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Cassandra warned Trojans to beware of Greek bearing gifts This site will be a forum for warnings that should be heeded.

15/11/2024

"He had been told by Franz that his hero lived somewhere nearby, and he kept the address safe in a buttoned pocket. Being in Vienna was the fulfilment of a kind of prophecy, rather than the search for mere work, mere sustenance. The scope and beauty of the city was gifting him an excitement he hadn’t experienced before. Music re-entered his mind uninvited. He could hear the sound of violins above his tinnitus. (The first symptoms of his deleterious hearing were beginning to manifest but he was able to carry on regardless). He looked back up at the snow but this time there was silence. He wore only a shirt and a waistcoat under his overcoat and as he re-entered the world from his dreams he began to shiver. He tilted his head forward and stamped on through the snow to adventure the city, hoping to collect its offerings. His hair was getting long and unkempt and the breeze fluttered in his curls. He pushed his scarf back under his coat and trudged on, making a rhythm from the crunching snow underfoot. He walked on and soon came to St Stephen’s cathedral.
..

An from Dominic Mallen's new story 'A Meeting' which imagines an encounter between and .

LINK IN BIO or STORY for full story.

13/11/2024

"l spent the past week reading status after status beginning with the words ‘Go f**k yourself if you_____’ regarding the election results—a decisive Trump majority. Trump himself engendered—I imagine because he had so much to gain, and now enjoys the fruit of his labor—this exact brand of vitriol, something like near-total dismissal from the left of the humanity of the right and vice versa. He now rules supreme over our fragmentation, the sole beneficiary. I cannot emphasize the extent to which I am certain the ‘go f**k yourself if’ approach to our fellow Americans—as sympathetic as it is, frankly—will keep men like Donald J Trump in power forever. I cannot emphasize the extent to which the left’s patent refusal to acknowledge a single human quality in the right* decisively lost what appears to be the entirety of the working class,* once a democratic bastion, and catapulted Trump to victory.
..

An from Haley Hodges' new article: 'America The Bisected'

LINK IN BIO or STORY for full article

richelle

13/11/2024

The Oath

by Jack Grady

The little hand he holds
Is all they could find to give him:
Wrapped in blue plastic,
A hand once brown, now bloodied and black,

The hand of one too young for school,
The hand of his daughter,
Riven in the charred rubble
That had been her room,

The hand he held so often
To guide the child in safety
Through Gaza’s streets in blistering heat
For the cooling waters of the Med,

A hand he cannot hold much longer,
Nor can he stay with his wife and weep.
His oath won’t release him
To surrender to his grief.

He must return to his hospital.
He must attend to children who live,
No matter where the next bomb falls,
No matter if it falls on him.

Feature Image: Victim of Israeli airstrike in Jabalia (wikicommons)

12/11/2024

"In Ireland since the early 1990s, religious abuse scandals have become a regular staple on the news. The official response follows the same prescription: establish an expensive tribunal headed up by a retired Judge; dispense a vulgar sort of financial compensation to the victims; and hopefully that’s the end of the matter, at least until the next batch of revelations. It’s an entirely post-colonial response, closely imitating the manner in which his lordship might on occasion have compensated a peasant farmer for the r**e of his daughter.

In reality, there is little if any appetite for understanding the conditions that made systemic child abuse possible. One might reasonably argue that there is little appetite to change a culture of abuse that dates back several hundred years. In Ireland, institutions get away with abuse. In a way, it is almost expected of them. The abuse (or at least the acceptance of it) is in our very nature; with time, all that appears to change is the form that the abuse takes.

Consider that most elderly people have a medical cabinet overflowing with prescribed medications. More often than not this is an abuse of the elderly perpetrated by the medical establishment in Ireland. The technical term for the abuse is: ‘polypharmacy’. Despite this being common knowledge, is not yet a ‘scandal’ because of the blind faith that is afforded to the medical establishment in Ireland. Polypharmacy in the elderly will only become a ‘scandal,’ if and when it becomes safe and permissible to criticise the medical profession. This will only happen if and when society comes to realise that it is not in need of much of the medicine it is all-too-frequently prescribed.
..

An from 'A Contract of Indefinite Duration' by Dr Marcus de Brun.

LINK IN BIO or STORY for full article.

11/11/2024

"The music is an intimate portrait of my inner landscapes and explores some of my main creative interests: a focus on colour and nuance, rich soundscapes, naturalistic imagery, obnubilated symbols, connections with the written word, and literary allusions translated into music. With this music, I want to create a sense of suspension, spaciousness, and introspection.
..

