I enjoyed this
The Booker Prize is billed as âthe worldâs most significant award for a single work of fictionâ. Itâs big business nowadays, promoted with internet events, talks, signings and a social media fanfare feeding 400,000 TikTok followers. I almost wish that deadpan football pundit Roy Keane was on duty for the ceremony itself, muttering âLots of presentations⊠lots of hullabaloo⊠a lot of nonsense. Writing? Thatâs their job.â
Donât get me wrong: 2024 winner Samantha Harvey has done a fine job with Orbital, which takes place over a single day in space. Itâs a graceful, insightful meditation on the Earth and humanity and a worthy winner, despite not being the bookiesâ favourite. The front runner was James, by American writer Percival Everett, a novel that puts James, the escaped slave Jim from Mark Twainâs 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, at the centre of the action. I gave the novel four stars in April, enjoying its droll, clever, lacerating story.
Prize awards aside, itâs fruitless and almost impossible to pick between the merits of two such different novels. What is hard to believe, though, is that the Booker judges would have risked the fallout from trumpeting a shortlist dominated by âthe highest number of women in the prizeâs 55-year historyâ and, being fully aware that the prize has gone only six times to women since 2008, then handed the ÂŁ50,000 award to the shortlistâs sole man. Edmund de Waal, chair of the judges, was asked specifically whether the only male writer had a âgenuine chanceâ and insisted the decision âwasnât a tick-box exerciseâ. He said the panel was unanimous that Harvey, the only Brit in the running (she was born in Kent in 1975), was the right choice.
There was certainly no outstanding candidate from the other four short-listed books, although Canadian Anne Michaelsâs Held, a novel spanning four generations, was perhaps my favourite, a work of real lyrical beauty. I also enjoyed Australian Charlotte Woodâs Stone Yard Devotional, although her brilliant 2019 novel The Weekend is better. Rachel Kushnerâs Creation Lake and Yael van der Woudenâs debut The Safekeep were always long shots.
So what of Orbital, the first Booker Prize-winner set in space and which, at just 144 pages, was the shortest book among the contenders (itâs only three pages longer than the shortest-ever Booker winner, Penelope Fitzgeraldâs Offshore, which won in 1979)? Harvey is one of Britainâs most original, ambitious writers, and Orbital, her fifth novel, explores the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station. During those 24 hours, they observe 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets.
Along with the two women and four men in space, Earth is one of the main characters. Through their planet-viewing windows, the astronauts observe climate breakdown first hand, as they watch a category 4 typhoon over the Philippines. Harvey describes the crew as âfortune tellers who can see and tell the future but do nothing to change or stop itâ. They observe an ocean roll over a town, floodwaters surge inland, bridges giving way, devastation for humans.
Harveyâs win comes in the immediate wake of the terrible floods in Spain. The Booker press release describes Orbital as âa book about a wounded worldâ and cites its win in âa year of geopolitical crisis, likely to be the warmest year in recorded historyâ. Yet De Waal played down the idea that the award would influence the way readers âapproach the environmentâ. He said: âNo, I donât think fiction has a practical impact. Iâm not interested in books about issues. Iâm interested in books that inhabit ideas through fiction. Whether it changes the next round of Cop, itâs not for me as the chair of judges to say. I donât understand the relationship between fiction and political action. What I can say is that extraordinary fiction can change people and their experience, and it can change collective reading. It can change conversations between people now.â
The 2024 United Nations Conference of the Parties is taking place now in Baku, Azerbaijan, but Iâm highly sceptical that Orbital (or any book for that matter), could make a jot of meaningful difference to changing the conversation about saving the planet. Itâs been decades since Kurt Vonnegut summed it up with the lament that, âThe good Earth â we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.â
In any case, I doubt political persuasion was Harveyâs aim. For her, Orbital is âspace pastoral⊠a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space, with a slightly nostalgic sense of whatâs disappearing.â The novel works effectively with scale, zooming between the cosmic and the mundane human, and sparkling with neat descriptions of the Earthâs bare beauty. âAfrica from space looks like a late Turner,â writes Harvey, who worked for a brief time in an astronomy museum. The former student of philosophy at the University of York also captures the wakeful fragility of modern existence, with bleak observations about the enduring fate of all humankind. âTime moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly insensate to our preference for living,â she writes.
Orbital, chosen from an original list of 156 books, is far from an intimidating read, however, and has already struck a chord with book buyers. It went into prize week as the âsales leaderâ among the shortlisted, having sold more than 30,000 copies since its release in June.
But while there are lots of things to admire about Orbital, I canât match the admiration of De Waal, who hailed the book as âmiraculousâ, one he and his fellow judges felt âcompelled to shareâ. The last Booker winner that came close to that was Douglas Stuartâs 2020 triumph Shuggie Bain. Then again, the whole business of Booker prizes has always been a cosmic crapshoot. I still marvel that William Trevor was nominated five times and never won, not even for The Children of Dynmouth (1976) or Reading Turgenev (1991). See, we all get starry-eyed over different things.
Youâd miss this sort of journalism. No snowflakes back then.
The flags in shite, sort it out.
Ye missed too many chances ye useless cunts.
Thats how ye play football lads.
History, memory, grief and belonging: my bittersweet Goodison farewell History, memory, grief and belonging: my bittersweet Goodison farewell | Everton | The Guardian
I enjoyed this.
A nice piece to be sure,but it could have been written by any fan of any stadium anywhere.
It could, but it was a nice read I thought.
Stadiums are like that. The magic is often in the eye of the beholder
Hugely impressive effort by these journalists with clear results impacting online pedo groups. Hopefully their approach becomes more widely adopted
(Should auto translate to English)
What do you reckon the bathroom situation was at those events in the apartment?
