There is a purpose

OK. I've been in and out of blogging for four years, lately mostly out. Reasons that have to do with time, energy and self-discipline have all played a part in my absence from this little corner of the internet.

But I'm going to turn over a new leaf. My survival may depend on it. Now that I've been moved to full-time features reporter at my beloved newspaper, I'm going to be fully consumed writing 500-word stories about girl scout events at the zoo and Black History Month programs. The prose naturally will be flat, listless and purely descriptive.

I'll try, then, to make this an outlet for more interesting writing, at least more interesting to me. We'll see.

Rip

To have spent any time listening to Norman Mailer speak is to have had an experience of incredulous wonder at both the stream of silly ideas and air of self-intoxicated importance emanating from this squat and wrinkled gnome of a man. Yet for all that he was listenable and not as listless as most of our intellectuals under the age of 50.

I remember watching a panel on C-Span a decade ago, I guess. The theme was war and literature and the panelists were Heller, Vonnegut, Styron, and Mailer. They are all gone now. Norman Mailer is dead at 84.

Grave

You describe one road winding cobbled gray
to three rocks overlooking strand, harbour,
hotel. A boy is falling from a tree, lighthouse
is hidden in sunlight. A white man. A red kite.
Driver on an oval track. Figure on a bench.

It was Endgame at the Peacock and Krapp’s
Last Tape on the radio, as I was driving to
Youghal, that converted me. The hot disc
atop the warehouse this evening cuts through
day’s heaviness. I pray for plain style. Clarity.

Base of granite, gray spotted marble late May
Sunday chirping birds at noon: Montparnasse
Cemetery under a clear sky. Walked with a
man from Dakar to Twelfth Division Number
66, grave of Suzanne and Samuel Beckett.

-Eamonn Wall