Czechs, books, journalism – An Irishman’s Diary about next week’s Flann O’Brien conference in Prague

Reading the latest email from the International Flann O’Brien Society (IFOBS), I was for the first time struck by the commercial potential of that abbreviation, which could quite plausibly describe the next generation of products from Apple.

Already, I can imagine the iFob 1 – a smart key-ring that would remind you where you parked your car in Dundrum Town Centre, or give you the Google coordinates of the Dublin lamppost you locked your bike to several hours ago when you weren’t concentrating.

The iFob 2 would be a dramatic advance on that. Not only would it tell you the location of the lamppost, but when you got there and found the bike gone, it would also have a very good idea of the home address of the bastard who stole it.

After that, perhaps, would come the iFob 2D. Designed for drunks, it would use self-balancing gyroscopic technology to find your keyhole every time, even when the house is swaying violently. I’ll leave those ideas with you, Apple, but if you run with any of them, I want 15 per cent.

Getting back to the IFOBS email, meanwhile, it features a key of a different sort – abstracts of the papers to be presented at the third international Flann O’Brien Conference next week in Prague. And what strikes me about those is their extraordinarily wide range, not just in subject matter, but in the geographical origins of the contributors.

Among the universities sending Flannoraks to speak are Boston, Brasilia, California Cambridge, Cork, Doncaster, Florence, Jerusalem, Notre Dame, Oxford, Salzburg, Singapore, South Carolina, and Utrecht. That’s not the full list, I promise.

But the spread of contributors is more than matched by the subject matter. Although united – in a nod towards local boy Kafka – under the title of “Metamorphoses”, the papers range as freely as the collected work of Myles na gCopaleen himself.

The latter is a major subset of the IFOBS remit. And the conference will, among other things, continue the critical rehabilitation of his Cruiskeen Lawn column. Once written off as a waste of his literary energies, it is now increasingly considered, in the words of one abstract, “a sustained artistic masterpiece”.

Of course we don't need to be told that here in The Irish Times, where the product of his 26-year residency hangs over latter-day columnists like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Even so, as another speaker, John Wyse Jackson, will point out, the very earliest of those columns, when he was at the top of his game but writing exclusively in Irish, are still largely untranslated and unknown to English speakers.

That aside, conference talks will include such disparate topics as his treatment of alcohol, his attitude to capital punishment, the tendency of his (and Samuel Beckett’s) characters to be disabled, and his relationship with sport.

It may come as news to Flann fans that he had a relationship with sport, since the only ball he was known to practice with was the ball of malt. But in fact, there’s a whole session devoted to the GAA and related matters.

It will take all of four days to fit the speakers in – more evidence that, far from waning, the cult of Flann is still growing on the eve of the 50th anniversary of his death. But mercifully, the conference won’t be confined to literary analysis.

The social programme includes an evening of Mylesian theatre, which it’s hoped will remind anyone who’s forgotten that the man was, above all else, funny. There’ll also be a reading by Flann’s spiritual son, Kevin Barry.

And as is now traditional, the week will end will a gala dinner at which will be presented the biennial Fr Kurt Fahrt SJ awards for Flann O’Brien criticism. There’s one for a book-length critique (the “Big Fahrt”), and one for an essay (the “Little Fahrt”). Both are much coveted.

On the other hand, I’m slightly disturbed to read that the programme will also include a “Flann-Flavoured Whiskey Tasting”. No doubt this is mere whimsy, and the whiskey involved is conventionally flavoured, just accompanied by literary references.

But the title reminds me of Myles's Gothic murder tale, set in fin-de-siècle London, and concerning a loathsome landlord who boasts once too often about his drinking capacity. The narrator eventually takes an axe to him, then dissolves him in acid and, after filling glasses with the residue, crawls beneath a piece of kitchen furniture – all to fulfil a promise, made at first idly before resolving into a grim plan, that he would one day "drink him under the table".

@FrankmcnallyIT