Joyce's great story, "The Dead" takes place today 6 January, feast of the Epiphany. I look forward to discussing it this evening @IrlEmbRome. An endlessly rich story for our times, it turns the comforting Christmas tale of new life into a meditation on death, memory, loss. Thread

It corrects or seems to correct some of the bleakness of the earlier stories. Joyce wrote that he had "been unnecessarily harsh" in not reproducing any Dublin's "ingenuous insularity and its hospitality. The latter 'virtue' so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe".
It offers a wonderful evocation of hospitality and a luscious description of the laden Christmas table "A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin ...
Joyce wrote this extraordinarily mature story when he was just 25 years of age. Part of its inspiration came from a tough Christmas he and Nora spent in Rome in 1906. Christmas dinner, he complained, was just an uninspiring plate of pasta.
The Dead is also a fitting story for #NollaignamBan as Gabriel is made aware of his failure to see and properly hear the three women who challenge him: Lily, the caretaker's daughter, Miss Ivors, and of course his wife, Gretta.
The role of women is key with Aunt Kate "fiercely" replying to her niece about the position of women. She is furious that Aunt Julia has lost her place in the Church choir: "it's not at all honourable for the pope to turn out the women out of the choirs that have slaved there...
The Dead is also a moving meditation on lost love and on lost intimacy within a marriage. It shows the damaging effect on Gabriel of relying on habit and his need to move beyond the superficial so as to see and accept the depth, mystery, history of the woman he loves, Gretta.
The closing section depicts Gabriel's great epiphany, his moment of revelation or, in Joyce's words, "sudden spiritual manifestation". You could do worse today than read "The Dead" or even watch John Huston's moving film version with Donal McCann and Angelica Huston.
Today is also a good day to remember that the House of the Dead at 15 Usher's Island remains at risk. We hope @DubCityCouncil @anbordpleanala @MichealMartinTD @LordMayorDublin @cathmartingreen will find a way to secure this unique heritage site for future generations.

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Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"


The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.
@bellingcat's attempt in their new book, published by
@BloomsburyBooks, to coverup the @OPCW #Douma controversy, promote US and UK gov. war narratives, and whitewash fraudulent conduct within the OPCW, is an exercise in deception through omission. @BloomsburyPub @Tim_Hayward_


1) 2000 words are devoted to the OPCW controversy regarding the alleged chemical weapon attack in #Douma, Syria in 2018 but critical material is omitted from the book. Reading it, one would never know the following:

2) That the controversy started when the original interim report, drafted and agreed by Douma inspection team members, was secretly modified by an unknown OPCW person who had manipulated the findings to suggest an attack had occurred. https://t.co/QtAAyH9WyX… @RobertF40396660


3) This act of attempted deception was only derailed because an inspector discovered the secret changes. The manipulations were reported by @ClarkeMicah
and can be readily observed in documents now available https://t.co/2BUNlD8ZUv….

4) @bellingcat's book also makes no mention of the @couragefoundation panel, attended by the @opcw's first Director General, Jose Bustani, at which an OPCW official detailed key procedural irregularities and scientific flaws with the Final Douma Report:

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