Prospero

HEAVEN underground is the best way to describe my experience of the 61st Berlinale, Berlin’s annual international film festival, which ended on February 20th. It all felt a bit like descending into a world of film and fantasy, of dim lights and flickering promises.
 
“In Heaven Underground” ("Im Himmel, Unter der Erde") is also the name of the film I enjoyed the most at the festival. Apparently I was not alone, as this documentary about the Jewish Cemetery in Weissensee ended up with an audience award in the Panorama festival section.
 
I have never been to this 130-year-old cemetery in East Berlin. Nor did I know that it is the biggest Jewish cemetery in Europe where funerals still take place. Britta Wauer, a young Berlin film director, has interviewed a number of people from all over the world who are descendants of Jews buried in this cemetery. Her subjects all travelled to the Weissensee cemetery, after reading a notice she placed in a newspaper for ex-Berliners called Aktuell (Ms Wauer expected 20 or 30 replies to the ad, but received 300 in the first two weeks). “In Heaven Underground” offers an array of funny and difficult stories about a remote and now all but abandoned place. Hidden behind walls in the middle of a housing estate in the outskirts of town, in an area covered with trees, rhododendron, ivy and lilac, this 40-hectare (about 100 acres) site looks like a fairy-tale forest. The cemetery houses some 115,000 grave sites, some of which look like small mausoleums.  

In the year following 1869, when German Jews were officially recognised as German citizens with equal rights, the Jewish community in Berlin grew to around 65,000. In the 1930s around 170,000 Jews lived in Berlin; a number that shrunk to 1,500 after the second world war. Somehow this cemetery, designed in 1870, wasn’t destroyed by the Nazis. The Jewish community in Berlin now numbers more than 12,000—the largest in Germany—80% of whom hail from the former Soviet Union. Now the cemetery has gravestones with Russian names in Cyrillic letters, and lots of flowers (though it is Jewish custom to leave stones). William Wolf, an octogenarian rabbi of German origin, has a good view of these mixing traditions, calling it “a captivating necropolis which reflects the change of times.”

In one interview, a man named Harry Kindermann describes the cemetery as a somewhat macabre playground in the late 1930s, when Jewish children could no longer play safely on the street. When he was 12 years old in 1939, his father, a bricklayer who worked at the cemetery, taught him how to drive on the cemetery’s grounds, which was tricky given the narrow paths.
 
Sebastian Schulz and his wife Susanne live in the flat on the top floor of the cemetery’s administration building. This is where Rabbi Martin Riesenburger, the cemetery’s rabbi from June 1943 until the end of the war, once lived. They explain that they don’t find living at a cemetery creepy. We meet Bernhard Epstein and his wife, who came all the way from Florida to visit his grandmother’s grave. This is one of the most affecting moments in the film. He cried when he stood by her grave for the first time, speaking to her in German: “Grandmother Helene, we have come to visit you. Sadly, grandpa can’t visit you, he was gassed in Auschwitz. Your middle son was also gassed in Auschwitz. Your elder son, my father, died on the Russian front. I only got to know your youngest son in Budapest.”
 
Ron Kohls, the current cemetery inspector, comes across almost like a museum’s director. He reveals a thorough registry with all of the names of the deceased, weighted with history and stories. What becomes clear by the end of this film is that the Weissensee Jewish Cemetery will soon have quite a few more visitors passing through.

 
"Im Himmel, unter der Erde" by Britta Wauer will be in cinemas in Germany from April 7th. “The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery, Moments in History” is a related book in German and English, published by be.bra verlag, Berlin

READERS of the recently published "unexpurgated" autobiography of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, are seldom moved to say "Tell us what you really think, Clemens". "Easy does it, old boy" might be more apt. This self-portrait in words was published in late 2010 by the University of California Press to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Twain's death, according to the man's own wishes. "A book that is not to be published for a century," he observed, "gives the writer a freedom which he could secure in no other way." In these pages, he takes advantage of that freedom by skewering sacred cows—the church, Congress, industrialists, Teddy Roosevelt—and, most bitterly, acquaintances he perceived to have wronged him.

Thus the vitriolic character sketch of the Countess Massiglia, the Clemens family's American-born landlady at the Villa Quarto in Florence. He accuses her, essentially, of ruining his life as an expatriate in Italy: "She is excitable, malicious, malignant, vengeful, unforgiving, selfish, stingy, avaricious, coarse, vulgar, profane, obscene, a furious blusterer on the outside and at heart a coward." Given such restraint, Twain was wise to ensure the ants got to him before any new enemies did.

