To Adare then to Dun Chaoin

On the guest bathroom's basket above the toilet upstairs, nestled a Penguin Black Classic. Nietzsche's Aphorisms of Love and Hate. I leafed through it, and it was well worth our hosts' Tony and Sinéad's pound sterling. If I was not so in need of sleep, I'd have stayed up reading it.

The next morning, we talked until Tony had to leave Corduff for work, so our long drive from Co Monaghan to our next friends in the perennial Tidy Town award-winning Adare, south of Limerick city. was delayed. However, after we had to say goodbye to him and Sinéad, our GPS itinerary detoured us across many stunning autumnal scenes as we slowly traversed via Eden Road the Kilmainham Woods of Co Meath. I thought of Brinsley McNamara's melodramatic "tell-all" tattletale on my Kindle from a century ago, The Valley of the Squinting Windows as we passed a sign for Delvin in Westmeath. Vivid leaves shone in the late afternoon and gradually we headed into sunset over Birr, mentioned by Joyce surely somewhere.

The radio featured, in slim pickings, Gay Byrne hosting a mixture of classics and reverie on RT'E Lyric. Continually rankled by the miserable fare sung on either BBC or Eire's wavelengths, I supposed I showed my age, relegating myself to near the dreaded 55-and-up demographic, sometimes that which lacks any number on the right side of that classification. Two locals in Co Monaghan had glared at us from the upper ranks of that cohort, with their little dog, as we halted at a crossroads. A bit down the road, a hardened redhead lass with a stroller, for whom we stopped to let her and her larger dog pass by. pushed past our smiles with undisguised contempt. Was it our Dublin plates?

By the time we made it to Adare, it was dark. Traffic jammed the picturesque village, but not for its charms. A drunk driver, we later found out from our host (who knew by repute and custom the culprit in question), had crashed and blocked the main highway. I felt sorry for the drivers caught for hours.  This is the major thoroughfare between Limerick and the South-West, and there's no easy diversion.

To our surprise, as the last time we were here, the motorway being built bypassing other local towns, it ran straight down the middle of Adare. I was baffled, but it did mean that the town profited from the constant hum all day into the night. So, our rental car had to maneuver to get the space in front of Seán Collins & Sons pub. We had a nice chat with him and his wife, Bridie, about the pressures of the business he continued from his father in that town, and about the small hotel we stayed in that they had bought since we'd last visited. The pubkeeper's trade is a patient one, requiring constant surveillance of the staff, chatting up patrons, and dealing with exorbitant fees for such as the "rights" to play a radio or TV channel in the place. It filled mostly with locals, who greeted and paid farewell to each other in that spirit of bemused camaraderie presumably deepened by decades of proximity.

After a night at their hotel, and then a happy breakfast with Seán and Bridie, we departed for Kerry. Our first time there, the Kingdom beckoned us for its breadth. Tralee bustled with corporate parks and upscale hotels, then Blennerhassett's giant windmill. In Camp/An Com, a pit stop. In the petrol station's cafe, lunch drew in many hunched over their soups and coffees. The wind blew off the Atlantic, as we perched up just out of sight of it, and we could feel the change in the blustery air. We were nearing the Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht, one of the last redoubts where (a bit of) Irish survived.

Layne pointed out a fort overlooking the highway as we left the village, and I later wondered if this had any association with the legendary landing of the Milesians on the hidden shores below, and of the healing of maddened maiden Mís made memorable in Austin Clarke's elegant, even erotic, poem.

Séan had shown us his photos of the one-way, dramatic Conors Pass road, and this tempted us. But construction was afoot there, so we had to go the safer if still hairpin route into the rolling hills down into little Anascaul, busily promoting Tom Crean, a local who found fame for his Antarctic expeditions with Scott and Shackleton. Now a brewery hustled a lager named in his honor. Nearby, a rebel who fought in the Rising and later died of force-feeding while imprisoned, Thomas Ashe, had been born in Lios Póil, received only a modest road sign indicated the townland where he began. In today's market-targeted Ireland, you can see which of two local Toms, without a doubt, gets lauded.

The day was overcast, so colors of green and brown were more muted, and glimpses of the strait between the Dingle and Iveragh peninsulas were infrequent. But the weather held and we felt lucky.
Famously, some mercantile-minded locals of An Daingean cross out the signs (I saw one outside Ventry/ Fionntrá) indicating nowadays in the Gaeltachtaí the non-anglicized location names. But entering Dingle town, the tourists seem to have found the home of Fungi the Dolphin nevertheless.

Off-season, a lot was closed, so we figured that it'd be no-go to voyage into the harbor in a search for that noted citizen of the town. Tour buses gravitate here, and as one who'd been patiently driving on narrow roads, and often had only the windshield's view as my own as I passed many marvelous vistas, I could not naysay those who had the comfort of a vehicle from which they could gaze out.

We walked the seaside road past tracts you could find in suburban Tallaght or Swords, catering to the summer's rush of visitors. They faced rows of colorful older houses, dated to 1909 and all numbered. The contrast summed up much. Reading Peig Sayers or the other Blasket Island writers, you can conjure up the past, when that as a market town attracted the peasants on foot or cart, and where the garrisons of the Crown fought during the war for independence on the same road that brought us in.

After we climbed up Goat Street, past more housing estates and an stately but abandoned-seeming school, we descended back into the lively core, where we purchased a few gifts at the bookstore. Both Seán, whose grandparents were from the town, and Tony, who knew such treasure-troves well, recommended that I (and Layne, who had long learned to drag me away from these dens of iniquity), stop in. Its owner was markedly taciturn, but we figured he could use our euros. The single book (although I could have spent 300 euro--the singular as the Irish say--easily on my itinerary on such) I took back was Daragh McDonagh's Tochar, about a secularized Catholic from Derry taking the old pilgrimage routes. I felt it was a path I followed, and I will review and report on it in due time here.

The Catholic church also on Green Street was enormous, built on wealth from Peig's peasants, and those emigrants who may have made good from their trade or their own capitalist endeavor. Now the Díseart Centre of Irish Spirituality run by Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, the Sacred Heart chapel featured Harry Clarke's stained glass. I had seen his fluid craft in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin and I admire its clear lines. Layne rightly recalled a resemblance to another artist we like, Eric Gill, from this same period when the medieval and the guild appealed against capitalist frenzy.

I thought of our fervently non-theist friends in Drogheda. In their bathroom, a few copies of  The New Humanist lay waiting. I found Tim Minchin's interview in a 2010 issue. He remarked that he saw no harm in "magical thinking" unless it caused harm, and I contemplated as often in my European travels the fate of the Church, its sanctuaries so spacious, as its congregants dwindled and died off.

Later on this Grand Tour, Layne noted my Pavlovian instinct towards any open church door. Surely this attests to my early imprinting, and I confess that I enjoy peering into any Catholic sanctuary. I've lost belief in the visions and doctrines it memorializes and inculcates, but I retain fascination for the cultural impacts and artistic legacies left by the Church over so many centuries, for better and worse. And, I suppose part of this calls up yearning, a return to safety, a quiet space enclosed and restorative.

We needed to get to our next room, so we drove north, the long way around so we'd in my hazy recollection go counterclockwise, the way I estimated best to see an ocean view. I guess I confused in my travel blur the Ring of Kerry (that next peninsula down) from the Dingle, but this took us to the iconic Gallurus Oratory. In my mind, this stone chapel, so modest next to the one of the Sacred Heart, endured fourteen centuries wind and sea on a barren outcrop overlooking stormy ocean tides. Instead, it nestled in a field, safe from view as it was closed off-season, and we barely glimpsed it over the fields and horses, from a gravelled parking lot of the empty carpark and luncheon spot for tour buses.

The number of new construction of subdivisions around An Clochan astounded me. I suppose while many decry the loss of Irish as a community language, they look to the schools. But as in my own study at Oideas Gael Uladh in Glencolmcille in Donegal a few years ago, the inward turn of the native speakers, who cannot be bothered to deal with the hesitant inquiries of wave after wave of students and daytrippers, leaves those trying to practice it left to struggle among themselves in class.

Also, I doubted that these largely second homes or vacation spots, given the massive distance even by cozy Irish standards from any commerce, were crammed with post-Tiger Gaeilgoirí eager to revive an teanga beo. We progressed at a horse's pace sometimes over gravelled byways, past farms or past McMansions. For all I imagined, Germans, English, and/or Dubliners might ease their BMWs into the asphalt driveways on weekends. The stark fact that the most prominent eatery and b+b in our next destination bore a German surname stood as testimony to me of who had moved into the homes the farmers or fisherman left behind. Surely, it's a primary reason why Irish fades from our hearing.

But I too am complicit. Lured by beauty and detachment from the city, I pass EU hikers on the winding roads, walking the designated route, and buying pottery and scones, from whomever remains, for these residents need to make a living. Here, survival of Irish matters far less than their own, in an economy perched at the far end of an island battered by austerity cuts and weak currency.

The next place of any size, Baile an Fheirtearaigh, was a remote holdout for pirates resisting Cromwell. It draws language learners to its center, similar to Oideas Gael in the northwest or An Ceathrú Rua in Connacht. Its museum was closed. Although as we crawled through the village, I noticed the door open. I was hopeful, but it was a cleaning lady. Three pubs in a row, one titled to me as a talisman Ó Murchú, loomed as the only thriving eateries for many a mile. We were hungry, too.

We finally found the next place. Asking at a very well-stocked cafe-gift shop, the owner failed to recognize the host. It turned out she went not by her name but a nickname known to her neighbors. But we had no indication of this with our correspondence, with her, and she kept insisting as we tried to find the "stone cottage" that any GPS could find it easily. Reduced to looking for that architecture, in a bucolic landscape that as Peter O'Doherty's photo above shows, has been speckled since Peig's death with many more structures, whitewashed or unvarnished, we despaired. Darkness on the edge of the Atlantic, next stop Boston, comes quickly in early November, and when we at last located the b+b brown sign at a junction and up a lane, we were exhausted. The tea was bagged, the loaf dry, so we went over the Camras road Peig describes often, into Fionntrá. We'd found online two restaurants that garnered rave reviews, one saying it was open all year on its website, but of course it was not.

Neither the first nor the last time on this trip, but this was Ireland. I liked that huddled townland, which I think is Baile na Ratha, and that blue house on the road with a for sale sign. We all can dream, even if I'd wake up to French trekkers or Japanese tourists with selfie sticks out my window. No matter how worn out the roads there make me, the breezes and the briskness boost my spirits.

Dun Chaoin fills a lovely series of fields. It slopes down to the shores facing the now-deserted Blaskets, and they loom like mounds from bygone civilizations from the Atlantic. Peig had been famous as a chronicler of life on the Great Blasket, but she grew up in the townland she called Vicarstown, as well as closer to An Daingean by the way of her school and her parish both in Fionntrá. She only moved to the Blaskets after she married. There is no center of her natal settlement, and Dun Chaoin instead spreads out as smaller hamlets on and off the twisting, if now paved, lanes.

The summit that opened up Ventry's vista must have been appealing in the day, but it was pitch black now, and oncoming cars roared past us, blinding me. Dingle was in the distance, but its lights discouraged us from another night of pub grub. So, a few miles from where the surviving soldiers from the shipwrecks of the Armada were slaughtered, we settled for take out: Spanish wine, sandwiches, and fruit from the local seller. I heard him chatting in animated Irish with customers. When I left, I shyly tried my thanks and my valediction with the correct grammar. He replied "Slán" and I could sense in farewell his sly bemusement. As Seán Collins had predicted of my attempts to hush, look native, and blend in  (as he had years ago teased my being a "professional Irishman, come to teach us what we did not know,") wait until they hear you speak Irish with an American accent.

