Week ending March 27th 2012
My long finger will be getting shorter by the day from now on. I have reached the magic figure of 60,000 woords and will be giving the novel I have been writing since the end of January a break for some time. The work is self-imposed. There is no deadline, but the desire to get it done, to have a break and to do all the things that have been sidelined for some time is a pressure in itself. I will get to sweep the floor, even mop it, to start planting a few vegetables for the summer, to clean the seasalt from the windows, to wash the backlog of clothes, to get down to serious preparations for Easter, to really enjoy walking the dog on Carna’s nine beaches rather than trying to think of how to start the next paragraph, the next chapter.
The beauty of writing in a concentrated way over a short period is that it helps the continuity of a story. I have found in the past that taking a break or two during the writing can damage a person’s momentum and make restarting very difficult. It is not that what is written in the first draft is the finished article, but it is a strong basis. Much editing, correction and rewriting will still be needed, but the heavy lifting, the hard yards as the modern cliches put it, have been completed. That is the stage at which the delete button becomes the writer’s best friend, while cutting and pasting can bring a paragraph or a chapter to a more appropriate part of the book.
When people ask me what I like about writing I usually answer: “Getting finished.” It is a glib enough answer, but I am sure that it could be echoed by somebody knitting a garment or building a wall. It is lovely to get finished and look back at your handiwork. The elation that comes from getting finished is not unlike that of the child who has been waiting and waiting for a treat, and then one day: “Tomorrow comes at last.” That was a phrase attributed to one of my siblings and often repeated proudly for visitors. A long promised trip to ‘town’ had materialised at last.
Every famly have such phrases in which wisdom “out of the mouth’s of babes” is repeated again and again. My ears still redden when I remember how often a remark made to defend my father’s assistance to an aunt instead of doing jobs at home was repeated: “She was his sister all his life,” I told my mother, rather undiplomatically, “and you are only his wife for the past few years.” A third member of the family displayed her diplomatic skills when defending the physique of a relative: “He hasn’t a yump, but his cap is sideways on his head.” Even after sixty years such phrases are still remembered.
At this time of the year I can imagine Mary, the mother of Jesus and the other Marys at the foot of the cross on Calvary hill, repeating the little phrases by which the baby Jesus had made them laugh, or displayed his wisdom. The only one we know is what he said when lost in the Temple at the age of twelve: “Did you not know that I had to be about my father’s business?” A mixture of idealism and naievty, as he overlooked the fact that he had put the heart crossways in his parents by wandering off.. But he grew up, got sense, and many of us will be following him as he goes about that business in the next few weeks.
The beauty of writing in a concentrated way over a short period is that it helps the continuity of a story. I have found in the past that taking a break or two during the writing can damage a person’s momentum and make restarting very difficult. It is not that what is written in the first draft is the finished article, but it is a strong basis. Much editing, correction and rewriting will still be needed, but the heavy lifting, the hard yards as the modern cliches put it, have been completed. That is the stage at which the delete button becomes the writer’s best friend, while cutting and pasting can bring a paragraph or a chapter to a more appropriate part of the book.
When people ask me what I like about writing I usually answer: “Getting finished.” It is a glib enough answer, but I am sure that it could be echoed by somebody knitting a garment or building a wall. It is lovely to get finished and look back at your handiwork. The elation that comes from getting finished is not unlike that of the child who has been waiting and waiting for a treat, and then one day: “Tomorrow comes at last.” That was a phrase attributed to one of my siblings and often repeated proudly for visitors. A long promised trip to ‘town’ had materialised at last.
Every famly have such phrases in which wisdom “out of the mouth’s of babes” is repeated again and again. My ears still redden when I remember how often a remark made to defend my father’s assistance to an aunt instead of doing jobs at home was repeated: “She was his sister all his life,” I told my mother, rather undiplomatically, “and you are only his wife for the past few years.” A third member of the family displayed her diplomatic skills when defending the physique of a relative: “He hasn’t a yump, but his cap is sideways on his head.” Even after sixty years such phrases are still remembered.
At this time of the year I can imagine Mary, the mother of Jesus and the other Marys at the foot of the cross on Calvary hill, repeating the little phrases by which the baby Jesus had made them laugh, or displayed his wisdom. The only one we know is what he said when lost in the Temple at the age of twelve: “Did you not know that I had to be about my father’s business?” A mixture of idealism and naievty, as he overlooked the fact that he had put the heart crossways in his parents by wandering off.. But he grew up, got sense, and many of us will be following him as he goes about that business in the next few weeks.
Week ending March 20th 2012
I have a little extra pep in my step these days as my latest novel, “I gcóngar I gCéin” (Cló Iar-Chonnacht,2011) has been chosen by ClubLeabhar.com as its ‘Book of The Month’ for April this year. This is an online Book Club in which Irish language books are read and discussed over the Internet by people who are interested in the subject in any part of the world. As I write these few words during Seachtain na Gaelge or Irish language week it gives me the pleasure of knowing that some of what I have written will be read and commented on by people of all ages as well as by people of different nationality in the near future. Criticism may please or displease an author, but it sure beats being ignored.
I am constantly amazed by the number of people from different nationalities who are studying or are fluent in the Irish language. Raidió na Gaeltachta or TG4 are constantly finding people in various parts of the world who can discuss global politics in Gaelic. I listened to a Russian recently discuss the election of Vladimir Putin in fluent Irish, while there have been comments from troubled areas such as Syria and Libya by people who went to school in Ireland and learned their Irish here. An increasing number of Ulster Protestants are learning the language and there are a number of them working as journalists North of the Border who write or broadcast regularly in Irish
The Internet has been one of the biggest influences on Irish language expansion in that it keeps many who have left our shores with some smattering of the subject in touch with what they learned in Gaelscoileanna or other schools or Gaeltacht summer colleges. They can hear or read it in virtually any part of the world if they so choose, and many of them do, as calls to Raidió na Gaeltachta, for instance attest. Unfortunately from the nation’s point of view the flow of young people from the country has been devastating for most communities here, but at least they have advantages their fathers, mothers or grandparents did not have when they had to leave. They can keep in touch with the people and things they love through Skype, phone, radio, and TV output.
While it is always nice to think of people in various parts of the world reading your stuff, the fans from nearer home, all three of them, are just as welcome or more so, to join in the bookclub discussions online during the month of April. It is always good to get feedback from what we might call ordinary readers, as much as professional critics. Reviewers in newspapers, magazines, radio or television can be more conscious of themselves and how well written their own views are than of what they are supposed to be reviewing. I will be looking forward to the twitters and the tweets, wherever they come from.
Speaking of ‘fans,’I was pleased to meet a few people from Tourmakeady recently when NCT preparation led me back across the Galway Mayo border to have the shock absorbers, on which the Conamara roads had taken their toll, replaced in the garage in which my Fiesta was bought. I was reminded of the old saying: “Every priest who ever came here came in a bad car and went away in a good one.” It is still a good one, and I have the NCT results to prove it.
I am constantly amazed by the number of people from different nationalities who are studying or are fluent in the Irish language. Raidió na Gaeltachta or TG4 are constantly finding people in various parts of the world who can discuss global politics in Gaelic. I listened to a Russian recently discuss the election of Vladimir Putin in fluent Irish, while there have been comments from troubled areas such as Syria and Libya by people who went to school in Ireland and learned their Irish here. An increasing number of Ulster Protestants are learning the language and there are a number of them working as journalists North of the Border who write or broadcast regularly in Irish
The Internet has been one of the biggest influences on Irish language expansion in that it keeps many who have left our shores with some smattering of the subject in touch with what they learned in Gaelscoileanna or other schools or Gaeltacht summer colleges. They can hear or read it in virtually any part of the world if they so choose, and many of them do, as calls to Raidió na Gaeltachta, for instance attest. Unfortunately from the nation’s point of view the flow of young people from the country has been devastating for most communities here, but at least they have advantages their fathers, mothers or grandparents did not have when they had to leave. They can keep in touch with the people and things they love through Skype, phone, radio, and TV output.
While it is always nice to think of people in various parts of the world reading your stuff, the fans from nearer home, all three of them, are just as welcome or more so, to join in the bookclub discussions online during the month of April. It is always good to get feedback from what we might call ordinary readers, as much as professional critics. Reviewers in newspapers, magazines, radio or television can be more conscious of themselves and how well written their own views are than of what they are supposed to be reviewing. I will be looking forward to the twitters and the tweets, wherever they come from.
Speaking of ‘fans,’I was pleased to meet a few people from Tourmakeady recently when NCT preparation led me back across the Galway Mayo border to have the shock absorbers, on which the Conamara roads had taken their toll, replaced in the garage in which my Fiesta was bought. I was reminded of the old saying: “Every priest who ever came here came in a bad car and went away in a good one.” It is still a good one, and I have the NCT results to prove it.
Week ending March 14th 2012
There is a powerful article in this month’s ‘Furrow’ by Claremorris native Patrick O’Brien who is now Parish Priest if Caherlistrane in Co.Galway. The Furrow is a magazine founded in Saint Patrick’s College, Maynooth in 1950, and once edited by another Claremorris native, Fr. James G. McGarry, Parish Priest of Ballyhaunis in the 1970’s. The magazine has retained a consistently high standard of discussion on matters theological, pastoral and spiritual during its sixty two year lifetime, and this month is no exception.