Twain was usually sure of the rightness of his opinions, but on the subject of the Countess they were coloured by especially unfortunate circumstances: his wife Olivia ("Livy") died in the Villa Quarto in 1904. Although her weak heart had long been a concern, Twain partly blamed the meddling Countess Massiglia for her death. Perhaps this explains his invective: he had lost not only his wife but his beloved Florence, too, a place he described as "the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon, the most satisfying to the eye and the spirit." Livy's death cast it all in shadow.

Samuel Clemens, born in Missouri in 1835, is so often seen as the quintessential American that we forget how cosmopolitan he became as Mark Twain. He read German, French and Italian, dined with the Kaiser and King Edward VII, and (despite having dropped out of school at age 11) was awarded a Doctor of Letters by Oxford University. But he was a bad businessman. In 1891, after some disastrous investments, he moved his family—Livy and daughters Clara, Susy and Jean—to Florence, which at that time was considerably cheaper than their stateside home of Hartford, Connecticut. Olivia's health was a concern, and the Tuscan climate was fortifying.

For all his no-nonsense Midwestern realism, he was a romantic. And for all his sardonic asides in "The Innocents Abroad", about crumbling buildings and ugly women, he was awestruck by the beauty of Italy. Upon glimpsing Milan Cathedral, he positively gushed. "What a wonder it is! So grand, so solemn, so vast! And yet so delicate, so airy, so graceful! A very world of solid weight, and yet it seems ...a delusion of frostwork that might vanish with a breath!"

Yet on the same trip, he got up on his Midwestern Protestant hind legs in Rome, which he called "a great fair of shams, humbugs, and frauds." But it was the Catholic Church, not Rome itself, that bothered him. He always reserved his mockery for unthinking worship—of God, of Mammon or Art. In the process he came across as something of a blowhard. Forever warring within him were the down-home scoffer and the world artist, the author of both "Huckleberry Finn" and "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc", which Twain maintained, against all evidence, was his best book ("It is the best; I know it perfectly well"). But at least Joan proved that he was more than a provincial storyteller. He also found fascinating the wider world and distant times.

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness," he once wrote, "and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts." It is a Romantic view: Goethe or Byron, both of whom also contemplated Italian exile, could have said the same thing. The man who did say it never ceased to relish the sight of new horizons.

"Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1" is out now

The BBC’s hit “Sherlock” is just one of 230 films or television series featuring the great man. Matthew Sweet picks the best...

1891 Illustrations by Sidney Paget    
Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes—but put more energy into trying to kill him off. So perhaps it’s his illustrator who conjured him for us: the lean, feline, frock-coated figure, steepling his fingers in a smoke-wreathed armchair. Paget denied having a model other than the text—but he himself had a long jaw, aquiline nose and high temples. I suspect it was all done with mirrors.

1916 William Gillette
Gillette gave Holmes two things that Conan Doyle failed to supply: a libido and a dirty great curved piece of smoking apparatus. One of them became a fixture, the other remained an act of transgression—as all the critics told Gillette, when he played the great detective in his own stage drama, juiced from Doyle’s short stories. The author, however, was unconcerned. Gillette cabled Doyle across the Atlantic: “May I marry Holmes?” Back came the reply: “Do what you like with him.”

1920s Eille Norwood    
The orthochromatic film stock of the silent days was unforgiving: every crack and fissure in the face of Eille Norwood has been preserved for posterity. With black lips, graveyard demeanour, and his hair shaved at the temples for a cerebral widow’s peak, he played detective in dozens of British two-reelers—the first Holmes with a touch of Transylvania. When he confronts the Hound of the Baskervilles—hand-tinted with a phosphor glow—it’s hard to decide who seems most unearthly.

1939 Basil Rathbone    
Viewers thrown by the 2010 “Sherlock”, take note: Rathbone was the first self-consciously period Holmes, in the dry-iced Victorian world of the Fox backlot. After two films, his bosses felt the Nazis were a more pressing problem and retooled Doyle’s famous speech about the Hun (“such a wind as never blew on England yet”) for Hitler. The delivery is knife-sharp. The cause would not have been more urgent if they had booked Churchill himself.

