Centenary morning, to ya!! A great, great author, full of wit and whimsy and a native Irish speaker, Flann O’Brien would be a hundred years young today, if he hadn’t met the fate of The Third Policeman. From the author’s page, an excerpt: Flann O’Brien Flann O’Brien, whose real name was Brian O’Nolan, also wrote under the pen name of Myles na Gopaleen. He was born in 1911 in County Tyrone. A resident of Dublin, he graduated from University College…
The Third Policeman finds his way to At Swim-Two-Birds and lives to write about it, writes to live within it. Riding his bloody bike, he feels his molecules changing, becoming something other, something cyclical. Along the way, he meets Saint Augustine and James Joyce, both of whom are really dead, but only one of whom is an apparition. The other is a bartender who doesn’t know about Finnegans Wake. Well, actually, that’s only part of the story and the wrong…
An older poem of mine reminds me of the biography of Yeats I’m reading now. The biography of Yeats reminds me of an older poem. Not so much for what resides inside the poem or inside the book. But the act of writing itself. The act of being a poet. The act. The context of that act. The bio is R. F. Foster’s two volume masterwork from the 1990s. I read Richard Ellmann’s essential biography many years ago, which set…