{"id":1231,"date":"2020-02-19T20:10:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-20T01:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=1231"},"modified":"2026-07-06T20:19:24","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T00:19:24","slug":"beatlebone-kevin-barry-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2020\/02\/beatlebone-kevin-barry-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"<i>Beatlebone<\/i> &#8211; Kevin Barry, 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Irish Writer&#8217;s Group selection. I mostly hated it! Using a real person, especially John Lennon, just feels lazy, even though it&#8217;s based on an actual incident in Lennon&#8217;s life. Constant references to external things (&#8220;Wuthering Heights&#8221; by Kate Bush) w\/o specifically identifying them, which usually bugs me. Example re Gerard Manley Hopkins: &#8220;I caught this morning morning\u2019s fucking minion\u2014the one where he sees a bird and goes all swoony coz he loves fucking nature.&#8221; Weird interspersion of first-person as-himself metafiction as he researches the book in New York and Ireland &#8211; I would have liked just that, as an essay, much better. In that section he says amusingly: &#8220;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.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">I looked up:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>bevvied: drunk<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>boreen: narrow country lane<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/Glitch_in_the_Matrix\/comments\/6408e7\/bold_street_liverpool_uk_time_slip_central_caused\/\">Liverpool time slip reports<\/a> (note I do not believe in anything paranormal but find it interesting)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Quotes:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>&#8220;Zola wrote that the road from Lourdes is littered with crutches but not a single wooden leg&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Depressed\/unresponsive father (of the driver) &#8220;would look back at me, with the eyes like stones inside his head&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;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.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Cornelius (the driver) asks what&#8217;s on his mind:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Love, blood, fate, death, sex, the void, mother, father, cunt and prick\u2014these are the things on his mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Also\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>How many more times are they going to ask me to come on<\/em> The <em>fucking<\/em> Muppet Show?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Irish Writer&#8217;s Group selection. I mostly hated it! Using a real person, especially John Lennon, just feels lazy, even though it&#8217;s based on an actual incident in Lennon&#8217;s life. Constant references to external things (&#8220;Wuthering Heights&#8221; by Kate Bush) w\/o specifically identifying them, which usually bugs me. Example re Gerard Manley Hopkins: &#8220;I caught this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-irish-writers-book-group","category-quote-dump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1231"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5166,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1231\/revisions\/5166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}