BOSTON: VOICES AND VISIONS

Time flies . . . whether you’re having fun or not. And it sure has flown by as far as my blogging is concerned: I haven’t posted an entry in more than two months. I’ll not bother to proffer excuses; instead I’ll try to get back in blogging stride with the words below . . . which are actually, verbatim, a transcription of the brief remarks I had the pleasure—and the honor—of offering a week or so ago (on November 4th, to be exact) to lead off the celebration of the publication of the latest title in the catalogue of the University of Massachusetts Press, Boston: Voices and Visions, an anthology edited by my friend and colleague Shaun O’Connell. I am prompted to post these remarks in blog form partly to justify the posting of the pleasing snapshot of Shaun and yours truly (see below), taken by UMass Boston master photographer Harry Brett, that landed in my inbox this morning!

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For most of you gathered here today, Shaun O’Connell is the proverbial “man who needs no introduction.” Now in his 46th year as a member of the UMass Boston English Department, Shaun is the literal “last man standing” of the literal “founding fathers” of both the University and the Department. Picturing how the highlight reel of that exemplary career would play—the decades of teaching, of writing, of serving the Department and the University in myriad ways, of representing UMass Boston beyond these walls as a major public intellectual—we might all recall how Fyodor Dostoevsky, acknowledging the influence of short story master Nikolai Gogol, reportedly once said of an entire generation of Russian writers, “We have all come out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’.” (“The Overcoat” being one of Gogol’s signature short stories.) Shaun O’Connell’s “overcoat”—in Irish (I can’t resist), his cóta mór . . . his great coat—has been just as capacious. Colleague, mentor and friend to so many of us over almost five decades, those descriptors could well chime with William Butler Yeats’s praise reserved for Major Robert Gregory: “Soldier, scholar, horseman, he . . .”

But I come not to bury Shaun—not even in mounds of collegial admiration and personal affection—nor simply to praise him inadequately, but to give some sort of context for Boston: Voices and Visions.

Actually, Shaun himself gives that context in his first book, Imagining Boston: A Literary Landscape, published 20 years ago this month. In that book Shaun established the essential coordinates for a coherent reading of—or mapping of—what he described as the “emblems and visions of place created by Greater Boston’s writers, writers who have invented and extended America’s sense of the city upon a hill.” Titling the seminal chapter “Hawthorne’s Boston and Other Imaginary Places,” Shaun set in motion his critical and scholarly analysis of a broad cross-section of writers—from our own Phillis Wheatley through William Dean Howells and Henry James to Edwin O’Connor and John Updike and beyond—who have indeed imagined into literary life not just “a city upon a hill” (or “the Athens of America” or “the Hub of the solar system”) but countless variations on the theme of Boston and environs as place and as possibility.

In one respect, Boston: Voices and Visions reads as Shaun O’Connell’s revisiting of that earlier inscription of Boston’s literary landscape by way of incisive introductions that frame the six thematic groupings of his generous selection of primary texts. The crucial difference, however, is that by way of Shaun’s carefully-chosen medley of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—extending from John Winthrop in 1630 to Patricia Powell (our former UMass Boston colleague) in 2004—this wide-ranging and far-reaching anthology adds high relief contours to that earlier mapping of Boston’s literary terrain. In a sense, it is the complement to, or perhaps even the completion of, that earlier project. Twenty years in the making? Shaun himself should be feeling high relief right about now!

But around six weeks ago, I was chatting with Shaun about the imminent publication of Boston: Voices and Visions. As blasphemous as it might sound, we ended up talking about the “pertinence” (or was it the “impertinence”?) of such a compilation in our age of Googlebooks and other electronic media that put entire libraries at our fingertips. Shaun wondered: “What is the place of such an anthology in this day and age?” Good question. And I hope that I proffered a good answer. “It’s a way of shaping the conversation,” I started. Then I became appropriately metaphorical: “It’s about defining the topography . . . of putting the full scope of ‘literary Boston’ literally on the map, not only for today’s readers but also for posterity.” I wish that I had had my wits—or my wit—sufficiently about me to borrow from John Winthrop and say, “The eyes of all people are upon you.” I was a bit more prosaic but no less certain: “It’s your legacy, Shaun.” And today, as we come together to help Shaun launch this landmark and landmarking book, we are the immediate beneficiaries . . .

HEY ROSETTA! . . . LIVE AT THE MIDDLE EAST DOWNSTAIRS

For the past couple of weeks there’s been an annoying ad on tv. I think it’s for some model of compact car . . . though it could actually be for car insurance. It features a young woman with a bland nasally voice and uninflected delivery who purports to be in a hipster band on some sort of tour. She’s wearing cut-off shorts (denim, I think) and fishnet (I think) stockings. A couple of mornings ago, my wife asked: “Who dresses like that in real life?” Well, we found out the answer that night—that would be this past Wednesday night—when we paid our first visit ever to The Middle East Downstairs, a longstanding Cambridge music venue that seems to feature mostly alternative rock bands. And the answer was: “Just about every young woman at The Middle East dresses like that.” We were amused. I guess we didn’t read the small print on The Middle East website about the dress code!

