Pearlify Me
I am worth my weight in pearls.
Didn't you know this?
Watch how they push up from my skin -
Boils and bruises turned to brilliance
I am a page of Braille-written grievances
The pressure is my becoming.
What am I without it?
Pearlify me
Until I am a beast of sand and cracked ceramic
My only value is in the tension
Bring it on
Drown me in it
And I'll fill my lungs with your bullshit
Let it be my worth
Until I clink and chip when I walk
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
6 hours ago
- Irish Times
Malachy Clerkin: Cannot wait for Lions tour, but why does rugby always feel this need for overblown nonsense?
It was well into the wee hours on Sunday night and the final round of the US Open had gone medieval. The best golfers in the world were falling into sinkholes all over Oakmont, drowning in grass, dissolving in rain. It was like watching live action Pac-Man, as one of the most difficult courses in the world chomped them all to crumbs. A snuff movie in soft spikes. But then, through the gloom, Sky came back from an ad break and from the opening seconds of the soundtrack you feared the worst. It was the light plinking guitar of The Mighty Rio Grande by This Will Destroy You, a portentously named instrumental band from Texas. You know it better as the music from the Moneyball movie. READ MORE The music played over footage of mysterious footsteps in the shadows. Smoke swirling around eight headless mannequins decked in red. A silhouetted figure stood before the camera, his head bowed, his face obscured. 'Finally, it's time,' growled Scottish actor Gerard Butler , laying the accent on thicker than a cranachan layer. 'It's Lions o'clock...' Ah, no. Please no. Not this stuff. Not again. Alas, yes, indeed, it is time for this stuff again. Regular as clockwork, like a naff Halley's Comet, the rugby industrial complex has started picking up speed. The Lions series is upon us, which means that rugby's comically overblown way of selling itself is cranking into gear. Even in the dead of night when we're watching the golf. Especially in the dead of night when we're watching golf. Gerard Butler is seen during the pre-2023 World Cup warm-up rugby union match between Scotland and Georgia at Murrayfield. Photograph: Andy Buchanan/Getty 'Gggggrraaaaggggghhhh,' Butler offered, scratching at the back of his head. 'Goosebumps,' he said, in case we thought he was selling dandruff shampoo. 'It's ... it's Barry,' he stuttered over footage of Barry John in 1971, as though he himself couldn't believe he was ploughing through this nonsense. On and on, through clips of old tours, old tests, old fights. For some reason, footage of Daniel Craig popped up at one stage, 007 visiting the Lions dressingroom after the third test in 2013. 'Actors, eh?' Butler winked, conveying some class of inside joke. Your guess is as good as anyone else's. All of it was mere preamble to the final 20 seconds, whereupon Butler rose himself to his full height and unleashed various lines from Shakespeare's Henry V. Part of the once-more-unto-the-breach speech repurposed and Tik-Tokified for the digital generation. 'Stiffen the sinews. Summon up the blood! Show us the mettle of your pasture, boys [he was shouting by now], for we doubt it not. And if it be a sin to covet honour, be the most offending souls alive [he was whispering by now].' Look. I can't wait to watch the Lions. You can't wait to watch the Lions. In a world where everything has had its edges planed and its knobbly bits lopped off, the continued existence of the Lions is a miracle. Nobody sitting down today with a blank piece of paper and the sport of rugby union to plan from scratch would dare to dream it up. It's too far-fetched. It makes no sense. The Lions tour is one of the only bankable entities in a sport that struggles for mass appeal. Photograph: Billy Stickland/INPHO Yet, somehow, one of the maddest and best ideas from rugby's amateur days has been preserved. Not just that, it has thrived. It has survived the Covid nadir, it has endured endlessly lengthening seasons, it has kept on as one of the only bankable entities in a sport that struggles for mass appeal. It's here and it's magnificent, one of the absolute highlights of the sporting year. So why can't rugby let us enjoy it for what it is? It's just a sport, lads. Indeed, it's one of the purest forms of any sport, anywhere. Nothing about it matters except the matches and the results. Never mind your ersatz Agincourt cosplaying – sell that. A Lions tour is like the Ryder Cup – you're immersed in it, completely and faithfully, for every last second that it's on. And when it's over, it's gone until the next time and you couldn't care less. Apart from the players and the staff involved, nobody's day is made or ruined by the result. It is its own thing, a glorious mayfly, here and gone in a finger snap. We've spent more than 30 years watching Sky sell sport and other events in every overhyped, overblown way imaginable. Photograph: Billy Stickland/INPHO And that's a good thing. That's what gives the Lions its own unique energy and momentum. The 40,000 or so who will go to Australia for it over the coming weeks are all chasing that once-in-a-lifetime buzz, that feeling of being right there among it when the planets align. There's a lot of mythmaking around the Lions and there's no harm in people wanting to attach themselves to it. Plenty are going for a right good jolly-up – and there's nothing wrong with that either. All of which raises the question: who is that Sky ad for? And why do they only ever use this kind of guff to sell rugby? We've spent more than 30 years watching them sell football in every overhyped, overblown way imaginable. Other sports and events too – the revitalised darts is a triumph of hype and publicity, the aforementioned Ryder Cup will be undeniable come September. And yet they wouldn't be caught dead trying to evoke a 400-year-old play based on a 600-year-old battle to gin up publicity for those sports. So why rugby? It's not just Sky, either. Plenty of pre-Six Nations montages on RTÉ and BBC come infused with this carry-on as well. It's as though somebody somewhere decided that rugby can only be sold to lizard-brained Game of Thrones acolytes, waiting for the mist to clear the mountains so a ball can be thrown into a lineout. Of course, there was a more immediate – and far duller – answer on Sunday night. As soon as Butler finished caterwauling, the golf commentator Andrew Coltart dutifully informed viewers that How to Train Your Dragon, starring Butler, is in cinemas now. Just happened to have been released two days earlier, in fact. If it be a sin to covet bums on seats at your nearest Odeon...