1959-68 Peter Cushing
When Cushing played Holmes for Hammer, the producer congratulated him for having lost weight for the part—his cheekbones looked sharp enough to cut the pages of the Strand. It was, however, dysentery that did it. In the Hammer “Hound” and in a subsequent series for the BBC, Cushing attacked the part as if relieved not to be playing another psychopath. For a man best known as Frankenstein, he is one of the screen’s least clinical Sherlocks.

1970 Robert Stephens
In the 1970s the intellectuals claimed Holmes. In “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” Nicol Williamson underwent analysis; in “The Private Life of…”, Robert Stephens even talked of a relationship with Watson—albeit as a ploy to avoid having to impregnate a Russian ballerina. Billy Wilder, directing, had Holmes ruled by his heart, not his head. In the character—and the actor, too—it provoked a constitutional crisis.

1980s and 1990s Jeremy Brett
For a performance that’s now regarded as definitive, Brett’s Holmes is a long way from any of his predecessors, and from Conan Doyle. This is Sherlock the addict: twitching, moody, capricious. Watch him in his white nightgown, stretching a colourless hand towards the fags on the mantelpiece—or yelping his way through dinner, veins thrumming with cocaine. Despite this oddness, he’s the Holmes in our heads, and the reason why several more recent ones—Robert Downie Jr, Rupert Everett – seem like pretenders.

2010 Benedict Cumberbatch
With his cantilevered cheekbones, staring eyes and the glaciated attitude of the Ubermensch, Benedict Cumberbatch could have been painted by Munch. We ought to dislike him. But the modern-dress Sherlock, a big hit for the BBC this year and due back soon, is also a sad casualty of his own brilliance. He doesn’t smile much. Dr Watson (Martin Freeman) was never more important as a link between the warm human world and the cold hinterland of when-you-have-eliminated-the-impossible.

"Sherlock" is expected to return on BBC One Autumn 2011.

Picture Credit: BBC

The mystery of King George VI's stutter
(Slate): "'The King's Speech' raises more questions about stuttering than it answers"

Pip in Calcutta
(Independent): A new production of Dickens's "Great Expectations" is set in 19th-century India

That enigmatic smile
(Guardian): The identity of the "Mona Lisa" is known, yet speculation continues

Today's quote:

“It’s as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet.”

~ Jaron Lanier, computer scientist, on the information age, as quoted in, "How We Know" (New York Review of Books)

The director of "Waste Land", a film about Brazilians who pick recyclables from garbage and the art they create, on finding her subjects

IT'S not a complicated game, and it doesn’t embody any clever new technology. But it’s great fun, has astonishingly broad appeal and manages to encapsulate the current state of gaming in a squawking, pocket-sized bundle. It is, of course, “Angry Birds”.

The chances are that you have either played it, or seen someone else playing it or been invited to play it. But if not, the basic idea is that you use your mobile phone touch-screen to lob a preordained series of coloured birds, one after another, towards precarious buildings containing one or more circular green pigs. There is some kind of plot that explains all this, but nobody I know has ever bothered to pay attention to it, because that would delay the arrival of the next level.

The idea is to kill all the pigs by getting things to fall on them, knocking them to the ground or blowing them up (the colour-coded birds have different abilities). This usually requires multiple attempts as you try different demolition strategies. Once you’ve finished a level, another slightly harder one appears, and another, and another. It is life-stealingly addictive and hugely popular: about 30m copies of the game have been downloaded in the past year. But “Angry Birds” is more than just another mobile-phone game. It epitomises gaming in 2010 in three ways. First, it can be enjoyed by people of all ages, and by both casual and hardcore gamers. Each attempt at a level takes just a few seconds, which is great when you’re standing in a queue or on a train platform. But it can be played for hours on end. It’s simple enough to pick up quickly, yet also has depth and replay value for the more obsessive gamer. This is a circle that game publishers everywhere are suddenly trying to square.

Secondly, it runs on a phone, rather than a console. Games have become a key selling point for smartphones. Microsoft recently got into trouble when it implied that “Angry Birds” was on its way for phones powered by its Windows Mobile 7 software. It isn’t. But who wants a phone without “Angry Birds”?

Finally, this is the perfect game for the age of austerity. It’s either free (on Android phones) or a couple of pounds (on others), yet it provides as many hours of gameplay as a full-scale console game costing 15 times as much. The British prime minister, David Cameron, is among its fans; depending on your political views, this either indicates his dedication to cost-cutting—or, as the birds and pigs battle it out, mirrors the way spending cuts will pit Britons against each other.