But even if we had dressed the part, it would have been tough for us to blend in to the predominantly twenty-something crowd gathered in the cavern-like performance space to see and hear the triple-bill of bands performing there that night. We had our twenty-something daughter with us—maybe she gave us some “street cred” . . . or maybe not: maybe she just confirmed how old we really are. But we weren’t really there to blend in—we were there to see the opening act, a band from St. John’s, Newfoundland called Hey Rosetta! Or actually we were there to see the violin player, Kinley Dowling, the daughter of our good old friends Alan and Estelle. Kinley is on tour with the core quartet of Hey Rosetta!, joining with a cello player to add some Electric Light Orchestra-like texture to their basic folk-rock sound. Hey Rosetta! played a well-received 45-minute set: we have their CD Into Your Lungs, so we were pleased to see them live and in person. And we were very happy to have some visiting time with the lovely Kinley, whom we hadn’t seen for quite a few years: she fit right in with those hip twenty-somethings . . . even though she wasn’t wearing cut-offs with fishnets. Our daughter remarked afterwards: “All the guys thought she was cool . . . and all the girls were jealous of her.” I couldn’t get my camera to work in the low-low light of Downstairs, but I’ve tracked down a video on YouTube from just after Kinley joined the band in Los Angeles in mid-August on their current connect-the-dots North American tour. Check it out!

Kinley mentioned that when the tour ends in Montreal she’ll hop on a plane to Vancouver to perform with another rising star from the vibrant eastern Canadian music scene, Jenn Grant . . . who happens to be the sister of another of our old good friends. Maybe they’ll end up at The Middle East some evening. We’d know how to dress the next time . . .

TEN YEARS AFTER . . . THIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATER

A couple of weeks ago, driving by the Simmons Sports Centre in Charlottetown, PEI, I had a flashback to a rock concert that I sneaked into sometime in the early 1970s at that unlikely venue (a small hockey arena in a mostly residential neighborhood). The band was April Wine. They were formed in Halifax in the late 1960s and eventually found not only a national but even a south-of-the-border following. Their signature sound of twin lead guitars is still catchy a full 40 years later, and I have three of their tunes—“You Could Have Been a Lady,” “Bad Side of the Moon,” and “Roller”—on my iPod. As this old video shows, they were a tight band with a distinctive presence.

One flashback prompting another, I have to observe that today marks the 35th anniversary of a “road trip” that my friend Marty and I made from Charlottetown to Moncton, New Brunswick—we took my family’s old VW Beetle on the car ferry from Borden to Cape Tormentine—to see the British blues-rockers Ten Years After perform there at the Coliseum. Listening now (literally now) to TYA’s Recorded Live album, I am transported back to that transporting night when Alvin Lee lived up to (if not beyond) his “guitar hero” reputation. This video from 1975 would be pretty much what we saw and heard . . . but I remember the live show being in color!

THE BIG HOUSE + THE LANDMARK CAFE + PARADE DAY

In Ireland, the phrase “The Big House” is historically laden with baggage—political, social, economic, cultural—associated with the mansions (and sometimes castles) that dotted the countryside as homes to mostly Anglo-Protestant landholders whose identification and self-identification with Great Britain emblematized the conflicted relationship between colonizing Britain and colonized Ireland.

Believe me, then, when I say that we have our tongues firmly planted in our cheeks when we call our summer farmhouse rental on Prince Edward Island “The Big House.” By PEI standards it is a fairly substantial residence—especially for a farmhouse more than 150 years old: it includes 5 bedrooms , 2.5 baths, 2 parlors, a dining room and a spacious modern kitchen . . . all fully updated by its current owner (a descendant of the original owner . . . of Irish stock, I might add). Oh yes, there’s also a little room at the front of the house, in that little centre gable on the second floor—apparently this was known as “The Priest’s Room” because back in the day the priest coming out from Charlottetown on Saturday evening to say Sunday mass at St. Martin’s Church (about a mile up the road) would stay over in that room. The house is perfectly located for our vacation—a short walk across a road and down a lane to the south shore beach that I grew up on and that our daughters have known for their entire lives. We first rented the farmhouse in 2004 when another rental we had arranged fell through: we just spent our 7th family vacation under its roof . . . and expect to keep returning to it as our “summer home” well into the future.

A few years ago I took a photo from the back steps of the Big House that continues to please me. It shows the various barns and sheds still standing on the property: they’ve been repainted recently, but in this photograph they reflect the Island tradition of farmers painting the corner trim red on outbuildings so that they would be able find their way to them to tend to the livestock during winter blizzards. Or so my sister told me many years ago: she was working as a guide on a tour bus at the time, and such arcane knowledge was essential to her spiel. She also told how the cattle were complaining about the new technology at the time that allowed hay to be rolled into bales rather than cubed: apparently the cows claimed that they could no longer get “a square meal.”

As usual, this year’s version of our annual pilgrimage to PEI was filled with highlights involving family and friends—including various dinner gatherings at The Big House. Despite having only one week to squeeze in a whole year’s worth of visiting and general holidaying, we also managed to get “out and about.” One especially nice outing was a jaunt to the attractive village of Victoria-By-the-Sea for a meal at the Landscape Café. My wife and I had eaten there once before—around 20 years ago (it has been open for 21 years)—and our return visit with our daughters and my father was well worth waiting for: tasty food served up in the interesting atmosphere of a renovated general store.

