At Home In Scotland reminds us that we construct our lives and our works using age-old narrative formulas without necessarily giving due consideration to the mastering of those techniques. For myself telling stories has always come easily, but I can still remember a period in my life when they were consistently of a certain sort. Lies, chiefly. When I was fifteen, an undercover detective discovered me in a public park with four cans of cider and a copy of the June 1998 Playboy secreted in my combat trousers. I told him my name was John Meade. I told him I lived at 16, Roman Street, Gurranabraher and where I went to school. This tall tale ended when one of my colleagues in criminal libation, eager to witness my predicament but unaware of my elaborately conceived alias, truthfully responded to the detective's enquiries regarding my identity. Having failed to learn my lesson I later used the same alias when registering my first mobile phone in an attempt to escape government profiling in the burgeoning digital age. There then followed over the next few years a number of befuddling call-centre conversations as the mobile phone company and I somehow managed to alter my original alias into an entirely new one; unrecognisable to either of us. At one time I used this non-fictional material as the basis for fifteen minutes of original stand-up comedy. This was least successful when I tried to use the changing aliases as the backdrop to a fictional family feud and most successful when I used swear words. I only used one swear word. I stopped telling tall tales for a while.
After finishing my undergraduate degree and leaving my nascent comedy career behind, I worked for a number of years in theatre and watched other people tell stories. People tell stories with song, scripts, chicken wire and fabric, as well as pie charts, branded pens and lies. I sometimes wondered what stories you could tell without lies. When I returned to university to do a Master's degree in musicology at the University of Edinburgh, it felt like a good idea in large part because of how well I thought it would slot into my own personal story. Academic achievements come with a compelling order of progression that commend them to parents and those uncertain of what they should do next. I am now nearly at the end of my first year of research as a PhD candidate; and it still feels like a good idea. I feel more comfortable with the academic pursuit than I thought I might because, whatever theoretical frameworks and conflicting methodologies I may come to grapple with, at root I feel like I am telling a story. That still interests me more than anything.
The story I am researching focuses on broadcast and recording studio practices in a Germany divided for forty years by barbed wire, concrete and antagonistic world views. Sometimes I think the division of Germany, Berlin and its people by an impregnable wall sounds like the set-up for one of the more budget-conscious episodes of Star Trek. One of those ones where seemingly insurmountable prejudices towards odd prosthetics are solved through humanistic principles against a backdrop of badly curated “alien music”. But as contrived a plot device as the Wall may seem its effects were concrete and pervasive and even now have not been fully understood. Despite the eventual fall of the Wall, I know that any story I tell will not have the neat ending that a unified Germany might suggest or that a story or tall tale might demand. If my desire to tell a story is the motivation for my work, I guess that academic practice is what I rely on to keep it honest. I’m hopeful the successes of my thesis won’t rely too heavily on swear words.
Cormac Ó Callanáin
After finishing my undergraduate degree and leaving my nascent comedy career behind, I worked for a number of years in theatre and watched other people tell stories. People tell stories with song, scripts, chicken wire and fabric, as well as pie charts, branded pens and lies. I sometimes wondered what stories you could tell without lies. When I returned to university to do a Master's degree in musicology at the University of Edinburgh, it felt like a good idea in large part because of how well I thought it would slot into my own personal story. Academic achievements come with a compelling order of progression that commend them to parents and those uncertain of what they should do next. I am now nearly at the end of my first year of research as a PhD candidate; and it still feels like a good idea. I feel more comfortable with the academic pursuit than I thought I might because, whatever theoretical frameworks and conflicting methodologies I may come to grapple with, at root I feel like I am telling a story. That still interests me more than anything.
The story I am researching focuses on broadcast and recording studio practices in a Germany divided for forty years by barbed wire, concrete and antagonistic world views. Sometimes I think the division of Germany, Berlin and its people by an impregnable wall sounds like the set-up for one of the more budget-conscious episodes of Star Trek. One of those ones where seemingly insurmountable prejudices towards odd prosthetics are solved through humanistic principles against a backdrop of badly curated “alien music”. But as contrived a plot device as the Wall may seem its effects were concrete and pervasive and even now have not been fully understood. Despite the eventual fall of the Wall, I know that any story I tell will not have the neat ending that a unified Germany might suggest or that a story or tall tale might demand. If my desire to tell a story is the motivation for my work, I guess that academic practice is what I rely on to keep it honest. I’m hopeful the successes of my thesis won’t rely too heavily on swear words.
Cormac Ó Callanáin
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