Rovio, the Finnish developer behind “Angry Birds”, is rushing out a range of tie-in cuddly toys for Christmas. Which sounds like game over. The search is on for the next breakout hit.

Angry Birds is available on Apple iOS devices, Android phones, Palm webOS devices and high-end Nokia smartphones

YOU don’t usually hear loud orgasmic moans during an art auction. But on February 15th at Sotheby’s in London five activists interrupted the sale of a painting by Andy Warhol to protest against the British government’s proposed funding cuts. The young people, inspired by performance art, began their gig with groans and then unfolded a large red banner that declared the sale an "Orgy of the Rich."

The drama brought home the dizzying disconnection that exists between Europe’s morose economies and the vibrant art market. Indeed, the prestigious evening sales of contemporary art, when the auction houses offer their most expensive goods, were bullish. Christie’s brought in £61.4m ($98.9m), the third highest total for a February sale in London; Sotheby’s £44.4m. When combined with the results of a single-owner sale called “Looking Closely”, which had been held the previous week, Sotheby’s total for its post-war art auctions fetched £88m, the second highest February total ever.

It seemed as if the boom was back.

But the art markets of 2007 and 2011 are very different. Nicolai Frahm, who speculates on contemporary art, sees the market as more selective now. “Artists come in and out of fashion very fast,” he says, “making it very difficult to predict what will happen.” Cheyenne Westphal, Sotheby’s chairman of contemporary art Europe, explains: “What defined the boom for me is that you could buy one season, sell the next and make a profit. Things are different now. High prices are being achieved but you can’t turn the work around so quickly.”

Another change that has taken place over the past four years is that art buying is more global than it ever was. In the past, a handful of artists such as Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter have had deep markets that have spanned continents. Their long-standing international appeal is the main reason why these two names are still in the headlines. Mr Richter’s 1990 work, “Abstraktes Bild” (pictured above), achieved the highest price realised at Sotheby’s. It was bought by Patty Wong, the chairman of Sotheby’s Asia, for a client at £7.2m. And Warhol’s 1967 “Self-Portrait” (pictured right) was the top lot at Christie’s, purchased for £10.8m by an American dealer, Larry Gagosian.

Warhol is usually perceived to have the broader collector base, but Mr Richter enjoyed more multinational demand this week. During Sotheby’s evening sale, collectors from seven countries bid on three Richters, whereas buyers from five countries bid on five Warhols. Similarly, at Christie’s, clients from nine countries were registered to bid on Richters, with collectors from only five countries taking aim at Warhols.

Today, many more artists have international careers than even a few years ago. At Christie’s, on February 16th, 11 telephone bidders from eight countries competed to acquire Yan Pei-Ming’s painting of Mao Zedong. Francis Outred, Christie’s European head of post-war and contemporary art, explains that the shift is “part of a broader discussion about how art collectors start with their own, then go international.”

Although the breakdown of Sotheby’s and Christie’s contemporary sales look similar at first glance, with 51-53% of the lots staying in Europe and 9-11% going to Asia, Sotheby’s buyers came from 12 countries and Christie’s from an impressive 21. They offered a comparable number of lots. So why the disparity?

A close look at the nationalities of the artists featured in the auctions offers one explanation. The only artist from an emerging economic region in Sotheby’s sale was Ai Weiwei from China, whereas Christie’s included Adriana Varejao (Brazil), Bharti Kher (India), Almed Alsoudani (Iraq), and Yan Pei-Ming (China). A wider variety of artists invites a broader range of buyers.

Ms Varejao’s “Wall with Incisions a la Fontana II” (pictured right) enjoyed a spectacular success at Christie’s. Consigned by a Portuguese collector who bought it from London’s Victoria Miro Gallery in 2002 for £20,000, the painting made £1.1m, the highest price ever paid for an artwork by a living South American woman, driven primarily by Latin American bidding. South American interest in Ms Varejao’s work may also have had the benefit of spilling over into other parts of the sale, encouraging bidding from the region on works by Cindy Sherman and Eduardo Chillida. Once a bidder is registered, the temptation to take a punt on another lot can be hard to resist.

