R.L. Swihart's Blog, page 35

Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds

Biographical reminiscence, part the first: It was only a few months before composing the foregoing that I had my first experience of intoxicating beverages and their strange intestinal chemistry. I was walking through the Stephen’s Green on a summer evening and conducting a conversation with a man called Kelly, then a student, hitherto a member of the farming class and now a private in the armed forces of the King. He was addicted to unclean expressions in ordinary conversation and spat continually, always fouling the flowerbeds on his way through the Green with a mucous deposit dislodged with a low grunting from the interior of his windpipe. In some respects he was a coarse man but he was lacking in malice or ill-humour. He purported to be a medical student but he had failed at least once to satisfy a body of examiners charged with regulating admission to the faculty. He suggested that we should drink a number of jars or pints of plain porter in Grogan’s public-house. I derived considerable pleasure from the casual quality of his suggestion and observed that it would probably do us no harm, thus expressing my whole-hearted concurrence by a figure of speech. Name of figure of speech: Litotes (or Meiosis).

Dalkey Archive: Dublin's Incomparable Archivist

—You are a native, I suppose? —No, no. No indeed. Mick toyed with his glass, showing nonchalance. —My own little trip to Skerries, he remarked, isn’t really for the purpose of holiday. I came here looking for somebody who’s in the town, I believe. —A relative? —No. A man I admire very much, a writer. —Ah. I see? —My good sir, I will not be so presumptuous as to ask you your name. Instead, I will tell you what it is. The weak eyes seemed to grope behind their glass walls. —Tell me . . . my name? —Yes. Your name is James Joyce. It was as if a stone had been dropped from a height into a still pool. The body stiffened. He put a hand about his face nervously. —Quiet, please! Quiet! I am not known by that name here. I insist that you respect my affairs. The voice was low but urgent. —Of course I will, Mr Joyce. I shall mention no name again. But it is a really deep pleasure to meet a man of your attainments face to face. Your name stands high in the world. You are a most remarkable writer, an innovator, Dublin’s incomparable archivist.

Flann O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive

It was after seven when he entered a rather poky establishment on the periphery of the harbour. One drink and the use of eye and ear told him there was nothing there. There was a big enough assembly, mostly of strangers, but they were loud and rowdy, and well on the highroad to a late night. No quiet, sardonic novelist loitered there. Yet was there any unhurried nook deemed seemly for a writer’s presence? Or was Joyce a recluse tucked away in chimney corner, avoiding all occasions of public concourse, fearing and despising the people and keeping to himself?

Redheads @ Colorado Lagoon

Redheads @ Colorado Lagoon. I think this is their second year, and it's nice to have them around. Happy 2024 & Read Some Poetry!!!🎈

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Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman

‘I can give you a question as good as that,’ he responded. ‘Can you notify me of the meaning of a bulbul?’ ‘A bulbul?’ ‘What would you say a bulbul is?’ This conundrum did not interest me but I pretended to rack my brains and screwed my face in perplexity until I felt it half the size it should be. ‘Not one of those ladies who take money?’ I said. ‘No.’ ‘Not the brass knobs on a German steam organ?’ ‘Not the knobs.’ ‘Nothing to do with the independence of America or such-like?’ ‘No.’ ‘A mechanical engine for winding clocks?’ ‘No.’ ‘A tumour, or the lather in a cow’s mouth, or those elastic articles that ladies wear?’ ‘Not them by a long chalk.’ ‘Not an eastern musical instrument played by Arabs?’ He clapped his hands. ‘Not that but very near it,’ he smiled, ‘something next door to it. You are a cordial intelligible man. A bulbul is a Persian nightingale. What do you think of that now?’ ‘It is seldom I am far out,’ I said dryly. He looked at me in admiration and the two of us sat in silence for a while as if each was very pleased with himself and with the other and had good reason to be.

Wilson's Snipes

Wilson's Snipes @ Huntington Central Park. Lifer. It was worth the wait.:)🎈

#rlswihart13 #huntingtonbeach #huntingtoncentralpark #snipes #snipesofinstagram #wilsonsnipes #chubbybirds #waders #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2023♥️ 🇺🇦🇮🇱🇵🇸

JP Jacobsen

No matter in how exalted a place a human being may set his throne, no matter how firmly he may press the tiara of the exceptional, that is genius, upon his brow, he can never be sure that he may not, like Nebuchadnezzar, be seized with a sudden desire to go on all-fours and eat grass and herd with the common beasts of the field.

JP Jacobsen

Music, however, was by no means Mr. Bigum’s chief interest. He was first of all a philosopher, but not one of the productive philosophers who find new laws and build new systems. He laughed at their systems, the snail-shells in which they dragged themselves across the illimitable field of thought, fondly imagining that the field was within the snail-shell!

JP Jacobsen's Niels Lyhne

He talked of painters and poets, too, and sometimes he would laud to the skies a name that she had never even heard. He showed her their pictures and read their poems to her in the garden or on the hill where they could look out over the bright waters of the fjord and the brown, billowing heath. Love made him poetic; the view took on beauty, the clouds seemed like those drifting through the poems, and the trees were clothed in the leaves rustling so mournfully in the ballads.

JP Jacobsen

“Silence, child of man!” thundered Pastor Jens. “Is this language meet for one who has even now one foot in the grave? ’Twere better you employed the flickering spark of life that still remains to you in making your peace with the Lord, instead of picking quarrels with men. You are like those criminals and disturbers of peace who, when their judgment is fallen and they can no longer escape the red-hot pincers and the axe, then in their miserable impotence curse and revile the Lord our God with filthy and wild words. They seek thereby courage to drag themselves out of that almost brutish despair, that craven fear and slavish remorse without hope, into which such fellows generally sink toward the last, and which they fear more than death and the tortures of death.” Ulrik Christian listened quietly, until he had managed to get his sword out from under the coverlet. Then he cried: “Guard yourself, priest-belly!” and made a sudden lunge after Pastor Jens, who coolly turned the weapon aside with his broad prayer-book.