Samhain in Monaghan

After Newgrange, the sunset hastened us up across lanes and onto dark main roads via the GPS. No idea how we'd have navigated without it. I remembered earlier trips, stopping passers-by or going to the post office to try to figure out locations. The technology had its own drawbacks, as it kept telling us the road titles in their Irish multisyllabic names we had no clue about, but eventually, after false moves and a stop at a gas station in Ballybay, followed by overshooting the drive into Cootehill, we found Killyliss Country House in blackness. A truck with German plates indicated the appeal of the local fishing, a lure this otherwise off-season. An teach mór even if it newish, owned by a horsey. genteel family. Photos of their two children filled the walls, so we could view their maturation. Prep schools in the North nearby, UCD, marriage, baby. I found the daughter's cards given her for her eighteenth birthday under a couch in the top floor attic room we stayed in. I wondered if she, now a mother I reckoned, remembered where the stash was, who sent her what when.

The house lay on a lane off a local road between the two towns. Their population was mixed between Protestants and Catholics historically, as Counties Monaghan and Cavan are very much in Ulster, partitioned only in 1922 from their affinity. With so few Presbyterians, a once-dominant faction in this area, remaining in the 26 Counties, I supposed many continued to follow the path of their forebears, looking to Britain or the Commonwealth for their future rather than the island that, at least in the South, rejected many of them. The museum in Monaghan town told their story along with many others: from the crannóg forts to medieval monks, Plantation to Partition, the Land League's demands for no rent paid to landlords to General Eoin O'Kelly's Blueshirts, the displays informed us.

Now, the market town changed. A pre-school had explanations in Chinese, Lithuanian, Russian, and Polish. The giant C of I church towered over the heavily trafficked town, while the Catholic counterpart was on a side street, looking as if it'd be the Protestant one in most Irish towns these days.

Peter's Pond lay in the middle of town, as it had on old maps in the museum. The fields were long gone around it, and we had parked on an industrial road that looked like any zone, anywhere. Many gush about the charm of Ireland, but honest observers might admit that it's also often dowdy and drab. People cannot live off scenery, and the trucks in German attested to the EU and its power now.

We had to eat out, as the b+b was that alone. Our meal in Cootehill was standard by Irish standards. We ate alone in a Frenchified brasserie in that town, where Big Pharma had a giant plant. The flax and linen industries were long gone, and the agitation that made it a Red hotbed in the Victorian era.

Our second meal was in Ballyboy. The locals knew each other. We were waited on by a young woman from Eastern Europe, but the bar pump was down. Luckily, the local Brehon red ale was tasty. But our palates, limited away from meat, meant fewer choices anywhere we went this trip.

At the next place we stayed, we had more choice as we were among friends. It was only a few miles away to Corduff, but the GPS took us a very long way. We drove in circles, the "voice" directing us to lanes and byways again, and we went three times in a loop before landing near a b+b with miniature horses outside. The elderly lady who answered our plea kindly offered us tea (we kindly declined as our friends were presumably waiting) while she guided us to the other Corduff. It turned out we were in Corduffkelly townland instead. As the crow flies, it was close. We found our way quickly-- to yet another busy crossroads of Carrickmacross. So, after spinning around it due to traffic and missed turns, we finally made it to our friend's place, a few houses spread out among fields and McMansions. There were plenty as Irish law allows anyone to build on a lot if a dwelling was there before, and many tear-downs birthed hideous houses, and many ruined cabins fell apart next to them.

One that survived its cowshed origins, converted into a handsome cottage by a family with seven children who lived around Corduff, was in Lisnafeedelly, the fort of the fiddler's townland. Our friends Tony and Sinéad bought it at a bargain price, and while their earlier choice of the house next to Patrick Kavanagh's grave in his native Inniskean would suit the poet-novelist-journalist Tony fine, the quiet of their weekend residence invited us, as it had them, to a respite from the urban hustle.

It was the first time I'd seen it, and from descriptions I expected some Famine-era, half-demolished by the peelers post-cabeen devolved from that on the Horslips' LP cover for The Unfortunate Cup of Tea.  While friends online, Layne and Sinéad had never met, so the afternoon and night and morning we spent was doubly enjoyable. You know how it is when you don't want to leave a conversation for fear of missing any of it? We talked non-stop as we were shown Kavanagh's resting place, and Tony remarked how devastated his mother had been after the priest told her that her twin babies stillborn would never be buried in consecrated ground. I agreed that the cruel scholastic logic of the Church ground down many of our ancestors, and I suppose me too in part, and we also noted that my sussing out the Presbyterian host earlier must attest to my inbred survival skills from the motherland.

Kavanagh's native townland emblazoned the headstones of his family. On some, the raw name, derived from the Irish for pig, Mucker, glowered onomatopoeically (can I ever spell that?). I felt here the feel for the rural roots that restive poet savaged as he remained stuck in them, until half into his thirties. He escaped that "fog of unknowing"--for it as much as the peasant's poverty cloaked him and his clan. His epitaph gracing that stark, humble wooden cross captures the parochial spirit that stayed with him during his years in London. Dublin, and Belfast. He drank and declined, and influenced Seamus Heaney greatly. I prefer Kavanagh, myself, to "famous Seamus," and this inscribed memorial phrase may explain why. "And pray for him who walked apart on the hills loving life's miracles."

Tony told me that there are two versions of the Collected Poems extant, due to disputes between the family who control the copyrights. This typical dissension speaks to the same battles in words and deeds which Kavanagh described in his novel Tarry Flynn and his autobiography The Green Fool. These while less heralded than his poetry, understandably, testify to the labors from one who found it impossible to romanticize what many of his colleagues in the capital had, the pain of sour isolation. How odd that the Free State censored these accounts even as his patron, the fearsome John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin, sponsored the poet with a lifetime's sinecure on its Catholic paper.

Visiting then Carlingford, we had lunch and strolled about the medieval ruins of the Thorsel assembly and the mint in this fortress town founded by the Vikings. On its long lake, almost a fjord, it boasted a crowded antique store stuffed with wonderful bric-a-brac, deserving a peek from any in the neighborhood.  The interior of the stone mint was being draped in cotton, candles, plastic pumpkins, and skeletons. We crossed what once was a border in bandit country entering South Antrim, and Tony told me how it'd be backed up regularly. Years now, the little guard hut at the frontier sat abandoned.

After a tour of Lidl, which excited Layne as similar Aldi's coming to our country soon, we ate and chatted. Sinéad and Layne in the kitchen shared recipe tips. I suspect my wife, claiming stress, had snuck some of her hostess's smokes, not for the first time this trip. Tony and I riffed from one book or author to another. I come away from any communication with him having added to my list of what to read next. Having published two poetry collections, two novels, and a novella, Tony has a knack for esoteric lore made into enjoyable tales. You can find out about his work here. He blogs at Ecopunks.

His interests, according to Layne, parallel mine more closely than anyone else. After all, we met in person in ancient Loughcrew at Samhain '09 only after he kept finding on this very blog my reviews of shared influences: The Fall, Horslips, John Moriarty, studying Irish, NI punk, Denis Johnston, and Francis Stuart, to name a few. He can sum up issues as complex as The North itself, or at least its nuances, pithily. While he and I have an awful lot in common, Layne observed that he did yard work.

We looked over his forest-in-training. He's planted a couple hundred trees on land that will replace what Planters might have uprooted centuries ago to build ships for the Crown. After dusk, we went outside and watched the shadowy fog roll in from the south over the fields. It came towards us, but it did not overtake us. Instead, it dissipated before it met us, or else we were shrouded without knowing.

(P.S. This photo resembles what we saw on that Samhain eve. Graham McPherson, from Somerset.)

Newark to Newgrange

After the longest time I've been away from home since I turned eighteen, I return to the past month. Unlike my first stint abroad, a summer in Yorkshire the season that Unknown Pleasures by a local band just down the road and over the hills and moors in Manchester, appeared, this time, with Layne, I found myself not putting down any recollections in a journal. Rather, I chose to let the time pass by.

Recollected, lots may vanish. But as those who know me too well have advised me, this year, after much pressure, I need to get out of my head a while, and not to chase after what others think of me.

So, a more informal reconstruction of my itinerary commences. It was hurried as I left. My classes had to be inched up as the weekend previous found me in Rapid City, SD, giving a paper on Sons of Anarchy's Irish themes in its third season. I had to grade papers and presentations coming in online, and I spent more of that Irish Studies conference than I'd bargained for holed up in my room, working. Still, I got to see Mt. Rushmore and Deadwood again in a quiet space, and in very dry air.

Cold at night, but warm by day, so I liked walking around the red brick, very to me Babbitt-1920s era downtown of sprawling South Dakota's western hub. Laid out in a grid, the place felt homey. The Hotel Alex Johnson, visited by seven presidents, is haunted. My room 305, more of a maid's than a guest's room (that conference rate), and the city's presidential statues in bronze (not that bad, I admit) gave me the appropriately frontier feel. Looking for provender near the prairie, the offerings for one who eats neither stag nor steak, bison nor beast, made me dine out on a lot of grilled cheese, again.

That next week, I combined my classes' final presentations in class two nights in a row, and by the hour I was to leave before dawn the following morning for a flight from LAX to Newark, I was weary. The rental car hassle and the snagged turnpikes from there to upstate New York slowed us down. Yet, returning to the place where we've stayed in Upper Red Hook was relaxing. Our son now lives in nearby Tivoli, in a standard sub-standard off-campus house.  But I managed to finish grading in some downtime as we joined Niall's Bard College for its Parents' Weekend. Although he's not a frosh but a junior, I welcomed any chance to see his bucolic campus in splendid autumn. We took him and his girlfriend to Olana, the Frederic Church home that artist of the Hudson Valley built for his views over hundreds of riverside acreage. Its Orientalist touches delighted us, and I proved the very last on the last tour of the season to depart its doors. Although none of the Irish immigrants who worked for the Church family renewed their contracts after their domestic servitude brought them up the river from the city, and although I wondered how they lived and what their rooms were like compared to the sumptuous ones of that privileged, talented artist and his brood, sights were worthwhile; sunset on the sparkling water was memorable. Olana invites hyperbole, and it rewards it.

We also as parents sat in at mini-classes some professors taught at Bard. I opted for Medieval Death as my diss. was on purgatory, and to my surprise the class was full. In an hour, she skillfully moved past a great amount of material on the art and the assumptions of memorializing the departed and instructing the faithful, and I was impressed. I hope Niall as an art history major signs up for that professor's course on altarpieces. I envied those able to study such as what I loved in such depth.

The next course, Layne and I had agreed on; the first hour she was at a Science of Forgetting psychology lecture I figured she'd prefer, and she agreed without dissent. "The Sixties" proved to be not about a broad but narrow topic, the radical theater of Julian Beck and Judith Molina in NYC, but the young instructor kept us alert and she asked the right questions about how enduring (or not) such an attempt to engage and confront the audience remained, decades later. Some in the audience looked like grandparents rather than parents of students, and vaguely (drugs?) recalled seeing plays like that.

We did not participate in the other events, as we'd been there for those before, but Layne lobbied for us all to attend the mini-Disney Hall, also designed by Frank Gehry, to hear the campus president, Leon Botstein, conduct a student orchestra. Like many in the audience, we lasted through Beethoven and the Russian who followed, but at intermission, we bailed, quailing after 90 minutes at least another hour of another Russian. Niall had worked in the parking lot at that Fisher Center last summer as one of his three jobs. He regaled his pals who still patrolled its domain with high-five's.

Speaking of such, town meets gown often. In Tivoli, where Peter Dinklage, Liv Tyler, and other famous people I forgot live at least off-screen, we saw at a church converted into coffeehouse by the woman who owns it appears not only our son's house but half the village, Daniel Mendelson. His name and face may be less familiar to many, sadly. But Layne and I, alerted to this classics professor and New Yorker/NYTRB critic, sidled up shyly to meet him and thank him. He accepted our greeting nicely, and his green eyes (he's exactly my age, but shaven sleekly bald) were both intense and warm, like my cat Gary's, in an intelligent, warm, yet penetrating gaze. It opened up and yet it held back in reserve. I told him that I admired his phrase "do you define yourself by the thing that sets you apart?" and shared it in my own teaching. It came from his memorable essay about Mary Renault, with whom he corresponded as a teen coming to terms with his sexuality on Long Island, just as I too turned an adolescent over near the other coast. His life and mine: so different, yet here we were, for a moment.