But not all artists are supported by their countrymen. Although Ai Weiwei is based in Beijing, his work has not been avidly collected in China where he is regarded as politically sensitive and too avant-garde. An active democracy campaigner, his art has mostly found homes in Europe and America. At Sotheby’s, Mr Ai’s 100kg of handmade porcelain sunflower seeds (pictured here), a domestic echo of the artist’s monumental installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, sold for €417,004 ($568,250) to an anonymous buyer on the phone to Gregoire Billault, a contemporary specialist based in Paris. The artist’s first sunflower piece, which weighed 500kg, was sold by Faurschou Gallery (of Beijing and Copenhagen) for €350,000 in 2009. That price indicates that, in less than two years, Mr Ai’s sunflower seeds have gone from €700 to €4170 per kilo—a sixfold increase. Sometimes, it makes sense to buy early and in bulk.

No discussion of the globality of the contemporary art market is complete without mentioning Damien Hirst. Sotheby’s evening sale contained no examples of his work, but Christie’s put three Hirsts on the block, including a pristine 1994 spot painting (pictured here), which realised £881,250. More than two years after “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”, the Sotheby’s sale that nearly suffocated the second-hand trade in Mr Hirst’s work, this price was wholesome enough that one commentator, Judd Tully, declared that the artist’s market was in “rehab condition”. Gagosian Gallery will be sure to have noticed. It is apparently preparing an international retrospective of Mr Hirst’s spot paintings with shows in every one of its locations—Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Athens, Moscow and Hong Kong, to name a few. The exhibitions are said to be scheduled for January 2012, by which time the aspirations of contemporary collectors will no doubt be even more groovily global.

I hardly read Irish writers any more, I've been disappointed so often... The older, more sophisticated Irish writers that want to be Nabokov give me the yellow squirts and a scaldy hole. If there is a movement in Ireland, it is backwards. Novel after novel set in the nineteen seventies, sixties, fifties. Reading award-winning Irish literary fiction, you wouldn't know television had been invented. Indeed, they seem apologetic about acknowledging electricity (or "the new Mechanikal Galvinism" as they like to call it).

IT'S tempting to quote all 1,800 words of Julian Gough's (year-old) answer to a mild-mannered question put to him about contemporary Irish fiction by his publisher. But then you'd miss his equally entertaining, and provocative, responses to questions on translation, European fiction and publishing in Ireland. So head over to his site and read the whole thing. (Mr Gough is an Irish writer himself, though lives in Berlin.)

I don't read enough Irish fiction to know if Mr Gough's claims are true. But during a recent trip to Ireland to research a piece on the country's mood after the crash and EU/IMF bail-out, I was struck by what little impact Ireland's boom and subsequent bust seemed to have had on the domestic arts.

This, remember, was a truly extraordinary story. The plot follows a satisfying rags-to-riches-to-rags narrative arc, with enough hubris and nemesis to satisfy the most demanding classicist. The cast of characters is superlative, featuring buccaneering bankers, outsized politicians and all-conquering property developers (plus a few poor Cassandras). Even the locations are enticing, from rural beauty spots blighted by "ghost estates" to high-end networking jamborees masquerading as racing events.

You'd expect this sorry tale to have generated a wave of films, plays and novels. After all, the Irish have never shied away from telling stories about themselves. Visual artists must have hit upon a new mode of expression. Musicians, surely, would have found a way to express the story through song, as they have done with so many of Ireland's historical traumas. Hell, this story could make an opera.

But there is little sign of an artistic response to Ireland's crash. In Dublin, I saw a production of John B Keane's "The Field", a 1965 play about a land dispute in south-west Ireland. (It was excellent; readers who happen to find themselves in County Mayo between Tuesday and Thursday next week should check it out).

The play was about a very different time in Irish history, but a few lines happened to resonate with more recent events—"There's a craze for land everywhere!", for instance. These invariably drew hearty chuckles from the audience, suggesting an appetite for some kind of dramatic interpretation of the Celtic Tiger years. But one of the producers told me that they had decided to re-stage the play before Ireland came bumping down to earth; the fact that parts of the script now sounded like a description of recent years was a (happy) coincidence.

That was about it. I spotted no exhibitions devoted to depictions of the new misery wrought on Irish lives, heard no songs expressing the anxiety and uncertainty that is so palpable in the country at large. I spent one delightful night in a small-town pub surrounded by enthusiastically warbling songsters and songstresses, but their repertoire did not seem to extend to anything more recent than the Easter Rising. (Although I am told that YouTube is dripping with home-made "bail-out songs".) An admittedly cursory scan through the programme of the Irish Film Festival, which began yesterday, throws up work devoted to the war in Croatia and ethnic tensions in Burma, but little on the drama at home. (Readers will no doubt be kind enough to point me in the direction of any works that have escaped my notice.)

