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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Category Archives: Irish Literature

Episode 424: Ronan Ryan!

13 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Blog Post, Episode, Irish Literature, James Joyce

≈ 1 Comment

Episode 424 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

RRAuthorPhoto

Photo by David Whitaker.

In this week’s show, I talk to novelist Ronan Ryan about the dramatic uses of gallows humor, how loss teaches us about our priorities, how elusive reality is, and how to match style to story.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

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NOTES

This episode is sponsored by the excellent people at Scribophile.

Scribophile

TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.

Consider donating to City Lights Books to sustain it and/or buying a book online from Powells.

Check out my literary adventure novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.

Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame Cover


Episode 424 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

 

The Curator of Schlock #314: Leprechaun 3

20 Friday Mar 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Horror, Irish Literature, The Curator of Schlock

≈ Leave a comment

The Curator of Schlock #314 by Jeff Shuster

Leprechaun 3

Vegas, Baby, Vegas.

I wish a belated Happy St. Patrick’s Day to one and all. I hope you all had a good time feasting corned beef and cabbage, maybe a pint of Guinness. I stayed in due to that worldwide pandemic that’s got everyone freaked out. I even closed up the Museum of Schlock and will be blogging from a remote location in the Florida Everglades. I just hope that thieves don’t ransack the Nightmare City display. Those sports coats from the movie set me back six figures.

Leprechaun 3

Tonight’s movie is 1995’s Leprechaun 3, which is also known as Leprechaun 3: In Las Vegas. This makes sense as the movie takes place in Las Vegas. Brian Medwin Trenchard-Smith serves as director this time around, and Warwick Davis returns as Lubdan the Leprechaun. I didn’t know this character had a name. Granted, I’m no Leprechaun expert, but I imagine this series of movies has its devotees much like the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street movies. I can’t imagine anything in this world sadder than Leprechaun fandom. They probably flipped out over the WWE Studios remake that completely negated the canon.

L3B

The movie begins with a stone statue of Lubdan getting sold for twenty bucks to Gupta (Marcelo Tubert), an Indian pawnshop owner in Las Vegas. Gupta is warned not to remove the magic medallion around his neck. Naturally, Gupta removes the charm and before you know, Lubdan is snacking on his ear remarking, “I love Indian food.” Gupta manages to ward him off with the charm. Lubdan runs away with his pot of gold coins, but leaves one behind. Now this is interesting. Gupta finds a CD-ROM on World Folklore and researches all he can on leprechauns. For instance, leprechauns love potatoes, but can’t stand the presence of another leprechaun. Also, you can wish for anything you want if you make the wish while holding a leprechaun’s gold coin.

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What’s a CD-ROM? Well, before the Internet became the sole source of all knowledge and wisdom in modern society, human beings used to store information on these interactive CDs they’d slip into CD drives on their personal computers. They contained fancy graphic and sound, sometimes even little mini games. Will Smith sung about a 101 Dalmatians CD-ROM that he bought for his son in his 1997 hit song, “Just the Two of Us.” I hope I gave you younglings some valuable history.

L3D (1)

Back to the movie. Uhhhh. There’s a scene of Lubdan the Leprechaun running into an Elvis impersonator, or maybe Elvis himself? Lubdan actually digs Elvis’s threads and Elvis digs Lubdan’s threads. Elvis even compliments Lubdan’s pointy boots and wonders if they come in blue suede. It’s actually a cordial meeting and it’s nice to see Lubdan not try and take a bite out of Elvis. See, we can be civil.

L3C

I remember that Big Trouble in Little China movie. Lo Pan is described as “The Ultimate Evil Spirit,” but I think Lubdan could give him a run for his money. In fact, I’d like to see a Big Trouble in Little Ireland movie, get to see Jack Burton versus the evil leprechaun. Of course, I also want to see Chucky vs. Leprechaun. And how about TRON 3 already! Why aren’t I running Hollywood?


Jeffrey Shuster 1

Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

Episode 137: Annemarie Ní Churreáin!

31 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Irish Literature, Kerouac House, Poetry

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Will Garland

Episode 137 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to Annemarie Ní Churreáin about the Irish language, poetry, and the allure of nature,

Annemarie Ní Churreáin

Photo by Kimberly Lojewski.

plus Will Garland reads his essay, The Art of Telling a Story About Southern Family Living in a Small Southern Town.