I mused on his career, and what he must have learned from so many. I thought of the intellectuals and creative classes, either from money or now having bought into it, and their lifestyle, half-small town Hudson Valley, half-Manhattan. Niall's classmates sometimes came from similar, elegant, backgrounds. They contrasted with his, but there he was too, among also a diverse mix of friends.  

This idyll, frequented by a endless flow of city-dwellers who either weekend up here or flee to here, shows itself in Hudson. A local Halloween parade if the week before passed us as we walked town streets, half gentrified, half slum. Definite class divide. We saw an actress who even I recognized at the pizza place, and she stars typically in a series set in Silverlake, among other such folk, half of whom like her again must "divide their time between" Hollywood adjacent and somewhere in NYC.

Off to NYC ourselves, if only to drop off the rental car, we made it with no fuel to spare, justifying our purchase of a full tank. I think we had according to the dashboard gauge nothing but fumes left.  We had landed at Newark where Layne had to battle the rental car company for a late fee, which after all we did not wind up paying, as we made it within the limit with fifteen minutes to spare. And we sat in a lounge, where I dared a shower, only to find the faucet broken and the shower icy. I made up for it partially by purloining the first of a few tea bags, and by staying beyond our two hour limit.

The flight from Kennedy to Dublin on Aer Lingus fit that perpetually troubled airline, where it's like a giant bus, as our ex-pat friend notes, but the accents do get you in the mood, as well as the mediocre food and crap t.v. There are invariably about three films I see in a theater each year, and when I fly, they all seem to be the options for viewing, along with a bloated Pixar 3-D kids extravaganza, or a Disney tween franchise. I had to settle for Ant-Man, which like too many films of its ilk played into the franchise and tie-ins to other superheroes, so that it lacked much if any clout. I could barely care.

One stewardess about my age, blonde dye job, sported a giant black eye. Another, who served us herded into coach, was kind. She gave us extra rolls and trifle after our vegetarian meals were never prepared--a situation that would repeat on another, far longer, flight, on our return. No extras then.

I never sleep on an airline, but for the first time it was not an 11-hour flight to Dublin but one half that. A sign of a reviving economy may be the restoration of non-stops from LAX, but I don't see myself going back soon to the motherland, although still, parts remain that I have not yet traveled.

Same for this trip, however, so we wound up landing in Dublin and for the first time I saw the airport not as the "black hole" of the past, but disembarked into a sleek new facility for international flights. Off in the rental, and an affable and informative tutorial on directions from the Dan Dooley driver, and after a shaky start by a weary Layne, we made it to Drogheda, a few hundred yards directly away from our friends' house, even if we had to go a long way about it, in the back of a tract home in a separate, clean, tidy B+B set up. So, it was a snap to drive over to see our friends. For reasons of security, as the North is never far away, I will not name them but I assure you our visit went well.

Their son and daughter are blooming, one with the teenage bookishness and hidden changes of her age, the other with a love of not his father's Liverpool FC but the rival Man U., and gaming to boot. They share their parents' intellectual range and sharp wit (I read in some travel guide over there how the Irish "have a typically dark sense of humour") and our time out with them was a hit. Even if we all discussed the flaws of the movie we saw, Crimson Peak, over dinner, we liked our camaraderie. Knowing them and their mother even before she met their father, I can attest to their warmth, and their bold passion for justice, qualities I am sure are passed along to their Irish-speaking children.

No visit to that old city on the Boyne is complete without the sight of St. Oliver Plunkett's mummified head in the cathedral, and the commemoration of the massacre that that city endured at the hands of Cromwell's army. The streets were bustling, some shops alive, and the sounds of varied accents attested to a changing Ireland. One in six Irish have left seeking better work elsewhere, while one in five residents is from another country, usually not England, these warping, globalized decades. What a new Ireland will look like can be seen in its children, and their variety increasingly resembles that across the North, not of Ireland this time but of the world, as immigrants keep moving up.

Our hostess missed her native O.C., and was delighted by the arrival of Starbucks. We shopped in a small mall, indoors wisely given the weather on the Irish Sea nearby, but the hilly sidewalks of the older shops were also filled with locals. although quite a few storefronts were closed or derelict. Our host, despite or because he was an erudite atheist, figured politics were useless compared to helping the poor himself. So he volunteered at the local St. Vincent de Paul. On short notice, I was recruited to drive him, for the "Vincent Men" as once they were called go in pairs for security and morality, to the flat of a woman who was in need of care. Many fall between the State and charity, and need a helping hand. Drogheda is coming back slowly, but despite elegant restaurants and a boutique hotel. it's clear that many on its quaint city center streets need more than those who frequent its charm.

That made me wonder again how so many of the Poles, Nigerians, and Chinese were making a living. That shift is very evident, as I've probably lost count of the times I've seen Ireland. A dozen over the past three dozen years, the first glimpse that same summer I came of age? The fate of the language I struggle with to learn as an adult, and that in which the children of our hosts are educated within, concern me greatly, but I do hope that whatever their origin, the new generation likes learning Irish.

Our last glimpse of Drogheda was dropping off our host to buy a new washer, as we feared our added demands on it with dirty laundry had done it in. The big-box stores might have different logos, but the look and feel was no different than where his wife had grown up not far from where I now teach.

We then left our friends to visit other friends, as we moved into the past at Newgrange in the meanwhile. I drove in/from Drogheda on, so I got the hang of the roundabouts, as they give you no choice. Two days before Samhain, the tour was full, and I wondered if that conjunction played its part. Around us, we heard French and Italian, and I suppose it's always popular to see this ancient site. We could see the little mound from the museum the other side of the Boyne's bank, far off as the moon rose. While I'd been beguiled into expecting a full-size replica of the site in the "interpretive centre," all I got was a mini-mock-up of the passage. Still, I learned from the exhibits, and I was intrigued by the possibility that its pre-Celtic spiral makers might have entered altered states of mind.

The museum was informative although the staff was cranky. I found the centre's charted estimate sobering in its details that revealed nobody exhumed lasted past the age of fifty. But their bodies might be left as those of Tibetans or Parsees, atop a structure, returned to the sky as bird-feed, before the bones that give us evidence of my ancestors' lifespan were buried for us to find 5000 years later.

"National Geographic Traveller: Ireland": Book Review

 As the blurb informs, some of the value of this guidebook comes from the lovely illustrations. While Glendalough may be expected, the inclusion of Dublin's eerie Kilmainham Gaol and of the Ulster-American Folk Park near Omagh surprised me, and the flora of the Burren graces its double-page spread. For the content, this reminds me of the Lonely Planet's Discover series. That is, cutting down to the essentials for a smart traveler interested in both the usual sights and local recommendations.

There is a reflective if realistic tone to the writing, and this honesty is commendable. It does not traffic in stereotypes about Ireland. It strives to give a depiction of the island nation's progress.

It does, however, stress the cultural elements. There are a few accommodation, shopping, and restaurant suggestions around the whole island appended, but this coverage is much less than other guides, and pitched at a higher budget than, say Rough Guide. The text while informative is quite brief for the sights suggested, and this is more of a sampler than a compendium as to what Ireland offers. As a National Geographic edition might be expected to deliver, this emphasizes more the sights than practicalities.

There are a few "off the beaten path" recommendations in larger colored type in the copy, but as a whole, I wish that the font was a bit smaller and the content more in-depth. It looks nice on the page and may be designed with a mobile app or e-book in mind, on the other hand. Like the magazine, attention to graphics and photography is a feature many may appreciate, if at the reduction of some details.

I would therefore recommend this to plan, but taking it along might not be as essential, if space is premium, compared to a thicker but also more detailed guidebook. It's rather pricy compared to the competition. So, while as a lifetime lover of the magazine I admire this foray into advice, it may serve the shelf after one has consulted it for itineraries, more than the suitcase on the go.

(Amazon US 12-22-14)

Oíche Shamhna ag imeall an Brú na Bóinne

Tá Lena agus mise in Uladh anois. Thug muid cuairt go dtí ár mac is óige ina Colaiste na Bhaird ina Stáit Nua-Eabhrac ar feadh ag deireach na tseachtaine seo caite. Ansin, eitil muid go dtí mBaile átha Cliath cúpla lá ó shín.

Go tapaidh, d'fhág muid an t-aerphort. Thiomaint muid go Droichead Átha. Chuir cuairt leis ár chairde, an chlann Mac an tSaoir.

Mar sin d'fhan muid in aice leis a dteach, fheadfaidh muid ag caint leis an teaghlach níos mó. Labhair mé leis an fear chéile agus an bean chéile le chéile, mar shampla, agus bhuail Lena na paiste go léir. Bhí mé ag plé leo as Gaeilge beagán, freisin.

Inne, d'imigh ár chairde. Bhí brón orainn, ach is gá duinn chun freastal air ár chairde eile i gCorrdubh i gContae Muineachán. Dá bhrí sin, bím ag scríobh an aiste seo an óiche roimh na h-Oíche Shamhna ina Teach Mór na Coill-a-Lios i Liosnalong, idir na bhaile na Muineachán agus Cabhan.

Bain sult as againn an faoin tuath anseo; chuaigh muid riamh go mBrú na Bóinne ach bhí an turas dúnadh ann. Is ciúin é thart anseo agus níos dorcha faoi an gealach beagnach lán, gan amhras. Amárach, beidh sé an lá roimh Samhain; b'fhéidir, is féidir liomsa féin a fheicéail ar an bhearna isteach na Saol Eile.

Halloween's Eve near the Boyne.

Layne and I myself am in Ulster now. We visited our younger son in Bard College in New York State during last weekend. Then, we flew to Dublin a few days ago.

Rapidly we left the airport. We drove to Drogheda. We paid a visit to our friends, the McIntyre clan.

Because we stayed near their house, we were able to speak to the household (family) more. I spoke with the husband and the wife together, for instance, and Layne met the children all. I spoke with them both in Irish a bit, too. 

Yesterday, we left behind our friends. We were sad, but we have a need to meet our other friends in Corduff in Co Monaghan. Therefore, I write this entry on the night before the night of Samhain's eve in Killyliss Country House in Lisnalong, between the towns of Monaghan and Cavan.

We are enjoying the countryside here; we went to Newgrange but the tour was full. It is quiet around here and darker under the nearly full moon, for sure. Tomorrow, it will be the eve of Samhain; perhaps, I may see the gap into the Other Life. 

Tim Robinson's "Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness": Book Review

Taking its subtitle from Wittgenstein, who stayed here in 1948, this second installment of a trilogy surveys the tip of Western Ireland as elegantly as Robinson's previous explorations of Aran. While the little map cannot display his cartographic expertise (some places are not included and you'll have to consult his Folded Landscapes fold-out chart or an Irish road atlas), his nimble prose and learned eye combine for a rewarding companion along these byways.

I've driven many of them, but stopped on too few. So, a resident of Roundstone since 1984 such as Yorkshire-transplant Tim Robinson, with his Irish-language expertise and his mathematically trained gaze, is ideal as a guide. This time, he takes you from Killary Harbour near Leenane under the Mayo border with Co. Galway to Slyne Head in the south-west of the Connemara coast. He keeps mainly along the coast. Whereas the first book, "Connemara: Listening to the Wind," felt sometimes despairing in its evocation of ecological frailty, this one despite its subtitle feels lighter.

