In My Mouth Sufficient Bread

''Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.''

This is the opening paragraph - one of them, at least - of Flann O'Brien's 'At Swim-Two Birds'. I am reading it now, and am ashamed not to have read it sooner. O'Brien was a contemporary and a countryman and a friend of James Joyce, and in my opinion he is the superior writer. It is near-impossible to compare writers as disparate as O'Brien, Leonard Cohen and Charles Bukowski by any mechanism other than personal opinion, but those three would certainly figure in my own ghostly hall of fame, of beauty.

This post is itself something of a second opening; to a blog I set up some five years ago with the intention of reviewing or discussing graphic novels, and consequently never posted upon. I am only doing so now because I feel it would be nice to have somewhere to write, unencumbered by limitations of style [my other blog is devoted to poetry], unrestricted by limitations of length [as in twitter's 140 character diktat] and away from the prying eyes of the world. I write this, as ever, to an audience of one.

Ciaran.