culture

Piano Van on the N17

Word came through from cousin Ed in Limerick: ‘Good news, I’ve a piano for you that’ll fit in Paul’s van.’ ‘Great stuff’ I enthused, blithely disregarding the challenge of getting it as far as my house in Sligo, let alone up the steps and through the door. Remarkably, cousin Paul agreed to make the trip … Read more

A Conversation with Carlo Gébler

Carlo Gébler’s work spans fiction, nonfiction, memoir, history, theatre, and film. Born in Dublin in 1954 and raised in London and Ireland, he has published more than thirty books. The author of plays for stage and radio, screenplays, and documentaries, he has for many years taught creative writing in prisons, currently in HMP Hydebank and … Read more

Hooligans, Thugs and Gangsters

  Our world, especially the United States, is now becoming a Gangster Enterprise where brutality and soma-induced compliance maintain the ruling order. Sadly, the weapons of resistance against authoritarianism are not readily apparent. Housing rights and in some cases a right to life are threatened at all levels. We experience deep-seated inequality and a worldwide … Read more

Distortions Of Language

  What tangled web we weave when our intention is to deceive? Sir Walter Scott The distortion of language lies at the heart of the greatest of threats to human civilisation. It now effects all aspects of the public and civic sphere, from court rooms to journalism to the expression of corporate-political elites. It is … Read more

Pathfinder: Manchán Magan

  I will follow these gallant heroes beneath the clay The warriors my ancestors served ever since Christ’s day. From Cabhair ni Ghoirfead / I Will Not Cry for Help by Aogán Ó Rathaille. Many poets, and all mystic and occult writers, in all ages and countries, have declared that behind the visible are chains … Read more

Podcast: “He Bought Plato” a conversation with John Dillon

John Dillon, Regius Professor of Greek (Emeritus) at Trinity College Dublin, is an Irish classicist and philosopher considered a world authority in ancient philosophy and Platonism. Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1939, he returned to Ireland as a child and studied Classics at Oxford before earning a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. He taught at Berkeley … Read more

On Rhetoric

What makes for fine rhetoric in an age of disinformation? Clearly, this is distinct from the techniques employed by corporate motivational speakers, tele-evangelists or self-help gurus. A useful starting point is to examine Aristotle’s views on Rhetoric, who argued that speech can produce persuasion (pistis) either through the character (êthos) of the speaker, the emotional … Read more

Zambia: Literature through English

I spent a number of years in Zambia, in the early seventies, the mid-seventies and the early nineties, teaching the English language and literature in English to school students in their early and late teens. They were preparing for public examinations including GCE overseas certificate organised by Cambridge University. It was called Literature in English … Read more

Eastern European Poetry in a Time of Trauma

I have been working in education for the last twenty-three years, and been publishing books as a writer over the last sixteen. I find disturbing the recent precipitous decline in reading and, consequent ignorance pervading contemporary culture. In response, in an effort to demonstrate its importance to my critical development, I would like to trace … Read more

Podcast: The Ghosts of Monto: Terry Fagan on 1950s Dublin

Terry Fagan is a renowned Irish local historian and storyteller from Dublin’s North Inner City. Born in the 1950s and raised in the historic heart of what was once Europe’s largest red-light district, the Monto, Fagan witnessed firsthand the rapid transformation, and often erasure, of the surrounding Dublin tenements and their culture. He is, to … Read more

Bullying: It’s You, Not Me

Bullies can take many shapes, forms, and disguises. It seems a daily occurrence that can be defined as repeated behaviours that are intentional or have malicious intent to cause fear or to instil feelings of superiority in the bully, while also causing anxiety and hopelessness in the victim, due to the bully’s relentless behaviour. Northern … Read more

Teenage Sex for Meth

Aged sixteen, I started trading sex for meth. There was no discussion about this with the drug dealers. It was understood. To me, this was a natural progression. My stepfather began to gawk at me when my first breast bud appeared, then molested me when I was twelve. Until I left home for college, I … Read more

The Release of Love

Todo lo que vemos o nos parece, no es sino un ensueño en un ensueño! ‘Everything we see or seem to see is nothing but a dream within a dream’ – Ruben Dario My father was cremated in Dublin, but he belonged to the heat. In Ireland, he carried Nicaragua on his shoulders—low, heavy, as … Read more

The Comics of Yesteryear

Most people whose Irish childhood was spent between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s wistfully remember the comics then available. They were mostly published by the DC Thomson company based in Aberdeen, Scotland. The Beano and The Dandy were read by boys and girls, and girls’ comics like Bunty and the School Friend (this for older girls) … Read more

Ностальгия

‘I confess I do not believe in time.’ Vladimir Nabokov On a hostel rooftop in Morocco, I met a Russian man who had not been home since the war broke out. I was there to catch the last of the sun and read my book in peace so when he first introduced himself I made … Read more

Review: The Occupant by Jennifer Maier

How would you feel upon discovering the objects of your daily, habitual use—ordinary objects of every imaginable function and variety—were inspirited, sensitively keen observers with their own desires, gripes, preoccupations, and ways of understanding the world? This is precisely the brain-tickling puzzle Jennifer Maier’s newly-released third collection The Occupant (University of Pittsburgh Press) shakes, opens, … Read more

The Inscrutable Mr. Scruton

At the end of Roger Scruton’s short book On Hunting, an out-of-print memoir about the British conservative philosopher’s discovery and participation in fox hunting during middle age, Scruton focuses on the final days of his cob Bob. Shorn of the energy needed to gallop in herd-like fashion through the landscape as a part of the … Read more

Electronic Music: ‘stepping into a space of anticipation’

I play electronic music, experimental ambient sets or hypnotic techno sets. It’s exciting to begin a set, stepping into a space of anticipation. The audience doesn’t know what’s to come, nor do I. I start with something and if I’m lucky, I catch them – they follow me. Together, we create a journey in the … Read more