Even if Robinson by now is of "gammy leg and bleary eye," this volume testifies to his perspective and endurance on so many lonely lanes and along the empty shores. The concrete fills some of this, and it's sad to read of the tourist industry's scars on the landscape, too often spoiled by ugly construction. Noting the stopping of the Clifden airport on the Marconi radio station's ruins on the bog, but admitting it goes in somewhere else inevitably, he laments the "death by a thousand cuts of the natural world, and a thinning of the human spirit" that we suffer by letting one more plot of land give way to concrete and asphalt. (176)

He sees the same "mental command" in the dominating spirit to acquire and diminish even in the Neolithic sacred stones erected in 1200 BCE. This "will to power," to lock down the landscape with monumental sightlines, resembles the Ordnance Survey of the British in the imperialist age. The soil began to be depleted by these ancient Bronze Age arrivals, and it began the bog that then swallowed up the stones, "not to be revealed again until our own exploitative, turf-cutting times." (130)

He writes well of what still dominates most of the Irish west. Whether the Rev. Alexander Dallas and the Famine-era attempts to convert the Catholic peasants to Protestantism, the impact of Marconi's radio transmitter in the light of quantum physics, coral and saint's legends, or the end of Kylemore Abbey, he gets you interested. Combining scholarship with energy, he teaches you in an enjoyable and thoughtful manner at what he himself has learned and marveled.

Like his other writings on Ireland, Robinson immerses you. Sometimes in the Connemara books it feels as if the goings on of the gentry and those who have moved here take precedence over the nameless families who have endured, and perhaps then emigrated, without acclaim or notoriety. I found the sections most engaging that dealt with nature or the Irish language place names, rather than chronicles or Big Houses, but this reflects my own bias. Robinson, to his credit, tries to stay more even-handed, a mediator between those like him who have come to settle here, but who by his Irish-language acquisition understands the hidden layers. Parts may slacken only by my own comparative lack of equal engagement with a chapter's topic, but not for long--the sights keep changing as does the weather, and it's no sign of any loss of control over his considerable erudition.

He reflects on juxtapositions of ourselves with the past, hidden as the Irish language names hint at a shallow legacy under the English-language culture that has swept the old tongue nearly away and with it most of its hard-pressed natives. (I note how many living here now do not live off the land, and how many of them as himself come to this place to enjoy its views, newcomers from another land.) He ponders the lesson of the ancient markers of white quartz torn open by a bulldozer today. "Ghosts and fairies are moods of one's feeling for the Earth; they wax and wane with our desires and delusions. The glimmer of white quartz, dim afterlife of its daytime brilliance, may persist throughout a long summer evening, but will succumb to the black rainy nights after Hallowe'en." (135)

Such metaphors show Robinson's power on the page. He adds a naturalist's knowledge and a folklorist's ear to his travel account, and he mingles history, song, politics, religious rivalries, and a steady focus on the human and ecological balance in this niche off the Atlantic. Recommended and if you have not read his visits to Aran as well, add those to your list as well. (Amazon US 2-9-13)

Tim Robinson's "Connemara: Listening to the Wind": Book Review

Reading this a few years after his pair of Aran books, the density of detail and erudition applied to what appears a far larger realm than an island is not diminished by the widened perspective. This Cambridge-trained mathematician, cartographer, and artist applies his Irish-language acquisition to his adapted terrain, where's he lived in Roundstone since 1984. Around his new home, he explores its shores, the Twelve Pins, and the Maamturk mountains inland in the western portion.

He walks without textbooks, so as not to get too bogged down in detail, but surely he consults them, as this learned first installment of his trilogy--well-indexed and over four-hundred pages-- documents. He tries to "see things as they are when he's not there," as a naturalist. (26) He visits a Dead Man's Grave and finds in its name a fitting reminder of our shared fate. He enters a bog to revel in its monoculture, where biodiversity may be lacking, but where it holds intact its own simple treasure.

As in all his writings and maps, the attention to the Irish enlivens this in terrain from which the spoken language has faded along this patch of its western enclave. "Irish placenames dry out when anglicized, like twigs snapped off a tree." (81) In a "gargoyle-logic of creation," Robinson inserts our own small span, as we add years, distort, and then fall rigid ourselves in odd postures. Mortality infuses these eloquent pages, where Beckett's "skull in Connemara" (and I think since this of Martin McDonagh's plays) lingers in the fate of a Famine village of Rosroe. Graves speckle some boreens so much that in his map-making he gave up marking them. Such poetry and philosophy combined with archives and science deepens the fatal impacts of the abandoned.

This narrative is best read slowly and sparingly, for sometimes the amount of local history (he seems to enjoy telling the comings and goings of the titled and the eccentric, as often the incomers get the attention given their printed records of power or orally transmitted anecdotes of oddity that the anonymous dweller or nameless emigrant will never reclaim) or botanical precision can weary. I would have welcomed more follow-through on colonist Sir Richard Bingham's 1641 coverage of the land, the 1660s Survey & Distribution books, or Richard Martin's holdings, for instance; Robinson has published on the Martins separately, but sometimes he alludes in this volume too briefly to matters that only whet the curious appetite. And the map here, the same in the sequel (see my Feb. 2013 review of "Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness") is far too small and sketchy. You will need Robinson's own maps of Connemara (and Aran) to fully enjoy his books.

Still, that gap shows a book that generates interest. Derryclare Wood's five thousand years in the making, the felled conifer plantation's disaster zone adjacent make for a telling symbol of Irish stewardship for a fragile ecosystem. But, a great joke about King Edward VII's visit to Recess in 1903, and a spirited encouragement on the Barony Bridge at Ballynahinch, restored after the War of Independence, sum up promise well. Young John Barlow hesitated to cross it; an army officer at the other end cheered him on. "Come on, little boy! This bridge was built for you!" (398) (Amazon US 2-14-13)

"Rough Guide to Ireland": Book Review

I've used this before, and the newest (2011 tenth) edition edited by Paul Gray and Geoff Wallis (who also wrote the fine "Rough Guide to Irish Music") continues in the solid tradition. Rough Guide like its competitor Lonely Planet aims at the market lower than Fodor's (whose 2011 Ireland guide I also like--see my review) as to cost but up slightly from, say, Let's Go for the hostels. Maps are decent, inserts on food/drink and festivities appeal, and coverage gets the cities and small towns in, and the familiar attractions and scenic and/or fabled villages.

That being said, I did a spot-check on a few places I know better, to see if the depth was there, for places a bit off-beat. Drogheda has good maps and historical data, and while certain eateries I'd frequent are absent, it's sufficient information for a market town's advantages. For a smaller town, Downpatrick, as a test case, had the basics, and a smaller one still, Waterfoot in the Glens of Antrim, the bare bones for a little place.

Further west, Oughterard and Galway city, Roundstone and Spiddal as checked had the usual sights, pubs, craft shops, bars, hotels and b+b's. No real surprises. Glencolmkille in Donegal was missing some "practicalities" but still a note for detail was welcome: in the rain or wet weather, an alternate if longer path to the recommended hostel was suggested. But, a newer place I was wondering about pro-con was not included from there, and this makes me wonder how often the editor or his team visits the hinterlands to update the material.

Dublin, Derry, Belfast, Limerick, Cork, Waterford, the Aran Islands, the Ring of Kerry, the Boyne Valley and the like gain the expected prominence. Bigger charts as to historical districts are a plus. Everyone needs up-to-date phones, locations, URLs, and hours, and these seem present. But the nitty-gritty of the times buses (or more rarely if ever trains depending on where you are) come and go is not included within the facts for each place (unlike some other guides) for smaller burgs. It's relegated to a summary list at the end of each region, and how often a day a bus or train comes and goes. While this saves the trouble of looking at each locale's entry, it may or may not help the visitor as to a precise timing of when journeys can be arranged. For a lower-budget visitor not having a car in the middle of the country outside the large centers, this is a lack that is telling. Not every visitor may have a smartphone to check web data, and the arrival and departure can be key. Still, you can always wait it out in a pub, more likely, or heritage center, perhaps, for the day, or find a place to stay for the night!

I'd use this, however, to plan a journey. The contact information can set you up via the phone or more likely if abroad the web. Reservations and itineraries can be coordinated with a judicious use of this guide, to see what's worth it and when. It does not have the all-island or regional tour suggestions of other guides, but it's good for accommodation details.

The Irish language section is unlikely to be consulted by many readers, but I found its lists not very useful for absolute beginners, with no transliterations save elements common in some place names. Despite dialectal differences by region, some raw equivalences beyond vowel sounds and consonant charts might have encouraged the brave visitor to try out the "cúpla focail" or couple words in Gaeilge, to break the ice. Otherwise, the cultural material, enriched by fine if of course idiosyncratic musical and literary recommendations, is fine as a refresher, stimulant, or conversation starter. I'd argue half the night in a pub over certain inclusions.  (Amazon US 8-17-12)

Robert Kanigel's "On an Irish Island": Book Review

 

A rowboat away, southwest of the westernmost tip of Ireland, the Blasket Islands seemed five hundred years ago in time to those who visited them starting nearly a century ago, and who read the memoirs and accounts written by its natives. These authors, in turn, did not all know even how to read and write in their Irish-language dialect. Yet, they found an international audience through a motley set of mediators, mostly in their twenties, who traveled to the islands after learning Irish themselves. 

Robert Kanigel, a science writer retired from M.I.T., in 2005 visited the interpretative center set up to explain the legacy of the islanders. On his honeymoon, he got into his first “tiff” with his wife, after he could not tear himself away from the bookstore stocked with works by the Great Blasket Island’s writers there. Unsurprisingly, he winds up explaining to us the meeting of European scholars and unschooled fisher-folk, recorded by sophisticated archivists and shrewd islanders, in a rare convergence of intellects.

George Thomson, a Cambridge classicist (and later leader in the British Communist Party), began the popularization of the Blaskets. He wanted to learn modern Irish, and his friendship with Tomás Ó Criomhthain leads to the publication of Island Cross-Talk and The Islandman. These accounts, the latter a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1933, generated mixed reviews. Some then, as with certain critics today, reacted negatively to the manipulation of romantic themes which minimized the repetitive storms and drownings of real island life. Others lauded the “simple, lilting pages” and enjoyed such exuberant pastoralism.

Mr. Kanigel sides with the editors and translators who crafted the storytelling talents of Ó Criomhthain as acceptable compromises to heighten the power of his tales. Robin Flower from the British Museum and Carl Marstrander from Norway join those attracted to what appeared a last bastion of spoken Irish and primitive ways on Europe’s last frontier. Brian Kelly, another mediator, gains a less documented and more shadowy presence as he works with Ó Criomhthain; Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, a brilliant Parisian linguist, brings deft skills to her own work with a raconteur, “Seán a Chóta,” in what may, as Mr. Kanigel suggests, have been an infatuation hatched out of opportunism, or a series of miscues about compatibility. Similarly, Thomson’s own attempt to woo a local girl, he twenty-three and an atheist academic set on doctoral studies in Greek at Cambridge, she fifteen with a big smile, appears fated for failure. Mary Kearney left the island, first for domestic service in the shadow of Ireland’s premier seminary, and then in Springfield, Massachusetts, where she soon entered the convent. 

The mismatch between trained scholars and blunt fishing families challenges both sides. The language barriers, as Mr. Kanigel sums up well, daunt even skilled linguists. Add the shock of leaving Oxford or Paris to land on a barren, treeless rock, so difficult to get to that a priest was rowed over but once a year, and the culture clash intensifies. Mr. Kanigel interweaves the perspectives of Thomson or Sjoestedt intricately into how they approached the islanders. Alternatively, via Maurice O’Sullivan--who while a policeman stationed unhappily among Irish-speakers in Connemara wrote what in English Thomson translated as Twenty Years a-Growing--Mr. Kanigel shifts to allow us to see 1920s Dublin through the eyes of the newly arrived O’Sullivan. 

