Well into his maturity, the great English poet Robert Browning (1812-1889), for all his erudition, was unacquainted with vulgar slang. Under the impression that a "twat" was a nun’s headgear, he misused the word in a spectacularly naive fashion in his verse play  Pippa Passes (best known for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world"):

Then, owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!

When asked why, later ...

 Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

Marshal Ferdinand Foch, under whose dashing command the French and their Allies defeated the Germans in WWI, had panache. During the second battle of the Marne in 1918, in response to fear-mongering reports from the front, he sent the following telegram:

My center is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I am attacking.

And, of course, like his fellow Gascons D’Artagnan and Cyrano de Bergerac, one quality he possessed in abundance was audacity: “L’audace, toujours l...

Of all the arts, sculpture is the most accessible but the least prized. Most people go right on by: oh, just another general on horseback or long-dead poet. But surely it's nothing short of miraculous to elicit from solid rock (or molten bronze) the myriad subtleties of human expression or the precise fall of a garment. I was reminded of this the other day when reading an article on Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828), the great French sculptor whose life straddled France's greatest upheavals: ...

Shoplifting at Dracula's cont'd.

     That first term I lived in a narrow attic room in the Seaview Hotel in Portrush, Co. Antrim, about ten miles from the university campus, with a view through a tiny window of red-brick Victorian buttresses, the gray northern sea and, on clear days, of the long low shank of Inishowen Head in Co. Donegal. Portrush was then famous throughout Ireland as a slightly rundown family holiday resort, a smaller, second-rate version of Blackpool, if anything mor...

Kipling believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defenses fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.

                                                Evelyn Waugh

Colour, old man, is what, au fond, clinches a creed. Colour and the light of God behind it.

                                                                          Rudyard Kipling, after visiting Chartres

As a writer, I am not of the minimalist school. On the contrary, I tend toward the prolix. But I hope I have enough of an innate sense of the structure and limitations of language to avoid overwhelming--or, worse, boring--my readers. A good writer needs an instinctive feel for honesty in his writing. John McGahern had this. He never overwhelmed; he was unsparingly spare, even austere, more of a word-painter, adding a daub here, wiping away a stroke there, than a word-musician orchestrating ...

The writer is driven by his own vocation to be a Protestant in a Catholic society, a Catholic in a Protestant one, to see the virtues of the Capitalist in a Communist society, of the Communist in a Capitalist State.

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country.

                            Edna O'Brien

At last...Ireland! (How suitable to re-connect with the Ireland of my youth on St. Patrick's Day.) Well, technically, yes, but it was actually Northern Ireland I ended up in. I worked that out from the name of the institution that accepted me as a student: the University of Ulster....

Beannachtaí na Feile Pádraig oraibh go leir.

Warmest greetings to all on St. Patrick’s Day.

The harp that once through Tara’s hall

The sound of music shed,

Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls,

As if that soul were fled.

           Thomas Moore (1779-1852)

What with certain Middle Eastern rulers calling for holy war against Switzerland, and a general and quite unusual Swiss jitteriness about themselves and their future, I felt a nostalgic fondness for the place and turned to memories of my own Swiss past and French-Swiss scribblers largely unknown beyond the Confederation’s borders: the late Jacques Chessex (L’Ogre) and his predecessors, Guy de Pourtalès (La Peche Miraculeuse), and C. F. Ramuz (Derborance). The intensity of these Swiss w...

[Drink] unlocks secrets, bids hopes be fulfilled, thrusts the coward onto the battle-field, takes the load from anxious hearts. The flowing bowl — whom has it not made eloquent? Whom has it not made free even amidst pinching poverty? 

My task is to chronicle those little daily lacerations upon the spirit.                                      Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

 Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

          White, blue; blue, white. Like her flag and the original cover of Ulysses. The prism-sharp light of Greece. Blindingly white, from the dark and increasingly fetid shelter of my train compartment, were the boxy houses, porcelain-blue the sky. Intimidated by the sudden foreignness of everything, exhausted from three days on the Yugoslav horror express, and homesick for our overgrown garden, old Stinko II, and Pete Toy, I lugged my steamer...

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.                                                                                                                                   The train journey itself, which took three days and three nights from Lausanne to Athens (via Milan, Trieste, Zagreb, Belgrade, Skopje, and Salonika), and my subsequent sojourn in Greece, introduced me to the most extreme form of two sensations: loneliness and nost...

Beware the writer who sets himself or herself up as the voice of a nation. This includes nations of race, gender, sexual orientation, elective affinity. . . The New Behalfism demands uplift, accentuates the positive, offers stirring moral instruction. It abhors the tragic sense of life. Seeing literature as inescapably political, it substitutes political values for literary ones. It is the murderer of thought.

                                           ...

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.

Crete had come as part of my all-in-one wanderjahr in Greece. A car trip with two schoolmates through Italy and Greece in the summer after graduation had revived my juvenile Hellenism and turned me into a proto-Hellene. I’d been immersing myself in the bleak and blistering books of Nikos Kazantzakis: Zorba, Report to Greco, The Last Temptation of Christ, Saint Francis, and The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, later parsed for me in Athens by a friend of ...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

            I glimpsed the wilderness again in Crete. I was at the foot of Mt. Ida, after about two hours’ gut-churning trundle in an old bus from Knossos, the restored Minoan palace just outside Heraklion. It was a hot morning in September 1970, forty summers and a thousand years ago. I was looking for the cave on Mt. Ida in which, it was said (by the D’Aulaires and others), Zeus was born to the goddess Rhea. Coincidentally, in that very sa...

As a young would-be writer and budding professional Irishman, I was infatuated with The Ginger Man, the comic masterpiece by Irish-American maestro J. P. Donleavy. I must have read it five times or more, enraptured by its picaresqueness and the absurd tenacity of the hero, Sebastian Dangerfield. Much of the book's influence trickled into my own Killoyle (which had several midwives: Donleavy, Flann O'Brien, Kingsley Amis, Laurence Sterne) ... I've always admired old J.P., not only for his ta...

While attending the University of Ulster I lived for a year in the pleasant seaside town of Portstewart on the northern coast of Northern Ireland, across from Co. Donegal in the Republic (placing the northernmost point of Ireland in the South: how very Irish). The Scottish islands of Eigg, Mull, and Rhum were visible on the horizon on clear days. The picture above shows the town in the 1960s; it had changed little when I arrived in 1971. I shared a bungalow with three Catholic rebels, one o...

Bohumil Hrabal used to say that he drew his worldview from a dry cleaner's slip he came across in Prague, which warned clients "Some stains can only be removed by the destruction of the material itself." Unknown until he was in his fifties, banned on and off by the Communists, Hrabal had ample opportunity to hone his sense of life's absurdity, a perspective on life specialized in by the Czechs and the Irish (or perhaps I should say the Slavs and the Celts). Another shrewd observation from ...

A new, humorless generation is now arising

It takes in deadly earnest all we received with laughter.

I imagine the earth when I am no more:

Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,

Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.

Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,

Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

                                    Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)