Word: corks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Dinner at Eddie's inevitably begins with the sound of a cork popping from a bottle of Asti Spumante. "We call it lemonade," he remarks with a grin. As he pours the spirits so Bernays, begins his outpouring of questions. He plays at once the inquisitor and the humorist, drawing people out of their shells of self-consciousness to see what they are made of Subtly, he demands the intimacy of everyone whom he encounters. The topic of discussion turns to Harvard. "The university," lectures Bernays, "is suffering from a cultural time lag of about four hundred years, since...
Well, it's always sad to see a good thing go to waste. When the cork on that bottle of Chateau Lafitte-Rothschild splinters and falls into the wine, connoisseurs all over the world cringe just a little...
Frank O'Connor (1903-1966) once described the short story as "the literature of submerged population groups." It is a regional definition with an old-fashioned thump of authenticity. O'Connor, born Michael O'Donovan in Cork, was no innovator. His stories lowered the reader directly into the weedy, half-lit world of Irish town life...
Genetic disposition, then, may have helped form Kelleher's interest in Ireland. His early nurturing, though, played a part as well. His father's mother, a native of the county Cork, "for some reason picked me as the grandchild to talk to. She talked about Ireland--later. I realized what she was really talking about was being young. She came over to America at 17 or 18, and worked in the mills. Everything turned out well in the long run, but by then she was an old woman." And so she told the stories of her youth, told them...
...adds, however, that those days are ending: "It seems to me that Irish literature is caught up in a real problem. The more Ireland becomes a modern western country, the less it is Irish." Once, Kelleher recalls, he was traveling with a teacher in the Irish department at a Cork university. "We were coming back after a very successful day of archaeologizing, and our heads were stuffed full of the 7th and 8th century. We drove into the small development where he lived near Cork, and there were children riding around on tricycles, people out washing their cars, housewives talking...