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"Let's Go Crazy", "Little Red Corvette", American Dream, Antrim, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Dispatches from the Diaspora, In Memoriam, Northern Ireland, Prince, Soundtracks of our Lives
‘you need a love that’s gonna last . . .’
Little red Corvette Baby you’re much too fast Little red Corvette You need a love that’s gonna last. I first paid attention to Prince and the Revolution when I was about twenty years old, and “Little Red Corvette” was getting regular airplay on Radio One. It was the eighties. I had big hair, big enough to be in The Revolution, and…
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Language of Cancer, Leontia Flynn, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Themes of childhood
poetry – the charm of it
For World Poetry Day 2016. The freedom and the lovely uselessness of poetry is its whole point. ~ Leontia Flynn My parents were raised in rural County Derry, in Heaney country, where they learned to be thrifty and resourceful, and also – when all else failed – to believe in the mystical powers of “folk healers,” those individuals uniquely gifted…
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Coming of age, craic, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Northern Ireland Culture, St. Patrick, Sunningdale Agreement, The Troubles, United Workers Council Strike 1974
by the wayside again on st. patrick’s day
I’m a bit ambivalent about St. Patrick’s Day. What is it about March 17th that renders so many people Irish or some version of it that I do not recall from living the first twenty-seven years of my life in Northern Ireland? Everywhere I turn tomorrow, there will be Americans proclaiming their Irishness , some in T-shirts emblazoned with a command for everyone…
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The Boss & Me – Still Looking for America
When he announced he was going to tour again and that he would perform The River – all of it – I knew I’d be there, somewhere in the nosebleed section. Since 1984, I have seen Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band ten times, and there isn’t a 4th of July – or a Presidential race – when I don’t…
