An Irishman's Diary

IT’S a sign of the times, I suppose. But the programme for the 2012 Doneraile Literary and Arts Festival arrived recently, complete with its schedule of workshops. And I notice that, along with the usual disciplines you’d expect at an event like this – creative writing, painting, poetry, etc – the organisers are offering a course in “Zumba dance fitness”.

Perhaps you hadn’t heard of Zumba dance fitness yet. If not, rest assured it will be coming to a gym near you soon. If the Doneraile festival is anything to go by, your library or book club may yet be holding classes in it.

In the meantime, allow me explain that Zumba is a musical exercise regime, originally from Colombia, and incorporating a wide range of dance forms, including hip-hop, samba, salsa, mambo, tango, flamenco, cha-cha-cha, belly-dancing, and Bollywood. Oh, and it also features some conventional, non-dance exercises, such as squats and lunges. My apologies to enthusiasts if I left anything out of that list. But I was getting tired just writing it.

RAGINGLY POPULAR though Zumba has become, it’s still a bit of a shock to read about in a literary environment. It shouldn’t be, I know. Writers are at least as likely as any other profession these days to work out.

But time was – and it’s not so long ago either – when the only form of physical exercise poets and novelists were publicly associated with involved lifting pints and short-ones. The more active literary types were those who exercised both elbows simultaneously, by using the other one to smoke.

OK, there was Hemingway, who while he did plenty of drinking and smoking, was also famously sporty. Plus he wrote standing up. But most writers had a sedentary lifestyle, and some couldn’t even manage that.

Proust preferred to write in bed, as did many others. Even George Orwell. You wouldn’t know from reading it, but 1984 was written lying down, in a cloud of cigarette smoke. In fairness to Orwell, he had the excuse that he was dying of TB at the time.

Anyway, as the Doneraile festival shows, the era when disdain for exercise was fashionable in the arts has passed. Nowadays, if anything, the reverse applies.

Martin Amis, for example, does pilates. The Limerick-born novelist Michael Collins runs ultra-marathons. And I’ve read that even Dan Brown keeps an hour-glass on his writing desk – an actual hour-glass – to remind him to take breaks every 60 minutes, during which he performs a series of push-ups, sit-ups, and squats.

It’s not just writers, either. Musicians are looking after themselves too. Even traditional music events now often have a physical fitness element built in. Fiddlers are, of course, notoriously prone to repetitive strain-injury. So as well as tuning the instrument before a session, there’s increasing awareness these days of the need to tune the musician.

IT’S AMUSING to wonder what Sir Edmund Spenser – the poet and one-time resident of Doneraile – would have made of the Zumba workshop.

Interestingly, he used the word “unfit” (or “unfitter”, to be exact) in the opening verse of his famous epic The Faerie Queene (1590). Not in the physical sense, exactly. He was just expressing his feelings of inadequacy towards the task in hand.

But even so, maybe he too would have benefited from the Zumba workshop, with its promise to target his “abs” (abdominal muscles), burn calories, and increase energy levels.

Then again, the times he lived in were probably a sufficient aerobic work-out in themselves. His Doneraile Castle was burned down during the Nine Years War, a period when the native Irish were targeting not just his abs, but the rest of him too. He in turn had some strong ideas – all on the general theme of genocide – about what needed to be done to them.

The people of Doneraile have not held such bigotry against him, however. On the contrary, the poetry competition in next week’s festival is named in his honour. And with the same aplomb, locals have also turned another potential PR problem from the town’s history to their advantage.

It dates from 1808 when a bard visiting Doneraile had his watch stolen. Naturally, he wrote a poem about it, inviting every imaginable curse to befall the town. Which, in the bardic tradition, functioned like a retrospective insurance policy.

The local aristocracy duly settled his claim, by giving him a new watch. In return for which, the bard wrote a palinode: a riposte to his own earlier work, withdrawing the curses and now praising Doneraile to the skies.

The organising committee is relaxed enough about the incident to include both poems in its festival press releases. It does, however, assure modern visitors to Doneraile that they have nothing to worry about. Next week’s festival may target your abs, as we’ve already noted. But your watch, at least, is safe.

The Doneraile Literary Arts Festival begins on Monday July 30th. More details are at literaryartsfestival.ie

* fmcnally@irishtimes.com