Musician of the Month Caterina Schembri launches her new album Sea Salt & Turpentine in the National Concert Hall, Dublin next Thursday, November 14.

ie

11/11/2024

"I hop on a Dublin southbound bus, and a woman next to me chats at me about how she is visiting her mother. She, too, moved away and seems chuffed about her good-looking husband and two daughters. “It’s well for some,” I thought. She announces she is doing well for herself, maybe she is another Edenderry head. I gaze out the window at the Irish hedges, and the misty rain swims like racing fish down the glass pane. I have forgotten it is Christmas Eve. I am headed to the family gathering.
..

New fiction by Imelda O'Reilly set among expats in Fez Morocco is haunted by memories of Ireland as she ask: Why do memories restrain me, hold me so tight?

LINK IN BIO or STORY

04/11/2024

Old Road Sign
by Greg Huteson

The sere severed plywood sign painted a modest white
was nailed once to spindly posts among the water oaks.
Now by accident it dangles, peeling and warped.
Underbrush too dense perhaps to let the fool board fall.
The paint is blanched so that it fairly imitates the mists
oft seen in bayous chockablock with oaks and black gums
and strands of gray-green moss on cypress limbs,
but five large letters—grim reminders of ill will—
still glare as bright as the morning when the prophet shoved
cheap pine posts down in the weedy grass and muck.
Broad feverish strokes in a harsh shade of red,
they’re there for homeless ducks and long-haul truckers—grunts,
dogsbodies, quacks—to read and contemplate…REPEN.
While stenciled on the far edge of the broken sign,
the faded letters barely legible…JESU.

Image: Daniele Idini

28/10/2024

Fittingly, it ends in Coppers.

They both sense what’s coming and this foreknowledge lends an astral tenderness to the night. They sit in the beer garden so they can speak.

She breaks the deadlock.

“I’ve got to go back to classes or they’re going to turf me out.”

He laughs and takes her hands in his.

“I’ve got my plane ticket,” he says.

“You’re really going? That’s great, baby. I’m so happy for you.”

“I guess you shamed me into it with all those plans of yours that stretch into 2050.”

They drink and make out and, near the end of the night, Suede’s “Saturday Night” is played. They rush inside and slow dance to it, folding into the mass of people on the floor until it feels like they are alone, the pirouetting axis of a cosy circle of darkness.
..

An excerpt from Damien McKiver's 'Old Poetry', new fiction available on Cassandra Voices www.cassandravoices.com

LINK IN BIO or STORY

Image: Rene Magritte, The Lovers II, 1928.

22/10/2024

"Last month there were two seemingly unrelated events which in an Irish context can be connected. On September 9th Mario Draghi’s published his 400-page report on improving E.U. competitiveness. The report provides a series of recommendations for how the E.U., in the face of changing geopolitical realities, can acquire new industrial policy tools to deal with its ‘existential challenge’.

A day later the Irish government was given the awkward news it had lost the Apple tax case. Despite its legal advisor Paul Gallagher describing the Commission’s case as ‘fundamentally flawed, confused and inconsistent’, that’s not how the ECJ saw it. Its punishment – €14 billion in additional tax revenue. As a result, it now has a financial war chest available for investment, but a dearth of policy ideas.
..

In the first installment in a forthcoming series, Cillian Doyle identifies the absence of an industrial policy as a major gap in Mario Draghi's EU Competitiveness Plan

LINK IN BIO or STORY for full article

22/10/2024

Whom You’re Never Told

by Putriyana Asmarini

She pleads with her mantras for years—endless
In a hill so tranquil, where she is—she always is
There she dwells untold, whom you never know—whom you’re never told
Bearing the name; Ujung Geni.
The Javanese herbalist who cheats
Time and death.

She broods in her thoughts no other than
To live, to live, to live, and to live
To live nowhere other than in her hill so tranquil
She lives more than the trees and times bore, more than love;
Ujung Geni, alone with her thoughts,
In her hill so tranquil.

Three musky cumin family of parsley, a branch of senthe,
Roasted parkia seed, petals of wijaya kusuma, buds of clove,
A finger long aromatic ginger and turmeric,
Altingia excelsa just a bark, dripped with essence
Of fermented cassava. Mesoyi, slice a little.
ethereal oil—Cinnamomum sintoc blume.

Powder them all,
Bathe with them,
Breathing their fumes
In a hill so tranquil, where she is—where she always is
Longer with spells written, mantras spoken, jamu can fulfill.
With the earth buttering all spices, bearing her will,
To live forever more with jamu no pottery can infill.

For ages long she lives indeed till death favors
her no more.

She knows to live but not to live for.
In a hill so tranquil, even the hill dismal, where she lives
She belongs but what is it for? These scars in eternal bearers
All tiresome mantras in gazillion styles and songs.

