I’m in a crush in a Dublin pub around New Year’s. Glasses clinking clicking, clashing crashing in Gaelic revelry: swinging doors, sweethearts falling in and out of the season’s blessings, family feuds subsumed or resumed. Malt joy and ginger despair are all in the queue to be served on this, the quarter-of-a-millennium mark since Arthur Guinness first put velvety blackness in a pint glass.
I love the way he writes; always have. No matter what it is -- from the rumination on Frank Sinatra (above) to his preface for a book of Psalms -- he writes everything as though he's telling the story at a bar to a group of his mates. Loud, unedited. His sentences are as much, or more, about rhythm and sound as they are about the meaning of the words. Maybe that's why he's such a good lyricist, too.
2 comments:
And:
U2 and Bruce Springsteen are among the musicians who have signed up to perform at an inaugural celebration for US President-elect Barack Obama.
Springsteen is kind of the same way. Everything he says is the equivalent of walking to school uphill both ways in snow up to his neck.
Stories big enough to fill stadiums.
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