Live from the Tramore Inn, Downings

Michael Yeats (1921-2007), son of WB and only male heir of the poet Yeats and his wife Georgie, had a distinguished career as a lawyer and politician, serving Ireland several times in the de Valera era. WB Yeats himself wasn't much of a father, writing to a friend that children were 'little bundles of noise and infection,' and practicing the continental brand of child-rearing, 'benevolent disinterest.'

Edna O'Brien's written a new book, a novel set on the west coast. Sligo and Strandhill are invoked, though the books' geographic center is the fictional village of Cloonoila, a village that could exist but doesn't. If anyone should ask, 'is it good?', feel free to say, 'it's good to read being here on the west coast of Ireland while reading it.'

The Irish have all these nice little phrases-no bother, if you don't mind awfully, would you now (as in I'd like another pint! Would you now?)-that signal their willingness to help a stranger while also preserving their dignity, and in the meantime creating the concept of passive-aggressive.

Every morning, as you look out the window,
Ireland seems to be a place where everything seems possible, and then as you look out the window again, everything seems impossible. The weather plays more games than the people play, in a country that loves to play games. Out for a walk through Glenveagh Park, along the lake toward the castle, Ireland is the most beautiful place in the world; two miles farther along the path you find that a certain Mr. Adair, landowner and castle-builder, evicted 244 of his tenants from the village of Garten on a cold April night in 186 because they couldn't pay their rents, and burned their homes so they couldn't return. Columcille, one of three Irish saints, the man most responsible for bridging the gap between paganism and Christianity, monk, poet, political activist, chief writer of The Book of Kells, was born in Garten in 507 AD, more proof that the past is never actually the past in Ireland.