Irish Times
6 hours ago
- Irish Times
‘Maybe Elon Musk is quite gullible. He seems to fall for a lot of conspiracy theories'
Taking us from the Renaissance Florence of Leonardo da Vinci via the songwriting chemistry of Lennon and McCartney to the Florida launch pad of Elon Musk's SpaceX , Helen Lewis's new book, The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers, sets out to unravel the mystery of what we mean when we call someone a genius and asks whether the modern idea of genius as a class of special people is distorting our view of the world. There's a sense throughout the book that these people are modern versions of saints, that they're performing something sacred in our increasingly secular world. It is a really compelling argument, made by historian Darrin McMahon in his Divine Fury: A History of Genius, that during the Enlightenment, when people became more rationalist, less religious, we still craved this sense of the divine. The idea that miracles happen in the world. Where you might once have thought that a miracle was attributable to the Virgin Mary, now the miracle is: how did Van Gogh's paintings happen? How did someone have this moment of inspiration where they came up with this scientific breakthrough? There is this deep hunger within all of us for the world not to be mundane, for there to be things that are still extraordinary within it. Even the phrase 'gifted', which people sometimes use about children and young people. Gifted by whom and for what purpose? READ MORE In classical times, you were possessed by 'a genius'. The muse of poetry or whatever spoke through you. I think that was a much more healthy way to think about it. The argument in the book really is about this category of special people and what that does to us and to them. It's much healthier to say I've done something extraordinary rather than I'm an extraordinary person and everything I do is probably going to be brilliant. That's the bit that tends to lead people astray. You look in the book at the story of how Shakespeare became the figure that he is now. Part of that is these enablers who made sure the folios weren't destroyed and forgotten. And then there's a fascinating process of mythmaking, which is about Englishness and Britishness in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. It's a classic story for your purposes, isn't it? Because there is something extraordinary going on in those plays, but then there's a whole other process that involves lots of people. That's the bit I wanted to try to unpick. There's a bad version of this book that is falsely egalitarian and implies that there is no such thing as extraordinary achievement. You're hard-pressed to look at the plays of Shakespeare and think that. So, yeah, I'm not trying to argue that great achievement doesn't exist, but I think which achievements we choose to praise and flag up often has a political dimension to it too, which is worth exploring. Helen Lewis, author of The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers Then there's another element added to the mix, which is the idea of the artist as mad, bad and dangerous to know. The outsider who burns brightly and sputters out early. I find that really interesting because it isn't at all the idea of the artist that you have before then, If you take someone like a Rembrandt, he was painting portraits of rich Dutch people. There was no sense that in order to market himself, he needed to be wasting away in a cupboard somewhere. It's only when you get to the Romantics that we get so into the idea that great art has this terrible cost to people. Susan Sontag wrote about tuberculosis being part of that story. Tuberculosis, which spiked as people moved into cities, has a lot of symptoms that are quite similar to all the things that people used to say about Romantic poets. And that's hard to separate out from the rise of capitalism. The idea that artists don't rely on patronage any more. They now compete in the marketplace. My brutal conclusion about a lot of the way that we talk about genius is that it's really a kind of a branding exercise. The idea that the life itself is the work of art. One of the things that's really interesting is the hunger for people who achieve things to have had interesting biographies and the slight sense of disappointment when they don't, as if we feel like we've been cheated. The book is also very much about science and also about pseudoscience – when science gets too big for its boots. Someone like Francis Galton, who used to be very famous but has been airbrushed out of history by embarrassed institutions. He was an incredible 19th-century polymath, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin from the same very talented family. He came to be interested in the idea of genius. He was grappling with the new ideas of evolution and natural selection and selective breeding. And that gets him to eugenics, which is the idea that you can 'improve a population' by only letting the smart people have babies. From that, you get this scientific discipline of eugenics that has absolutely no human empathy behind it. And it was really widely accepted. I used to work for the New Statesman magazine, which was founded by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who were Fabian socialists. But part of the paternalism of their socialism was they were