Will GarlandNOTES

The music used with The Art of Telling a Story About Southern Family Living in a Small Southern Town is “Color Cave” by Noveller, a one person band, that band being Sarah Lipstate. Check out the link for more info on her upcoming show at The Tinnitus Music Series in Brooklyn.

Orlando Shakespeare Theaters production of The Merry Wives of Windsor begins this week.

Orlando Mixtapebanner 2_______

Episode 137 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In Boozo Veritas #33: St. Patrick’s Day

17 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Drinking, In Boozo Veritas, Irish Literature

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

In Boozo Veritas

In Boozo Veritas #33 by Teege Braune

St. Patrick’s Day

If you are the kind of person who celebrates holidays by listening to podcasts, you’ve no doubt already enjoyed The Drunken Odyssey’s drinking roundtable discussion recorded especially for St. Patrick’s Day.

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Somewhere among the odd off topic asides and the sounds of clinking glasses I share an obscure poem written by Irish poet, scholar, and mystic W.B. Yeats entitled simply “The Irish Car Bomb.” Don’t ask me where I dug up this relic of misguided poetic innovation. I’m sure Yeats himself would have preferred it lost to posterity. It is admittedly not the poet’s best work: for one thing its rhythm and meter lack the near perfect precision for which Yeats’ is rightfully credited. Furthermore, the poem’s references are a hodgepodge of Irish culture and mythology with nothing of any discernible importance uniting them together in this particular poem. Careful readers of Yeats’ work will find it odd that he mentions Orlando, which at the time of his death in 1939 was still only a fledgling metropolis. Stranger still is that the poem is about a drink often deemed culturally insensitive to the Irish and their history of violent conflict between imperialist England and the IRA, but most perplexing is the fact that Irish car bombs were invented in the United States forty years after Yeats died. His prophetic foreknowledge of their future popularity can only be attributed to his involvement with the Hermetic Order of Golden Dawn and communion with Secret Chiefs.

WB-Yeats

Despite its spurious origins and cultural carelessness, the Irish car bomb is a favorite among binge drinkers on St. Patrick’s Day. We can at least acknowledge that its ingredients are Irish, though ninety percent of the Guinness consumed in the United States any day of the year is actually brewed in the company’s facility in Canada and not in its historic Dublin brewery. One could argue that the car bomb is actually a perfect symbol for St. Patrick’s Day in the United States: “Irish” ingredients created in the new world thrown together and chugged at one’s own peril with zero consideration for how they actually relate to the people one is supposedly celebrating. This is the way we appropriate any culture in this country, right? Taking bits and pieces from various stories and epochs, combining them without much thought or justification, blurring the lines between honoring another ethnicity and simply bastardizing it.

And yet I’ve enjoyed my fair share of car bombs, consumed them with a clear conscience, and probably will again.

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This is the nature of a melting pot: one generation shares with its neighbors and progenies the pieces of the old country that it has brought with it across the ocean. These same neighbors and progenies remember the details but forget the old country, a place, after all, they have never seen, or if they have, visited only as a guest and a stranger. Like a cross generational game of telephone, they pass the half-remembered traditions up their family trees until they are as watered down as their own bloodlines. This isn’t a lament. This is simply the nature of America; the alternative, namely nationalism, is much darker indeed.

Neither is this an argument for unbridled cultural appropriation, the inevitability of which does not justify the creation of insulting portrayals of other ethnicities, nor the trivialization of their struggles. Unfortunately, racism is still a huge problem in this country and much of the world. Despite my occasional consumption of the beverage, the Irish car bomb is undoubtedly on the insensitive side of the cultural appropriation fence. There’s a great Irish proverb that goes, “It is often a person’s mouth that broke his nose.” The ignorant tourist who orders an Irish car bomb in any random pub in Dublin deserves the fat lip that he may receive instead. Why, then, drink it in the United States? Guinness, Bailey’s, and Jameson are surprisingly delicious when all gulped down all together, but is this justification enough? What if we simply changed the name? Were I taxed with renaming the car bomb, I might call it something like Fergus’ Folly or Finnegan’s Quake, but we all know that neither of these are likely to stick.

