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All The Young Dudes, david bowie, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Drive in Saturday, Lazarus, Life on Mars, Rebel Rebel, Rock n Roll Suicide, Young Americans
bowie – is it any wonder?
The following post was also published on the Irish Times website as part of a collective tribute to David Bowie from Irish writers Julian Gough, Joseph O’Connor, Edna O’Brien, Roddy Doyle, Eimear McBride, Hugo Hamilton, John Kelly, John McAuliffe and many others – David Bowie: Irish Writers Pay Tribute It was just after one o’clock in the morning. On my bedside table, a tiny screen lit up with a message from another planet and three words that still don’t belong together: “Bowie is dead.“ David Bowie is dead. It was cancer that took him, a cancer he kept private from this world – my world – of which he was so much a…
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Arizona, Awesome Women, Immigration, Linda Ronstadt, Memoir, Parkinson's Disease, Politics, SB1070, Soundtracks of our Lives, Themes of childhood
Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of her Voice
I never thought I would hear Linda Ronstadt sing again, but there she is on my television screen, singing a traditional Mexican cancione with a nephew and cousin. It is, she explains, a family thing that she doesn’t want them doing without her. She stops to find a note, they resume, and when the song finishes, she looks at the camera – right at me – and says, with a no-bullshit candor: This isn’t really singing. Believe me. It’s a few notes sketched in. But it’s not really singing. And, I am in tears. I bet I’m not alone. I’ve been cheated. On Monday, work will take me back to…
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How to Greet a New Year
Wherever you are, even if you’re feeling a bit lost, you are sure to find yourself in the final essay from Local Wonders by Ted Kooser. It’s a lovely reflection on life and loss and on looking ahead – where the world is waiting for us. Enjoy: Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away. There’s a windy, perilous…
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When the sun stops for a moment . . .
Dawn light began stealing Through the cold universe to County Meath, Over weirs where the Boyne water, fulgent, darkling, Turns its thick axle, over rick-sized stones Millennia deep in their own unmoving And unmoved alignment. (from A Dream of Solstice by Seamus Heaney) This morning, once again, the sun paused for its moment of solstice before changing direction to move northward. From the Latin, solstitium, the apparent standing still of the sun, the Winter Solstice is a turning point, something I look forward to each year. The day after my daughter’s birthday, it is a lovely reminder that the light is coming. At Newgrange, a neolithic burial tomb even older than Stonehenge, in the Boyne valley outside…