interested in the eugenics movement. I wrote in my last book, Difficult Women, about Marie Stopes, the great contraceptive pioneer, who was also madly interested, until the [19]30s, it was a respectable scientific endeavour. Because people hadn't yet had the vivid proof about what happened when this ideology was put into practice. The book is a very odd book. It pings about from Renaissance Florence to eugenics to The Beatles. When you put them all together, you begin to realise that we have these very deep ideas about human worth and that we're always fighting over them. [ Difficult Women book review: Whirlwind tour of feminism Opens in new window ] One of the other themes is that just because somebody is good at something, it doesn't mean they're necessarily good at anything else. But that seems to be a common fallacy. Yes, the book ends with Elon Musk, who I think is a great demonstration of this. It's hard for people on the left to acknowledge that he did have great success in business because of personal qualities. He's not purely a lucky idiot who wandered into his success with Tesla and SpaceX. However, the last six months have shown that he isn't good at everything. If I may say something controversial, maybe he also is quite gullible. He seems to fall for a lot of conspiracy theories. What it comes back to is humility. Just because you've had great success in one area, you should still be humble about all the other areas. Humility doesn't seem to come with most of these characters. There's a really interesting question about whether or not there are certain personality traits that make you more predisposed to either be a genius or get called a genius. A certain level of narcissism, because you're okay with people looking at you and bigging you up and you accept the attention and you thrive in it. You can take two people of absolutely equal achievements and the bigger narcissist will probably get called a genius more. You quote someone saying that in this world there are actors and there are movie stars. I think that there are these people who have those magnetic qualities to them. But yeah, it's really hard to separate it out, isn't it? You can't be a genius on your own. It's not an intrinsic quality to you. It's something that gets conferred on you by other people. There's a right-wing, left-wing element to this. On the one hand an emphasis on collaboration and community. And on the other, on the primacy of individual agency and the individual casting off the bonds of the little people all around him. Because of copyright, because of the patent system, because of people wanting to make money, it becomes winner takes all. Alexander Graham Bell becomes the inventor of the telephone, even though it was much more collaborative than that. You're a writer with t he Atlantic magazine and often cover politics. Some of these themes feed into what's happening right now, such as the assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). I have my own reservations about some aspects of DEI, but the crudeness of that assault uses language about excellence being damped down by it. Is there a resurgence of the genius myth happening right now? Definitely. One of the things I argue in the book is that every age has its own different template of genius, which tells you a lot about that society. Our current one is the tech superman, these brilliant start-up founders who have an insight that no one else does. And you are right, they are often guys who think that they're just special people. But to go back to Elon Musk, both Tesla and SpaceX had significant public investment. SpaceX, at its lowest point, got a Nasa contract that assured its future. So, yeah, the dynamism of the private sector contributed enormously to its success, but taxpayers' money was ultimately also part of the story of what allowed it to thrive. It's really tempting for people to believe that they made it all on their own, whereas what you usually need is talent, plus luck, plus society that lets you achieve stuff. [ Elon Musk sees humanity's purpose as a facilitator of superintelligent AI. That should worry us Opens in new window ] As you point out, there are millions of people who never got that opportunity. Like you, I have reservations about some of the way that that DEI has ended up being implemented. Things like the implicit bias test don't really seem to predict very well who is actually racist in real life. But go back and look at someone as brilliant a scientist as George Washington Carver, who was black and therefore never got to go to school. Or the fact that Jewish people were excluded from lots of the Ivy Leagues. The exclusion of women from the professions for a huge amount of history. The number of bright working-class kids who never got the opportunities they deserved. So for all that we are now in this period of backlash, I think you have to say that the small efforts that we've made towards allowing more people to realise their potential come against this background of a huge amount through human history of wasted talent. I'm thinking about all the children who died in war or starved to death. There's a quote from Stephen Jay Gould about people who got very into preserving bits of Einstein's brain. He said he was less interested in the exact form of Einstein's brain than in the people who were just as brilliant but who died working in sweatshops or cotton fields. The Genius Myth is published by Penguin This is an edited extract from an episode of the Inside Politics with Hugh Linehan podcast Is there any such thing as a political genius? With Helen Lewis Listen | 39:17
