a n d y ' s b
i o . . . by
rufus t. firefly
Born under a wandering star this 23-year-old
gentleman from Derry (known to his friends as Andy) is a would-be
writer and a drinker of
note dedicated to revelry and song. Formerly a politics student
in Belfast (he left amid some "unpleasantness") he drifted
back to his hometown and has spent the last year there writing.
He has written
articles on Gunter Grass, Brendan Behan, Richard Brautigan, Hart
Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Nikolai Gogol and Miguel de Unamuno for
various websites,
has had poetry published in Hard Luck magazine (Warm Angel Whiskey)
before it disappeared into the ether and is currently contributing
to a forthcoming Scottish music and cultural magazine.
He enjoys Night of the Hunter, Bill Hicks, German expressionist and
Akira Kurosawa films and listens obsessively to everything from the
Beta Band to Mississippi John Hurt, dub to gothic Americana.
His literary heroes are Orwell, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Flann O Brien,
Steinbeck, Camus, Tom Paulin, Sylvia Plath, Tom Waits, Primo Levi,
Leonard Cohen, Ozamu Dazai, Yukio Mishima and Friedrich Nietzsche though
his writing is more like a deadbeat Miroslav Holub.
Most of the time his thoughts extend only to music, food, outer
space, cinema, the sea, books, alcohol, his friends and nights
of hedonism.
He has worked in a bowling alley, a children’s theme park, a
supermarket, a warehouse, a bookshop and a library. He likes to drown
his sorrows with Jack Daniels but his sorrows have learnt to surf.
He records music, which the world may never hear, on a dusty four track
under the name "HarderPedroHarder" sketching out an EP
called Songs from the Whorehouse. He looks like a caricature of
someone else:
on a good day Jeff Goldblum, on a bad day Steve Buscemi. He holds
ambitions to work in Japan and live in Catalonia or Northern California.
He possesses the belief that contemporary Irish, and European,
fiction can be at least as vital as it’s past and requires
a new movement to spearhead a renaissance (perhaps Deaddrunkdublin)
instead of merely
engaging in the necrophiliac worship of Joyce, Yeats, Beckett etc.
His hope is to lead a charge against the emotional weaklings, the
empty headed narcissists and the soulless Blairites that have characterized
our times for too long.
He is currently putting the finishing touches to a collection of
short stories and poems and a novel called "First We Take Jerusalem" (to
be finished next year), which will either take the world by storm
or send him into an early grave.
His special move is the spinning bird kick. [] |