Neil Burns I have a mild neurosis, situated in Utopian wish-fulfillment, of the ideal that I often step in a prelapsarian coppice with slats of warm-light breaking the gentle canopy and then filtering on down through the trees to come to a swirling perceptible rest and thus luxuriating golden on the forest floor. The morning fontanelle, in … Read more
Picture the scene: the small backyard of a tiny working-class pub in Belfast at around 8pm on a dark Autumn night. I am smoking with a friend, older by a few years, and with way more life experience, talking about books. A dim-light is ebbing away, further subdued by the frosted glass of the bar-door. … Read more
In Ireland, North and South, the Arts Sector, currently, is a sinecure. Those middle-class mentalities which dominate, and, indeed, hold most high profile positions, would argue vehemently against such – as they would see it – an offensive statement, but nevertheless I believe it to be a fair characterisation. ‘Stephen says bitterly, “It is the … Read more
Does an age of frenetic online activity afford time for literary masterpieces, especially Outsider Novels, transcending what is considered ‘normal’? He whose vision cannot cover History’s three thousand years Must in outer darkness hover Live within the day’s frontiers. The above stanza is from a twelve-book, poetry collection by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which was … Read more
Levi ‘Lev’ Driscoll, wrote the odd sentence or two when creativity revealed itself to him. This month, albeit at a snail’s pace, he’d immersed himself in Frank Herbert’s classic, Dune. How he relished reading the exploits of Paul Atreides and his mother Jessica, deep into the vast inhospitable desert on Planet Arrkais. Lev marvelled at … Read more
It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted. Aeschylus Protestations against James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ House on Usher’s Island being ear-marked for a hostel are rooted in cultural-bias and emotional-led egocentrism, and exhibit blatant hypocrisy among the denouncers. Artsy sentimentality can be the lesser evil, but it is still … Read more