Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the memoir 'Angela's Ashes', which recounts his impoverished childhood in Limerick.
On the island
Eight records
The Chieftains and The Rolling Stones
It's a very unusual combination of Irish and rock.
I wanted to be Fred Astaire, and that was another thing. I'd go home and grab one of my brothers and start dancing around the kitchen, and I thought he was the most elegant and stylish of of of any of anybody on the screen
The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem
This is rooted in my admiration for James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake. And my my friend Patty Clancy was the one who kept who got the Clancy brothers going and Tommy Makeum a long, long time ago.
Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra
When I was going to uh New York University, which was at one end of Manhattan in Greenwich Village, and I lived at the other end of Manhattan in Washington Heights, and the train I took was the A train, and that's why this has this take the A train of of Duke Ellington has special meaning for me.
very early in my life I became interested in jazz. And along the way, I don't know when, Dave Brubik swam into my life, and particularly this number, take five.
Stubby Kaye, Johnny Silver and Douglas Deane
this particular show, Guys and Dolls, I've loved for probably 40 years, and this particular number, which is real New York, is called a fugue for tin horns, but it's I got the horse right here.
Kyrie (from St. Cecilia Mass)Favourite
Munich Motet Choir and Munich Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Hans Rudolf Zöbeley
the part that I particularly lifted my heart was the Kyrie from the St. Celia Mass of Guno.
I Can't Give You Anything But Love
This is the song that I want them to play at my funeral.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:31How did you find that voice [to write Angela's Ashes]?
I suppose … a lot of it is the result of all the years I spent in the classroom. I figured out that I'd had in my teaching career 11,000 American teenagers sitting in seats before me. And when you're dealing with them, your delivery, your presentation has to be simple and clear and it has to grip them, grab them, and be dramatic. … there was a day in nineteen ninety four when I started writing Angel's Ashes and I wrote my earliest memory. … And I wrote that in the present tense, with the simplicity of a three-year-old.
Presenter asks
2:51Did you think that people wouldn't be interested in your life story, or did you perhaps feel you couldn't face it psychologically because it was so awful?
I had to get this out of my system. Not that you ever do get it out of your system because you start peeling at the scab and it gets more you get or you find more sores. … You wish you could reach back into the past and heal things, but you can't. It's done. Uh my mother's sufferings were immense and the sufferings of most of those women in the lanes of Limerick who raised families with their husbands who were drunks or husbands who were absent.
Presenter asks
4:46How come you haven't gotten infected [with an American accent] after fifty years in the States?
The keepsakes
The book
The Oxford Book of English Verse
Arthur Quiller-Couch
If I never got off the desert island I'd have English poetry from the Anglo Saxons up to Seamus Heaney.
The luxury
I just use it to look at the stars and to see passing birds migrating.
Well, I didn't deliberately I didn't make a deliberate attempt to keep the accent. Sometimes because you get weary of being spotted uh in linguistically or accent wise and people say oh … You're Irish. You're off the boat. … So sometimes I tried to disguise my accent but it never worked.
Presenter asks
13:17What makes you keep going when you are reduced that low [in New York]?
I knew there was nothing for me in Ireland. There was no place to go. And then the n what ha what what saved me was uh that Mao Tsichung decided to send these legions into into Korea. And uh I was drafted into the American army … but they sent me to Germany instead … The GI Bill was the most wonderful piece of legislation ever passed in America that that enabled me even though I didn't have any secondary school education, I was able to leap over that then I matriculated.
Presenter asks
19:53Why would you travel all the way back to Ireland for your father's funeral?
Because I suppose I was I I became aware of rituals in life, that certain things are that only happen once. Your mother dies once, your father dies once. Uh I wanted to be uh a present, I wanted to witness this. Which was very it's a sad okay, the sadness derived from from the waste of a life. He's wasted life.
Presenter asks
21:57Why couldn't you reach out, touch, or reconcile with your mother?
We weren't encouraged to show our emotions when we were kids. … I know she went through a lot, but then I wanted her to fight back. But now I realize uh that she was probably in a clinical depression of some kind. And I think if I had been a little more understanding and a little wiser, I could have helped her.
“I had to get this out of my system. Not that you ever do get it out of your system because you start peeling at the scab and it gets more you get or you find more sores.”
“You wish you could reach back into the past and heal things, but you can't. It's done.”
“I wanted that kind of artistic life, but instead I met and married the the American middle class.”
“good taste pops up when imagination dies. … because p people in the middle classes are always bragging about their good taste, which is bad taste, to brag about your good taste.”