One other “detail” of our visit worth mentioning is the Gold Cup and Saucer Parade, which for almost 50 years has added pomp and circumstance to the culminating harness race of the year at the Charlottetown Driving Park. The Gold Cup and Saucer Race also marks the end of Old Home Week . . . which in turn pretty much marks the end of summer on the Island. This year—for the first time since 2007—I marched in the parade as a member of the Charlottetown Community Clash Band . . . an intentionally ragtag gathering of local musicians (well, many of us are “former” music students) who have been showing up and creating a scene for the past 20 years or so. What we lack in rehearsal time we make up with enthusiasm and energy. Last year I watched the parade from the sidewalk and realized that I had more fun in previous years when I marched. So I found my old saxophone under a bed in my boyhood home, went to one of the two rehearsals, and then stepped out with a rush of adrenaline when the drumrolls started. Could there be a better way to observe the end of summer?

THE BLUES SCALE

Usually I don’t have to make New Year’s resolutions: my wife makes them for me. But this past January, I decided to challenge myself to shed a few pounds—20 pounds to be exact. Well, I did better than that, losing a total of 24.2 pounds in a little less than 5 months, which brought me back to my marriage weight just in time for our 25th wedding anniversary. That was in May. Since then I’ve backslid a bit: nine days in Dublin in June didn’t help; nor have all of the caloric temptations of the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. So last weekend I resolved to get back on the exercise wagon—well, back into the gym—with renewed commitment . . . which also required adding some new music to my iPod shuffle.

For much of my run for the roses during the winter and spring, I listened either to my 137-song “Rock Party” playlist or to my 50-song “Blues You Can Use” playlist. But at a couple of crucial points I tuned in exclusively to a couple of albums that I had been tempted by but had never gotten around to adding to my music library. The first was Piety Street by John Scofield. I wrote a lengthy blog post about Scofield and his band after I saw them perform at the Regattabar in Cambridge a year-and-a-half ago. Worrying that their recording would not come close to their terrific live act, I resisted the temptation of picking up the CD . . . but finally I succumbed—and I am happy to admit that my worrying was completely unwarranted. Ostensibly an album of gospel music, Piety Street is really a blues album of the first order, with Scofield’s guitar front and center—and it was just what I needed to keep me on the straight and narrow of the treadmill during the dark days of February.

But it wasn’t all that I needed: after years of having guitar hero Rick Derringer’s album Blues Deluxe in my shopping cart, I also finally added it to my listening mix. And what a great addition it proved to be: every single tune on the album—mostly blues standards—is a keeper . . . and the whole package certainly kept me go-go-going during March.

But now it’s August—the dog days, no less—and once again I am looking to the blues to tip the scale in my favor. So I currently have cued up on my iPod shuffle a pair of albums, by local blues bands, that I’ve been deferring the pleasure of listening to for a while . . . until now. One is Low Expectations by Ernie and the Automatics, a blues/rhythm-n-blues/rock unit that has been making some noise around here for the past couple of years. Part of their claim to fame is that a couple of the band members—guitarist Barry Goudreau and drummer Sib Hashian—are alums of the legendary “corporate rock” band Boston. Another part of their claim to fame is that the “Ernie” who lends the band half its moniker (he also plays rhythm guitar) is Ernie Boch, Jr., who sports a household name thanks to his late father, who owned several major car dealerships in the Boston area. Come on down! But the band is truly greater than the sum of its parts—which also include Brian Maes on keyboards and vocals, Mike “Tunes” Antunes on tenor sax, and Tim Archibald on bass. Low Expectations features tunes with super-tight arrangements, catchy hooks and fine guitar, piano, and sax work. I should get some pretty good mileage out of it. (I might also mention that Ernie and the Automatics are well worth catching live and in-person: I saw them at Firefly’s in Quincy back in January—they were barbeque hot!)

The other album that I added last weekend is Living in the Light by Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters, a band that I wrote about at length on this blog a year or so ago. This album came out not long after I saw them in concert in Arlington, and coincidentally, I was in the guitar repair shop in Winchester run by bass player Jim Mouradian and his son Jon on the morning that Jim received his copy of the CD—it was just sitting on the counter unopened and unlistened to: so it has been on my radar screen for quite a while. Well, it was worth waiting for . . . though the blues stylings are really quite different from those generated by Ernie and the Automatics. First of all, they are much more gospel-oriented, fueled considerably by Hammond B3 organ player Dave Limina and also by pianist Dave Maxwell on a couple of numbers. Also, some of the vocal numbers, delivered by Kim Wilson and Dave Keller, are a bit earnest (no pun intended on Boch, Jr.) lyrically: “What Can I Do For You” might be too overtly religious for some listeners’ tastes, “Child of a Survivor” has the Holocaust as its subject (an unlikely subject for a blues tune), and “Donna Lee” is a very personal tribute to Ronnie Earl’s wife. But, almost needless to say, the quality of the music—with Earl’s guitar the main event—is first-rate. With Jim Mouradian on bass and Lorne Entress on drums, Earl and Limina deliver the goods. No less than Ernie and the Automatics, Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters should help to keep me on track for my daily workout.

DUNKIN' DUGOUT . . .

So . . . last night my wife and I took our three daughters and a boyfriend of one of them to the Red Sox-Indians game at Fenway Park. It wasn’t the most dramatic game of the year . . . though we were already on our feet applauding the return of Mike Lowell to the lineup (he had been on the injured reserve list since late June) when he really lifted us up by hitting the first pitch he faced into the Monster seats, delivering what proved to be the winning run in a 3-1 Sox victory. Josh Beckett, who I checked out during his pre-game warmup in the bullpen, pitched very well—he allowed only three hits (one of them a solo home run) and was able to wriggle out of the several minor jams that he found himself in.