Irish Times
6 hours ago
- Irish Times
The Mona Lisa is on the move and staff at the Louvre are not happy
The Mona Lisa is bound for a new part of the Louvre, which if she were alive she would presumably be very happy about, even if no one would be able to tell for sure. Her eyes have been following people around the room for so long that no one has stopped to think it could be the walls she's looking at with that hint of disgust. Maybe she's long fancied a change of scene. Unveiled by Emmanuel Macron, the French president, earlier this year, the plan to give her a room of her own at the Paris museum seems wise on paper, though I fear the comings and goings will seed the kind of confusion that makes perfect heist-plot material and risks bringing Danny Ocean and his crew out of retirement for one last job. As for that hint of disgust, researchers from the University of Amsterdam used emotion-recognition software in 2005 to quantify that the expression of the Mona Lisa, aka the Florentine noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo, nee Gherardini, is 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful, 2 per cent angry, less than 1 per cent neutral and 83 per cent happy. READ MORE [ Potential new names for the Department of Arts: Smacc, Cacs, Scam and – my favourite – DoSac Opens in new window ] I don't have a precise breakdown of how staff at the Louvre feel, but this week's abrupt work stoppage suggests they are not quite 83 per cent happy and are somewhat more than 2 per cent angry. The museum failed to open for several hours on Monday morning because a scheduled staff meeting turned into what one union representative called 'a mass expression of exasperation'. The source of this exasperation isn't complicated. The Louvre is overcrowded, understaffed and crumbling, and workers aren't the only ones to have noticed. Visiting it has become 'a physical ordeal', with 'no space to take a break' and 'insufficient' toilet and catering facilities, its director, Laurence des Cars, warned in a memo to France's culture minister, Rachida Dati, in January. Even its architecture is conspiring against it. The glass-and-steel pyramid entrance, completed in 1989, creates a 'very inhospitable' greenhouse effect on hot days, while some areas suffer temperature variations that endanger the preservation of the artworks. And parts of the building are 'no longer watertight'. Soon after Le Parisien newspaper published this leaked memo about the leaky Louvre, Macron sprang into announcement mode, emptying the Salle des États – the room where the Mona Lisa currently resides – to reveal a renovation and expansion project dubbed its Nouvelle Renaissance. [ You might think it's Your Friends & Neighbors, but And Just Like That... is the only true aspirational show on TV Opens in new window ] The €800 million vision includes the addition of underground rooms, the construction of a new entrance near the river Seine and the relocation of Leonardo da Vinci 's masterpiece to a dedicated room accessible via an add-on to the main ticket. I saw the Mona Lisa in January 2005. A few months later it was moved to a different spot and placed in a sealed enclosure made of bulletproof glass. This was unconnected to my visit. What I remember about that trip to the Louvre is that Paris was freezing, so my expression by the time we reached the painting was likely 83 per cent relief just to be indoors. Another 10 per cent was probably fatigue from contemplating what felt like the majority of the Louvre's 33,000 less-famous artworks along the way, and 7 per cent was weirdly prescient regret that proper smartphones hadn't been invented yet. The great thing about the Mona Lisa is that it's small enough for a selfie. I'm confident I could have fitted my big Irish head and the whole portrait into one frame. I'm not now in the habit of taking selfies beside paintings, but a significant number of the near nine million people who visit the Louvre each year like to try. It doesn't necessarily lessen their appreciation of 16th-century art. They might not have had any to start with. And if you're paying €22 in, or €30 from 2026 if you're a non-EU visitor, it is perhaps not entirely daft to want a record of your 'ordeal'. As for those who snap only the painting, they may have concluded that the Mona Lisa's smile is enigmatic mainly because she is so tiny and far away. If they use their phones' zoom function, they can get a closer look. So don't blame the customers, blame the infrastructure, and adjust your expectations accordingly, because unless the Louvre's daily visitor cap is tightened, congestion and frustration seem inevitable for a while yet: the glaring flaw in Macron's ambitious plan for a roomier museum is that it will take up to 10 years to complete. My advice for anyone keen to absorb some Leonardo genius in the meantime is to choose Milan. Book well in advance and see The Last Supper instead . It beats the elbow-sharpening and neck-craning required to glimpse the Mona Lisa through a sea of screens – or, if you're my height, a selection of armpits that elicit at least 9 per cent disgust.