Emigration by the 1930s accelerated, even as eager readers found more books to read by islanders documenting their now-vanishing folkways and dialect. After the success of The Islandman and Twenty Years in 1933, the reminiscences of Peig Sayers appeared, from a woman who had married into the island but who could neither read nor write in Irish. In the pages of Peig, generations on the Irish mainland labored to learn an “official” national tongue foreign to nearly all schoolchildren. Three works had found success, produced from a community of about 150. More studies and accounts followed, and fame came to Great Blasket.

Yet, a blip of tourism ended with the privations of WWII, and the economy dwindled along with the numbers able to survive in a harsh if sometimes enchanting place. Marriage partners dwindled, and the school taught fewer children. By 1953, the last islanders were evacuated by the Irish government. 

Mr. Kanigel draws upon the research of nearly a hundred years. Assisted in relevant Irish-language materials by his own mediators, he admits collaboration of his own. The results for a wider audience rest on a command of the sources and an understanding of the complexity in translating and rendering one worldview into another aimed at mass consumption. As a professor of science writing, Mr. Kanigel is to be commended for working outside of his natural expertise. He knits together a handsome pattern as he traces the inherent drama within the destinies on the page--and in recollection by themselves and others--of the Blasket Islanders. In their encounters with European intellectuals, this narrative provides an unexpected combination of characters, all treated with dignity and sensitivity.

Concluding with the aftermath of the Blasket encounter upon its interpreters, both schooled and untutored, this history shows how the impact of the island, whether savored in summer by visitors or endured all year by natives, effected the rest of their lives, after nobody was left to hunt rabbits or catch mackerel. Mr. Kanigel compares the setting to the legendary Land of Youth, where writers and mediators combined to capture the essence of their transformed vision of a place. He knows both its allure and the dangers of distortion, but after all, this is the making of a legend as much as it is the chronicling of fact. The mundane makes magic. Mr. Kanigel reminds us of our own longings for a respite from the pressures of civilization and mechanization; all involved in this Blasket saga appear, later in life off the island, to regret to a small or great degree their exile. 

This book efficiently conveys the feel of living in such a place, and the excitement of the intellectuals who lay claim to having found what Thomson marveled over. Of the fifteen or so books from those who grew up or conducted research on the Blaskets, the results were unequalled in any language, “a collective portrait of a pre-capitalist village society, made by the villagers themselves, at the very moment of transition from speech to print.” This Cambridge scholar’s praise for what when he voyaged there was still largely cut off from the early twentieth century today turns poignant, as the Co. Kerry interpretative center faces the depopulated Blaskets, across three miles of rough, choppy sea. (New York Journal of Books 3-6-12)

Carn Ghórta Mór

Bás a fháil den ghórta mór duine Éireannach go leor. Chuir mé cuairt an leacht i ómós orthu. Chuaigh mé go dtí Nua-Eabhrac an deireadh tseachtain seo caite, agus ar feadh lá chéad go iomhlan ansin, shiúl mé ansiúd.

Coinníonn leacht ag imeall im bPairc Cathair Bhataire i Manhattan iseal i gcuimhne an Gorta Mór na hÉireann. Bhí é an Drochshaol go cinnte. Cuirim achainí faoi bhráid "an gorta a bhuail Éire ón mbliain 1845 ar aghaidh agus a mharaigh is a ruaig as an tír cupla milliún Éireannach" de réir Vicipéid as Gaeilge.

Cheap Brian Tolle é. Deanamh sé ó aolchloch. Is leachtán cloch cósulacht créthulach adhlactha anallód.

Thug an ailtire seo na clocha briste le Contae Mhaigh Eo go raibh ag dulta i léig ina bhfothracha ann. Ath-thóg siad na baillte folamh sin ar an mullach os cionn an bealach siúil a fhágail suas. Tá baile ó Ceathreamhadh di Dhubhagain soir na hÁth Tí an Mheasaigh. Bhí an teach bunaithe na chlann Slack na céile fir na Tolle fadó. 

Chuir siad gort leath-acra a chur faoi fásra sa thir dhúchais suas ansin. D'oscail sé ina samraidh 2002. Tá áit dhá bloc siar go díreach ó suíomh ar Lár Trádáil Dhomhan. Tá tú ábalta feicéail ar an láithaireach ath-tógála sin ina grianghraf le Roger Shepherd go socair suas anseo. 


Eolas:
Vicipéid (as Béarla) le Leacht Ghórta Mór Éireannach ag imeall im bParc Cathair Bhataire i Manhattan iseal.
Ghrianghrafaí súil i Nua-Eabhrac
Ghrianghrafaí níos mó le Weblicist ó Manhattan
Tá aiste le Roberta Smith ina Amannaí Nua-Eabhrac faoi tiomhnú ina dhiadh 9/11.
Leabhrán & learscáil.
Tá aiste-ghriangraf le Roger Shepherd ó Teist Ailtireacht

Irish Hunger Memorial

Many Irish people were taken by death in the great famine. I paid a visit to the memorial-stone in homage to them. I went to New York this past weekend, and during my first full day there, I walked over there.

This monument for the Irish Hunger Memorial near Battery City Park in lower Manhattan commemorates the Great Hunger of Ireland. It was the "bad time" surely. It memorializes "the famine that hit Ireland from the year 1845 on and killed across the land a couple million of the Irish" according to Irish-language Wikipedia.

Brian Tolle designed it. It was made from limestone. It's a grave-stone site resembling a passage tomb in ancient times. 

This architect took the broken stones from County Mayo gone to ruin there. They rebuilt those empty walls on the top above the passage way as entrance below. The house is from Carradoogan to the east of Attymass. It was the family home of the Slack clan of Tolle's life-partner long ago. 


They planted the half-acre field with native flora up there. It was opened in the summer of 2002. The place is two blocks straight westward from the site of the World Trade Center. You're able to look at that re-building site in the photograph by Roger Shepherd easily, above here. 

Information:
Wikipedia for the Irish Hunger Memorial near Battery City Park, lower Manhattan.
New York City Walk Photos.               
More photos by Weblicist of Manhattan
Roberta Smith 2002 New York Times article on post-9/11 dedication.
Brochure & map.
Architectural Record photo-essay by Roger Shepherd.


Scríobh mé seo/I wrote this 12ú/th Aibreal/April 2011. Grianghraf le/Photo by Roger Shepherd.

"Fodor's Ireland 2011": Book Review

Certainly a vibrantly hued presentation of images and lots of words, aimed at the comfortable traveler who has money to spend but in this very expensive country wants to do so wisely. The appendix of golf courses indicates this audience, as do the "In Focus" inserts, almost like informercials, about Cork cookery, traditional music, the Rock of Cashel, or the craft revival. These appeal to the eye and break up the standard columns of text and marginal symbols that any guidebook features. It's an attractive resource, one that I have used along with the Lonely Planet and Rough Guides aimed more at younger or fitter visitors wishing more on the nightlife, the hostels, and the pub scene than found here, where handsome hotels, nicer restaurants, and more elegant accomodations beckon.

The foldout map's more of a sketch when compared to the likes of a Michelin one; you get lines linking market towns with cities by (non-numbered) major roads but many more scenic or byway routes are not listed. Oddly, none of the six counties of the North are filled in on the map. However, the guide is organized not by county but by major areas, so this may not confuse the visitor as much as with other guidebooks which keep to the region, then county, then town or locale, breakdown for organization.

Again, Fodor's takes pains to incorporate local talent. Alannah Hopkins with her Cork residence and Paul Clements based in Belfast have long experience as journalists and travel writers; Anto Howard weighs in from his native Dublin. Spot-checking three entries for this review, I found their contributions helpful. I tested what I know against details, for some of this material's covered in every guidebook, other material's not or is skimmed over.

Glencolmcille in Donegal has its new Ionad Siúl walking center as the one place to stay, but the Guinness cakes (as of my last visit) were sad to say not sold at the Folk Museum's tearoom anymore. I'd love to be corrected on this. The three pages given over to this village feature two lovely photos. But, no pubs, no shops, no food places, no other places to stay are mentioned, whereas in other guides, this information may be common. It may show that the writers expect visitors to pass through some places rather than settle down for a week or so. Still, the pictures, the feature trumpeted by Fodor in this edition, may convince more than one more paragraph about archeological sites around the area may to visit.

For a larger place, but one often rushed past or ignored, Drogheda on the Boyne gets great coverage as to how to get there by bus: how much the fare, how often the buses run, where they drop you. Fodor's maps (unlike some competitors) are usually reserved for the truly popular cities and destinations, so for example, none here. But you get a brief sense of the medieval walled town, its historical attractions. For it, a country club and a trendy hotel the two places listed to stay, but nowhere can be found recommended to eat!
What about Dublin? The writers know the hotels and the eateries. They describe them succinctly and accurately. The emphasis is on the mid-to-higher end, albeit in a city where few bargains exist. Nice to see a list of bookstores, decent maps of the city center (small streets may not always be given, but the keyed numbers mapped to what's listed in the guidebook get you there), and a pro-con (as in all the accomodations) for the good-bad of the hotels. Many seem to have slipped a bit in service from what they were, as an aside.

The book starts with a frank acknowledgment of how the recession's hit Ireland. Prices may have slipped a fraction for where you may stay due to a glut, but food (if not a pint) and amenities will cost you more. In the appendix, I think they needed to warn American drivers more about the fact that insurance for a rental car may not be covered and that you must purchase it from the renter directly--the authors note the costs that can be added but they do not cover what can double the amount paid for a vehicle. They give good advice about phones (US ones tend not to work overseas as is), tipping, credit cards and transaction fees, and the ways to get around what can be with or without a car a daunting place to navigate.

The writers prepare you for an island nation not what romanticized readers might expect, and they honestly weigh their own pros-cons of the rapid pressures of sophistication and drive for accumulation that characterize today's Irish culture. The history and myth tend to get blended into the presentation rather than separated as in some other guides. I'd say there's less attention to some of the ancient monuments, churches and medieval structures, and Irish-language culture than other books provide. Instead, Fodor's seems to pitch its contents towards a middle-of-the-road visitor, perhaps a bit less eager to rummage around relics on display than to buy a scarf, find an inviting dining nook, or to play golf. This is not a critique but an observation!

At nearly seven-hundred pages, in an appealing format, this is a solid mainstream reference. I liked the website, admission fee, bus-route type of data integrated into entries. The visual breadth, as in the insert on the Ring of Kerry, adds of course to the interest conjured up for the tourist planning a stay. It may not direct you to the more quirkly or less-frequented sights, but for a single-volume compendium, Fodor's combines enthusiasm with guidance well. (Posted to Amazon US 12-29-10 & Lunch.com 2-20-11)

Fur Coat, No Knickers

This title comes from a phrase used by my host and her friend about one of the guests at their forthcoming ex-pat Thanksgiving celebration. She would appear along with Gay West, The Frump, and others to whom I was not privy. Due to the sensitive nature of their identities, not alone of said female so monikered who I haven't the foggiest about but anyone else mentioned who I do heretofore, today's cast of characters are identified if necessary by simple if sometimes capitalized Common Nouns. Don't feel left out if despite a favorable nod I have not named you, dear Reader, as a Proper Noun; I like you(se) all. I've blurred a few identifiers and specifics; to be fair, I avoided what used to be called Christian names, so as not to herd the sheep with the goats. No witty or catty sobriquets, however, as energy fails me. I am still sort of jet-lagged. Mine left hand verily knoweth not what my right hand doeth, on this very keyboard, I say unto thee.

My latest Irish excursion left me only four nights there, none of them restful. The red-eye over on Delta more than lived up to its name. I'll revert to my family's tradition lapsed with me of novenas to the Little Flower if it frees me from ever using this airline again, but I must book through an agent approved (or outsourced) by My Employer and verify I have chosen the lowest fare. The program sets up a red flag if you do not do this. At least on the way back, if not the wretched flight over showing only "GI Joe 2" as the sole channel, I found the video-audio delights on a brand-new plane via Aer Lingus a great comfort last time, but they flew out of O'Hare and I figured two days prior to Thanksgiving, the conjunction of weather and crowds might be fatal that far north, or mid-west, so I avoided it and the second choice of Newark for Atlanta, the vast hub of un-Southern inhospitality.

Not much of interest. The dreaded TSA full-body scan machines apparently have not been installed at least at any terminal I traversed, nor did the pat-downs transpire. I did notice respectable-looking men of a certain age getting their luggage opened more than once. On the way back into Atlanta, a veganish backpacked waif tried to go to the left of dog and handler, a hefty lass in a green vest as ugly as that strapped on the compact canine Cerberus, snarled at Miss Rainbow Brite to turn to the right. She meekly did, but the dog stayed alert. Asked what she carried, she compliantly responded "brown rice." I hurried on. On the way in, I had bags full of home-made, hand-wrapped (if not many by me, given my lack of dexterity) caramels and brownies, not the magic kind, which disappointed My Host. Those olfactorily enhanced beagles spook me.

I read on the plane a couple of the sale books I'd bought at the Cal State L.A. bookstand the week before, to raise funds for a Critical Thinking course's students as their project. I'd been there as My Second Son wants to apply to the prestigious county high school for the performing arts that shares the campus. I chatted a bit with the silver-haired, granny-esque, petite overseer of paperbacked wares, which were of markedly higher intellectual quality than the usual dreck at such tables. She explained that she was selling off books to raise funds for the re-opening of the radical bookstore that once was down on 8th Street in the Pico-Union barrio, a hotbed, if one store's worth, of the truly far-left. Now they will move to Hollywood. Howard Zinn's icon graced flyers, and homage to an agitator farther tilted than even Zinn, whose name and affiliation remain tacit to avoid web-trolls, also appeared. It was like discovering the Queen Mother's a Maoist.

Anyway, I carefully sifted the stock, as I rarely buy any books no matter how cheap now, to a fine anthology about the philosophy of religion from the mid-60s "God, Man, and the Thinker," a 1963 reprint of an 1896 collection of Buddhist texts, and an old primer I'd wanted anyhow, "What the Buddha Taught," by Walpola (reminds me of Andy Warhol[a]) Rahula. Added to this, a serendipity, a Mercier Press paperback of the bilingual stories of Padraig Pearse. I had this in a newer reprint, of course, but I felt sorry for it and feared it'd be relegated to the trash, so I rescued it. I expected to pay $8 for the lot, but she let me have them for $5, a bargain. She and I discussed teaching the course we both did a bit, and she recommended I do what all the sections at Cal State's Northridge campus show to their freshmen, as "Lies My Teacher Told Me." I demurred, if intrigued, telling her where I taught and of its own hegemony. (They busted their union long ago.)

So, with Pearse's Conamara Irish simply eloquent for me to try to fall asleep to (it did not work) and Rahula's patient explication of Noble Truths (that did not do the trick of trance either), I played the online audio tracks for the flight, at least the LAX-ATL leg. Oddly, the more "modern" plane's the domestic one. Under "retro rockers" classified, the music CDs called up The Clash, who wanted to be retro anyway. I listened instead to the Cure's "Disintegration," full of long instrumental intros before moody tunes, and Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks," full of skipping and wavering, about as close as I'll ever get to jazz or grooves.

The movies were $6 and even t.v. episodes $2, which disgusted me. I was saving my phone with its own music files for the longer flight, as I knew I could not recharge it and feared I'd need it on arrival. In my naivete, I still hoped I'd be able to get internet access and e-mail over there. I munched the salmon sandwiches thoughtfully provided by my wife and drank their club soda as the alternative to no mineral water. I could not believe how many people bought the $3 chips and $6 snacks peddled on board.

The young woman next to me had tattooed on one thumb-wrist web (what do you call that?) "I'm tired." Her other one had "Me too." I reflected on this but could only come up with an off-color association. She asked the "customer service representative on-board" for aspirin, and slouched over the tray table with her red blanket over her head and another riding hood over her body. She did play with her iPhone underneath. She had a cosmetology test bank prep booklet as her in-flight reading, but she only read a page or so.

Atlanta's a big airport. The train shuttle underneath the concourse was broken in the direction needed to go but one of the six or so terminal extensions. If I'd had to go E backwards D-C-B-A to T, it'd be a marathon. The one stretch, A to T, was long enough to take me--a fast walker--nearly half an hour, as we all were funnelled into a side passage not meant for hundreds of us, and we had to then wait in an labyrinthine layout to go back in to security as we'd been dumped out into the regular throng again at the front of the terminal. People kept glaring at me and I was not cheery, but sweaty, tired, and already weary with the Dublin part of the trip still looming. I made it to that gate past the usual smells of whirring coffee machines and manufactured baked buns as the flight was already boarding. In the corner, young folks with very heavy Norn Iron accents regaled a duskier and differently accented fellow about being in the wrong Belfast place at the wrong pub.

I closed my eyes a lot, but seeing the flight filled with Racquetball Ireland teenagers and their families, or chaperones, I did not get much rest. The previous flight had blue polo-shirted rugby teens from New South Wales, all husky and very British in jaw and haircut, but they were surprisingly demure. Stocky Mrs. P.R. (her initials, but her name was nearly as common an Irish one if not more than my own) from Thurles or Clonmel (the teams had jerseys from these locales) sat next to me, who was at the window. But her charges were across the aisle, so Kate and Megan and Matthew had to be hectored constantly. This did not increase my susceptibility to slumber. I had finally, thinking of Warhol[a] Rahula, relaxed my body, against all odds, and may have had a moment of nirvana, when I heard "duty free, duty free" summoning me. I never returned, and two rows away, the back-of-the-plane's bathroom door and the galley's metallic clash, slamming on and off served as my metronomic alarm against any sleep. The crew chattered away, and so did the racqueteers.

However, arrival in Dublin proved magical. The plane seemed to coast in, silently, as we circled at the southern end of the city, glowing amber lights on velvet. I'm no real fan of the place, but it looked enchanted in the pitch-black clarity of 7 a.m. I'd never seen the city like this before; previous flights had the usual clouds. We sailed in softly, over the Swords roundabout and even its garish shopping-mall glow could not dim the gentler necklaces of what outlined quiet seconds before the Hill of Howth and its invisible mansionettes.

The plane landed, and the passengers burst into applause. Not sure why, but it was deserved. I left the plane happy, even if I left it, as I would three out of four sections of the jaunt, all but dead last.

Customs had been remodelled since last autumn's visit, but it still seemed boxy. At one point I nearly ducked, as if entering a Bunratty Folk Park's recreated cabeen's threshhold, into a small corridor, before emerging. We were shunted via a small passageway, and as with many airports, it never looked fully finished.

I'd just missed the 100 bus to Drogheda. The air was in the mid-30s, so I bundled up. I'd taken my trench coat that I'd worn but twice ever, when I went to NYC in the beginning of the '90s. I had layered, and bought gloves along with a backpack from Patagonia, an investment I figure at the rate of necessity in L.A. will last the rest of my life. The man hunched over the timetable and I struck up a brief chat, the kind you do. He sounded Nigerian, and we agreed it was cold indeed. Talk about fur coat and knickers.

On the bus, I again marvelled at the inanity of pop music on Irish radio. If My Older Son was here, I'd have asked him: how does musical talent come out of an island so poorly served by this medium? As expected, the transmitted chat was full of austerity cuts, tottering coalitions, and IMF bailouts.

I like the announced stops on Bus Éireann in Irish for the placenames. The town of the knight sounds better in the original; Baile an Ridire, than Balrothry. I watched what had become familiar signs from last year's itinerary, to Lusk, Balbriggan, Julianstown, Laytown, Bettystown, on the hour-plus ride into Drogheda.

Its Southgate shopping center still languished, only its Dunne's store open and another office, all other sites as empty as last year when I noticed this ambitious edifice on the city's border. A sign promised a development second to none for investment. I was not sure if I missed, when gawking at it, the woebegone, yellow, deserted motel across the road where once the INLA had convened, or if that eyesore had been razed. A symbol of what this county had meant once, and perhaps still did for a few, as Gerry Adams had announced he'd contest for Sinn Féin the Dáil seat vacated in Louth only last month. 

The traffic on the Dublin road as the declivity to the Boyne that divides the medieval town from its suburbs clogged the route. I could have disembarked and walked to my destination twice over in the time it took to crawl a few blocks. But, I waited. I bade farewell to the affable driver, watched the last of the schoolchildren who seemed to be half the occupants of the morning's cargo, and wished the Nigerian best of luck as he and I fiddled with our luggage, and he waited for yet another bus. I went off, around Millmount rumored to be the burial mound of Amergin-- first bard of Ireland who landed on its shores five thousand or some years in myth ago-- and up Pilcher's Hill steps towards my host's home.

Cleo, a doggie simulacrum of my own Oprah, a puppy younger than her but just as lovably evil, welcomed me. I would soon listen to my host and her haircutting comrade about their views, as seasoned ex-pats, on the Irish. They had both lived there long enough for me to hear as their American accents morphed in and out of Irish inflections picked up from spouses, new friends, their own children. About their neighbors turned intimates: "They tell you what they want you to hear, and then when you leave, they tell their friends what they really think of you." I responded, "we're their entertainment. They get tired of talking to each other."

I thought of similar opinions in this novel, recommended by my wife, "The Bleeding Heart" ("Ordinary Decent Criminals" in its British title: both sum it up well); the Philly ex-pat Lionel Shriver and her fictional alter ego Estrin Lancaster share a mordant, post-feminist, bitterly unromantic account from late-80s Belfast that explores and excoriates the Troubles and those "conflict junkies" who come and go to dabble in them as comedy and tragedy. While I found her broad targets hit-and-miss (and only one rating for my review over at Amazon US, that a negative, to date), any participant-observer of the Irish scene, especially transatlantic transplants, will find its morning-after, mirror-shattering looks unblinkingly reflecting, perhaps, their own bleary gaze. Fictional or real, we all agree that we Americans represented our own stereotype, as enduring, as unfair, and as recognizable as that of the country we all loved, admired, put up with, and put down.

I wished I could have stayed for the feast of my less vicious nationals. It's my favorite holiday, even if this would have been my first without turkey. I gave up eating meat after it last year. But I crave cranberries.

After my host's egg-and-potato burrito (closer to home, with chipotle sauce) and a nap I felt better. We had fish and chips, another favorite of mine, for supper, and I regaled the lad and lass in residence with gift t-shirts and brownies and caramels. My politically astute host watched six times, it seemed, the RTÉ newscast with Fianna Fáil's Brian Cowan defending patiently, I thought as an unbiased observer, his party's role in the bailout. Despite the effigies of him paraded on O'Connell Street the Saturday I was there, up the road at my conference, I felt he defended his role manfully, and took responsibility for his party's debacle in a brave manner. I am not sure if FF will survive the election, but given the namby-pamby response of a handful of SF activists who stormed the capital's barricades to overwhelm one harried Garda, and what looked like all of three placard-brandishing SWP allies, I was reminded of what happened the day the Rising started. The rebels broke into Dublin Castle, shot to death a guard, a fellow Irishman, but then stood around, not sure what to do next.

I am jaded, but compared to my situation back home in a state billions in the hole, in a city Third World more every day, the imposition of such as a 100 euro property tax, paying for the first time for water, and a reduction of a minimum wage by a euro from an amount far higher than the dollar equivalent in my home state did not seem draconian. The generosity of the dole outweighs that of the U.S., and the support for housing childcare, medicine, and education reminds me again of why I sympathize with benevolent social welfare as opposed to heartless bottom-line mentalities that dominate my native land's mindset.