We enjoyed the game and the entire evening despite sitting in nosebleed seats—Row 48 (out of 50) in Section 41 of the bleachers: we were just two rows below the seats donated by Dunkin’ Donuts every game to kids in Boys and Girls Clubs and similar non-profit and charitable organizations. The Dunkin’ Dugout.

Fenway Park has its history, and it has its traditions—though some of them are relatively recent, like the en masse singing in the late innings of Neil Diamond’s hit “Sweet Caroline” and the Dropkick Murphys’ “Tessie” and even “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night. (The singing of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at the seventh-inning stretch goes without saying.) But we also have a family tradition at Fenway that involves a visit, before the game, to a particular sausage stand on the street outside the ballpark. It is run by the family of a teacher our daughters had in high school: he works at the stand himself, and he and the girls always have happy reunions whenever we make it to a game. Not that we’re superstitious, but we have to believe that our faithful observance of that tradition contributes to the success that has become another Sox “tradition” in recent years!

DOG DUTY

I’m not quite sure how this happened, but somehow I have ended up on dog duty for our neighbors, keeping an eye on their two Chihuahuas for a day or so. Are these creatures even dogs? I’m not so sure. One of them looks like a chinchilla; the other is what is known as a teacup Chihuahua—the sort of critter that hides in Britney Spears’ handbag. My cat would eat them for breakfast . . . if she could ever catch up with them: they sure are hyper, and they sure do move fast!

I think their names are Zoey and Bella, but I’m not sure which is which, so—taking a page out of Vicki Hearne’s book Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name, in which she emphasizes the importance of giving a pet a distinctive individual name—I call them Scruffy and Baldy.

PRETTY WOMAN

All cats are beautiful, and they know it . . . including my cat, Honey, who recently posed herself (obviously for comparative purposes) next to a cover photo of Julia “Pretty Woman” Roberts.

O'DOCHERTY SLEEPS . . .

This morning’s Boston Globe included the sad news of the death, last month, of Boston-based Irish-born painter and musician David O’Docherty. Reading his obituary, I was transported first of all back to my earliest days in Boston, in 1984—specifically to my first visit to The Black Rose, a landmark Irish pub near Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market. One of the distinctive features of the pub at that time was a large painting (probably 4’ x 7’) of faces and profiles all blended together into a sort of Chagall-esque expressionistic dreamscape. The painting, by O’Docherty, was titled Finnegan’s Sleep , an obvious allusion to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—that “lingerous longerous book of the dark”—and featured many recognizable figures with literary associations in particular: Joyce, his character Leopold Bloom from Ulysses, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Sean O’Casey, Seamus Heaney. . . . Needless to say, I found the painting both eye-catching and intriguing . . . and I was prompted to arrange for O’Docherty to have a show of his paintings at the Harbor Gallery at UMass Boston. A quarter-century later, most of the details of that event have faded from my memory, but I do know that the show included Finnegan’s Sleep. I bought a poster of that piece and it has hung in my office ever since. . . .

But I was also transported back to some point in the past decade when I happened to be in the vicinity of Downtown Crossing and my ear was drawn to the sound of an Irish jig being played on a tin whistle. I had not seen David O’Docherty since the mid-1980s, but I immediately recognized him as the man behind the music. I am quite sure that he was not busking —he was just playing his whistle for the joy of playing and for the joy that his playing gave to others. After a few minutes we made eye contact and then we had a nice chat: he was a gentle and generous spirit. Reading his obituary this morning, I remember with happiness that chance meeting by way of his musical talent so many years after we first crossed paths by way of his talent as a painter.

DISRAELI GEARS

I’m sitting in Cakes right now, a coffee and baked goods shop located a block or so from my house. My trusty steed is tethered to a signpost outside the window—the same signpost I tied it to a week or so ago when the chain slipped off its teeth and got jammed in the rear sprockets. I was on my way to the gym and didn’t feel like taking time to fix the bike’s problem, so I simply dismounted, locked it up, and walked the rest of the way. When I got to the gym I texted my wife to let her know what happened: I worried that she might drive by the coffee shop and notice my bike there and think that I was “cheating”—stopping in for a cupcake instead of burning off last night’s cupcakes (metaphorical) on the treadmill.

A couple of days ago, the Tour de France bicycle race was scandalized by a similar situation. No, not a rider being falsely accused of stopping for a cupcake (ou peut-être une crêpe?) . . . but the leader, the guy in the yellow jersey, having his chain slip off its sprocket, which allowed another rider to pass him and ultimately win that stage of the race and thus get to wear the yellow jersey the next day. Apparently this was a violation of bike-racing etiquette. Sacre bleu! That’s a very nuanced notion of fair play . . .

Anyway . . . all of this reminds me of that fine album released by the supergroup/power trio known as Cream—Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker—back in 1967. Just for the sake of Clapton’s utterly sculpted guitar solo on “Sunshine of Your Love,” Disraeli Gears could be a desert island essential. Cream trivialogists will know that the album’s title derives not from the name of 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli but from a roadie’s mispronunciation of the word “derailleur” when he chipped in to Clapton’s chatting about buying a racing bicycle with that so-named gear mechanism. Those same trivialogists will also know that “Badge,” another song recorded by Cream (on the album Goodbye), derives its title from Clapton’s misreading of the word “bridge” (as inscribed by song co-writer, Beatle George Harrison) on a sheet of paper with lyrics and chords. How random. Speaking of random . . . I wonder what the odds are that either of those songs would pop up on my iPod Shuffle when I’m on the treadmill at the gym thinking about eating cupcakes and watching Tour de France highlights on ESPN?

ON THE ROAD AGAIN . . .

I’m not sure how or when a trip to Annapolis, MD got on my calendar . . . but I can now add that quaint state capital to my list of been-there-done-that places. The temperature was pushing a withering 100 degrees during my evening/morning visit, but I still managed to walk the heart-of-downtown streets three times and mostly liked what I saw . . . including the Starbucks in the cellar of the Maryland Inn. It was a cool haven . . . with a cool vibe as it was once a happening jazz club called the King of France Tavern. The wall-hangings include photos and clippings of jazz greats who played there—Teddy Wilson, Chet Baker, Charlie Byrd . . . and my old friend Gene Bertoncini. In fact, a clipping from 1979 previewing Gene’s performance there with bassist Michael Moore prompted me to cue up their album Two in Time on my iPod as I sat there: time travel!

I wish that I could have been transported so easily on my drive down to Annapolis. Whenever I’m on a road trip—no matter where I am—I keep my eye out for Prince Edward Island license plates: it drives my wife crazy, but I always assume that I would know anyone from that small common ground. Well, this time I ended up getting a long close-up look at a PEI license plate while sitting behind a tractor-trailer for a full hour in virtually standstill traffic in the vicinity of Lyme, CT. I didn’t get a look at the driver, though: when the jam finally broke, I was off to the races . . .

My lucky wife had flown down to Annapolis on Monday, so she was spared that traffic. But the trip back to Boston was even worse—we lost easily two hours sitting in a bumper-to-bumper gridlock trying to get onto the George Washington Bridge in NYC. According to the car thermometer, the outside temperature was 108 degrees—so hot that the GPS device in the front window shut down . . . not that we needed it at the rate we were moving!

But the trip back from Annapolis did have an upside—an overnight in Philadelphia . . . a city I had never visited before, but would happily return to again. Mostly we just wandered the streets—no agenda beyond getting a feel for the place. We had a hotel room right in the center of the city—on the 27th floor looking out on City Hall. But the real highlight was our evening of random wandering that included first a fine pint at a fine pub called The Black Sheep and, much later, a terrific meal at Lolita, a Mexican restaurant on 13th Street. Like a number of restaurants we checked out, Lolita has a BYOB license—which we were not prepared for. So imagine our delight when our server said that she would see if anyone had left anything behind that we might enjoy . . . and sure enough, she showed up at our table with a fairly substantial quantity of Jose Cuervo tequila. The food itself was outstanding—but with tequila thrown into the mix (as it were), we ended the night truly in Margaritaville!

The next morning, before hitting the road back to Boston, we wandered around Philly both on foot and by car . . . for a couple of very hot but very pleasant hours. I found the heart of the city stunningly attractive—almost Parisian in the grand scale of its buildings (and of the architectural styles). I kept on thinking “Philadelphia, Here I Come!”—I hope to get back there sooner rather than later . . .

IN FULL SWING . . . JEAN McKENNA O'DONNELL

This morning’s tide of emails brought home all the usual flotsam and jetsam—notices of new releases on Amazon.com and on iTunes, various barely resistible offers for health products, the daily overtures from Nigerian scam artists addressing me as “Beloved one,” a reminder from my University bookstore that I had not yet placed by book order for the Fall semester. . . . But one message floated to the top of all those—news of an event that I’m going to try to squeeze onto the calendar for July 18th: a concert at Greenvale Vineyards in Portsmouth, RI featuring jazz vocalist Jean McKenna O’Donnell. The concert is scheduled for 1:00-4:00 p.m. and admission is free. The event also features wine tastings.

I first met Jean about 7 years ago and at the time she was a long-retired jazz chanteuse. Prodded by her proud husband, she confessed that “in her day” she could hold her own with a big band swinging behind her. I think that in the course of our chat it emerged that she has fine musical bloodlines—her brother is the legendary jazz pianist Dave McKenna (now departed). So fast-forward about 5 years to the first time I actually heard Jean sing . . . at a concert in Woonsocket, RI memorializing her late brother. That was in December of 2008. The concert itself was warm and poignant as it featured a number of New England jazz musicians who played with Dave McKenna during his lengthy career. But the concert also served notice that Jean was back on the scene! She had just released a CD—appropriately titled Full Circle, as indeed she had come full circle, returning to the bandstand quite a long while after first making a name for herself. It was great to see her performing in the tribute to her brother . . .

And so this morning when I got that email, I immediately spun the dial on my iPod and summoned up Full Circle for a good listen. Comprising mostly tunes from the Great American Songbook—“You Stepped Out of a Dream,” “Taking a Chance on Love,” “I’m Old Fashioned,” “I’ve Got a Crush on You”—it’s an altogether pleasing compilation. Supported by Mike Renzi on piano, Dick Johnson on alto sax and clarinet, Marshall Wood on bass, and Jon Wheatley on guitar, Jean is in fine company and in fine vocal form. The CD is a real treat!

No doubt Jean will be singing some of those gems on July 18th at Greenvale Vineyards, which is located on the Sakonnet River just five miles north of downtown Newport, RI. For more details, contact Greenvale Vineyards (582 Wapping Rd., Portsmouth, RI) at (401) 847-3777.

THE MONIKERS . . . MAKING A NAME FOR THEMSELVES

So last night I was out on a hot date . . . with my middle daughter. On her recommendation, we took in an evening of music at All Asia in Central Square in Cambridge that included—for us, featured—a rockin’ four-person band called The Monikers. A great name for a band! I had seen this foursome before—many times before . . . mostly sitting in our kitchen or in our family room, sometimes strumming guitars and singing Beatles tunes (one night the entirety of Abbey Road, word for word, chord for chord, note for note . . . until 2:00 in the morning). But I had never heard them perform under their official moniker . . .

Well now I have, and they are well worth catching “live and in person.” Not only do these self-styled “hipsters” look the part with their skinny-legged jeans and their moppish haircuts—they live up to their appearance with their playing and singing. And with their songwriting. And with their onstage performing. Hey, they’re not just making a name for themselves—they make a spectacle of themselves . . . led by Francis Anderson on guitar, keyboard, and lead vocal: he really creates a scene all by himself! And he’s backed up with real finesse by Peter Chinman on lead guitar and supporting vocal, by Tim Marchetta-Wood on room-thumpin’ bass, and by Erica Warner holding them all together with impressive work on the drum kit. They threw a few covers into their set—most notably a show-stopping arrangement of the Beatles’ iconic “Let It Be”—but mainly played catchy original tunes with titles like “Dressed Up in Yellow,” “That’s What She Said,” and “Catch a Little Rainbow.” (A nice touch: the band provided takeaway lyric sheets.)

I hear that The Monikers have a few more gigs lined up for the summer. Check out their website. And catch them if you can!

PLUS ÇA CHANGE

Just a day or so before heading across the pond for Dublin, I found a photograph of myself from a visit to Ireland in 1987—“Exhibit A” supporting my longstanding claim that I didn’t have a gray hair on my head before I became the father of three daughters.

That photo may not be a fair gauge of change for this visit . . . but inevitably I have been tuning in to various other measures. One that struck me particularly on my last couple of nights is the proliferation of taxis. Last night—my last night in Dublin, spent happily in the company of my friends Fionán and Paula and their fine children Oisín and Laoise—I needed less than 15 seconds to flag down a cab in the northside community of Drumcondra. I don’t think I would be exaggerating much to say that close to 50% of the cars driving the streets of Dublin at 1:00 in the morning were taxis. Chatting with the driver on the way back to the Burlington Hotel, I learned that this radical change came about partly because of an intense enforcement of drunk driving laws in Ireland and partly because of a deregulation of the taxi industry, which allowed pretty much every man and his dog to buy a hackney medallion and get into the business.

Another gauge, of course, is the gradual disappearance of various Dublin landmarks with literary associations—especially Joycean associations. One that I happened to notice whose days are numbered is the Ormond Hotel, site of the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses . . . and until recently site of the “Sirens Bar” as well. It is now shuttered and up for sale: I imagine the wrecker’s ball and the developer’s dream will give an entirely new face to that old Liffey quay.

But some things also remain the same—including Bewley’s Café as an essential place to grab a bite to eat and a restorative cup of tea or coffee. There used to be a number of Bewley’s locations in Dublin—there are fewer now and the only one that I visited is on Grafton Street. I had a great lunch there on Saturday with my old friend Robert Duffy, who drove up from Hacketstown, Co. Carlow for the afternoon. Robert and I go all the way back to 1977 and have managed to keep our connections alive over the years by get-togethers on both sides of the pond—in Indiana, in Boston, in Carlow. But we hadn’t seen each other since 1998, so it was great to get caught up on personal, familial, professional, and writerly matters: just before I left for Ireland I read about halfway through Jack in the Box, an engaging collection of short stories, set mostly in small-town Ireland, that Robert published a year or so ago. . . . After Bewley’s, just to punctuate—or “christen”—the reunion properly, we decided to grab a pint at one of Dublin’s true landmark pubs, McDaid’s. Associated with Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan, among many other writers of “Bohemian Dublin” of the 1950s, it is a grand place to raise a toast to “the good auld days.” But as one more measure of change, right across the street from McDaid’s, in front of the Bruxelles nightclub, stands a larger-than-life-sized statue of the late Phil Lynott, lead singer of the band Thin Lizzy that rocked the charts back in my student days in Dublin in the late ’70s. It seemed apt that Robert and I pose for a shot with the man who sang on the hit single “The Boys Are Back in Town”!

46A

Back in the day, the Burlington Hotel was a pretty fashionable address. But times have changed—several times—and now even a visiting academic with a small budget can afford to stay there. The hotel is still stylish and well-maintained, and for my money I could not have asked for more. And as for location, location, location . . . well, it was about a 12-minute walk to anywhere I wanted to go in the heart of Dublin—the National Library, the National Gallery, St. Stephen’s Green, Grafton Street—and also my old stomping grounds of Ranelagh and Rathmines. It’s also on the AirCoach bus line—a direct ride from and to the airport for just 8 Euros each way—and it’s on a couple of regular bus lines as well, the #11 that goes far into the northside and the 46A that goes south. . . .

I took the 46A last night out to meet my old friends Bairbre and Gerry (and their sons Oisín and Eoin) at my old “local” back in 1977-78, Byrne’s Galloping Green pub on the dual carriageway in Stillorgan. Bairbre was one of the first people I met when I came to Dublin as a student in 1977—we’ve almost fallen out of touch a couple of times, and I hadn’t seen her and Gerry since 1998 (in Galloping Green) and had never met their handsome young sons. But seeing them after a dozen years made no big difference—time collapses under the substance of old friendships and we spent a wonderful few hours together. Now if only I could do justice to Gerry’s stories—including several about a friend’s yellow Ford car! Gerry was insistent that his stories were not only “good” but also “true” . . . Hmmm.

Perhaps needless to say, seeing Bairbre and Gerry under the roof of the Galloping Green pub brought back many memories for me, some with literary associations. One of them is Galloping Green’s claim to literary fame as the only pub that barred legendary writer Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien/Myles na Gopaleen from its premises . . . in writing. (Clearly, publican Jerry Byrne, who ran the establishment when I frequented it and who wrote the letter, took serious exception to something!) I believe that incident is recorded either in Anthony Cronin’s biography of his crony, No Laughing Matter, or in Peter Van de Kamp’s illustrated biography of the author of my favorite novel of all time, At Swim-Two-Birds. In fact, as I was riding the bus out to Galloping Green I had yet another memory . . . of my first-ever pint of Guinness, which I enjoyed at Kiely’s of Donnybrook, a well-known pub which happens to be on the 46A bus route. Not long after that experience, in September of 1977, I read for the first time this passage in At Swim-Two-Birds:

We sat in Grogan’s with our faded overcoats finely disarrayed on easy chairs in the mullioned snug. I gave a shilling and two pennies to a civil man who brought us in return two glasses of black porter, imperial pint measure. I adjusted the glasses to the front of each of us and reflected on the solemnity of the occasion. It was my first taste of porter.

The mind may be impaired by alcohol, I mused, but withal it may be pleasantly impaired. Personal experience appeared to me the only satisfactory means to the resolution of my doubts. Knowing it was my first one, I quietly fingered the butt of my glass before I raised it. Lightly I subjected myself to an inward interrogation.

Nature of interrogation: Who are my future cronies, where our mad carousals? . . .

Ah, what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed . . .

Anyway, there’s a funny story about Kiely’s pub, told by author Benedict Kiely—no relation to the publican, though he lived almost directly across Morehampton Road from the pub for the last couple of decades of his life. Kiely told me this story in person back in 1998, but I think he may have written it somewhere as well. It’s about an American friend who grabbed a cab at the airport and told the driver—vaguely, he thought—“Kiely’s . . . Donnybrook”: when the driver headed off without further details, the American thought that Ben Kiely must have really made a name for himself if even a random cabbie at the airport knew exactly where he lived. The American was dropped off at the pub . . .

ICONS

I didn’t set out to have lunch at the Hard Rock Café today . . . but as I was passing through the Temple Bar area of Dublin I had a “Lestrygonians” moment and, like Bloom, decided to duck in to a convenient establishment for a quick bite. While I was waiting for my fajitas—a brave menu choice deep in the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis?—I took a peek at several books that I picked up this morning: a new volume of poems by my friend Louis de Paor, a substantial gathering of poems by the late Michael Hartnett (about whom I have a little piece in progress), and a compilation of various short writings by James Joyce. Then I decided to record the moment for posterity.

DUBLIN MISCELLANY

As I recall, the Irish Times used to have a regular feature titled “Dublin Miscellany.” Maybe it still does. Well, I’m borrowing that heading as the umbrella for the somewhat random musings that follow . . .

First of all, a simple gauge of the changes that have taken place in Dublin since I last visited in 2005. On that occasion, on my first night back in the city I met my old friend Fionán for a pint at Conway’s pub on Parnell Square South. Competing with The Brazen Head for the title of “the oldest pub in Dublin,” it was for me an emblem of the radical social and economic changes that had taken place in Ireland during the roar of the so-called Celtic Tiger: not only were our pints of Guinness pulled by a woman . . . but that woman was Asian. As Fionán explained to me at the time: Irish-born people no longer work in the service industry. Well, five years later that particular gauge is moot . . . as that one-time claimant for the distinction of ultimate longevity is now shuttered and out of business. Hmmm . . .

Second of all, today I did some particularly Joycean rambling, covering a lot of territory in the process. Around midday I stopped in to the James Joyce Centre on North Great George’s Street. I didn’t know what I would find there . . . and, frankly, I didn’t find much. It provides a very basic introduction to Joyce’s life and his works, mostly via a video and some displays. The major point of interest for Joyce fetishists would probably be the door from #7 Eccles Street, the real-world address for the fictional Leopold and Molly Bloom in Ulysses. Beyond that? Well, I don’t think there is anything beyond the door—it’s all façade!

