Announcement, even yet still more new blog

[Have decided to experimentally launch a Kevin Myers fansite called Cruiskeen Eile; what follows is a cross-posting of the "Justification" I've posted there] I have to admit that I'm quite fond of Kevin 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 did argue from the particular to the general in an intellectually disreputable manner without the benefit of substantial and credible evidence, he did launch an attack on 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. Kevin Myers has been tending what is no doubt the most coveted real estate in The Irish Times for quite the number of years at this stage (much to the frustration of aspiring gCopaleens the length and breath of the island). It's been a lot of hard, thankless work (our hero often notes the reluctance of his vast, silent army of supporters to out themselves in the letters pages). Like the colonel's, my shelves groan under the weight of ponderous military history tomes, though I own myself a little more sceptical of the enthusiasm for the glorious crucible of battle than thin red line cheerleaders John Keegan, Dicky Holmes, Max Hastings et al, than perhaps our Kev might be. Given the faux Edwardian tone Caoighmhín facies he carries off with effortless aplomb, it is appropriate to refer readers to one of them, War of Nerves by Ben Shepard, a survey of military psychiatry among whose delights is a potted history of early pscyhoanalysis, the immutable verities of which, believe it or not, are still with us. The early days of the science coincided with the rise of cerebral, white collar employment giving rise to fears among the newly minted middle classes of "brain strain". And that I fear is what Mr. Myers has. You can't put out polemic after polemic under tight, Sisyphusian deadlines without putting the old grey matter under unwise levels of stress. I've been reading Myers' output since my teens and there have been many times over the last 15 years when I've bought The Irish Times simply to read his column and do the crossword (Simplex), giving no more than a cursory glance to much of the rest of the paper. And I'm sure I'm not alone. Alas, having blown vast chunks of its trust fund out the collective arse of its board of directors, the Times has been a shadow of even its former self for quite some time. Many of its contributors and payrolled journos have been cut adrift from their former world of expense-account lunches and company cars with only their generous pensions to console them. And this degradation of the brand has coincided with the ineluctable diminution of the colonel's mental powers. Of course, it's a tidal thing. 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 perspectives to be 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.