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October 2008
The Archives
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10.29.08Neil Gaiman’s Day of the DeadStraight after his visit to the Revelatorium tomorrow, Neil Gaiman will be wielding one of his fabled magic pens and signing copies of The Graveyard Book at Eason’s on O’Connell Street at 7pm.
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10.28.08The Song of Wondering AngusThe venerable Angus Cargill has a blog up and running to mark the publication of Faber's Hang The DJ.
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10.28.08Revelation ReloadedElaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton and author of The Gnostic Gospels and Beyond Belief, lecturing on The Book of Revelation last March.
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10.27.08Prayer Before Birth – Louis MacNeiceI am not yet born; O hear me. Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me. I am not yet born, console me. I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me, with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me, on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me. I am not yet born; provide me With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk ...
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10.24.08Dylan’s Secret HistoriesBob Dylan Tell Tale Signs – The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Rare And Unreleased Recordings (Columbia) We’ll never solve the mystery of why Bob Dylan has continually omitted some of the best songs he’s ever written from his official album releases. Maybe he’s just an incurable existentialist who doesn’t care for preserving his work in terms of the Definitive Recorded Statement. Maybe he fancies himself the archetypal man in motion (“Ain’t talkin’/Just walkin’” as he puts it in on one of this album’s finest cuts, a throbbing out-take from Modern Times that sounds about two thousand years old), more concerned with life ...
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10.22.08Absolutely Queen LucindaThe new Lucinda Williams record Little Honey will break your heart and straighten your back. Here she is from ten years ago doing the sublime ‘Drunken Angel’.
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10.22.08The View From Last NightFriar Murphy was on The View panel last night discussing A Film With Me In It, Richard Rodney Bennett’s gothic opera The Mines Of Sulphur, Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day In Blackrock, and the John Shinnors exhibition Back to the Lighthouse. The show is now online at www.rte.ie/tv/theview
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10.17.08Ray Lowry 1944-2008When I was but a cub writer contributing a series of autobiographical shaggy dog rock ‘n’ roll tales to Hot Press in the late 90s, I'd the honour of having those pieces illustrated by Ray Lowry, the cartoonist most famous for designing the cover of The Clash’s London Calling. Ray also contributed to Punch, The Guardian, Private Eye and the NME, and it’s one of his panels that kickstarts Greil Marcus’s epic punk treatise Lipstick Traces. Ray and I spoke a few times on the phone to discuss work in progress, and he was kind enough to send me contacts ...
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10.16.08Vico’s Road“As rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligentia fit omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendo fit omnia). Perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for when man understands he extends his mind and comprehends all things, but when he does not understand he makes things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them.” Giambattista Vico, Principles of New Science, lifted from the epigraph of No Go the Bogeyman by Marina Warner.
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10.15.08ee cummings – Lament for Buffalo BillBuffalo Bill's defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat ...