Bøger af Kevin Corrigan

These songbook lyrics were written over a period of about ten years between around 2008 and 2018. As a music lover with an eclectic taste in musical genres (but not extending to rap, garage and other more 'modern' versions of the pop genre) these lyrics have been inspired by many of the artists I have enjoyed listening to over several decades. These have included Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, the Mavericks, Neil Diamond, Richard Hawley, the Eagles, Don Mclean, Leonard Cohen, the Beach Boys, David Gray, Billy Joel and representing the blues genre, John Lee Hooker. Each of the song lyrics has an appended 'melody hint' which provide a clue to the musical arrangements suggested for each of the songs. Six of the songs in this volume have been recorded by Steve Corrigan in 2012 on the album 'Bahraini Sunsets', singing, playing and producing the tracks according to his magical interpretation of them. The fifty sets of lyrics here are full of emotion and chart life's ups and downs with a sincerity guaranteed to move the reader and singer of them. If you just like lyrics as poems, as enshrined in the works of Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, then these hold up well and are full of depth and poetic imagery. Dip into this kaleidoscope of moving, lyrical stories and tunes. This second edition also contains the 18 song lyrics that feature in the production 'Captain Freedom - the Musical'. Happy reading, happy singing, happy playing! T

These 'bloody slices' of life, love and loneliness are packed with an eclectic range of characters and scenarios set in the UK, USA and one that takes the protagonist on a nostalgic journey to France to revisit the adventures of a former life. There's also a story about Mel and Fred, two wise-cracking New Yorkers, a budding actor playing the part of a super-hero and a sardonic Fleet Street journalist with a paranoia over the boring people he comes into contact with. There's tragedy here too with a long forgotten Blues singer and a story of a forty-year birth separation mixed with the capture of a serial killer. Whatever the story and the travails of the characters, can you guess the denouement for each of the bloody slices?

This is a humorous story about a young budding actor, Alan Finkelstein from Brooklyn, New York trying to make it big in movies. Unfortunately he is stuck making his living playing plastic vegetables in low brow TV commercials for local TV stations. Alan thinks he can do better than this. Unfortunately his pretty useless agent does not share Alan's aspirations. Alan begins the action by meeting and haranguing his agent, George Arthur Lewis, for not giving him the big parts he feels he is capable of. Alan does an impromptu impersonation of the famous 'do you feel lucky punk' scene from the film Dirty Harry. The young actor is also writing a script about a superhero which he feels is one way of moving up the movie ladder, preferably with him playing the central character, the super-hero Captain Freedom. However, George can only get him a part in a new burger commercial. At home, we meet Alan's parents. The mother is supportive, helping him with his super-hero costume, his father dismissive of Alan's acting ambitions. As the story unfolds, Alan begins to assume the persona of his super-hero alter-ego, Captain Freedom. The story is full of Alan's playing of parts from famous films, not just Clint Eastwood. He also does Bogart and de Niro while his friend Jimmy makes do with bit parts in the latest Planet of the Apes blockbuster. Is Alan really a super-hero from the planet Zeldon or just a schizophrenic, out of work actor? This version of the story is in a play format with the added bonus of the short story also included. The short story version can also be found in the collection '10 Bloody Slices' by the same author.

This is an eclectic selection of poetry written over a period of around fifty years. Most of it is reflective - on life, love and loneliness, major themes of our existence here on Earth. Or the poet's existence anyway. Some of it is just funny. Some of the pieces are certainly venomous, showing a deep dislike of some of life's more irritating habits and tribes. There are various poetic forms here - some free verse and some lyrical, what you might respectively call 'low grade T.S.Eliot' and 'junior' Betjeman. There is also a fair amount of pure 'Pam Ayres' and would not look out of place on a 'Hallmark' greetings card. There are also some examples of show-off 'technical' poetic forms (including abercrandian, haiku, nonet) written as challenges to the poet's wordsmithing abilities, rather like completing a crossword or Sudoku puzzle. Some poems were written as, or became songs, humbly attempting, to follow in the huge footprints of US singer-songwriters like Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits and the UK's Richard Hawley.Too much explanation of poetry and poetic forms is not what poetry is about. Poems are not there to be dissected, explained, interpreted and generally torn apart for a reader, as if in preparation for an examination. Poetry is there to tell a story, describe or evoke an emotion, make a point - yes; but the impact for the reader as an individual is his or her own connection with the poem or the poet. There is also the strong possibility that the poet himself (or herself) didn't understand, or didn't want to understand, the words that had appeared on the page. This is where poetry scores over conventional 'noun-verb-object' sentence construction, the usual but necessary building blocks of writing and story-telling. In poetry, there are no rules, no conventions (unless you want them), no guidelines, no required plot development - just words and, wondrous beauty, a blank sheet of paper (or its modern, computer-driven equivalent). Some poetry does require, or is enriched by, a lyrical, symmetrical beat to it, as in humorous or venomous poems. In these types of poems, repetitive meter and rhyme add to the enjoyment of reading them and because they flow and feel more comfortable, the better for a more structured form. There are many examples of this in the collection. Some of the collection could be described as pithy, as in the poem 'Loneliness', with four short lines capturing a myriad of thoughts, an untold (but for the reader, imagined) story, a scene clearly painted in the mind - where could this be: a street, a bar, a railway platform viewed from a carriage window with a journey undertaken? The beauty of this short poem is that it opens a window to the reader's imagination without leading the reader through a neatly plotted story viz. loneliness is a statewhere all the time I crynot just for mebut all the strangers passing byIf any there is any passing resemblance to an aspirational autobiography here, the analogy that comes to mind is that of a jumble of jigsaw pieces lying in their box - with the lid missing and hence no clue to the picture. If life is a jigsaw, or at least the personal emotional attributes that comprise a person's inner being are, the pieces (poems) have been sorted into 'sky, sea, faces, trees, greenery ....... ' (adjectivally inscribed emotions like lonely, philosophical, venomous ......). A lot of the 'characters' in the collection are purely fictional. Angeline ('only drowning men can see her') features a lot as does Michael Alexander Caruso ('MAC to his friends ... a very funny man'), Captain Sensible ('its time to go home') and many others, both male and female. Enjoy!

By uncovering the structural design of the dialogue, "The Symposium", this work aims at revealing a Plato for whom the dialogical form was not merely ornamentation or philosophical methodology, but the essence of philosophical exploration. His dialectic is not only argument; it is also play.

Evagrius of Pontus and Gregory of Nyssa have been overlooked by philosophers and theologians in modern times. This book argues that in Evagrius and Gregory we see the important integration of many different concerns that later Christian thought was not always able to balance including: mysticism, asceticism, cognitive science, and theology.

Ennead VI.8 gives us access to the living mind of a long dead sage as he tries to answer some of the most fundamental questions we in the modern world continue to ask: are we really free when most of the time we are overwhelmed by compulsions, addictions, and necessities, and how can we know that we are free? Can we trace this freedom through our own agency to the gods, to the Soul, Intellect, and the Good? How do we know that the world is meaningful and not simply the result of chance or randomness? Plotinus' On the Voluntary and on the Free Will of the One is a groundbreaking work that provides a new understanding of the importance and nature of free human agency. It articulates a creative idea of agency and radical freedom by showing how such terms as desire, will, self-dependence, and freedom in the human ethical sphere can be genuinely applied to Intellect and the One while preserving the radical inability of all metaphysical language to express anything about God or gods.

This book brings together a selection of Kevin Corrigan's works published over the course of some 27 years. Its predominant theme is the encounter with otherness in ancient, medieval and modern thought and it ranges in scope from the Presocratics-through Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and the late ancient period, on the one hand.