Titled “A Slave Pleading For Slaves – Thoughts for St. Patrick’s Day” Fr. Pat O’Brien’s article is a stark reminder that slavery is not a thing of the past., that estimates from International Organisations put the number of slaves in the world at “between 12 and 27 million people.” As he points out “the seeming divergence between the figures gives an idea of the impossibility of counting people who have no voice.” He tells us of the slavery existing in present day Ireland: “A good proportion of the sex trade in Ireland is part of a worldwide enslavement of young women from Africa, parts of Eastern Europe and the Far East.”
We are aware that Daniel O’Connell the great Irish ‘Liberator’ opposed slavery with all his might in the Westminister Parliament when it was neither popular nor profitable to do so, a fact which President Barak Obama reminded us of during his visit to Ireland last year. Fourteen hundred years earlier Saint Patrick was brought to our shores himself as a slave. As a bishop later in life he wrote a “letter to the soldiers of Coroticus” which was a scathing attack on the people who captured some of his young converts and brought them across the sea to a life of slavery, and, in the case of the young women, to enforced prostitution.
As Patrick O’Brien points out in his article the Greek and Roman Empires, or at least their great buildings and waterworks which are still admired for their ingenuity and engineering, were basically built by slaves. Slavery did not end in those far off days however. It was part of the past century too: “Beneath the nightmare of Hitler’s Reich was a view of Europe as a slave empire run by the superior Aryan race. The concentration camps were primarily devised as places of slave labour. Racism and slavery are bestial twins. The Utopian vision of Stalin was underpinned by the enslavement of millions: The Gulags were slave camps.”
I remember being somewhat surprised a number of years ago when Trócaire’s Lenten campaign took the reality of bonded slavery as its theme. We can forget that the branded jeans or shirts we can buy in the shops are made in many cases by slave labour, the same slave labour that wiped out our own textile industry. As Pat O’Brien puts it more graphically: “The history of much of modern capitalism, the profits of the giant companies which held American Foreign Policy in their grip were made on the slave labour of the poor of South and Central America. Mao’s China was a slave regime…”
On Saint Patrick’s Day let us look past the cardboard cutout Bishop in the green robes leading the parade to the slave who never forgot his roots, the radical bishop who opposed slavery in his “letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus” described by Fr. Pat O’Brien as “a primer in non-violent resistance to evil.”
Titled “A Slave Pleading For Slaves – Thoughts for St. Patrick’s Day” Fr. Pat O’Brien’s article is a stark reminder that slavery is not a thing of the past., that estimates from International Organisations put the number of slaves in the world at “between 12 and 27 million people.” As he points out “the seeming divergence between the figures gives an idea of the impossibility of counting people who have no voice.” He tells us of the slavery existing in present day Ireland: “A good proportion of the sex trade in Ireland is part of a worldwide enslavement of young women from Africa, parts of Eastern Europe and the Far East.”
We are aware that Daniel O’Connell the great Irish ‘Liberator’ opposed slavery with all his might in the Westminister Parliament when it was neither popular nor profitable to do so, a fact which President Barak Obama reminded us of during his visit to Ireland last year. Fourteen hundred years earlier Saint Patrick was brought to our shores himself as a slave. As a bishop later in life he wrote a “letter to the soldiers of Coroticus” which was a scathing attack on the people who captured some of his young converts and brought them across the sea to a life of slavery, and, in the case of the young women, to enforced prostitution.
As Patrick O’Brien points out in his article the Greek and Roman Empires, or at least their great buildings and waterworks which are still admired for their ingenuity and engineering, were basically built by slaves. Slavery did not end in those far off days however. It was part of the past century too: “Beneath the nightmare of Hitler’s Reich was a view of Europe as a slave empire run by the superior Aryan race. The concentration camps were primarily devised as places of slave labour. Racism and slavery are bestial twins. The Utopian vision of Stalin was underpinned by the enslavement of millions: The Gulags were slave camps.”
I remember being somewhat surprised a number of years ago when Trócaire’s Lenten campaign took the reality of bonded slavery as its theme. We can forget that the branded jeans or shirts we can buy in the shops are made in many cases by slave labour, the same slave labour that wiped out our own textile industry. As Pat O’Brien puts it more graphically: “The history of much of modern capitalism, the profits of the giant companies which held American Foreign Policy in their grip were made on the slave labour of the poor of South and Central America. Mao’s China was a slave regime…”
On Saint Patrick’s Day let us look past the cardboard cutout Bishop in the green robes leading the parade to the slave who never forgot his roots, the radical bishop who opposed slavery in his “letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus” described by Fr. Pat O’Brien as “a primer in non-violent resistance to evil.”