California's facing similar cutbacks. Three years of hardship in my household itself has inured me, I confess, to tales of financial woe. It sounds hard-hearted, but teaching so many who have been laid off, downsized, outsourced, and in my own job working faster and harder than ever as I do the tasks of my departed colleagues, while facing heavier courseloads, I betray compassion fatigue. Meanwhile, we're told to spend on Black Fridays (what a term to contrast in the U.S. post-Thanksgiving to the Irish usage) as our patriotic duty, as if to increase our own credit card balance outweighs any lessons forced upon us by the current (it's not over yet) dep-recession.

I had feared the extravagances of the past decade, here and there, would not last. I watched on RTÉ the high dudgeon in which such reports of austerity have been met in Ireland. I calculated in my mind how much even with the lower minimum wage the workers earned compared to my own nation, and the come-down while not welcome did not seem as outrageous as those interviewed made it out to be. Yet, I understood their collective outrage and personal helplessness, when we all feel like decisions are made in purported democracies that none of us as voters and citizens have any say in. What I can agree with? That the leaders who profiteer and the bankers who collude deserve the real contempt. They get that from us, sure. But they will as always suffer less if at all, compared to the rest of us.

The tension between those who control the pursestrings and those who come, cap in hand, never ends. I viewed a billboard on the way in to Drogheda from St. Vincent de Paul Society: "I used to build homes. Then I lost mine." A young man, haggard. Television ads, well-produced, featured related appeals by this venerable charity. They keep dignity for the benefactor and the recipient, and avoid sentiment or self-aggrandizing.

The RTÉ Angelus always moves even hard-hearted me, and the spot I saw this time took in villagers cleaning grave markers by the river at Sixmilebridge. There's tender grace in these aired meditations that I think can be valued by anyone in Ireland or anywhere else, and I find it a powerful reminder of the best that the island has encouraged within its inhabitants, of all or no creeds. Despite the slippery slide to sudden secularism, for better and worse, in recent Irish culture, the tug to give more than take I do pray remains with the ethos instilled over centuries.

With the transition nearly everywhere to capitalism, at its most rapacious, the few countries such as Ireland who still possess a modicum of social consciousness-- despite the temptations to greed the past twenty years that have weakened the communal constraints on avarice-- themselves now face the results of too much speculation, too much flip-flopping, too much debt, too much trust in corporations and politicians. Not to mention what has ravaged so much of the landscape, so many villages made ugly, so many roadsides and ridges scarred, thanks to landowners cashing in and selling out, aided and abetted by developers (a class that for me deserves to languish in Dante's ninth circle, frozen and upended in excrement).

That leads me to the link here: Is there a future for socialism in Ireland? This is a three-hour panel discussion held November 25th at the Holiday Inn, Belfast. I could not attend as my bus headed that night south, so I am doubly glad to have had the chance to hear it online. My host's husband spoke as one of the panelists, along with Daithí Mac An Mhaistír (éirígí); Eoin O’Broin (Sinn Féin); Dr Brian Hanley (Author of The Lost Revolution – The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers Party). He served as the Critic, with such lines as "Left unity's like a black Klan. It won't happen," but also as the Activist, who told how long it took him with twenty euro coins, to distribute them to the beggars he passed in Dublin's streets: 12 minutes, 37 seconds. "Every paper cup tells a story."

When I arrived in Dublin that same night, the air bit and chilled. On the rumbling ride down in the early dark, I thought about lunch, with my host and the Novelist. He had graciously presented me with a signed copy of his novel Ecopunks which had appeared two days before and he heroically (his car being "scuppered," a fine word) made it down from the North to see us, at the same table in the same restaurant where we had all met a year before. I think this restaurant rivals the best of those (at least on my own austerity budget, for we rarely eat out anymore) in my home city. While the service was unaccountably slow, the fact it was Happy Thanksgiving there, as the cook is American, gave me cheer, and more time to talk with my friends.

They discussed the common pursuit of journalism and its vagaries, in this age of electronic archiving which opens the profession up to all sorts of difficulties in platforms, storage, retrieval, and display. Access can be limited rather than expanded, and researchers such as my host and myself find the barriers placed by the press as frustrating as, for me, using as I still have had to do once in a while a microfiche machine at the library! We discussed "emerald noir," the ironies of the American complaints against the TSA compared to the usual searches and seizures once a daily part of Belfast life, and the challenges of getting the word out about what one has invested so much effort in, as in his contribution to Requiems for the Departed of modern crime fiction based on ancient Irish myth. He and I chatted about the changes one editor may request, and how they may embed themselves, better or worse, into the story forever. I look forward to his novel, especially as a character appears to be based on one real-life figure who I link to in my blogroll at the right-hand here.

I had to leave soon, as both the Novelist and my host's husband had to go north. My visits, with the Novelist and the Host and the Activist, were all too short. Before departing, I did take the picture above on our walk with the dog, and the three yappiers in the window could be heard even from my distance beyond the gate. I guess it fits sort of with the blog entry's title, if you're Cruella de Ville.

The schoolchildren again filled many seats on the bus. I watched the lights pass, the line of cars northward creeping along as commuters edged back from the city I approached. The Skylon Hotel is certainly convenient, the same bus route that took me from the airport to Drogheda now passing the airport into the city. It was next door to St. Patrick's College where I'd give my paper at this conference on Purgatory in Irish literature and culture. Esoteric to all, indeed, but for me, a conjunction of two topics I'd labored over in my dissertation and despite that decade of effort have loved long, and an opportunity I could not miss.

My repast that night, as the delicious mackerel and fries and Smithwick's repast earlier still filled me up, was tea and cookies, and I sat reading the old USA Today paper discarded that I picked up as I'd left the plane. I actually got some sleep, a few hours at least, but as my pattern now, before I left, during my trip, and since then, I have been largely and fitfully awake since two or three each morning. I thought about nothing much and everything in the darkness.

When I woke up, it was in the thirties, for me colder than it ever gets, as it's never this low back home. I figured I'd better load up on carbs to warm me. The breakfast voucher let me down, as muesli, toast, yogurt while I like them all allowed me no portables to take away for later noshing--a strategy often advised by budget travelers. Best Western chain has its own austerity plan. I longed for fruit, not stewed prunes or canned pears in a plastic tray, all that could be found on the buffet not made of caffeine, dairy, or bulk.

The five-minute walk to the conference got me there early, as I could see the school building immediately over the wall of the hotel, but I had to stroll way down the block and back again to get to it. No signs were up yet to guide me to the room for the event, and being a very punctual type, I'd again over-estimated the tendency of other cultures to take their time. I paced the halls, circling the corridor around a courtyard, the one elegant trace of what this teacher-training college might have once looked like, with its old tiles set in the floor and remnants of a Gothic-ish study hall, in the mid-Fifties austerity era of John McGahern, who wrote about being practically immured here in his All Will Be Well (US title) Memoir (Irish title).

His portrait as not a young man faced us as we spoke in D-115. Two days spent looking out at a window where the legs of tall men and lissome women rushed about on the grass above our classroom left me feeling a bit incarcerated myself. Many at least of the younger Irish do seem leaner and more fit than Americans, still. But at 2/3 of my countrymen as overweight or obese, that may not be setting the bar very high. I stretched my cramped legs on a piano bench and sat at the back of the room, given my bad knee propped up. I took notes on all the speakers, who can be found listed via the Conference Schedule of the link above. Discretion rules. Many talks were harbingers of heavenly hope; a few--less than average--proved, well, grimly penitential.

I reflected on return this week to my speech students, despite my wooziness, about how international characteristics may be seen in speakers. Early on, the renowned French expert read off of her own seminal article on the subject to us from a photocopy. While essential research, it went longer than the twenty minute limit. This meant the time skewed. Luckily, the skillful organizer helped us recover the pace, but at conferences, as in my own speech class, if one or two speakers don't follow the timetable, it sets up a domino effect that no Einsteinish quirk or quark (the latter word from Finnegans Wake) of relativity can recover.

A Japanese presenter delivered a talk as if robotically, every word enunciated identically. An Italian effusively joked and played with her material that she projected for us to view. She later carried on conversations with fellow listeners during other presentations, and took out her cellphone to call sub voce during my own talk.

A Central European grad student never looked up his whole speil, as he gripped each end of the lectern. French students varied: one gave a superb talk, another drifted off. Professors from the Sorbonne joined the St. Pat's faculty as conveners, and they impressed me by their questions and comments. A Balkan lecturer never seemed to get to the point and remained mired in generalizations. Irish students as a whole shone, and appeared in their preparation of their talks to stay focused, diligent, and controlled. While they too varied in the way they connected or did not with the audience, they managed to convey a concentration on the material that credited them well, and their professorial colleagues who also gave strong presentations.

I don't mean to be (too) hard on my peers. This is the process by which we learn from one another, and step up the plate, whether two years into our studies or forty years accumulated. As an outlier, I attend conferences once or at most twice a year, to stay in the game for which I was trained even if where I teach, it's as if semi-pro minors sub-class A baseball compared to the majors. Graduate students and independent scholars need fora to share ideas and influences, and those of us like myself on the academic margins gain degrees granted long past our own matriculations of imposed, voluntarily humility, necessary for purgatorial improvement and chastising progress, in our own efforts to scale academic heights.

My own talk went well, considering the next morning it had iced over and I walked over gingerly, never having really had to tread on such a surface before, fearful of black ice and invisible gloss. My own path, however short, reminded me of the fire-ice, hot-cold, boiling-freezing alternations of which I'd speak, Beckett's texts of agnostic afterlife rather than what I'd adapted (nods to Hugh Kenner and Vivian Mercier) as "Protestant hells" and "Catholic purgatories." Being 9 a.m., and with one of our three panelists unable to drive in from the county whose name I can never pronounce, Offaly, we had time for tea and conviviality in the staff room as a handful of us trickled in. I was glad to have come in the previous night, rather than take the early bus down, given the freezing dawn that made for so many a treacherous journey.

I counted a dozen brave listeners. My fellow presenter gave a great overview taken from his UCD doctoral work on Sam Johnson's influence on Beckett's salvific perspectives, as Sam junior had contemplated a drama circa 1937 on Sam senior. Our papers overlapped neatly with Joyce's 1929 essay on "Dante," more about Beckett than Joyce. The follow-up questions weren't as nerve-racking as I'd anticipated, even if I had to betray ignorance given the hour and my condition on entropic exegesis in the works I'd discussed.

The rest of the conference, as such events do once you have spoken, went smoothly. The arc started Friday morning with Origen and Lough Derg, and rose to Yeats and Joyce the first day; it continued with Beckett and passed refugee camps for asylum seekers, Travellers, and still more Protestants as it traversed literary and anthropological terrain the second day. At any conference, nervousness never for me quite goes away until I have delivered my talk, but I enjoyed the remaining papers even as fatigue did dull me to some nuances. A vividly narrated near-closing one on the film "In Bruges" and its purgatorial plot for me proved a personal highlight. Then, I had to rush back to my hotel to try to log on to get a boarding pass, in vain. Their only (coin-operated!) public computer now broken, the staff let me use the one at the front desk but it showed no record for me of a reservation. Panicky, I wondered what to do. I had no access to the net, remember, myself, on my phone. "This is Ireland." Back from years in NYC, Ma soeur Gaeilgeoir's wry admonition echoed in my ear.

By the time I darted back across the evening's ice, Barry McGovern's recitation of Beckett's early (written when he was about twenty-one, in 1927) story Dante and the Lobster had commenced. I waited in my own Ante-Purgatory outside the room where he dramatically related its wonderful, painful tragedy. I could barely hear him if I edged near the window, hiding behind a paper poster so as not to have my head looming over the proceedings. Snatches of his oratory floated through the classroom's pane, but I gave up, a contorted position because or in spite of my height. I sat, as if meditating--resisting the posture of Belacqua's namesake who slouched indolently in Ante-Purgatory in Inferno IV--on the well-worn bench where McGahern might have long lounged. I waited patiently for the applause that could signal my dash into the room.

