Flann O'Brien [was 'Flann O'Brian']

had he not been a
drunk and curmudgeon in love
with his own sad doom

but At Swim-Two-Birds
rules because it skewers all:
"Irishness", James Joyce

(whom O'Brien liked),
legalese, detective stuff,
and meta-fiction

and its characters
(demons, slackers, Finn McCool)
talk SO FUCKIN' WELL

(whom O'Brien liked)

It was mutual too -- Joyce read it before he died and loved it.

The misspelling in the title annoys me. Can I change it?

(best anecdote is about young Brian O, who wasn't really allowed to speak English, growing up but read adventure books on the sly, only Irish, he says to his dad one day 'take care, sir, or I'll do you a mischief')

At Swim Two Birds,
The Third Policeman,
The Dalkey Archive,
The Hard Life,
The Poor Mouth, and
The Best of Myles na Gopaleen.

While all of them display excellence in whole or in part, my personal favourite is The Hard Life - A Sober Farce, as the humor in it is so finely balanced and shaded that a humorless person could miss the joke entirely, but anyone who gets it is roaring with laughter.

I picked up TP at a library sell off and thought he was an unheard of nobody.. Nice to know other ppl love him too.

The copyeditor I have lined up for the job will never let it see the light of day.

Yours, etc,

was there really an argument about a painting of flann?

RJG -- yes there was Yes.

But you'd think I'd know how to write my own surname in gaelic by now wouldn't you? :)

x-post, yes should be there, at about 7.

At Swim-Two-Birds has the cleric called Ronan in it I think but that's another bag of cats.

Unstaged since 1943 at the Abbey?

I remember it reading quite well. Why has it not been performed at that shining beacon of Irish theatah for so long?

Following a (brilliant) rant about Disney's Fantasia:

The Editor: Have you seen this picture?
Myself: No.
The Editor: Why?
Myself: Because the free list is suspended.
The Editor: But why condemn something you have not seen?
Myself: Why suspend the free list?
The Editor: Then is all this an exhibition of spite because you are not admitted free?
Myself: Not necessarily. It is something taut, elegant, alert.

Updike on Flann:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/02/11/080211crbo_books_updike

i just saw a lecture by the museum of jurassic technology dude. he read some flann. sounded rad.

HEY WAIT A SECOND. why did my this week's newyorker not show up yet????

That Updike review is inadvertently hilarious. Would he start a review of, say, James Baldwin, with a bit of literary blackface?

Indeed. John Updike thinks Irish people say "to be sure...". He thinks the line in "The Poor Mouth" about having nothing in our mouths but the occasional potato and words of fine Irish is a robust indictment of mid-20th-century rural poverty rather than, um, a joke. Worse: he thinks "the fiddle is the man..." is not funny. [More muttering, swallowed curses, tears.]

I think he's doing At Swim-Two-Birds rather than Oirishing up, but it still reads kinda sad.

Sounds like I am vindicated in refusing to read this article.

TS Finn MacCool vs Brahmin Fule.

As Tom E. just noted on Twitter, born a hundred years ago today!.

love this guy

irishtimes.com have had bits n bobs all week

http://www.irishtimes.com/indepth/100-myles/

surely

The Irish [Started by Ned Raggett in August 2001, last updated 2 minutes ago by drugs/lies: poll (darraghmac) on I Love Everything] 63 new answers
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got a collection-further cuttings from cruiskeen lawn. great, obviously. I must aspire to write more like him in my civil service correspondences.

ive only read at swim two birds and the third policeman, the former i rate about as highly as any comic novel ive read. are an béal bocht and the dalkey archive worth reading? ive read mixed things about them both.

I'm not yr man I'm afraid, but up above there's good and middlin reviews of both I think

An Beal Bocht is definitely worth reading. The Dalkey Archive, as well as The Hard Life, are somewhat middling, and Dalkey Archive has the further problem that O'Brien recycled some stuff from his earlier books, at that time unpublished, and he obviously could't have guessed that his earlier stuff would someday become cult classics. They def aren't as good, but still, it's better reading them than not reading them.

i remember an béal bocht as being really good. completely forgotten the particulars of the dalkey archive other than it concerned a mad scientist (or philosopher?), also james joyce darning socks! need to reread them all, i think.

any o'brien biographies since that cronin one came out decades ago?

also bizarrely enough from the top of the thread:

...having heard about him for years (including the album At-Swim-Two-Birds by Peter Jefferies and Jono Lonie)

my father (who introduced me to flann o'brien's work) played in a band with the aforementioned lonie in the seventies... guess that was when his stuff was becoming more well-known.

other than it concerned a mad scientist (or philosopher?)

de selby!(1)

(1) whose theories are referenced and explored in the third policeman's overwhelming footnotes

Oh, I think the Dalkey Archive is plenty fun even if you've already read the Third Policeman. Every now and then I dip into Best of Myles but I can sense how much I'm not getting - surely much funnier if you have some Irish and alas I have none.

his stuff, his angle on the teaching of the gaeilge, from the pov of a reader who hated and resented having to study it the way it was taught, is brilliant, better again when read with the knowledge that he was himself a notable gaeilgeoir iirc

the Finn stuff from ASTB is hugely enriched imo if you had to sit through the type of nationally self-aggrandising blarney that was a significant result of the cultural nationalism movement.

oh yeah, so is O'Brien pronounced like O'Brian. I've never had reason to say his (pseudonymous) name out loud, but perhaps one day

y

y but with the constant proviso that it depends on how u pronounce O'Brian I spose

with a silent G

the g makes the c silent akshly

that's how i read "gCopaleen" in my head tbf, you usually see it Anglicized as just "Gopaleen"

awful tempted lads

https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/fonsie-mealy-auctioneers/catalogue-id-srfons10024/lot-610fd622-a52f-4b51-a581-a76900c356c1

who wouldn't be?

thatd be kinda cool

xpost to current what are you reading thread:

Flann O'Brien: The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman
The temptation to skip ahead to see the war-crime-level pun that each of these stories is reverse-engineered from is incredibly strong.