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Actors, Art, Children's Books, Gary Shteyngart, HBO, James Gandolfini, Maurice Sendak, Memoir, Soundtracks of our Lives, television, The Sopranos, Themes of Childhood, Where The Wild Things Are
james gandolfini ~ forever with the wild things
The only non-book on my bookshelves is the Sopranos DVD collection. Apropos that it sits among some of the most compelling stories ever told because, as Gary Shteyngart says, The Sopranos is “storytelling for the new century.” And, a good story lasts forever. Every night at 8PM my husband used to ask me, “So are you ready for Tony and the boys?” and we would tune in to HBO to watch, again, a re-run of an episode we had seen before, knowing what would happen but lured nonetheless by James Gandolfini’s charisma. So it is still surreal to watch his Tony Soprano fight about money with Edie Falco’s Carmela, knowing he died in Rome three summers…
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has anybody seen my old friend, America?
I often feel guilty for having left my Northern Ireland. I often wonder if perhaps the better thing or the best thing would have been to stay, to stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our television screen at six o’clock every night. But I didn’t stay. I fled. I became an immigrant in an America I no longer recognize, and turned my back on the vulnerable, tiny country that shaped and scared me – my lovely tragic Northern Ireland. Not much older than my 18 year old American daughter, I spent most of the 1980s planning my escape. It was a turbulent and traumatic time in Northern Ireland. We…
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America – Another Year Older & What Have You Learned?
Every Fourth of July, when fireworks flash and fly across a desert sky, I find myself transported back to a twilight over Slane Castle shimmering with music and the notion of America. So very young, and had I not been awake, I would have missed it . . . the whole of me a-patter, Alive and ticking like an electric fence: Had I not been awake I would have missed it ~ Seamus Heaney My first rock ‘n’ roll concert at Slane Castle was in 1982 for The Rolling Stones “farewell tour.” Seriously. The Stones were saying goodbye. Goodbye. Warming up for them were the J. Geils Band, The Chieftains, and George Thorogood and the Destroyers. The Rolling Stones kept saying…
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For My Granda on the 100th Anniversary of the Battle of the Somme
My grandfather died on June 22, 1977, a decade before the Enniskillen bombing. Had he been alive on that day, he would have been wearing his pressed suit, with medals and poppy attached to the lapels, not unlike those pensioners gathered respectfully at the Cenotaph where at 10:43am, with chilling choreography, an IRA bomb exploded, killing eleven and wounding 68. I cannot think of the First World War without also thinking of Enniskillen, so as we prepare to commemorate the one hundred year anniversary of the Battle of the Somme – in which my grandfather fought – I am also remembering those old men gathered in remembrance at the Cenotaph in County Fermanagh. My…
