The Blind Leading the Blind

Why the fuck am I writing this. It isn't as though I have anything to say that is earthshattering, but then again, most of the blogs I've been reading are so much shite. So here goes.

It was really the idea of my literary agent in Ireland - maybe the best known there -and she felt it might somehow help get my fucking book published.

The book, A STRANGE BLINDNESS, is I suppose about the church but then isn't everything written by an Irish person of the Catholic sort about the one, the holy, the catholic and what it did to our updragging. So, while the book is of course about the church in the same way a fish story is about water, it is also the story of a wanderer - one in whom the wanderlust never dies as Homer pretended to believe about Ulysses.

(Pseudo lit. aside) Dante and Tennyson were not fooled. The former met Ulysses in hell and he told how he'd taken off again, sailing "with the boys." Sometimes a guy just has to get out of the house - go for a pack of cigarettes.
Tennyson imagines the man's boredom ruling that rocky little state: "...mete(ing) and dole(ing) unequal laws unto a savage race, that hoard and sleep, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel, I will drink life to the lees..." He said and off he went. No twelve step program in those days for the compulsive wanderer.

Now the protagonist in A STRANGE BLINDNESS is no Ulysses. Quite to the contrary. This is the story of a young person so stymied by the incessant what-are-you-going-to-do-when-you-finish-school question that he decides, fuckit, to slap down a trump card that'd shut his parents up: he'd go to seminary and become a friggin' priest. And he does just that and in the time it takes get a couple of degrees and ordination, the bould Jack Holland is off to preach salvation to the lucky folks in Minerva, California.

Maybe some of you can see where this is going but don't be too sure. This Ulysses stops at many ports, pisses off a great many gods, survives many storms and (don't tell Penelope) had many interesting parishioners, in the course of a very successful ecclesiastical career. Ha, Ha! And he looked so great in those red skirts and lacy over-blouses... But that's all in the book.