MY DEAD OF IRELAND

 

This evening I was wondering why Dublin does not come to mind more frequently.  I was in the basement and picked up GIRL ON A BICYCLE a novel by Leland Bardwell.  I had not read it as it was badly printed on paper that turned brown though I  had acquired it from the memory of meeting her in Dublin.  But more vivid in mind was Fintan MacLachlan her companion, boyfriend or what not, now  finally only known as the father of three of her children but when I knew him he was a taxi driver and as a "toucher."  

There is never reason for how names appear in mind, as they simply do...we are always almost unanchored to the present moment

SO to make a list of the dead--- does that account for how Dublin seems to have gone somewhere yet my ST. PATRICK'S DAY another day in Dublin remains in print in the world--though the National Library of Ireland does not have it in its collection, while University College, Dublin's library has it... 

James Liddy, 

Philip Casey, 

Eugene Lambe, 

Derek Mahon, 

Patrick Kavanagh, 

John Jordan, 

Francis Stuart, 

Liam O'Flaherty, 

Dickie Riordain, 

Dermot Healy, 

John Montague, 

Leland Bardwell, 

J. P. Donleavy,  

Christine Keeler,

Pearse Hutchinson, 

Austin Clarke, 

Jonathan Bardon, 

Ian Whitcomb, 

Tommy Smith, 

Philip Hobsbaum, 

Brian Higgins, 

Michael Hartnett, 

Tim Tollekson, 

Willie and Beatrice Opperman, 

Brian Moore, 

Desmond O'Grady, 

Roger McHugh, 

Jeremiah Hogan, 

Garech Browne, 

Paddy O'Hanlon, 

Jan Kaminski, 

Justin O'Mahony, 

Jim Fitzgerald, 

Stephen and Kathleen Behan, 

Mary Lavin,

But of course Grafton Street remains and St Stephen's Green... I will walk by Ely Place where last I lived...continue on and think of teaching at the Dublin Tuition Center or living in Grosvenor Square...and and and... but no longer tonight

A NEW YEAR JUST LIKE LAST YEAR and most likely like next year

Summer 1978 in THE GOREY DETAIL (Ireland)   Francis Stuart writes, All the  best fiction lately, and this will be evident in the future, is a criticism and extension of the novel form.  No good piece of fiction can now be self-contained, it is open to the world outside at both ends.

AND:   Knowledge, as Blake said is love. Knowledge that is not love, and that is almost all contemporary knowledge is illusion.

AND:  The serious novel is negative to popular ideas, is alienated  from the general assumptions of its society, gives an unequivocable ‘No’ to all general ideas and ideals.  Only in the style in which this “No” is annunciated is there a positive glimmer.

One could quote the whole short article but why bother as we live In a culture that has grown only worse from this moment  back when Stuart writes, The real enemy of art is not general indifference or widespread public ignorance.  It is culture, what passes for culture among any of the so-called well-educated.  For them art is an adjunct to their successful lives; it is positive and reassuring, confirming them in their intellectual assumptions. This kind of culture, that incidentally, prefers biographies and even travel books to fiction, is rampant in the literary supplements of the English Sunday papers. 

Of course Stuart if he was still alive would add: this is still  true and maybe even more dire now with the partial disappearance of literary supplements in the United States and the growing importance of  the on-line substitutes such as The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post which are even worse in their sheer knowing ignorant stupidity.  These supplements, these organs of power have made us aware of and popularized the fakery represented by: Paul Auster, Jonathan Franzen, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Martin Amis… each of which is an incitement to never admit that one writes or reads as too many consciously think of these as being what is good and drop sad inevitable necessary comparisons, the trying to explain… better give it up! As you will only be thought to pressing sour grapes as opposed to…

The BLACKLIST SECTION H by Francis Stuart is his authority for what I am quoting  above and my GOING TO PATCHOGUE and THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV is my cliaim upon you to make this post