Word: dubliner
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...hero of Da is Charlie Now (Brian Murray), a middle-aged writer who has come back to his boyhood home near Dublin to bury his father and dispose of the old man's effects. As he begins stuffing faded letters and papers into the kitchen stove, who should shuffle in and plop into his favorite armchair but old Da himself (Barnard Hughes)? Only to be followed by Young Charlie (Richard Seer), Charlie's teen-age self; Mother (Sylvia O'Brien); and Drumm (Lester Rawlins), a dour early employer given to pungent maxims: "Marriage is the maximum loneliness...
DIED. Michéal Mac Liammóir, 78, renowned Irish actor, designer and playwright; of a pulmonary embolism; in Dublin. Blessed with what he called a "godawful gift of gab" and a deep streak of talent, Mac Liammoir designed and appeared in 300 productions at Dublin's Gate, a famed small innovative theater he helped establish in 1928. In the 1960s he popularized the one-man show by giving, on four continents, marvelous solo recitations of passages he had culled from Oscar Wilde, an act he called The Importance of Being Oscar, and from centuries of Irish literature...
...evening. His mother had a fine mezzo-soprano voice, and at the beginning of his journalistic career, he was a music critic signing himself Corno di Bassetto, which means basset horn. The cadences of his speeches are like arias, and Donnelly delivers them that way with an ingratiating Dublin inflection. Indeed, most of Shaw's greater plays could be transposed into operas, just as Pygmalion was made into My Fair Lady...
...English prose style was most thoroughly affected by his knowledge of Gaelic. He regularly mocked those nationalists and bicycling anthropologists who made the preservation of Gaelic a sacred mission. In The Poor Mouth (1941) a long tale written in the old language, O'Brien shows a linguist from Dublin religiously transcribing the grunts of a western Irish pig. Flann even joked about the impulse that led him to learn his native tongue: "Having nothing to say, I thought at the time that it was important to revive a distant language in which absolutely nothing could be said...
...absurdity have not gone out of fashion, and Myles was keenly aware of both. When a local judge levied a stiff jail term on a woman who had been caught shoplifting, the journalist commented: "I suppose he was right when he said there was far too much shoplifting in Dublin but I am not clear how one calculates what is the right amount of shoplifting for Dublin." He took figures of speech literally and then offered advice on solving problems that only he could discern: how to keep blood from curdling, what to do about Ireland's excessive-burning...