At Cassandra Voices we believe in contrasting the original work of our contemporary contributors with accomplished authors from yesteryear. Perennial favourites of such mastery, they appear as fresh and modern as the day they were first published. For our May edition we bring you Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’. A short story from 1948, and notorious … Read more
The cruellest aspect of protracted displacement is a descent into the realms of collective forgetfulness, in places where social injustice and political abandonment are normalised. Fresh from her fourth visit to Lebanon, author and activist Bruna Kadletz sees the Palestinian cause being relegated more and more to the margins of global concern. In the autumn … Read more
I feel Irish today, No decent future, maybe just money and a new distillery The new hotel to fuck my view in Dublin 8 is empty The enormous student residence is as windy as a Hong Kong typhoon. And empty like my pockets. How is it possible to live without depression in Dublin 8? Rents … Read more
In the time it took him to close the three yards of separation between us, a well-dressed young man with a Saints ballcap pulled down low was holding a Glock 19 semi-automatic to my head. I’d been hypervigilant for three weeks after a New Orleans tarot card reader at the Golden Leaves Bookstore divined bad … Read more
Nightfalls. Creatures are on the move, Leaping, dancing, diving, digging, loving that’s the art of living, that’s the art of dying. Machines are slowing down Cars, trains, ships, aeroplanes I’m coming in now to land, from all those names the Pacific, the Wild Atlantic way, the Mediterranean, the Indian and Arctic Oceans the South China … Read more
Last January, the Minister for Education, Joe McHugh, invited views from the public on the current system of granting exemptions to pupils from the compulsory study of Irish, following debate around the current regime. The Irish language organisations want exemptions to be kept to a minimum; they have long complained that these are granted too … Read more
Temperature Rising ‘Give them enough rope and they’ll hang themselves.’ That’s what a wise ex-colleague of mine used to say whenever someone made a boneheaded move out of extreme self-interest. Democrats would do well to heed that lesson. In the first edition of this newsletter we argued that they should move on from the Mueller … Read more
Inferno in the Alpine foothills of Northern Italy near Vercelli and Biella, Piedimont. [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”40″ gal_title=”NoComment: Inferno in the Alpine foothills of Northern Italy near Vercelli and Biella.”] https://cargocollective.com/francescotaurisano/BIO
Back in Dublin again, I was one of thirty, all-male trainees destined to become the camera, lighting and sound operators with the new television service. I started late, in November 1961 and found the first work ambience I had ever enjoyed. We were based in the hall of a school near Ringsend and then in … Read more
‘Descend the stairs, bend your legs, melting one by one. / Open your mouth to the snake in the sand, swallowing you one by one.’ So begins the first single from our latest album. It’s one of my treasured moments in the meandering Loafing Heroes journey: in how it came about, how it was constructed, … Read more