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May 2009
The Archives
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05.31.09Back from the west…Many thanks to all at Listowel Writers' Week for treating us like royalty. Our reading from the theatre at St John's Church, recorded for RTE Radio 1's Sunday Miscellany, is now online. The show commissioned a short piece entitled 'Sunday Morning, Away West' and features Cyril Kelly, Joseph O'Neill, myself, Christine Dwyer Hickey, John Montague and Gabriel Byrne. Click on RTE's website and there's a link to the right of the Sunday Miscellany page. Plus, we got blogged here: http://listowelwritersweekfringe.com/wordpress/?p=490
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05.25.09Wise blood…If this don't stir your wanderlust, well... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOSZwEwl_1Q
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05.23.09the cause of all our sorrows…"Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them." – Sitting Bull
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05.19.09That old man river…... just keeps rollin' along.
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05.19.09Cheers EmmYou should see me trying to wire a plug. http://emmgryner.com/emmbassy/?q=node/691 Stay tuned for the interview.
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05.19.09If the first casualty of war is truth, the second is art"In wartime the state seeks to destroy its own culture. It is only when this destruction has been completed that that the state can begin to exterminate the culture of its opponents. In times of conflict authentic culture is subversive. As the cause championed by the state comes to define national identity, as the myth of war entices a nation to glory and sacrifice, those who question the value of the cause and the veracity of the myths are branded internal enemies." War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges
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05.14.09All This Futile Beauty: Richey Edwards’ Last WordsWe resume where we left off. During our last encounter with the Manic Street Preachers two years ago, we discussed, among other things, the notion of the band’s then current single ‘Your Love Alone (Is Not Enough)’ as a hypothetical conversation between a potential suicide and a loved one. We talked about Richey Edwards, the band’s guitarist, minister for propaganda and aesthetic avatar, who disappeared from the Embassy Hotel on February 1, 1995 and was declared presumed deceased last year (the band’s forthcoming ninth album Journal For Plague Lovers features lyrics culled exclusively from the notebooks Edwards left behind – ...
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05.14.09Heavy WeatherInteresting piece in the Australian Literary Review about the use of weather in J the R, American Rust and The Day I Killed My Father. http://richardjking.blogspot.com/2009/05/heavy-weather-australian-literary.html
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05.12.09A starred review…... for J the R in Publishers Weekly. Our first US write-up. John the Revelator Peter Murphy. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25 (272p) ISBN 978-0-15-101402-6 In the hallowed pantheon of Irish coming-of-age novels, Murphy's strongly written debut splits the difference between the sensitivity of Portrait of an Artist and the freakishness of Butcher Boy. John Devine lives a marginal life with his single mother in the small Irish town of Kilcody. He has a love for the lore of creepy-crawly things (thanks to his favorite book, Harper's Compendium of Bizarre Nature Facts). His mother, a maid for the rich folks in the area, ...
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05.11.09J the R Sindo Review"(The author) has acknowledged the influence of books such as Pat McCabe's The Butcher Boy, the American gothic style of Flannery O'Connor's short stories and the dirty realism of writers like Raymond Carver on John the Revelator. He also cites Arthur Rimbaud as one of the heroes of his 20s and Rimbaud's famous "Merde a Dieu!" graffiti is woven into the Revelator narrative. But in his first novel Murphy has absorbed and moved on from his influences and pushed form to exciting potentialities." http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/a-rites-of-passage-tale-with-a-fine-narrative-pace-1734561.html