Conor Tuohy > Recent Status Updates

This is great, enjoying it a lot. Only complaint is that a character for no explicable reason smokes opium the first time he sees it walking about while his inner monologue details every minute piece of intergenerational trauma ascribable ultimately to opium. Okay maybe there was a reason, but christ I didn't want him to.

Edna O'Brien is really forgiving a huge amount because he wrote some pretty poems (have I done the same with Yeats, maybe, shut it).

The madness continues, it seems shocking that what are now considered very reasonable countries (in the main) were run in such a ramshackle, discombobulated and backwards way. I know I know, modern leaders stupid/bad too etc..not this bad, believe me.

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Had I not literally been in a *Piedmont* museum when listening, I would not have realised it meant "originator of national unification" without elaboration.

Another chonky history book to listen to. Christ things are easier now that most of these places are in the EU, and run by (comparatively) sane people (no really).

Slow going, but I'm actually getting some meaning out of it this time. Also the usual Shakespeare thing where a bunch of lines are just everyday idioms now (well not idioms because now I know where they come from shhhh).

So I have left like a two year gap between this and the first two, and while I see that it's not as good, because there's been such a long time I am just so back into the world that it seems amazing. A good way to start the crawl out of my backlog.

70 pages of introduction felt a tad excessive

Again she still circles slightly too much around the meat of what's going on. Too much time on biographical description of where people were and what they were doing while alluding to what they were thinking but nowhere near enough on what those actual thoughts consisted of. Regardless, it gets the gist across and at least gives a good idea of which of them you'll actually want to read directly.

She's got this tendency to talk around what she's trying explain/describe an awful lot. When she actually gets to it she can explain something unintuitive and abstruse quite well though.

This country is a few generations removed from an economic, social, cultural, and humanitarian abyss. Joyce knew but he went to Clongowes and fucked off to the continent as soon as he could. O'Brien and Kavanaugh drank themselves to the brink and to death respectively. None of them could ever convey or conceive the complete tragedy of growing up a woman in prewar ireland. Profoundly sad, imagine it'll stay that way.

Finally getting to the bit where the wheels come off the Nazi economy, I imagine there is much more schadenfreude (sorry) at this stage of a narrative history of the war generally. Here on the other hand it just seems like this big huge machine is being disassembled and I'm left with a sterile sense of the complete waste that it amounts to.

Would love for the Abbey to bring back some of his, Lady Gregory's or J.M. Synges work. Playboy of the Western World when????

This has been a slog, a rewarding slog, but a slog nonetheless. After this and the WWII one I need to read some fiction for awhile.