“Memory Is Not Stable”: A Conversation with Glenn Patterson Patrick Hicks and Glenn Patterson (bio) from the Archives This article originally appeared in New Hibernia Review 12:2. glenn patterson was born in 1961 and grew up on a Protestant estate in Belfast. As a teenager he was involved in Orange Marches, and he witnessed the sudden rise in sectarian violence. In order to escape from Northern Ireland, he went to England to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia, but he returned to the province in 1988 to become “Writer in the Community” for the city of Lisburn. He has since written six novels and been involved in a number of documentaries for both the BBC and the RTÉ. His first novel, Burning Your Own (1988), is set in Belfast during 1969. It won the Betty Trask Award as well as the Rooney Prize. His second novel, Fat Lad (1992), won the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award. It is told from the perspective of a young man who has returned to Belfast after living in England for many years. Black Night at Big Thunder Mountain (1995) involves a character from Belfast who has gone to work at the Euro Disney construction site. The International (1999) takes place in a hotel shortly before the Civil Rights marches begin. Number 5 (2003) explores the lives of different families that live in a particular house over the course of four decades. That Which Was (2004) is set in contemporary Belfast and examines the intersections between memory and history. His most recent publication, Lapsed Protestant (2006), is a collection of his nonfiction. Patterson is currently a writer in residence at the Seamus Heaney Centre, affiliated with Queen’s University Belfast. We met at a coffeeshop on Fountain Street in Belfast.1 Patterson is tall and slender, and his blond hair is streaked with gray. He stands with his hands in [End Page 38] his back pockets, not quite slouching, and he is immediately friendly. One or two people in the coffeeshop wave to him and he smiles back. When our tea arrives and we settle down to talk, Patterson grows suddenly serious and ready to discuss his work. ________ PH: We had a conversation some time ago about the term “‘Troubles’ Trash.” You mentioned that the violence in Northern Ireland has been exploited by writers of the thriller genre. Since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, do you feel there is a rise or fall in this type of writing about the North? GP: Well, curiously, when That Which Was came out, there were several novels that year [2004] that had elements of the thriller in them. They all dealt with characters that had been involved with violence in the past and they were trying to come to terms with what they had done: Eoin McNamee’s The Ultras, David Park’s Swallowing the Sun, and Sean O’Reilly’s The Swing of Things. And, you know, it surprises me that I wrote that kind of a book, a thriller, if you will. It surprised me that I wrote a book that had an unheard-of thing called a “plot” or a “genre plot.” These other books had characters that were broadly similar to my central character in That Which Was and I think that represented—and Henry McDonald, a columnist with the Observer, wrote a feature on this—how unusual it was that four novels had characters with terrorists’ pasts. I think that this occurred because the past wasn’t completely dealt with. The Good Friday Agreement made many people feel that there was an end, and many people felt that we had drawn a line under the past; but I think what happened a half dozen years after that was that the peace wasn’t, actually, as complete as we all imagined that it would be. The present is bedeviled still by issues that have to do with the past and there was a question of how have we accounted for the actions of the past. I think that all of these books come out of that imperfect peace. So, the very short answer to your question is that...

A Conversation with Glenn Patterson Patrick Hicks Glenn Patterson was born in 1961 and grew up on a Protestant estate in Belfast. As a teenager he was involved in Orange Marches, and he witnessed the sudden rise in sectarian violence. In order to escape from Northern Ireland, he went to England to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia, but he returned to the province in 1988 to become "Writer in the Community" for the city of Lisburn. He has since written six novels and been involved in a number of documentaries for both the BBC and RTÉ.His first novel, Burning Your Own (1988), is set in Belfast during 1969. It won the Betty Trask Award as well as the Rooney Prize. His second novel, Fat Lad (1992), won the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award. It is told from the perspective of a young man who has returned to Belfast after living in England for many years. Black Night at Big Thunder Mountain (1995) involves a character from Belfast who has gone to work at the Euro Disney construction site. The International (1999) takes place in a hotel shortly before the Civil Rights marches begin. Number 5 (2003) explores the lives of different families that live in a particular house over the course of four decades. That Which Was (2004) is set in contemporary Belfast and examines the intersections between memory and history. His most recent publication, Lapsed Protestant (2006), is a collection of his nonfiction. Patterson is currently a writer in residence at the Seamus Heaney Centre, affiliated with Queen's University Belfast. We met at a coffee shop on Fountain Street in Belfast.1 Patterson is tall, slender, and his blonde hair is streaked with grey. He stands with his hands in his back-pockets, not quite slouching, and he is immediately friendly. One or two people in the coffee shop wave to him and he smiles back. When our tea arrives and we settle down to talk, Patterson grows suddenly serious and ready to discuss his work. [End Page 106] PH: We had a conversation some time ago about the term "'Troubles' Trash." You mentioned that the violence in Northern Ireland has been exploited by writers of the thriller genre. Since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, do you feel there is a rise or fall in this type of writing about the North? GP: Well, curiously, when That Which Was came out, there were several novels that year [2004] that had elements of the thriller in them. They all dealt with characters that had been involved with violence in the past and they were trying to come to terms with what they had done: Eoin McNamee's The Ultras, David Park's Swallowing the Sun, and Sean O'Reilly's The Swing of Things. And, you know, it surprises me that I wrote that kind of a book, a thriller, if you will. It surprised me that I wrote a book that had an unheard-of thing called a "plot" or a "genre plot." These other books had characters that were broadly similar to my central character in That Which Was and I think that represented—and Henry McDonald, a columnist with the Observer, wrote a feature on this—how unusual it was that four novels had characters with terrorist's pasts. I think that this occurred because the past wasn't completely dealt with. The Good Friday Agreement made many people feel that there was an end, and many people felt that we had drawn a line under the past; but I think what happened a half-dozen years after that was that the peace wasn't, actually, as complete as we all imagined that it would be. The present is bedeviled still by issues that have to do with the past and there was a question of how have we accounted for the actions of the past. I think that all of these books come out of that imperfect peace. So, the very short answer to your question is that there are still books in the thriller idiom being written, but I think that the nature of them has changed slightly...

