CÚ CHULAINN.

Patrick Lawrence’s online journal.

Journal Entry #53

Journal Entry #53

Four elegies. FOR A LONG TIME we made a group I took to calling “the scrum.” We were like-minded souls, ever supportive of one another, ever encouraging. We were all writers. The scrum was a sort of anchor in my…

Journal Entry #52

Our fingers all in knots. NORFOLK, CONN., JAN. 7— Cú Chulainn did not anticipate writing this year-opening Journal entry as America provokes—and exacerbates at every turn—a frightening and wholly manufactured crisis with Iraq and the Islamic Republic. Not one week…

Journal Entry #51

My contempt runneth over. NORFOLK, CONN., OCT. 24—Maybe it was destined from the first to come to this. Maybe the chicanery and corruption that began in the spring of 2016 and soon enough became known as Russiagate was always going…

Journal Entry #50

All that we cannot read. NORFOLK, CONN., SEPT. 5—Something remarkable began to be published last Sunday. Cú Chulainn urges readers not to miss it. It is a multi-part exposé of singular distinction for its astonishing revelations and its exceptional documentation….

Journal Entry #49

What we have made of ourselves. NORFOLK, CONN., JUNE 24—Two friends sent a couple of news items this week that prompt in Cú Chulainn a mood of sober reflection. Just who are we in the nineteenth year of our new…

Journal Entry #48

Memory and forgetting, power and the press. NORFOLK, CONN., JUNE 6—The New York Times carried an interesting opinion item in its Tuesday editions. This is worthy of comment all by itself, of course: Reflecting the Times’ very essential duties in…

Journal Entry #47

1. Sharmine Narwani and American media. NORFOLK, CONN., MAY 7—I recently published one of my long, two-part Q&A exchanges, this one with Sharmine Narwani, a correspondent residing in Beirut and one of the very few to cover the Syrian conflict…

Journal Entry #46

1. Mueller’s Rorschach test. NORFOLK, CONN., APRIL 19—Jiminy Cricket. It is black, it is white. It tells all, it tells nothing. The president is off the hook, the president now dangles on it —and will for the rest of his…

Journal Entry #45

The complicit. NORFOLK, CONN., APRIL 12—The heart grew sick, the heart broke a little more, on seeing the pictures of Julian Assange as he was forcibly removed from the Ecuadoran embassy in London yesterday. Packed into a waiting police van,…

Journal Entry #44

Truth on trial. NORFOLK, CONN., APRIL 9—Many of us have been greatly distressed by recent reports that Julian Assange will shortly be turned out of the Ecuadoran embassy in London, his asylum privileges withdrawn. It is clear where this will…