He also put the following question to seven writers, including myself: Which Irish writer, alive or dead, do you think is most unjustly unread? Why should we read them now? Our answers - mine on the wonderful SÃofra O'Donovan - are here in a piece called 'Ireland Unread'.
Dave's editorial interview is also worth a read. He says, 'It isn’t really a good time to be anything in Ireland except a crooked politician, banker or businessman or one of their arselickers. It’s the time of the wolf in Ireland. And this is true in the arts as well as everything else. You need to be very thick-skinned, very determined, perhaps even a little bit vicious, as well as very talented, to be able to stick at professional arts practice in Ireland now if you are coming from outside the establishment. '
On James Joyce:
'Dubliners is the Ur-text of the last century of Irish melancholy naturalism, which is our default/dominant expressive mode in long and short fiction; Dubliners has been rewritten dozens and dozens of times and is being rewritten all over Ireland right now no doubt and often by people who have never read it. They don’t have to read it to have been influenced by it since its influence is so general.'
More about Joyce from me, come the weekend :)
