COMING SOON

We're hoping to produce as a regular treat for readers certain [not particularly] exclusive extracts from the secret undercover diary of Special Agent Myers; a chronicle of derring-do and heroic exploits detailing our hero's efforts to track down and destroy his Arch-Nemesis, BASTARD BABY. Here's an appetite whetting sample of the hard-bitten prose our cherished band of dedicated fans can expect!

Babies are not merely filthy, incredibly noisy nuisances who require constant attention, [they] are monomaniacally selfish and thoroughly unreliable.*

In our next installment, Myers vows "I'll get you Bastard Baby, you unreliable bastard. I'll get you if it's the last thing I ever do!"

*From "Unmarried Mothers" pg 192 of Kevin Myers (Four Courts Press, Dublin 2000) and reprinted from An Irishman's Diary, The Irish Times, December 1994.

Sir Myers na gCopaleen of Cruiskeen Eile

Colonel Kevin Myers has been tending in his Cruiskeen Eile the most coveted real estate in The Irish Times for quite the number of years, much to the frustration of aspiring gCopaleens the length and breadth of the island. But it's been hard, thankless work with our hero often having to note the reluctance of his vast, silent army of supporters to out themselves among the letter writers of the adjacent acreage.

I have to admit that I'm quite fond of Mr. Myers really. I was among the first to defend the beleagured Colonel during Bastardgate when the feminazis and anarcho-syndicalist freedom haters descended on him like a ravening horde. Sure, I would say, he argues from the particular to the general.  Sure, he despises so-called "evidence". Yes, he attacked a vulnerable and largely voiceless social group by deploying in its most shocking iteration a word (bastard) which it is dubious in the extreme ever enjoyed the neutral value he claimed in his defence to have ascribed to it. But you have to understand, the poor man is as mad as a fucking balloon.

Of course, it's a tidal thing. The Colonel ebbs as well as flows. He was at his most hysterical and incoherent in the aftermath of the events of 11 September, 2001. Myers vascillated from pole to pole as the beast slouched towards Bethlehem and he exhorted the falconer to bid the falcon gyre and gimble in the blood-dimmed wabe. Deploying all the lit-crit powers a UCG undergraduatcy can bestow (not many), I managed to identify his weltanschauung as an alarming comingling of the terrifying perspectives found in two poems; Yeats' apocalyptic classic, The Second Coming and the, er, Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll.

I'm hoping Myers provides a bit of gold for my reading pleasure tomorrow. But if not, I noted as I sat in typical Rodin pose on the jacks yestereve and thumbed through his collected Irishman's Diaries, a volume of which is a mainstay of my privy library, that he addressed himself in February '95 to the case of Lee Clegg and the mischievous doings of the illustrious Parachute Regiment. So maybe I'll blog about that instead.