Brian Moore’s latest novel, The Magician’s Wife (1997), is set in nineteenth-century France and Algeria. In this work about magic, Moore manipulates history, rewrites it, and the nature of faith is investigated from the diametrically opposed agendas of colonizer and colonized. As readers, we are caught in a fictional reconstruction of precise historical events and, like the protagonist, Emmeline Lambert, we are compelled to wrestle with disturbing questions of faith and empire.

Reviewed by: Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers Patrick Hicks Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers, by Eugene O’Brien . pp. 213. London: Pluto Press; distributed by University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2003. $75 cloth; $25 paper. Eugene O'Brien has been impressively prolific in his analysis of Ireland's most recent Nobel Prize winner, in Seamus Heaney: Creating Irelands of the Mind (2002) and Seamus Heaney and the Place of Writing (2003). In this, his latest effort, he successfully untangles the overlooked links between Heaney's prose [End Page 159] and poetry. O'Brien also reads Heaney against such literary thinkers as Derrida, Bakhtin, and Adorno, and he investigates textual interplays between Heaney and Yeats. Throughout, O'Brien explores the gaps—or "traces" to use the terminology of deconstruction—that help to fuel Heaney's search for aesthetic, political, and linguistic answers. This readable book considers Heaney's entire oeuvre: poetry, prose, and translations. Heaney has now published eight collections of prose and it is through these writings, O'Brien reminds us, that Heaney's ongoing interest in plurality, the poetic voice, and heritage are highlighted. Heaney is never satisfied with his conclusions and revisits old ideas through new writings. Such oscillations in a poet—one who has been influenced by the binary oppositions of Ulster—makes it unsurprising that O'Brien invokes Jacques Derrida. Derrida grew up speaking French in colonial Algeria, and he also understood the complexities of cultural hybridity. Derrida recognized that answers promote further questions and in his philosophical writings he challenged the notion of logocentricism in much the same way as, O'Brien argues, that Heaney does throughout his own writings on voice and culture. Both men approach the notion of "text" from similar perspectives and are dubious about answers. O'Brien reminds us that Heaney, too, often oscillates between binary poles and that he places ideas in dialogue so that the search for answers might be widened, not collapsed. Much of the final chapter, "Noble Causes: Heaney and Yeats," explores how the two poets understand their place in Ireland and, indeed, the Irish canon. Yeats obviously influenced Heaney, but now—since they have both stood on that rostrum in Stockholm—how might Heaney influence our reading of Yeats? Although O'Brien is not necessarily preoccupied with supplying an answer for such a question, he does tug at the strands that tie these two Nobel winners together: a strong sense of place, their mutual interest in the complexities of history, and a willingness to keep the text open. Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers offers a fine overview of Heaney's work and broadens our understanding of a writer who shuns the monolithic because he sees answers as malleable, porous, and temporary. As O'Brien suggests, Heaney does not arrive at simple conclusions because he refuses answers and encourages the search. Copyright © 2004 The University of St. Thomas

In 1969, James Charles Roy bought a small, crumbling castle in County Galway. During the subsequent refurbishment of Moyode Castle, which was built in the mid-sixteenth century, Roy became increasingly interested in the history that surrounded his smaller, if not draftier, version of Thoor Ballylee. In The Fields of Athenry he not only explores the history that his castle has witnessed, but also charts the humorous travails of renovating a castle in modern Ireland. This is not merely a book about a relatively insignificant structure; it is, instead, a sweeping and daring account of how history is intricately embedded into the Irish landscape. Roy filters nearly a thousand years of Irish history through the experiences of those living around Moyode and, in the process, he offers an exceptional study on the influence that national history has upon the local.

