Dec 6, 2010 | Features
The story was on page nine of my newspaper. It wasn’t a huge story yet the headline which contained the words ‘prisoner transfer’ viscerally threw up a lot of emotion and anger about the way things had been and need not have been. The headline was based on a crass...
Nov 29, 2010 | Features
Wrote a feature for today’s edition of the ‘Andersonstown News’, which they titled: “From Most Wanted to Not Wanted in three decades”: A long, long time ago, when I was a teenager and hadn’t a clue about life, I applied for a job as a librarian. What a wonderful...
Nov 22, 2010 | Features
Read ‘A Walk On The Wild Side’ by Nelson Algren. The main character, Dove Findhorn, Texas son of an alcoholic preacher, is initially a bit of a greenhorn and too honest for his own good. “My pappy was a preacher of sorts,” he says. “The sort to make you throw your...
Oct 15, 2010 | Features
Read ‘Falconer’ by John Cheever, the great writer who died in 1982. Read his ‘Journals’ two years ago, though have yet to transcribe my notes. Falconer is the name of the prison where Farragut, a war veteran and drug addict, is incarcerated for murdering his brother....
Oct 11, 2010 | Features
Finished ‘The Paris Review Interviews Vol. IV’. Have to say that throughout the entire series I found the interviews with novelists and short story writers much more compelling than those with poets but I suppose that is understandable. Nor was I impressed by the late...
Oct 4, 2010 | Features
Finished G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Autobiography’. Mostly boring but with some notable things, some of which were quite funny. I always remember my friend Terry Devlin quoting Chesterton’s hyperbolic saying about the Irish: For the great Gaels of Ireland Are the men that God...
