Slimming for the Beach

KaaBloomsday, June 16, 2010

June 16 is of course famous throughout the world as Bloomsday, the day on which James Joyce first walked out with his future wife Nora Barnacle, an event he marked by setting his novel Ulysses on that day.

This is a a family Bloomsday story which we’d like to share with the greater family and friends throughout the globe. I should have published this several weeks ago, but maybe it’s appropriate that it appears on the day Dublin was designated a UNESCO City of Literature.

June 16 was also my aunt Kaa’s birthday. She died last November and is sorely missed. Her real name was Katherine Philomena, shortened to Kamena, and then to Kaa.

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Taking Ownership

A fascinating new series of talks begins this evening, May 7, 2010, at Christine Clear’s The Living Room. What she calls ‘contemplative conversations’ have the collective title of “Taking Ownership: conversations exploring a radical sense of responsiblity in contemporary Ireland.”
These conversations are contemplative in nature and attempt to understand the dynamics behind the upheavals in our current culture. The format uses silence and reflection as a sympathetic cocktail for exploring an appropriate spiritual response to the dilemmas we collectively face.

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We Need A General Election

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Aosdána votes unanimously for motion seeking clarification of Residential Institutions Redress Act, 2002

Last Wednesday and Thursday (April 14 and 15) Aosdána held its 2010 agm in the Armagh City Hotel, under the auspices of the Armagh City and District Council and the North South Ministerial Council, which is based in Armagh.
It was the first meeting to be held in Northern Ireland (the only other agm held outside Dublin was in Kiltimagh, Co Mayo), but the speeches at the welcoming dinner stressed that the meeting reflected the long-standing tradition of all Ireland collaboration and interaction between artists and arts organisations.
The agm was significant in other respects too, not least in the unanimous vote supporting the motion on the Residential Institutions Redress Act, 2002, proposed by Margaretta D’Arcy, and seconded by Paula Meehan.

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The Woman Who Danced With Her Cross On O’Connell Street

When I saw the headline Tribute paid to Dublin character, by Olivia Kelly in the Irish Times, I feared that one of the few public witnesses to her gospel that I had ever warmed to was dead. Happily, Mary Margaret Dunne is still alive. The article was referring to a living tribute to her organised on Facebook

In my 1994 novel, The Fabulists., Ms Dunne features on the last page, as crowds wait on Lord Edward and Dame streets to cheer the newly-elected President Mary Robinson, due in cavalcade in her 1947 Rolls-Royce. Needless to say, everyone was behind barricades, watched over by the relaxed and good-humoured Guards (Irish police). And then, exactly as the passage describes, came one exception, and the Guards, to their eternal credit, just smiled like everyone else.

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One Hundred and Thirty Nine Years of Solitude

Photo owned by Dan4th (cc)
Back in 1992 or 93, I was asked to write a poem to commemorate 139 years of The Christian Brothers School in Gorey. I obliged in the only way I knew how, but of course it wasn’t published. Maybe it was the title? Perhaps it would be now, though it’s far from a masterpiece.

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