One finds references to St. Patrick’s Day lacking in Yeats’ work. In fact, the ideologies of the poet and the patron saint of Ireland, separated from each other by a gulf of centuries, stand in stark opposition to each other. While the latter made the rediscovery of Irish mythology and folklore his life’s work, the former spent his first years in Ireland, a land that was not his home, in slavery, and then after gaining his freedom only to voluntarily sacrifice it for a monastic life, created his legacy by converting pagans to Christianity, thus Romanizing Ireland and initiating the end of the age of myth. The primary miracle associated with St. Patrick is the legend that he drove all the snakes from Ireland. While it’s true that there are no snakes on the island, paleontological evidence suggests that they were never there to begin with. The snakes St. Patrick drove from the island symbolize the pagan gods whom Christianity associates with demons. Rediscovering these gods, breathing new life into them and reestablishing their significance was Yeats’ own mission, and thus its easy to imagine why St. Patrick was a not figure for whom he had much reverence.

Despite their differences, there are aspects of St. Patrick’s Day for both Yeats and the old monk to enjoy. The shamrock, for example, while appropriated by Christianity to represent the trinity, was also a sacred symbol of springtime and regeneration to the pagan Celts who came before. On the other hand, the adoration of leprechauns, about whom Yeats collected a host of folktales, would no doubt please the poet, while their ubiquitousness might have the saint rolling in his grave, and if that didn’t do it, the fact that his holiday serves as an out in out bacchanal for many would most likely not please him in the slightest. Of course, it is unlikely that your average American reveler is thinking much about how the plastic shamrock hanging on a beaded necklace around their neck is a bridge between Christianity and paganism while they are getting smashed chugging car bombs in some “Irish” pub most likely owned by Americans.

Last year while I was in Target with my own bonny lass, Jenny no less, on an errand unrelated to the holiday, a middle-aged woman ran up to me and began talking enthusiastically about how excited she was to meet a real leprechaun on St. Patrick’s Day. Perhaps I was wearing green. Perhaps not, though I can safely say I sported a big, red beard. Nevertheless, I allowed her daughter, whose mortification was obvious, to take a picture of her mother and myself together while Jenn stood off to the side unable to control her laughter. What can I say? I am a person who aims to please. No sense, it seemed, in mentioning the fact that I am really only about twenty-five percent Irish, my lineage being mostly German. When people see my red beard, especially on St. Patrick’s Day, they often want me to be Irish, and I am usually quick to indulge them. If I meet a party-goer with more than one drink in them, I just claim to be 100% Irish. “Came to America when I was a wee lad,” I’ll tell any random drunk person. It reinforces some idea to them, not a religious principle or anything so sacred. Rather I become another component to the flimsy veneer of Irishness with which they have adorned themselves. Rubbing elbows with a real Irishman on St. Patrick’s Day becomes one more glorious detail in a night of blurry memories. If I, of all people, approve of them, then they must be doing St. Patrick’s Day right.

Personally, I love St. Patrick’s Day. I enjoy an excuse to dust off my collections of Yeats and Seamus Heaney, to play the music of Shane MacGowan and Ronnie Drew, and yes, get drunk on beer and whiskey. Perhaps my red beard is indicative of Irishness as my spiritual ancestry even if it only makes up a quarter of my blood. I’ll ignore the fact that the recessive ginger gene is a minority among the population of the emerald isle as it is everywhere else in the world. Perhaps my red beard is only an excuse to claim a cultural identity that is more romantic than my German lineage. In truth, I am really as American as everyone else pretending to be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. Sitting in the Drunken Monkey, writing about Irish car bombs while listening to French pop music and drinking Ethiopian coffee, I feel grateful to live in a time and a place where I can enjoy various bits and pieces of cultures all over the world, but I also know that their is privilege there too, that enjoying a song, a beer, or kind of coffee will never allow me to understand what its like to be anything other than an American. St. Patrick’s Day will never mean the same in America as it does in Ireland. Nor, for that matter, will it mean the same today as it did for the down-trodden Irish immigrants of a hundred years ago. We will never distill the experience of an entire people into a single day or idea. That being said, rather than deride those who wish to adorn themselves in green hats and beads and consume green beer, I would simply encourage you to have fun in whichever way you please, but while you do so remember that respect is always an important virtue in the United States, Ireland, and across the world.

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Teege Braune (episode 72, episode 75, episode 77, episode 90) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.

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