She begs to live no more.

16/10/2024

I was born in Dublin in 1987, and grew up 5 kilometres west of the city centre in a village called Inchicore. Since birth I’ve been completely enveloped by music and creativity. My father, Dave Clifford, was involved in the counterculture performance art scene of the late 70s / early 80s in Ireland. Additionally, he played in the original line-up of Thee Amazing Colossal Men and was the editor of Ireland’s VOX music magazine (1980-83). My mother, who in fact typed the VOX articles, is also innately artistic and adept in crafts such as tie-dyeing and jewellery.

My brother and I were privileged enough to have parents that valued and prioritised creativity, curiosity, application and dedication. We grew up in an art rich household. The walls displayed, and still do, works of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, abstract sculptures and my father’s photography. This environment naturally piqued my interest in the alternative and the absurd.
..

Musician of the Month Greg Clifford discusses his musical formation and current band MANA.

LINK IN BIO or STORY for full article.

Image #1 by Stephen Golden
Image #2 David Clifford in 1979
Image #3 Vox Music Magazine
Image #4 Greg playing guitar aged 9.

15/10/2024

The First of February

by Ernest Hilbert

Well, here’s a pile of puke on a bank of snow,
Yoga-pants-purple, budget-cocktail-blue,
Lava lurid as a toy volcano,
Day-glo confetti frozen stiff as glue.

The fire hydrant’s calked in hardened gum.
A Phillies Blunt’s in a bottle of Pepsi
Inside a purple Shark Week Slurpee,
And it looks like someone pi**ed all over them.

A ghost-ship umbrella is partway jammed
In the snow heap’s side; its tattered black sail
Of nylon flutters; a stroller is crammed
Into a dumpster nearby. I’m stuck, a snail

Inside a crusted, slowly draining tank.
The chill in me is deeper than I’d like,
My pockets packed with lint, the blue snowbank,
Spiked with pink spokes of a Barbie bike.

Lingerie spills from a cast-off backpack.
The neon tubes are dismal, dark at dawn:
DRAFT BEER now drab, the BAR sign simply black,
Lattimer Deli’s knife-steel grate still down.

The stained-glass windows of McGlinchey’s Bar
Are dead. The only thing that holds a light
That’s real is melting snow, the run of bright
Rills altering to echoes in the sewer.

Feature Image: Daniele Idini

07/10/2024

Hats On for the Happy

by Claire Crowther

We couldn’t go in person
since the car had grown moss inside.
So we sat on Zoom in Birmingham,
between a Dublin screen
and one in the south of Chicago.

We were silent, serious. Our separated frames fused
to witness the in-person
rejection of otherlessness. Two Canadians
entered the gallery, laughing under starry pointed hats.
Were they suggesting

we far-flung wedding guests, fixed
to the wall, watching and waiting, might have a party
of our own? Dublin man
fetched himself a sunhat. He handled
his brim a lot. I left the screen and found my bonnet –

orange felt, with a yellow
flower, in a cupboard I never use.
The Canadians waved me back to my chair.
The Chicago Mississippi-
Bankside lady pierced the screen

with solemnity – who would not be solemn
at the imminence of such
vows – then disappeared behind
clouds of simulated background. She came back
Queened, in a boat of black

hat, that was tulled and beaded
and pinned tight to her slowly unsombreing stare.
Our four tiny head-high squares
of life sparkled over the grey room. We
made champagne-rich speeches about commitment

to wear and be worn by, to cover
and to be covered by. My partner was bare-
headed. He never wears a hat, only a sun visor
that shades his sight
when the heat-sapped tryst of eye

and sky is painful. The bride folded her veil back
into a hood. The groom
meditated on her dr**ed hair
and then on her naked face. Say it, whispered each
brimmed and muted heart.

Feature image Daniele Idini

06/10/2024

Media coverage of the war currently unfolding in Lebanon describe Hezbollah as an “Iranian-backed” group, and frame the conflict as one between them and Israel. In this reading, little attention is given to Lebanon beyond Hezbollah, nor that Hezbollah, for all its links to Iran, is first and foremost a Lebanese group embedded in Lebanon’s sociopolitical fabric. While Hezbollah’s military superiority enables it to act unilaterally, and undermine the Lebanese state at any given moment, the armed group must still weigh into consideration its relations with other domestic actors, both allies and adversaries, in order to secure its longer-term presence in Lebanon.

