Well, well. An amazing report on BBC Online on how a fleeting placement of Flann O’Brien’s surreal novel, The Third Policeman, on the cult TV series, Lost, has led to an upsurge in sales.

More than 15,000 copies were sold in the three weeks following the Lost episode airing in the US – equalling sales of the previous six years.

O’Brien (whose real name was Brian O’Nolan) played a big role in what might loosely be called my literary development, in that I was once thrown out of the National Library in Dublin because I had been reading back numbers of his Cruiskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times and was overcome with uncontrollable, hysterical laughter. A stern custodian escorted me to the door. I had been obliged to resort to the National Library because my mother regarded the Irish Times, the house organ of the Protestant Ascendancy, as a publication of the devil, and would not — as she put it — “have that heathen rag in the house”.

There are two good Wikipedia pages on O’Brien — one about his novels, the other on his newspaper column, but by far the best online reference is Carol Taaffe’s splendid essay.

For such an outrageously funny and original man, O’Brien seems to have had a pretty miserable life — as captured in the title of Anthony Cronin’s workmanlike biography — No Laughing Matter: the life and times of Flann O’Brien. He died in 1966.

Hilarious piece by David Pogue in the NYT. Sample:

Eventually you will get to a person. You will tell him/her why you are calling, and most likely you will be told you have to call someone else. They will offer to transfer you, but before they do, GET THE EXTENSION NUMBER. This is very important, especially when (not if) you get cut off. Note that it is a seven-digit extension number.

While waiting, pause and ponder the size and complexity of a company that needs an extension number the size of your phone number.

Now you are getting close. You will eventually get to someone who after getting your name, address, problem, and again, Express Service code, will say the magic words, “I can help you with that problem.” You have now contacted a Dell Offshore Personal Expert – a DOPE.

Some notes on this part of the process:

* The DOPE will probably call you by your first name, because he/she wants to be your new best friend.

* He/she will profusely thank you at every step of the way for the same reason.

* He/she will have a notable American name like Patrick, Matthew or even a Shaun. Do not react to this.

But congratulations; YOU HAVE REACHED SOMEONE WHO IS TRYING TO HELP YOU! You reached the ninth circle, and all you have to do is return.

AOL is holding A Discussion (capital letters) on a portentous topic — Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing? I only know about it because Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s Svengali, was on Radio 4’s Start the Week this morning talking about it. Apparently, Alastair has decided that the Internet is here to stay. Phew! Meanwhile, now that AOL is in discussion mode, how about another, equally relevant topic? Is Electricity A Good Thing?

The “let’s discuss the Internet” meme is spreading btw. I’m speaking next Thursday in London at the RSA Economist debate on the motion “The Internet’s best days are over”. I’m down to support the motion. Yikes! I’m developing lawyer-like tendencies. Dr Johnson once observed that “lawyers are like dice, in that they can lie on any side”.

Er, I always knew there was method in my somnolence, but now there’s scientific evidence to support it!

When it comes to making tough decisions – don’t sweat it, sleep on it – or so a team of scientists recommends.

A Dutch study suggests complex decisions like buying a car can be better made when the unconscious mind is left to churn through the options.

This is because people can only focus on a limited amount of information, the study in the journal Science suggests.

The conscious brain should be reserved for simple choices like picking between towels and shampoos, the team said.

Zzzzzzz….

French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand trying to reassure consumers that poultry remained safe to eat. [link]

There’s something deeply comical about the tangle Hollywood has got into over Brokeback Mountain, the so-called “gay cowboy” movie. Basically, the problem is that the awkward fact of homosexual love at the heart of the story has to be somehow finessed so that it becomes Motherhood and Apple Pie. Daniel Mendelsohn has a lovely piece about it in the New York Review of Books. He notes:

The reluctance to be explicit about the film’s themes and content was evident at the Golden Globes, where the film took the major awards—for best movie drama, best director, and best screenplay. When a short montage of clips from the film was screened, it was described as “a story of monumental conflict”; later, the actor reading the names of nominees for best actor in a movie drama described Heath Ledger’s character as “a cowboy caught up in a complicated love.” After Ang Lee received the award he was quoted as saying, “This is a universal story. I just wanted to make a love story.”

What’s going on, Mendelsohn maintains, is a concerted attempt to situate the story in a well-understood and respectable genre — the Romeo and Juliet story: lovers doomed to be destroyed by horrid families, tribal jealousies, race or whatever. The difficulty is that Brokeback Mountain is about two boys who happened to love one another but whose lives were destroyed not by traditional scapegoats but by the hostility of their society (US mainstream society, that is) to their sexuality.

It will be interesting to see how the Oscars ceremony handles this delicate problem.

Armando Ianucci, one of the best things in the new-look Observer, has a lovely spoof interview with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Excerpt:

Iannucci: On the issue of terror, why did you feel the need to bring in an extra law banning the glorification of terror?

Blair: Well, you see, Armando, you don’t sit where I sit and see day in, day out the intelligence reports…

Brown: I see those as well…

Blair: Really? I didn’t realise you… anyway, we get the intelligence that says people are up to no good, but in ways that don’t flout existing laws. The police tell me they’re seeing people commit offences all the time, but that at the moment these are legal offences. The police need to be able to see if someone’s committing an offence, then bring in a law afterwards to tell them what that offence is. Like glorification.

Brown: I’d go further. Yes, we’re bringing in a law to make glorification illegal. But you can also break glorification down into its three constituent parts.

Iannucci and Blair: Can you?

Brown: Yes. Smiling, exaggerating and being sarcastic. There are people who smile when they hear about terrorism, or who exaggerate how successful a terrorist act has been, or are sarcastic whenever we come on the news. It only needs three of these people to come together in co-ordinated attack for them to collectively commit glorification.

Blair: Precisely. I think.

Brown: Or two people being sarcastic and one smiling. It works in different ways.

Blair: Really?

Forget the celebrity gunge and political tittle-tattle which clogs this morning’s newspapers and read something beautiful instead — Seamus Heaney’s wonderful 1995 Nobel Lecture, Crediting Poetry.

When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation. At the time I am thinking of, such an outcome was not just beyond expectation: it was simply beyond conception. In the nineteen forties, when I was the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural Co. Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world. It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other. We took in everything that was going on, of course – rain in the trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the railway line one field back from the house – but we took it in as if we were in the doze of hibernation. Ahistorical, pre-sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we were as susceptible and impressionable as the drinking water that stood in a bucket in our scullery: every time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of that water used to ripple delicately, concentrically, and in utter silence…

As a child, Heaney was fascinated — as I was — by the radio.

I also got used to hearing short bursts of foreign languages as the dial hand swept round from BBC to Radio Eireann, from the intonations of London to those of Dublin, and even though I did not understand what was being said in those first encounters with the gutturals and sibilants of European speech, I had already begun a journey into the wideness of the world beyond. This in turn became a journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival – whether in one’s poetry or one’s life turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination, and it is that journey which has brought me now to this honoured spot. And yet the platform here feels more like a space station than a stepping stone, so that is why, for once in my life, I am permitting myself the luxury of walking on air.

The lecture is full of vivid imagery which reminds one of the special skills poets have. Here, for example, is Heaney on what we want (need?) from poetry.

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin’s regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it.

It’s a wonderful lecture. Even better when you listen to it. (Needs RealAudio player.)