As for novels, the journey from conception to publication can be long, often longer than the two-and-a-bit years since the Irish government decided to guarantee the debts of the country's rapidly collapsing banks, the first big sign that Ireland's landing was not going to be soft. So perhaps we can expect a wave of recession-lit in the coming years. Anne Enright (pictured), author of the Booker-winning "The Gathering", told me that her next novel is set in February 2009, a strange, limbo time when nobody realised how quickly the country was falling into recession.

But I'm not sure. Ireland has had the best part of 20 years to produce a novel that captured the exciting, sometimes frenzied mood of a country undergoing momentous economic and social change. If it's been written, people don't appear to have bought it. Much of the Irish literature that has populated the bookshops and the bestseller lists in that time has been of the Frank McCourt-style "misery memoir" type: sorry autobiographical or semi-autobiographical tales of poverty, domestic violence and abuse of various licit or illicit substances.

Why might this be? Ireland is certainly not lacking a distinguished literary history. In "Ship of Fools", his polemical response to Ireland's crash and the people that caused it, Fintan O'Toole, a well-known Irish journalist and critic, suggests that Ireland lacked the tradition of forensic social realism needed to deal with a chaotic period like the years of the Celtic Tiger. When I put this to Ms Enright, she agreed, sort of, but suggested that this was a natural consequence of Ireland's history, specifically the fact that it never underwent a genuine industrial revolution. "We can't produce a George Eliot any more than we can a steam railway," she said.

Kevin Barry, another author I met, told me that Irish literature was "weirdly retrospective". This may, he suggested, have something to do with the fact that Ireland in effect "skipped the 20th century"—it transformed itself from a poor, largely agricultural economy into a high-tech export-intensive powerhouse in less than a generation. Mr Barry said he was "not rubbing his hands with glee" at the prospect of the epic Irish social novel. His soon-to-be published debut novel, "City of Bohane", is a "Clockwork Orange"-style dystopia set in a fictional Irish town in 2054. (If it's half as good as his New Yorker short story from last year, it'll be worth reading.)

Mr O'Toole also draws attention to a couple of crime novels, "small masterpieces" he says do a good job of depicting Ireland's "globalised culture". In that vein I should mention that a couple of friends have recommended Alan Glynn's "Winterland" as painting an accurate portrait of the seamy side of Ireland's boom.

One more thought. Although Ireland's top-flight novelists have tended not to tackle the big story of their country's recent history in their fiction—at least not directly—they have proved willing to express their thoughts in other media. Ms Enright has taken to the pages of the London Review of Books to describe, compellingly, the recession. After last November's bail-out, amid much talk about Ireland's humiliating loss of sovereignty Colm Tóibin provided British radio listeners with three minutes of wisdom and common sense. A week earlier John Banville, another Booker winner, struck a slightly more melancholy tone in the New York Times.

I may be wrong, but I'm not sure that there are many other countries which outsiders would turn to novelists to explain. It helps, of course, that the Irish speak English. But were Australia's economy to collapse, or Canada's banks to buckle (unlikely, I know), I don't imagine newspaper editors would solicit op-eds from Tim Winton or Alice Munro. Readers can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall major cultural figures from Greece or Portugal cropping up in mainstream media outlets to describe their countries' respective woes.

Why might this be? I think there may be supply and demand reasons. On the supply side, Ireland is a small, proud country with a long history of telling its story to the world. It has treated its literary children well; perhaps they are considered to have earned their place as narrators and so feel confident about acting out that role on the international stage. (This, of course, makes the absence of fictional responses to the crash even odder.) On the demand side, many of us hold tight to outdated notions of Ireland as a romantic sort of place that only the artist can really understand. Even in the form of newspaper articles, the novelist's response, we suspect, will take us beyond the deathly analyses of economists and historians and uncover the true soul of the place.

At £3.50 a seed
(New York Times): Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s works “Sunflower Seeds’’ sold at Sotheby’s in London Tuesday evening for £349,250

Angry Birds vs Halo
(Wired): Mobile games endanger the console gaming industry

Man Asian prize will reward published work
(Wall Street Journal): “As we sat down and thought about it, we came to realize that, in fact, the Man Booker format of dealing with published novels is a lot better”

Today's quote:

“If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable. ”

~ Martin Amis, "Martin Amis claims only a 'serious brain injury' could make him write children's literature" (Telegraph)

WHERE are the good plays about climate change? At More Intelligent Life Robert Butler writes about two plays on the subject that opened in London recently: "Greenland" (pictured top), at the National Theatre, got panned, and "The Heretic", at the Royal Court, got raves. If you go and see both, you could come away fairly confused about climate science.

