Spring For Lois P. Jones I The gentle discord of rainfall, its alternating static dance are Reeds of air in suspension before the corona of sensation. A droplet splashes and trickles along your neck, its joyous grief is welcomed by you with a shudder. The courage of the leaf passes beneath the banks of … Read more
Try to envisage Odysseus, on stiff headland, on the Western Atlantic coast of Ireland, tilling the soil with an ancient looking hoe. His hands are dry, chapped and his thick fingers curled around a parched shaft, steady palms supporting the implement, with which he works effortlessly. The slap, jut, and pull of the short blade … Read more
Promoter, venue and band manager, Conal Lee reflects on the experience of musicians over the course of lockdowns, and considers the ongoing difficulities for musicians and venues in Dublin, as well as the challenges of dealing with new controls. How have you survived through the lockdown? Having an enforced break, albeit as a result of … Read more
I still don’t know musically where I belong. Being classically trained as a pianist, but listening also to Jazz, World, Indi Pop, Nordic, Heavy Metal or Ambient music, and loving them all, I keep losing myself in whichever direction I go. I wouldn’t say I want to compose Heavy Metal, but I am influenced by … Read more
Ace of Wands Fire & Desire And then, at the right time from the heat of our hands a love that was old and new lit up like a torch burning from the depths like fire to the turf. Eight of Wands BOOM!! Someone’s heart whispered: Boom!!! And everything blew up The Earth stopped moving and … Read more
Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense is a recently published work by Irish philosopher and public intellectual Richard Kearney. The book is the third in the ‘No Limits’ series published by Columbia University Press. The blurb and introduction promise a timely meditation on the importance of touch in an age of virtuality. The book, we … Read more
Introductory Note “Icarius’s Daughter” celebrates Penelope, Odysseus’s wife and heroine of Homer’s Odyssey. In the Odyssey, two narratives are woven together by means of changes of scene and frequent flashbacks. In the first strand of the plot, Odysseus has many dire adventures as he makes his way home to Ithaca from the siege of Troy. … Read more
In how many garrets and non-garrets of the world Are self-convinced geniuses at this moment dreaming. Álvaro de Campos, ‘The Tobacco Shop’, 1928 In the early days of the Internet – end of the 1990s for me – while a history student in UCD, a friend took a passionate interest in a volatile political situation … Read more
The Sacred Mundane 1 We might say with confidence that the world is a lovely catastrophe—paradise buried in a rubbish heap; devilish, angelic, perishing, precious, priestly, proud; one home to the light that is oil and the water that is darkness, this poor dazzling Earth a jar cracking with the strain of their dueling dual … Read more