by J. Nathan Matias

Last Night's Fun

A page-long poem precedes the table of contents in Last Night's Fun, by Ciaran Carson. More than a mere epigram, this poem by Séamus Ennis begins a book filled with a profusion of quotes and excerpts. Even though Carson is a distinguished poet himself, he chooses to fill this book with a sizable number of words that aren't his own.

Carson often puts meaning and interpretation in the space between the sources and chapters, allowing the reader to make the connections. By the end of the book it's clear that one's understanding of Irish music is a personal thing. The book just puts Carson's memory and experience on loan, allowing readers to find the essence Irish Music through his memories.

Not everything comes from Carson's life, however. After the table of contents, the Acknowledgments section of Last Night's Fun stretches for two pages. These 15 sources are just works cited too extensively for normal fair-use. The book is full of quotes. Almost no page passes without including a quote from some musician, writer, philosopher or song lyric.

Carson emphasizes the intertextuality and constant flux of traditional Irish music and how it is intricately woven into the thread of the people who play it. In one section, he describes the Bakhtinian equivalent of musical transclusion while describing a trip to America:

To reflect the wild, interconnected nature of Irish music, Carson weaves an infinitely ordered, infinitely chaotic text with bits and scraps of stories, songs, definitions, poetry, academic treatises, and even the Oxford English Dictionary.

One chapter, The Rub of Rosin, is a story by John Loughran that Carson turns into a poem. Another chapter, The Humours of Whiskey, pretends to be a linguistic, historical essay on the origins of illicit Irish brew. The chapter instead becomes a story about day he won an American Country/Western competition by singing Irish tunes. The next chapter, The Mountain Road, starts with American moonshine and ends with an American he meets who plays Irish music. Boil the Breakfast Early begins with the intertextuality of egg breakfasts and ends in the mysticism of eating breakfast the morning after a music session. Pigtown, which follows it, is a two-page joke.

The inside a chapter is as chaotically ordered as the chapters themselves. Halfway down the second page of Harry the Jug is the solitary word "Interlude," followed by two pages of italicized text:

The rest of the italicized interlude describes a Guinness commercial he had just seen while typing.

Carson uses techniques of artifactual fiction in many chapters. Dowd's No. 9, discusses Carson's futile attempts to discover the origin of the tune and what he learns from failure. This four-page chapter quotes Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, followed by Aristotle's De Memoria et Reminiscentia, followed by an excerpt from Artist/Cartographer Tim Robinson about interdigitation.

The Standard, found at the exact center of the book, consists of eight pages of numbered quotes and vignettes. The first entry reads, "There is no standard." The second is a precise scoring system. The rest of the chapter is an all-out war between quotes. The postulations and arguments lunge around the page furiously. Some are academic definitions. Some are poems. Others are stories, or letters-to-the-editor, or songs, maxims by Francis Bacon, or snippets from magazine articles. Half of them are no longer than five lines long. The sources range the whole of history, from as far back as 1185 to as recently as 1993.

Yet Carson's book is lyrical, funny, exciting, and as full of energy as the phenomenon it describes in the subtitle: In and Out of Time with Irish Music. Even a chapter like The Standard (link to bottom) is fun to read, though the entire chapter consists of 31 numbered quotes.

Ciaran's storytelling holds these sections together. In some spots, he includes a numbered story to nudge the argument in the right direction and keep readers chuckling. The sources are just barely under the surface, and the upper tips of conversations, ideas, discussions, good times, and holy wars pop up in the middle whenever they're needed.

Storytelling and poetry extend to Ciaran's other way of using sources: describing them poetically. The first chapter, also called Last Night's Fun, describes his experiences listening to his favorite LP, an informal recording of one of Joe Cooley's last barroom sessions. Carson writes about his nostalgia for the sparks of imagination set off by old records. He wonders about how the emotional anatomy of a tune in memory is influenced by tapping feet, the "rhythmic rattling of loose change in punters' trouser-pockets," and the resounding notes on the hardwood floor (Carson, p2). He describes the music as if it were a character in the story. He describes the excited crowd, the snatches of conversation that drift onto the record.

Carson brings that day to life by using words to bring readers into his imagination as he listens to the recording. Lahiff's bar is busy, and the sound of the bar turns into full descriptions of setting, atmosphere, and emotion.

Then he tells us, Joe Cooley is dead.

Carson moves the needle and starts the record again. Immediately, "I'm back there now, and Joes is playing 'Last Night's Fun.'" (Carson, 5).

At the end of the book, Carson returns to the LP of Cooley's fiddle. He wishes to return to the past he inhabits only through the record, as a ghost. He plays the record again and realizes that bits of Cooley live on:

Reading Last Night's Fun in alternate chapter orders works well. Those new to the culture of Irish Music might best understand the book by reading it from front to back. But once read, the story blends into one interconnected pile of poetry, thought, and good times. Pick it up and read a few chapters, or devise a new path through the book. The chapters, while flowing forward thematically, are self-contained.

I would not suggest a chaotic reading pattern for Old Friends, a considerably less chaotic nonfiction book by Tracy Kidder. However, both Kidder and Carson construct their books with small segments that work well with each other.