"The Making of a Bureaucrat" by Micheal O'Loughlin

"The Making of a Bureaucrat" by Michael O'Loughlin  (1989, 13 pages)

Year III

March 1 to March 31

 Michael O'Loughlin

Dublin

Event Resources-Links to lots of short stories, from classics to brand new works.   Please contact me if you are interested in doing a guest post.

I was born to the stink of whiskey and failure 
And the scattered corpse of the real. 
This is my childhood and country: 
The cynical knowing smile 
Plastered onto ignorance 
Ideals untarnished and deadly 
Because never translated to action 
And everywhere 
The sick glorification of failure. 
Our white marble statues were draped in purple 
The bars of the prison were born in our eyes 
And if reality ever existed 
It was a rotten tooth 
That couldn't be removed. Michael O'Loughlin 

Michael O'Loughlin is primarily known for his poetry and his amazing skill with language shows very strongly in "The Making of a Bureaucrat", the first work of his I have had the privilege of reading.    We first meet our lead character in Barcelona on the day that Spain was admitted to the European union.  The bars are full of wildly celebrating people. The narrator works for the European Union, basically shuffling papers.   He meets a wild man in a bar, he calls him Frederick after the German Emperor Frederick the great.  O'Loughlin gives is a marvelous description of him  and the narrator's first meeting:

“You! Who are you and what are you doing here?” So I told him, at least to the best of my knowledge. About Frederick and who he was, it would take me a lot longer to figure out. That first evening in Jordi’s bar, I learned a few things. He was about forty years old, seemed to have been here a few years. From his English it was possible to deduce a hippy-era past, not to mention the frequent references to events that had taken place in Nepal and Kabul, Marrakesh and San Francisco. He had even spent some time in Galway in the early seventies. But Frederick didn’t just talk about his experiences, fascinating as they were. His soundtrack alone would be meaningless: his whole being was a dazzling performance of words, gestures

The narrator normally goes to simpler working class bars but once and while he is drawn back to the bar where he met Frederick.  I really enjoyed learning this about him:  "As soon as I got used to his hippy dialect, I realized he had read everything, and thought about it."

Soon he begins to see Frederick as the first true existential hero he has ever met.   O'Loughlin's prose is so wonderful I find I must quote it again.

 "He could repeat a litany of words like money, freedom, country, love and make it seem like the most subtle Czech cabaret. It reminded me of people you can sometimes come across in pubs in Ireland, men who with a little alcohol can make you feel you are in the presence of genius, who can create pieces of performance art which exist only in the sensations of the moment. An art of spontaneity, contemptuous of the bad faith implicit in thinking beyond the moment. In short, Frederick was the first real existentialist hero I had ever met, outside the pages of fiction."

There is an amazing very devastating revelation about Frederick in the story.  I never saw it coming and I will be surprised if others will 

Author Data

Michael O’Loughlin was born in Dublin in 1958 and studied at Trinity College Dublin. In the late 1970s he was involved with Dermot Bolger in setting up Raven Arts Press. In 1980 he moved to Barcelona for some years. After this, he lived in Amsterdam until 2002, where he worked mainly as a translator. He has translated over a hundred books from the Dutch, includingHidden Weddings: Selected Poems of Gerrit Achterberg. In the 1990s he concentrated on screenwriting and had a number of feature films produced.

Since returning to Ireland in 2002, he has been Writer in Residence in Galway City and County, as well as Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. He has received many awards, including the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship. As well as his five volumes of poetry, the most recent of which is In This Life (2011), he has published many essays and reviews. He is married to the singer and writer Judith Mok, and has a daughter, Saar. He lives in Dublin.

Michael O’Loughlin is important as one of the few genuine, intellectual, working-class voices in Irish poetry. His poetry displays the sensibilities of many of his generation and background who felt alienated by the prevailing myths of national identity which had been forged in the aftermath of the 1920s bourgeois revolution. This included the establishment’s manipulation of the Irish language and its set of idols formed from historical and mythical heroes of blood sacrifice.

I read this book in  The Anchor Book of New Irish Writing . Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition. 

I am discovering lots of wonderful new to me writers, Michael O'Loughlin for sure is one of them.

Here is a link to a very interesting interview with the author in The Dublin Quarterly.


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