Week ending March 6th 2012
_
I became a
Cardinal recently – in my dreams. I woke at about five o’clock in the morning
of Ash Wednesday knowing that I was a prince of the church. I was on a walk
with the late Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiach and many others in what seemed the
mountains of Mayo, possibly the Black
Valley. We were in fear
of being ambushed by one or both of the Loyalist paramilitary groups, the UDA
or the UVF. We had just been informed that there was no longer any danger when
a gust of wind in the trees outside my window woke me up. I let my eyes wander
around my bedroom to see if my red hat had had survived the dreamwake. All I
saw was an old red and green one hanging on a peg, the relic of a different
dream shattered by Kerry in another kind of storm.
I have been pushing my imagination to the limit in recent weeks. I mentioned a few weeks back that I had started a new novel, at a page a day. That worked for the first eight days, but the drive to get it done moved me on to two, three, four or more pages. Those are just the days there is enough time to do anything but my parish work. Writing off the top of your head can be a fairly scary experience, just sitting down and turning the blank page or screen into talk or narrative. Very satisfying but very hard work, A real dream-maker, better than poitín, better than red wine, better than hot chocolate. I haven’t tried LSD or any of those drugs but they would be hard pressed to equal the imagination stretcher called creativity..
It was about four days after Pope Benedict appointed twentytwo new Cardinals that I had my dream. I can only surmise that it is a subliminal or subconscious way of telling me that Pope Benedict has chosen me as one of his Cardinals ‘in pectore.’ Those are the Cardinals the Pope retains in his heart, usually to protect someone in danger of being persecuted, or in other cases to honour a maverick but loyal Catholic, which might go some way to describe my humble self.
I have already taken to refering to myself as ‘his eminence’ but so far only when talkng to the dog, as in: “Fetch the newspaper for his eminence.” I will not ask anyone to use that title until I ascertain what os the correct Irish language version. The word ‘cardinal’ comes from the Latin word for a hinge, so it might not be the correct term for someone as unhinged as I am.
As someone who is a dab hand at lighting a fire I imagine myself at some future date lighting the stove in the Sistine chapel, adding the voting papers and straw that provides the white smoke which proclaims: “Habemus Papam – We have a Pope.” Of course if I happened to be choice of those whom I now refer to as “the lads” I would leave the firelighting to someone else. I would be happy enough if the Carna Cardinal was to be a Popemaker in the way that Tourmakeady/Partry/Baltimore’s Cardinal James Gibbons was instrumental in persuading the man who was to become Pope Saint Pius X to accept the honour or burden of the Papacy a little over a hundred years ago. As they say in all the great newspapers – “Watch this space.”
I have been pushing my imagination to the limit in recent weeks. I mentioned a few weeks back that I had started a new novel, at a page a day. That worked for the first eight days, but the drive to get it done moved me on to two, three, four or more pages. Those are just the days there is enough time to do anything but my parish work. Writing off the top of your head can be a fairly scary experience, just sitting down and turning the blank page or screen into talk or narrative. Very satisfying but very hard work, A real dream-maker, better than poitín, better than red wine, better than hot chocolate. I haven’t tried LSD or any of those drugs but they would be hard pressed to equal the imagination stretcher called creativity..
It was about four days after Pope Benedict appointed twentytwo new Cardinals that I had my dream. I can only surmise that it is a subliminal or subconscious way of telling me that Pope Benedict has chosen me as one of his Cardinals ‘in pectore.’ Those are the Cardinals the Pope retains in his heart, usually to protect someone in danger of being persecuted, or in other cases to honour a maverick but loyal Catholic, which might go some way to describe my humble self.
I have already taken to refering to myself as ‘his eminence’ but so far only when talkng to the dog, as in: “Fetch the newspaper for his eminence.” I will not ask anyone to use that title until I ascertain what os the correct Irish language version. The word ‘cardinal’ comes from the Latin word for a hinge, so it might not be the correct term for someone as unhinged as I am.
As someone who is a dab hand at lighting a fire I imagine myself at some future date lighting the stove in the Sistine chapel, adding the voting papers and straw that provides the white smoke which proclaims: “Habemus Papam – We have a Pope.” Of course if I happened to be choice of those whom I now refer to as “the lads” I would leave the firelighting to someone else. I would be happy enough if the Carna Cardinal was to be a Popemaker in the way that Tourmakeady/Partry/Baltimore’s Cardinal James Gibbons was instrumental in persuading the man who was to become Pope Saint Pius X to accept the honour or burden of the Papacy a little over a hundred years ago. As they say in all the great newspapers – “Watch this space.”