Reviews: Leirmheasanna quibbles: Greg Delanty's The Hellbox offers a fresh and resonant voice in the swelling crowd of poets eager to share their views of the emigrant and immigrant experience. ''"' BRIAN C. BROWN Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories, edited by Liam Harte and Michael Parker, pp. 271. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. $49.95. The eleven essays that Liam Harte and Michael Parker have chosen for Contemporary Irish Fiction survey the fictions that have emerged from both sides of the Irish border in recent years, many ofwhich have systemically recalibrate issues of female identity, homosexuality, incest, Catholicism, and de Valera's patriarchal theocracy. All of the essays collected here are highly evocative, and each raises new debates. Collectively, they go far toward proving the argument that we are in the midst of a second Irish renaissance Ann Owens Weekes's "Figuring the Mother in Contemporary Irish Fiction" is an especially well crafted contribution. Weekes examines the representation of motherhood-and by extension, daughterhood-in the works of Mary Lavin, Edna O'Brien, Jennifer Johnston, and Clare Boylan. and registers how the sociosexual awakenings of the 1960s have undermined the neo-Victorianism of de Valera's template for feminine identity. While registering the changing role of women in Ireland, Weekes concurrently interrogates how images of motherhood transform when female writers have children of their own. The result is a successful portrait of changing female identity throughout the latter half of twentieth-century Ireland. Equally compelling is Antoinette Quinn's "New Noises from the Woodshed: the Novels of Emma Donoghue." Aside from providing an excellent summary oflesbian literature, Quinn also registers how Donoghue's fiction mainstreams lesbian life into contemporary Irish culture. She scrupulously examines both Stir Fry (1994) and Hood (1995) to expose how Donoghue's homoerotic writings subvert lesbian stereotypes. Quinn also draws refreshing parallels to Ulysses, which are highly innovative additions to the study of Donoghue's burgeoning oeuvre. Following Quinn is Tom Herron's "ContamiNation: Patrick McCabe and Colm T6ibin's Pathographies of the Republic." Drawing upon meticulous readings of McCabe's The Butcher Boy (1992), The Dead School (1995) and T6ibin's The Heather Blazing (1992), Herron successfully demonstrates that these texts undermine the ideal of Ireland after independence. Pointedly, he suggests that the absences and reimaginings of these texts imply the incompatibility, or 155 Reviews: Leirmheasanna pathology, ofthe republican narrative as well as a need to rewrite history into a more palatable form. Two other particularly engaging essays are Richard Haslam's "The Pose Arranged and Lingered Over: Visualizing the Troubles" and Richard Kirkland 's "Bourgeois Redemptions: the Fictions of Glenn Patterson and Robert McLiam Wilson." In the first, Haslam offers close readings of William Carleton 's "Wildgoose Lodge" (1830), Bernard Mac Laverty's Cal (1983), as well as Eoin McNamee's violent potboiler based on the Shankill Butchers, Resurrection Man (1994). Haslam questions how the representation ofviolence affects the reader and if there is much difference between the literary depiction of agrarian sectarianism in the nineteenth century versus the urban terrorism of the twentieth. Clever observations regarding the voyeurism of the "male gaze" and the glamor of ritualized Hollywood violence also play into Haslam's argument , as well as the moral dilemma of how to represent violence for aesthetic purposes. Kirkland, on the other hand, views violence through the rubric of Marxist culturalism and examines how Glenn Patterson's Fat Lad (1992), and Robert McLiam Wilson's Eureka Street (1996), are rooted in a bourgeois tradition that belies the postmodernism that readers initially attach to the texts. Kirkland is interested in the fictional simulacrum of Belfast and its characters; but he also examines how violence, as a commodity, attracts capital gain. Questions of the use, and misuse, of capitalism permeate Kirkland's highly detailed argument. In other articles, Gerry Smyth offers a detailed examination of Dublin from Joyce to Northside Realism; George O'Brien investigates exile and how it is represented in John McGahern, Brian Moore and Joseph O'Connor; Siobhan Holland registers patriarchal influence and female identity in Moore's Cold Heaven (1983) and McGahern's Amongst Women (1990); Joseph McMinn explores modernism in relation to Banville and, in a...

This paper presents a demand transformation analysis that maps a predicate's output demands to its input demands. This backward dataflow analysis for concurrent constraint programs is constructed in the framework of abstract interpretation. In the context of stream parallelism, this analysis identifies an amount of input data for which predicate execution can safely wait without danger of introducing deadlock. We assume that programs are well-moded and prove that our analysis is safe. We have constructed an implementation of this analysis and tested it on some small, illustrative programs and have determined that it gives useful results in practice. We identify several applications of the analysis results to distributed implementations of concurrent constraint languages, including thread construction and communication granularity control. This analysis will enable existing computational cost estimation analyses to be applied to stream-parallel logic languages.

In this paper, we note and analyze a key trade-off: as the complexity of caches increases (higher set-associativity, larger block size, and larger overall size), the power consumed, by a cache access increases. However, because the hit rate also increases, the number of main memory accesses decreases and thus the power consumed by a memory access decreases. Recent papers which consider the power consumption of caches tend to ignore hit rates. This is unfortunate, because it is undesirable to have energy-efficient caches which are also very slow. Hit rates also play a key role in truly evaluating the energy efficiency of a cache, because low hit rates lead to more frequent main memory accesses which consume more power than cache accesses.