Youâd imagine a fair amount of them were in there âpreppingâ !
This is beautiful. Might have read it at the time, but donât recall so doubt it. But it ended me a few times
Bruce Springsteenâs Glory Days is a tribute to a late friend and unrealised teenage sporting potential
The universal theme of unrealised teenage sporting potential was immortalised in Springsteenâs ode to his friend Joe DePugh
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Bruce Springsteen: at a concert at Giants Stadium just before launching into Glory Days, he roared, âJoe D., are you out there?â He was. And loving it. Photograph: Liam McBurney
Dave Hannigan
Thu Apr 10 2025 - 06:00
Joe DePugh may not ring a bell, but youâve heard his story of what might have been many times through the years.
On the grass at Nowlan Park. In the comfy seats above in Croker. Out in the RDS. Around the stands at Thomond. Yes, you know the details of his yarn by heart. About all that wondrous teenage potential ultimately coming to naught.
Of course, you never met Joe in person. Or even saw footage of him in action. You didnât need to. Thereâs always a version of his biography playing in your head, every time you hear that distinctive opening riff and these words.
âI had a friend was a big baseball player / Back in high school
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He could throw that speedball by you / Make you look like a fool boy.â
That was Joe. A sliver of his otherwise unremarkable childhood in Freehold, New Jersey immortalised forever in a Bruce Springsteen lyric on Glory Days. He died of metastatic prostate cancer in Florida last week at the age of 75 but in his youth he was apparently something to behold on the mound. A high school pitching phenom bulwarking a team where the future âBossâ was a benchwarmer nicknamed âSaddieâ. The kind of scrub only pressed into action when other kids didnât show up,
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Saddie once cost DePugh a Babe Ruth League championship game when he caught a routine fly ball with his head instead of his glove. No biggie. The pitcher and the reserve right fielder remained on good terms thereafter and right through high school.
DePughâs talent earned him a tryout with the Los Angeles Dodgers before he pivoted to playing college basketball while earning an English degree. Following his motherâs death when he was 20, he assumed legal guardianship of his younger brothers. A hard station.
Four years later, by then a substitute teacher, he was leaving The Headliner, a bar in Neptune near the Jersey Shore, when he bumped into his former classmate, bearded and just starting to regularly blow the doors off Maxâs Kansas City up in New York. No longer answering to Saddie. Or anyone.
As old school pals and one-time team-mates invariably do, the pair climbed a pair of stools to sip the heady brew of nostalgia. They closed the joint that night, recalling long-forgotten games, epic classroom japes and fearsome nun teachers. Stuff that could only matter to those who were there. Stuff that mattered to them.
DePugh never made it to the Big Leagues but long after he peaked as an athlete this chance encounter subsequently inspired the first verse of a typically bittersweet Springsteen elegy for lost promise, unfulfilled dreams and the curse of the eternal wondering about what might have been.
âSaw him the other night at this roadside bar
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I was walking in he was walking out
We went back inside, sat down, had a few drinks,
but all we kept talking about . . . Glory days.â
Bruce Springsteen and Joe DePugh.
Long before any of us ever figured out the intricacies of pitching, Irish people appreciated the significance of the evening. Meeting by happy happenstance. The impromptu, beery saunter down memory lane. Wistful retelling short stories that become tall tales. Chances missed. Catches dropped. Shots not taken. The chatter of freshly grown men low-key yearning for the simplicity of childish things, the more innocent joys of their previous life.
American pedants have always moaned about Springsteen deploying speedball instead of the more traditional fastball. We cared not a jot about that. We didnât need to understand the sport to appreciate the sentiment at play here. The dreams of youth foundering on the rocks of adulthood is the most universal concept. A story as old as time.
In any bar in America you hear tell of the kid with the golden arm who never made it to the show. Just like everybody in Ireland can recite the local legend about the boy who might have gone all the way. Coulda. Shoulda. Woulda. That fella had everything. World at his feet. Blessed by the gods, cursed by the demons. Injury. Drink. Women. Misfortune.
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Bruce Springsteen plays to a sold-out crowd in Croke Park last year. Photograph: Sasko Lazarov/© RollingNews.ie
One of the curious joys of talking sport incessantly is name dropping inevitably obscure prodigies who fell by the wayside. Gifted youth who peaked too early. Blue-chip prospect who somehow went off-colour. The Cork fella who was better than Keane. The Dubliner supposed to be the next Brady. Where did it all go wrong? You could hum the tune from memory.
For a man dealt a tough hand, Joe DePugh lived a decent life, raising his brothers, moving on from education to work as a contractor between Vermont and Florida. A perfectly ordinary, anonymous existence until the release of the Born in the USA album in 1984 and his discovery heâd earned a footnote in American folklore.
At first he thought his old pal was having a pop at him, then he fully understood and embraced the true meaning of the song. And one night years ago, his most famous classmate gifted him and other old school buddies tickets to a concert at Giants Stadium and, just before launching into Glory Days, Saddie roared, âJoe D, are you out there?â He was. And loving it.
âHe was a good friend when I needed one,â wrote Springsteen of his friend in a statement last week. ââHe could throw that speedball by you, make you look like a fool.â ⊠Glory Days my friend.â
They just pass you by.
By God, that is just beautiful
What a song
Hannigan is a great writer. He lost his wife at a young age a few years ago and he has written some lovely articles about himself and his two sons coming to terms with the loss
Heâs a lovely fella, was pally with my brother back in UCC, he was a handy enough soccer player
Those are brilliant. A lament to the emigrant.
Top class