in fact, often just say something for the Hell of it. It never fails to surprise me of how entirely devoid of tact people can be and at the end of the day, despite my best efforts to persuade you other wise, I am only human with feelings too.

Downhill from here by Liam Geraghty appears every week in the Kildare Nationalist

Posted by LiamG at February 21, 2006 10:25 PM