Irish Writer’s Group selection. I mostly hated it! Using a real person, especially John Lennon, just feels lazy, even though it’s based on an actual incident in Lennon’s life. Constant references to external things (“Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush) w/o specifically identifying them, which usually bugs me. Example re Gerard Manley Hopkins: “I caught this morning morning’s fucking minion—the one where he sees a bird and goes all swoony coz he loves fucking nature.” Weird interspersion of first-person as-himself metafiction as he researches the book in New York and Ireland – I would have liked just that, as an essay, much better. In that section he says amusingly: “I would return to report my findings in a mature, honed prose, as clear as glass: this from a man who had never knowingly underfed an adjective.”
I looked up:
- bevvied: drunk
- boreen: narrow country lane
- Liverpool time slip reports (note I do not believe in anything paranormal but find it interesting)
Quotes:
- “Zola wrote that the road from Lourdes is littered with crutches but not a single wooden leg”
- Depressed/unresponsive father (of the driver) “would look back at me, with the eyes like stones inside his head”
- “He read once that the hare augurs darkly in the Irish mythology. From what he can remember there is fuck all that augurs brightly in the Irish mythology.”
Cornelius (the driver) asks what’s on his mind:
Love, blood, fate, death, sex, the void, mother, father, cunt and prick—these are the things on his mind.
Also—
How many more times are they going to ask me to come on The fucking Muppet Show?
I do like that italicized tmesis there! And the references to Radio Luxembourg (this is set in 1978 so right around when I was listening in my bedroom in Paris).