12. Elliott Mills: Brian, Myles and the Civil Service

A special edition of the Radio Myles podcast dedicated to Tobias W. Harris and Joseph LaBine's special edition of the Journal of Flann O'Brien studies which focuses on Flann O'Brien and radio. You can read each article named here at no cost on the Parish Review website here: https://parishreview.openlibhums.org/issue/1700/info/General Editors: Ruben Borg, Alana Gillespie, Maebh Long Cover image credit: Michéal Ó Nualláin, Kilroy Is Here (Michéal Ó Nualláin, 2009), 28. Cover design: Ellie Hastings, https://www.eehastings.com/about

Katherine and Toby dissect death in 'Two in One' before exploring Irish executions, reading Achille Mbembe's necropolitics and turning to Flann, the energy humanities, and the geological turn. Transcript Toby: ​Hello and welcome to another episode of Radio Myles, the podcast which hopes to entertain, intrigue, and maybe change your perspective on the figure known variously as Flann O’Brien Myles na gCopaleen, Myles na gCopaleen, George Knowall, and many other names. This episode is made of a support of Birkbeck College, university of London, and today I am joined by Katherine Ebury. Katherine is a senior lecturer in modern literature with an established international reputation as a literary historian and scholar of modernism. She has written a lot including two well reviewed monographs and led to collection many peer reviewed articles and book. Chapters, including on Flann O’Brien and science, [00:01:00] writing in the Problems of Authority collection, and on Flann O’Brien in the Death Penalty in the Gallows Humour collection. She was an editor of Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman, the most recent collection of essays about Flann O’Brien. She was awarded an AHRC Fellowship for her research project: “Literature, psychoanalysis and a death penalty, 1900 to 1950”, which was a basis for her recent monograph in the area of law and literature, modern literature and the death penalty, 1890 to 1950. She has mentored several postdoctoral researchers funded by the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust who have gone on to successful roles elsewhere. We are going to try to focus on today’s topic, which is Flann O’Brien and the law. Welcome, Katherine. Katherine: Thank you Toby. Thank you for having me. It’s great to be on the podcast. I’m a fan and it’s really good timing for me ‘cause I’m working on a chapter on Flann O’Brien and the law for the new Cambridge Companion for Catherine Flynn. She commissioned it from me, so is wonderful to be here talking to you about this topic. [00:02:00] Thank you for the generous introduction. Toby: And before we go on just in case there are any listeners who are totally new to Flann O’Brien, AKA Myles na gCopaleen, aka Brian O’Nolan, I do wonder at this point if there are any listeners that are totally new because presumably they’ve listened to an episode, but just in case and it’s also interesting to find this out from the different guests: would it be possible for you to give us a, thumbnail sketch of this writer and his major work? What’s the brief image of him that appears in your head? Katherine: Well, thanks Toby. Yeah, I do like the conceit that you have on the podcast of getting everyone to introduce Flann. I hope you won’t stop no matter how long the podcast goes on for, because everyone does have a different take. I think about an Irish mid-century writer who’s amazingly funny and perishingly sad. He’s the author of at least three great novels. The others we could fight about At Swim-Two-Birds, An Béal Bocht and The Third Policeman, as well as [00:03:00] these brilliantly flawed novels again, that we could fight about, as I was saying, The Dalkey Archive and The Hard Life. And recently, we’ve been discovering more short stories and plays and teleplays. I think I’m fondest of the Myles na gCopaleen persona, but at the same time, I’m conscious of all the columns. I’ve not read, you know, the limits of my expertise. Like with the students’ fearing that there’s jokes they’re not getting. I know that there are lots of people who are much better versed on Cruiskeen Lawn than I am, particularly ‘cause I’m only a novice Irish speaker. God knows where I am in Duolingo. But I do love that persona. I find it very fun. In recent years, I’ve devoured Flann’s letters wonderfully edited by Maebh Long, but I found that I learned less about the man than I expected from that exercise. He was a civil servant and a drinker. He has a crumpled, hard boiled look in photographs. Thinking of crime fiction, I think of him as a,

In this guest edition of Radio Myles, Maebh Murphy presents a compilation of voices and atmospheres, scholarly ideas and craic agus ceol from the 8th International Flann O'Brien conference in Strabane. Credits: Recording, editing, mixing and transcription by Maebh Murphy (Cheasty) Additional mixing and mastering by David Murphy

In this episode of Radio Myles Toby welcomes Oisín, the nephew of the celebrated Irish writer Brian Ó Nualláin, also known as Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen. Oisín shares personal reflections and anecdotes about his father, Micheál Ó Nualláin and his uncle, Brian, detailing family dynamics and the intellectual and creative environment he grew up in. We learn about Brian Ó Nualláin's role as a craftsman and paternal figure and the importance of the history and environment of Counties Tyrone and Armagh, now in Northern Ireland, for the family's mindset. Oisín also reflects on his father's extensive inventions and contributions to education, art, and politics in Ireland and concludes with a discussion of concept of the entire family's role as 'ex-centros' or 'eccentric state builders' who felt a duty to contribute to the Irish state's strength and development by attacking the centre from the periphery.

Paul and Toby explore human and nonhuman worlds in An Béal Bocht, the politics of Flann O'Brien's comedy, the history of the International Flann O'Brien Society and Paul's interest in hoaxes.