That being heard, I entered rapidly and added my own applause. McGovern had to run off to the Gate, and his half-hour reading was appended by an intriguing tidbit I record for myself and posterity. Beckett had sent him a postcard about an alternative ending to passage ending with its shattering last sentence.

In the depths of the sea it had crept into the cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of its enemies, it had breathed secretly. It had survived the Frenchwoman's cat and his witless clutch. Now it was going alive into scalding water. It had to. Take into the air my quiet breath.
   Belacqua looked at the old parchment of her face, grey in the dim kitchen.
   “You make a fuss” she said angrily “and upset me and then lash into it for your dinner.”
   She lifted the lobster clear of the table. It had about thirty seconds to live.
   Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death, God help us all.
   It is not.

McGovern, one of Beckett's most renowned interpreters, elaborated he asked the author, long after the story had been published, for an alternative ending. Beckett had written on the card: "Like hell it is." And: "What do you think? Yes? No? Yours, Sam" A fine and typically terse, ambiguous, demotic, yet philosophical resolution, so typical of his style and soul.

This ended the conference perfectly. The more I read Beckett, the more I admire him, as much if not more than Joyce, for Beckett lived the courage of his convictions by his bravery and generosity to those far less fortunate than he. Joyce tended to spend his money on white wine and lavish blow-outs for his friends whenever he got a check; Beckett gave out many checks to those who sought his assistance large and small.

Speaking of assistance being at my own loose ends far from home, I still had my own fretting, so the friendly organizer let me use her office computer as she tidied up. The single Irish customer service number for Delta apparently keeps only normal business hours, not much help for travellers without the net.  The organizer typed in an alternative, somehow, that led to a fourth (!) version of the booking site that then allowed me, mirabile dictu, to confirm my flight and print the boarding pass. She'd been briefly locked in a corridor as the college was closing late Saturday night, as the security guard had already checked my bonafides up there, typing away and praying I'd get a flight confirmation. They were on edge as there'd been break-ins recently. It was that kind of evening. I feared the weather worsening, and that I'd be snowed in. Fatigue wore me down, and I needed rest.

I'd talked to my Irish friends then as before who assured me that all would be well, and I trusted them. Even though my own plans had been scuppered, I'd relished a chance to get out the nippy night previous to trek down to Temple Bar, a good forty-minute hike down Drumcondra Road to Dorset to Capel Streets into what was now, speaking of lobsters boiled for dinner, Dublin's Chinatown and a bit of Polish or Slovenia-burb to add. I'd needed the exercise after being cooped up far too long that week.

The collisions of car trouble, work schedules, emergency intrusions, parlous roads had left attendees at the conference and comrades for my own optimistic arrangements unable to fulfill them, so I was on my own. So addled I forgot to stop and linger. I realized on coming home (when my students asked me if I'd done the usual tourist pub crawl) that only twice have I ever downed a Guinness within a mile of its brewery. I'm not much of a drinker, anyway, and introverted, so I don't gravitate towards bars.

Instead, I paced about and watched the strollers along Eustace Street. I peered at the old House of Meetings for Quakers, next to the place where a tavern had once been the meeting place for the United Irishmen in the failed uprising of 1798. Speaking of the Year of the French, a French Film Festival attracted ticket-goers, and I wondered about one film, perhaps not French, called "Leap Year" that looked steamy-- if in Spanish. Those in line talked about it and gestured at the poster, which reminded me of "Y Tu Mamá También."

Polish and Italian and passersby of even native extraction shouted and muttered. I was intrigued by how much or how little Europeans compared to me might dress in such weather, and I was glad for my purchase and donning of thermal underwear along with backpack and gloves. I watched misses in miniskirts (were they from Ukraine or Uzbekistan, I wondered, having read lots of such heroin-snorting, packet-shuffling, brawling scenarios in that collection of crime-Irish myth stories) traipse through the cold that at one point had me in the Irish Film Institute (the site of the old Friends Assembly House) sitting on a radiator to keep warm.

On the sidewalk, an teenish urchin passed me brusquely with his mates as I stood outside. "Hey Mr Mac gargle slash garble" I'd worn my khaki-colored, clunky if efficiently lined mac, me as the man in the macintosh; I thought again of Joyce. I think Anthony Burgess commented on what the late John Devitt of Mater Dei Institute told me on meeting him by chance at a lunch at another conference, back in Galway in 2004. It's in the middle of "Cyclops," its anti-semitic tirade, when, recalled by the narrator, "a slut shouts out of her: 'Eh mister! Your fly is open, mister.'" This referred not to me, for once, but to the ear Devitt admired that Joyce had for his city's cadences, exactly rendered in such repetition as they were naturally conveyed. Repetition, as we learned at the conference, leads in purgatory to redemption, if not in reality. For the Irish, the boom and bust pattern familiar from a generation ago appeared to be repeating, as all pointed elsewhere at truer sinners.

For my own budgetary measures, the temperature dropping led me to take a taxi back. It had me repeatedly counting out two-euro coins in the dark, as I tried to reduce my change and watch my remaining stash. To my chagrin, cabs there do not take credit cards. The fare had gone way up it being Nighttown, and I was not used to how much it cost to go the couple of miles back from Temple Bar to Drumcondra. I tried to sleep, but did poorly. I watched television, TG4 the Irish-language channel as is my habit over there, but except for a few phrases subtitled by Gaeilgoir gals winning the All-Ireland teen Gaelic football slots on the pageant I watched groggily, that was that. I'd earlier enjoyed the mellifluous 'blas' of the enigmatic Biddy Jenkinson (not her real name), one of the leading Irish-language poets, on RTÉ, but that show ended too soon, as I tried to pick out word and meaning from the natural flow 'as Gaeilge' broadcast. She spoke of Eve, and maybe Adam, or else my mind was on paradise and the Fall after a weekend's immersion in the metaphorical state Ireland kept returning to, post-lapsarian, post-Catholic but still feeling guilty after last night's or last decade's fun. Before the lights went out, in the spirit of Gabriel Conroy, I found myself finally viewing the weather report in Irish, which seemed foolhardy given my fluency. The island rimmed in frost, the interior white, clouds hovering: even this amadán could tell what was up, or down. In purgatory as in Beckett's The Lost Ones, I'd lectured that dawn, fires and ice alternate.

I was unsure if I'd be stuck at the airport, if there'd be a mass run on the ATM's, if I'd be holed up for days as you see the pictures in the papers, of bedraggled backpackers from Australia trying to get home, rolled out with their tarp on the linoleum at some terminal sixty-eight hours straight. And me with no working phone, damned US incompatibility even as I passed on the way to work "Droid does global" as a boastful billboard.

The final morning had me jittery, for the sleep rarely came. The second morning straight, I opened the curtains to see The Dead's "snow general over all of Ireland," at least from my vantage point over the district where young Dedalus had joshed: "It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra — said Stephen, laughing — where they speak the best English."

I'd packed and obsessed the night before, so not much to do at 6 a.m., but, it not being even time for breakfast yet, a munched scone from under a cake server on the counter, and asking the porter, when he finally showed up, for a taxi. The air rushed in the side door. He left it open. English guests sat in the lobby under a display of flights departing, and Heathrow was closed.

My taxi driver, the fare being twice the distance to Temple Bar, cost twice as much, but I learned from him a tale he must tell a dozen times daily, of how he courted his Balinese-born wife first by e-mail and then by a generous portion of cake with her first coffee upon their meeting. The airport was crowded, but no more really than any other time I'd arrived before dawn. I was checked six times total with passport and pass-- which had to be turned in at one point and reissued, for apparently they suspected now me logging in online and having no bags to check.

I lacked even the time to get my wife her beloved packets of Wine Gums, for it took a while to get through so many lines. Descending the circle, not quite hellish, that draws those American-bound downward around the 300-numbered gates of the terminal, I remembered past summers when the line up the stairs filled every corner while we inched past eloquent wall panels about American wakes and Statues of Liberty. Lately, the wait for the passport clearance has been but seconds, and again the central-casting, burly New Yorkish officer I recalled from earlier interrogations stamped my clearance.

A young woman wore a green knit pixie hat that stood straight up. Her hair red, not sure if bottled or by birth, her eyes green, her skin fair but at least not as paper-white as mine. She reminded me of the first girl I ever kissed, I admit. But she was prettier than the girl I first kissed, me being me. She wore only an above-the-knee black knit dress and I had no idea how she kept warm. She sat in front of me the flight to Atlanta and slept. The woman next to me also did, and even my contorted leap over her after I closed her empty tray table to use the facilities failed to wake her. But, I did not sleep. A movie with Drew Barrymore and somebody who the magazine told me was Justin Long filled the screens. I closed my eyes, with my souvenir Virgin Atlantic first class (we got upgraded long ago twice in a row as a miracle akin to lightning twice striking) eyeshade, superior to the cheaper kinds even if the strap keeping it in place was wonky, attempting to bring me into a Beckettian state of repose like Murphy in his rocking chair in his garret.

At least the train worked back in Atlanta. This was the one out of four flights where I was not near the bathrooms and at the tail-end of the plane, so I got off quickly and walked past customs and the girl with the brown rice. "Welcome back," said the central-casting official as I handed my declaration to him.

There's not much else to report. I changed out of my thermal gear in the bathroom, which took forever. I had an hour to wait. I heard the pitch over and over of the woman enticing walkers into her lair by a pleasant entreaty to sign them up for credit cards with SkyMiles. I circled a "Simply Books" shop where the employees glared at my every move. The Delta kiosk for recharging devices is configured so you cannot use a plug with a side-USB slot, so I perched near a football game blaring above. I pecked out a few messages on my phone, finally in Wi-Fi land.

The flight was jammed, being filled with babies and luggage and families. This time I sat at the back where an "unpleasant odor," as the attendant phrased it on the intercom, permeated the plane. A toilet was broken. We waited ninety minutes on the runway for a starter mechanism to be repaired. Due to the holiday weekend, the passengers had no way to get another flight as all were full. I leafed through SkyMall magazine and reflected on how many products there were not only for dogs but to recharge iPhones on the go, and none for Droids. I used mine carefully, and listened to a calming set of songs, however depressing at times, me being me, that I had put on it: albums by the well-named Bedhead that were rather narcotizing, and the only Belle & Sebastian LP I found consistently listenable, "If You're Feeling Sinister."

Both hefty men between me and the aisle drank beers and played video games non-stop and watched football but never budged. I did once, in desperation to use that darned bathroom. I tried the Delta audio selections, the device being on this flight again, but the interference to the Mozart from perhaps the movie channel drove me back to the narcotic files stored on my phone.Despite all my grousing, my habitual fears, I do love going over there to see old friends and to meet new ones. I was lonely, even if I am a loner, and I welcome the graciousness with which so many met me and looked after me in ways large and small, humbly and quietly. I hope I repaid them with sufficient warmth despite my off-kilter presence of body and mind. I went over the conversations I'd had in Ireland, and the cadences I'd heard, and I sought comfort, wisdom, and peace.

So, back to my own city's inferno, bottom row of the stacked lanes that circle Dantean LAX endlessly. I was the last one off the plane, and I passed a beaming woman who pushed her pallet of trash cans past the dwindling bands of those still waiting to depart. The couple at the last row of the aircraft had been bound for Honolulu, and that flight had been kept waiting for them. I was glad to be at the terminus of my terminal.

A Russian-ish middle-aged jowly blocky man, smoking in a leather jacket and flowered shirt even as the temperature was quite cutting by Angeleno standards, blocked the loading zone in a black Mercedes. He stood on the passenger side, slouched by a young, fair-haired, thinly-clad (I thought of the miniskirted femmes marching in heels down frigid Eustace Street) girl, maybe his daughter. (I hope so given the central-casting alternative.) He refused to move. To my delight, he was being written up by the officer as My Younger Son and My Wife pulled up to fetch me.

Justice rarely comes in this exile in this vale of tears compared to the purgatorial afterlife, but I took it as a good omen to end upon.