Desi's Diary
Would The Real Mr Joyce Please Stand Up
first reading of James Martyn Joyce’s first collection of short stories entitled “What’s Not Said”, just published by Arlen House, you could be forgiven for thinking that it is the work of yet another “Angry Young Man” reacting in disgust and horror to the cynical and hypocritical world he finds himself living in where everything is brushed under the proverbial carpet and what’s not said is better than saying anything at all. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Valparaiso: The Personal Odyssey
There is at the top of Dalysfort Road, and in several other Galway City locations, a particular spot which offers a panoramic view of Galway Bay that is as spectacular as any such like vista on this planet. Anytime coming over that hill, I happen to see a ship coming in the Bay, the opening lines of Padraig De Brún’s poem jump to mind: “Tháinig long ó Valparaiso Scaoileadh téad a seol sa chuain”. No matter how often this happens, it always – as it did the first time I came across the poem in Secondary School – brightens the day,
Moments of Quiet Desperation
Walter Macken, probably the author most associated with Galway City, would have been 97 today. What is not generally realised is that he had strong East Galway connections, his mother hailing from Cappatagle near Ballinasloe. Most of Macken’s claim to be Ireland’s finest popular novelist of the twentieth century stems from his books “Rain on the Wind” and “Seek the Fair Land”. However one of his best novels (recently republished by New Island Books) is entitled “The Bogman” and is set in his mother’s country.
A Literary Gem In The Arts Festival Crown
No more than the Galway Races and the Galway Oyster Festival, not to mention Cúirt and the Galway Film Fleadh, the Galway Arts Festival has become a major event in the Irish Festival Calendar. As the organisers have grown in confidence and professionalism, so have the quality of the acts and the wow factor of the spectacle.Even the publication of the Festival Programme is as much of an anticipated event as any that are announced within and this year’s is no different.
Our Breton Exiles
In the years immediately following the end of the Second World War, Ireland was host to a small but significant number of Breton refugees who found their way here, for the most part, through either Wales or England. Because of their alleged collaboration with the Germans or their anti French behaviour they had all been convicted in absentia and sentenced to long terms in prison or, in some cases, to death. Those that didn’t warrant prison sentences were denied of their citizen rights, a subtle form of House Arrest. Eventually the sentences were revoked and most of these refugees returned.
A Brave New Voice
One of the more refreshing delights of bookselling and of reading is when a new voice makes itself heard for the first time. There is a natural tendency for cultural life to become stagnant even moribund. Indeed, an essential premise for the survival of any culture is its ability to reinvent itself, to regenerate new talent, to allow new voices space to flex their muscle and to take on board a whole new generation of creativity. Since the end of the nineteenth century, despite its inherently conservative ethos (or because of it as some might maliciously suggest), Ireland has been extraordinarily lucky in that every generation has brought with it a fresh wave of creative writers, painters, sculptors, actors and musicians
Presenting Little John Nee: Author
For most Galwegians, Little John Nee was to a large degree synonymous with the spirit of the Galway Arts Festival in its early years. None of the people who lined Galway’s streets on that wonderful Saturday afternoon in 1988 when Gulliver was paraded through the city centre will ever forget the obnoxious little character who proceeded the Footsbarn drums haranguing us all – the good, decent, honourable and honest citizens that we were – to hide our dirty faces and to take our ugly selves off the streets as our filthy smelly presence was nothing but the highest of insults to the Queen of Lilliput who was following him in all her grandeur.
The Book Club Phenomenon
There is nothing new about the recent explosion of Book Clubs throughout Ireland. It could be argued that ever since two or three people discussed a book they all had read the concept of the Book Club was formed. The more formal examples of the Book Club in modern history are the French Literary Salons and the English Coffee Shops of the Eighteenth Century. These Salons were generally frequented by the literati themselves who used them as a talking shop to promote their own work and satirise their literary opponents or by the nouvelle bourgeoisie who were trying to establish their literary, intellectual and cultural credentials in Fashionable Society.