The Stepping Stones to Eternity — from Flowering Poverello
From the Flowering Poverello blog, a poetry sequence which, for some reason, especially resonated. I will let it speak for itself, except the resonance began with the opening lines “I…
Category: growing up
#ChoralMarch, March 15th: “Bogoroditse Devo” from All Night Vigil, Sergei Rachmaninov performed by St Petersburg Chamber Choir
On this day in 1915 Rachmaninov’s All Night Vigil was first performed. Back in 2013, I conceived of a grandiose plan that performances of this piece could be held contemporaneously…
Review of “Homesickness: An American History” by Susan Matt, Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, 2012
This is a wonderful book I heartily recommend, indeed re-reading the review I hope the warmth of my recommendation is clear. The balance Susan Mat strikes between mastery of the…
“Shopping Centre” – a poem from September 2007
Came across this rather randomly lately, will leave it as is, with its hilariously unsubtle allusions to this and that intact, as a memorial of pre-bust Ireland: Shopping Centre. Time…
Geoffrey Langlands RIP: major, Dieppe Raid survivor, educationalist, 97 year old coup leader
I had never heard of Geoffrey Langlands, who has died in Lahore aged 101, until coming across his death on Wikipedia’s Recent Deaths page. His Wikipedia page has been subjected to a…
Review of Robert Pogue Harrison’s “Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition”, Nthposition 2009
Another review of mine from the departed nthposition.com. I quite enjoyed this from Robert Pogue Harrison. And I am now even further along my immersion in the “dull adult world”, ten…
Against the inspirational
A while back I posted about what I called the Inspirational Imperative; the pressure to craft suffering and distress and setbacks into more-easily-digestible, feelgood stories of “inspiration.” The need to…
Trying to do too much – lessons from the Life Study, the Trappists and David Mamet
Here is a post on my other blog “A Medical Education” inspired by a passage in Helen Pearson’s “The Life Project”, which I reviewed in the TLS. An understandable tendency to…
Séamus Sweeney 