The Cat Flap
I’m no objectivist (I think!) but I really enjoyed
Peter Sirr’s review of The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 1918 – 1975, and while I could take or leave some of the poems quoted, I thought this was marvellous.

Walk about the subway station
in a grove of steel pillars;
how their knobs, the rivet-heads–
unlike those of oaks–
are regularly placed;
how barren the ground is
except here and there on the platform
a flat black fungus
that was chewing-gum.
(Jerusalem the Golden, 18)

Rosemarie Rowley’s essays

ECT in the life and work of Sylvia Plath by Rosemarie Rowley

One of the characters in my novel The Water Star undergoes ECT and in trying to imagine it I could not see how it could be other than barbaric.
Rosemarie Rowley thoughtful and affecting essay convinces me that this is so.

Writing of the ECT as a ritual should not surprise us. It is a ritual, a modern one. The treatment is both profoundly humiliating, and barbaric, twin elements of torture. In a letter to the author of this essay, myself, Ted Hughes described it as an atrocity. He wrote to me that ECT was the crucial event in her writing

The Beckett Country Collection
The Beckett Country Collection is now online at Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive Project (IVRLA) at UCD.
The Beckett Country Collection is derived from
The Beckett Country: Catalogue of an exhibition for Samuel Beckett’s eightieth birthday. E. O’Brien and J. Knowlson. Black Cat Press. Dublin 1986... See Eoin O’Brien’s Samuel Beckett page.

Eoin O’Brien
Do further explore Renaissance Man Eoin O’Brien’s website.
Eminent cardiologist, friend and publisher of Samuel Beckett, he is also a considerable medical historian. See, for example, his Conscience and Conflict. A Biography of Sir Dominic Corrigan (1802-1880). The Glendale Press. Dublin 1983, which, as it has long been out of print, he is generously making available for free download under a Creative Commons licence, along with other medical history volumes of great value, such as The Charitable Infirmary, Jervis Street 1718-1987: A Farewell Tribute. Edited by E. O’Brien. The Anniversary Press. Dublin. 1987. pp.279. Illustrated..
Many of his voluminous papers and essays are likewise available. It’s quite a monument to a life’s work, and is still growing.

The Dublin Review of Books

The Dublin Review of Books is proving to be a most stimulating online review, allowing critics to flex their critical muscles in essays up to 7,000 words in length. Such reviews have only been available to tiny audiences in Ireland, and it’s a particular pleasure to see such intellectual stimulus online, for free. The Phantom of Exclusion, by Barra Ó Seaghdha’s review of Surveying Irish Poetry
Modern Irish Poetry, 1800-2000, by Justin Quinn, Cambridge University Press, 256 pp, £14.99, 978-0521609258, is a fine example of this.

Chris Singleton
Finally, he gets in this post as he writes fine lyrics, but Dublin solo artist Chris Singleton’s Rock and Roll and Hyperbole recently had a very interesting post on how musicians can track how and when their music is being listened to. Here’s an excerpt:

With the rise of social networks like Facebook, Myspace, iLike and Last FM, musicians now have a plethora of ways to measure how many people are listening to their music. For example, any band with a Myspace page will be able to see how many plays of their songs they are getting; which tracks tend to be more popular; and how many songs are downloaded (as opposed to just listened to).

The permalink for the full entry is here.

Editors Maurice Earls & Enda O’Doherty

Featured essays are:

1. Barra Ó Seaghdha on Paul Muldoon as critic
2. John-Paul McCarthy on Justice William Brennan, a Catholic liberal in the US Supreme Court
3. Manus O’Riordan on Jews in independent Ireland
4. Belinda McKeon on Milan Kundera’s theory of the novel
5. Maurice Earls on the bombing of Germany
6. James Ryan on an historical novel by John Maher
7. Pádraig Lenihan on early modern Irish mapmakers
8. Peter Mackay on Scottish Gaelic poetry
9. Ana Paula Arnaut on José Saramago’s memories of youth
10. Michael D Langan on the essence of Englishness

Dublin Review of Books, Summer 2007