Highly divisive issues have generated some important plays: think of McCarthyism and Arthur Miller’s "The Crucible", or AIDS and Tony Kushner’s "Angels in America", or political correctness and David Mamet’s "Oleanna". Yet 20 years after the first report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and five years after "An Inconvenient Truth", no major playwright had written a play about the subject. Many reasons have been suggested for this. The science is complex. The links between cause and effect (on which plays depend) are hard to show. Arts organisations get sponsorship from Big Oil. And everyone has made up their mind anyway...

Jim Thompson, author of "The Grifters", once wrote there are 32 ways to write a story (and he had used every one of them), but there is only one plot: "Things are not what they seem." The problem with climate change is that the scientific consensus is a bit of a bore. It just doesn't catch our imagination. As an audience, we are naturally drawn to deception and mystery, the half-hidden and the shadows. The theatre may be the one place where we hope our trust in authority figures will prove to be misplaced. The authors of "Greenland" might have had more fun if they had concentrated on the smooth and powerful authority figures who deny the science, rather than the earnest folks who fret over it. That's where the action is. As David Mamet told an interviewer, "Drama is basically about lies, somebody lying to somebody." It's the impulse audiences had in Ancient Greece, when characters were portrayed with masks. Whichever way you tell the story, we want to see the mask slip.

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ADRIAN TOMINE, a Brooklyn-based cartoonist, is something of a poster boy for a certain kind of carefully studied mopery. His spare, elegant lines bear the influence of such comics greats as Dan Clowes ("Ghost World") and Jaime Hernandez ("Love and Rockets"). But his dialogue and stories skew more Woody Allen, if Woody Allen were a young Asian guy from the West Coast.

His highly regarded comic book "Optic Nerve" began life as a mini-comic in 1991 when Tomine, who is Japanese American, was still in high school in Sacramento. It was picked up in 1995 by Drawn + Quarterly, a Montreal-based comics publisher, and Tomine remains with the outfit today. "Optic Nerve" was most recently collected and released as the graphic novel “Shortcomings” (2009), which found Tomine’s protagonist and possible alter-ego Ben Tanaka navigating the fraught territory of romance, desire and identity with his girlfriend, Miko. Ben’s fondness for the white ladies spins the couple out into the kind of conflict at which Tomine excels, his sharp ear for dialogue limning both the political and the highly personal.

Those not initiated into the comics scene might recognise Tomine’s work from the New Yorker, where his clean, stylish drawings and muted colour palette grace the cover from time to time. His covers carry a strain of his usual melancholy, but the mute, single-panel format tempers it into something more like wistfulness. Still, Tomine’s figures seem to be strangers to happiness, or even contentment, which is why his latest offering, "Scenes From an Impending Marriage", comes as such a nice surprise.

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RAMALLAH, the de facto capital city of the West Bank, has been festooned in red and white for nearly a week. Palestinians are busy celebrating two seemingly incongruous occasions: the revolution in Egypt and Valentine's Day.

When news of Hosni Mubarak's resignation broke last Friday evening, hundreds of men, women and children gathered in Ramallah's central square to cheer on their neighbours, waving red, white and black Egyptian flags. Amid singing, dancing and the occasional home-made fireworks display, the crowds chanted slogans denouncing President Barack Obama and American interference in the Middle East politics, and called for an end to dictatorships throughout the region.

Like much of the Arab world, Palestinians in the West Bank appear to be buoyed by Egypt's revolution and fed up with American foreign policy. But the wave of pan-Arab solidarity sweeping the region seems to have done little to dilute the appeal of Valentine's Day, a romantic holiday with Christian roots and a uniquely American commercial spin. In the past few years, Valentine's Day has become incredibly popular in Ramallah and other West Bank cities, and this year was no exception.

Last week, many store-owners in Ramallah's predominately Muslim shopping district, Manara, began displaying heart-shaped candy and stuffed animals emblazoned with familiar declarations, such as "I love You" and "Be My Mine" in Arabic and English. On the eve of Valentine's Day, the festivities continued in cities across the West Bank as Palestinians bought gifts for their loved ones and revelled in the reflected glow of Egypt's revolution.