Tonight begins the first evening of the Republican National Convention, starring the reality-TV star Donny Trump. Expect hyperbolic claims, lies, and astounding quantities of bovine fecal matter–really, the greatest, the most everest in the history of the universe. Mounds and mounds of it. There will be misinformation, disinformation, and infomercials. It will be a phantasmagoria of vapid spectacle and fear-mongering heretofore never witnessed throughout the annals of time. In short, lots of bad lies.

Contrast that with the good kind of lies: humor, whimsey, fairy magic, and Guinness-infused cock-and-bull stories. These are the lies that have a kernel of truth to them. These are the lies told by the Irish satirist Brian O’Nolan, otherwise known as Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen–and quite possibly Batman, the Riddler, and the Joker wrapped into an emerald enigma. Clarity and epiphanies are the products of his shenanigans. Fiction conveys the deepest truths.

So, in the spirit of making truth known–or, to put it another way, peer-reviewed scholarship–The Parish Review (a journal devoted to Flann’s writing) has joined the Open Library Humanities to make its publications free for the public. That’s called the democratization of information. You need not sell your soul to student-loan companies–or to an elitist indoctrination into graduate study–to access its fun-for-all literary investigations.

So, if you have some time to kill as Donny rambles off script into the netherworld of hateful and gaseous fascism, check out this cool website: https://www.openlibhums.org/ It features many other journals, too.

Sure, and why not some shameless self-promotion for an article I wrote years ago: https://parishreview.openlibhums.org/issue/286/info/. And if anyone is irked by the fact that this post was written on a computer rather than a typewriter, you might notice that the cover of this issue of The Parish Review features Flann’s very own Underwood 5. So there.