After ten minutes or so wondering about the least clichéd way to open a conference report, I felt it might be better simply to formulate the problem, as Myles na gCopaleen might have done, catechistically: In what way must a problem be confronted? Head on. In a Cruiskeen Lawn column on 27 March 1942, Myles offered the first of what he claimed would be '356 tri-weekly parts' of 'The Myles na gCopaleen Catechism of Cliché [...]. A unique compendium of all that is nauseating in contemporary

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... .' 1 The form was simple and formulaic: a list of related clichés would be reformed into a catechistic call and response. A 'second,' 'third,' 'fourth,' and 'fifth' part followed over the next few months and a series of unnumbered catechisms with titles like 'Dead English' followed over the next year. 2 Despite admitting to being 'worn out' by the 'hard difficulty' of spending 'innumerable brain-hours every week trying to remember and record clichés,' he refused to relent. 3 Indeed, he poked fun at the form and persistence of his obsession in an early January column the following year: 'in relation to giving up my clichés I would perform that negative traumatic act-not dream.' 4 Talk of cliché at the opening of a conference report might not bode well, so let me state clearly and at the start that the remarkably original, engaged, and intelligent papers that came together to make up the fifth international conference of Flann O'Brien studies were not clichéd in any of the senses that drew Myles's scorn.