The introduction to Luke Fitzherbert's new article on Lebanon. To read full article
LINK IN BIO or STORY

04/10/2024

An excerpt from Cormac Deane's review of Kneecap and the latest in the Ross O'Carroll-Kelly series:

"While the do-nothings in the south live free of the British yoke, the Belfast crowd are working hard at the labour of resistance. Education, self-motivation, organising are all positive attributes in Kneecap, which goes some way toward explaining the heavy emphasis on drug-taking hedonism that runs throughout, a careful counter to the characterisation of moralising busybody do-gooder that in other times and contexts has stuck so well to militant gaeilgeoirí. Indeed, when Irish does occasionally appear in earlier ROCK instalments, it tends to reek of worthiness, a tool for virtue-signalling southerners for whom gaelscoileanna are little more than feeder schools for the elite private institutions.

That there is something important and vital at stake is absolutely clear in Kneecap. The achievement of bringing so many people to see an Irish-language film, both within the island and without, is enormous. The band and the film itself combine masterfully punkish attitudinizing and youth-coolness on the one hand, and mainstream institutional endorsement on the other. The Kneecap thing is slickly done and, with money from TG4, Northern Ireland Screen, Coimisiún na Meán and Screen Ireland, plus public endorsements from people such as Elton John and Cillian Murphy, and positive coverage everywhere from the Guardian to the LA Times, they will bring the Irish language and the reasons why it should be spoken to more eyes and ears than perhaps anyone has ever achieved. They also show no sign of toning down their solidarity with Palestine, which will surely hurt their chances when it comes to the Oscars, now that the film has secured the Irish nomination.
..

LINK IN BIO or STORY for full article

03/10/2024

The Austrian Mind
by David Langwallner

Late last month 28.9% of Austrians voted for the Freedom Party (FPÖ) led by Herbert Kickl, an avowedly anti-migrant, anti-Islamic party, founded in the 1950s by former N***s. The governing conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) gained 27.5% lost 20 seats, while its coalition partner, the Greens who received 8.2%, losing 10 seats. In third place, the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) received 21.1%, marking its worst result ever. In fourth place, the liberal NEOS increased its share to 9.1%.

We can only hope that the conservatives do not enter into a coalition with Kickl’s party as Hindenburg did with Hitler’s N**i party. Perhaps a Dutch solution will at least dilute the forces of darkness. Kickl was formerly the speech writer of the now-deceased long-time leader of the Freedom Party, Jörg Haider, but Kickl is far less ambiguous in his pronouncements than his former boss.

What’s clear is that the far right is on the rise across Europe, Ireland and the world. My own childhood in Ireland, as a half-Austrian, not unlike Hugo Hamilton’s experience as recounted in his autobiography The Speckled People, involved casual racism and bullying on account of my background.

At one level Austria is among the most cultured of nations. So, I defend it. Ma Vlast as Smetana said about Czech Bohemia, albeit a defensive posture often leads to a failure in understanding. Why Kickl? What is the Austrian Mind that has created this?
...

LINK IN BIO or STORY to read the rest of the article

Feature Image ‘Avenue in the park of Schloss Kammer’ produced by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt in 1912 whilst he was living near the village of Unterach on the southern shore of lake Attersee in Austria.

01/10/2024

Rothko in Paris by Desmond Traynor.
[excerpt]

If Rothko’s painting can be considered ‘good’ (which it is), and is therefore, by his own lights, not ‘about nothing’, then what is it about? Scale was not an end in itself for Rothko, I surmise: it is merely a means to an end. ‘If you are only moved by colour relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom.’

The parallels with the music of Sunn O))) need not be laboured: their work is not, or not only, about loudness for its own sake. They clearly want to make an audience feel something, be it a viscerally physical reaction felt in the chest, the abdomen, the nervous system, or something less tangible and more esoteric, something you can’t quite put your finger on. Perhaps they are seeking to show, at some profound level, that this mind/body duality problem, in terms of apprehension and appreciation, is not irreconcilable.

Both artists are exponents of a maximalism which is a port of entry for a greater minimalism. You may share a large bottle of cognac in front of a roaring fire on a chilly evening with a friend, but it is not necessary to down the lot between you in one sitting to achieve a warm inner glow. Again, maybe this apparent something/nothing, presence/absence dichotomy can be resolved by way of Beckett’s remark in his essay ‘Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’, an exegesis of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake – then known simply as Work in Progress: ‘His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.’ This chimes well with Rothko’s own proclamation: ‘A painting is not about an experience. It is an experience.’
..

LINK IN BIO or STORY to full article.

Feature Image: Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978). Mark Rothko, Yorktown Heights, ca. 1949.

01/10/2024

Desmond Traynor explores what is 'the elusive and rarely glimpsed ‘content’ – if any – in Rothko’s work, which eludes us as we endlessly consider its forms.'

https://cassandravoices.com/society-culture/rothko-in-paris/

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