In contrast, about 8 miles away via the D.A.R.T train, in the seaside town of Sandycove, sits the early 19th-century “Martello” tower that houses the James Joyce Museum, which I visited an hour or so later. I had been there before but I still found it to be “ambient”—Joyce himself lived in the tower briefly, and of course it is the setting for the opening episode of Ulysses, in which Stephen Dedalus’ antagonist Buck Mulligan describes it as “the omphalos” . . . the “navel” of the world. It has some interesting memorabilia, including Joyce’s old guitar and also a beautiful striped necktie given to him in Paris by Samuel Beckett. . . . Close by, of course, is the “Forty Foot” swimming place that Buck Mulligan plunges into at the end of the “Telemachus” episode. (“Forty Foot” also figures prominently in Jamie O’Neill’s fine novel At Swim, Two Boys.) It used to be “For Gentlemen Only”—it was essentially used for bathing in the nude—but is now a family swimming area.

Finally (for this installment), a note about my evening stroll tonight. I decided to see if I could make my way without a map to one of my old addresses—9 Effra Road in Rathmines. Well, I have to admit that I got very lost. I thought that I knew where I was going—I went past my previous “digs,” my bedsitter on Beechwood Avenue Lower, and I went past my friend Joan’s old flat on Dunville Avenue . . . but then I was suddenly in a brave new world: old landmarks had been replaced by new shops and condos, and even once-familiar street names seemed part of an utter “throughotherness.” I did end up in the heart of Rathmines . . . but even using Slattery’s pub (one of my old watering holes back in 1978) as a new starting point, I got desperately lost again. Finally I gave up and took a left turn that I hoped would bring me back in the basic direction I had come from. At the end of that street I paused for a second, my eye drawn by an ultra-modern looking house that was architecturally completely anomalous with the century-old (or more) row houses lining both sides of the street. I was truly stunned to realize that I was standing in front of 9 Effra Road. I had heard years ago in a roundabout way (from my parents, who met my old landlord—who happened to be celebrated Irish playwright, novelist and short story writer Eugene McCabe—when he received an honorary degree, along with my father, from the University of Prince Edward Island) that the house I lived in had burned down; but I had never imagined that it would be replaced by such an anomaly! Oh well . . . I am still in disbelief that I happened upon my old address after I had given up hope of finding it this evening.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS . . .

The social emphasis of my blog posts notwithstanding, my week in Dublin actually has a work-related dimension to it, and today was a total immersion in a couple of projects that are quite literally “earning my keep” here. The first of them, which I am just getting started on, is my “official” reason for making this trip; the second is one that I am literally putting the finishing touches on—I’ll be sending it out the door the day after I get back to Boston.

The first of them involves the work of photographer Fionán O’Connell. Many years ago, I published in Colby Quarterly an essay centered on a selection of his Dublin curbscapes: “Through a Lens Darkly: New Focus on ‘Joyce’s Dublin’.” That essay focused (as it were) on how Fionán’s photos of contemporary Dublin complement the new literature of the city emerging in the early to mid-1990s—the writing of Roddy Doyle, Paula Meehan, and Dermot Bolger, for example—to create essentially a palimpsest over James Joyce’s etched-in-stone (as it were) representation of Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century. This new project involves a series of black-and-white photographs that Fionán happened to shoot around the same time—interior shots of Belvedere College, SJ, where he was teaching at the time. What makes these shots so interesting to me is first of all that they represent a variation on what I call Fionán’s “peripheral vision”—his method of capturing with his lens essentially what an individual might catch, almost subliminally, out of the corner of his/her eye: architectural details, shadows, odd angles of light, the physical texture of the place they were taken. But what compounds my interest is, of course, the Joycean element: like Joyce, O’Connell is an alumnus of Belvedere College—and in an intriguing (yet also coincidental) way, O’Connell’s photographic art shares certain aspects of Joyce’s narrative technique of “stream of consciousness” that he employs at times in Ulysses. Add to this the fact that Belvedere College is the setting for most of Chapter Three of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . . . and you (or I) have the makings of a promising exploration of cross-disciplinary artistic convergence.

So . . . an important dimension of my Dublin visit was my first visit ever to Belvedere College—which included not only a personal tour of the place by alum and former teacher (and current parent of a student) Fionán O’Connell but also an “audience” with the school’s Headmaster, Gerry Foley. By coincidence, I had met Gerry in Boston just a month before I set out for Dublin—that at least gave me a knock on his door. (I had to laugh when I found out that I would be sitting down with Gerry: I met him at an event in Boston in which one of the speakers described how difficult it is to get through to him directly—his responsibilities as Headmaster of Belvedere are all-consuming.) But after a great, wide-ranging chat about matters literary, Joycean, and Jesuitical, I—or Fionán—actually came away from Gerry’s office with literally the keys to every door in the Belvedere compound. With unrestricted and leisurely access to Belvedere, I felt that I was able to absorb for myself some of the “spirit of place” that Fionán registers in his photographs and that Joyce would have registered in person (in a literal, not literary, “stream of consciousness”) during his days as a schoolboy there in the late 1890s. Fionán has sorted and catalogued his Belvedere photos from the mid-1990s: my job now is to find the language of critical engagement to do justice to the idea that I have just sketched. . . .

But that is not the only work-related project I have had on my mind, and on my agenda, while I’ve been here. In fact, as always happens when I visit Ireland, I will come away from this visit with a stockpile a new ideas and a freshening up of old ideas that I already have on the multiple back burners (metaphorical) of my desk (literal). One of these is a follow-up to my twice-published essay on Dublin-based jazz guitarist Louis Stewart. I had the high hope of seeing Stewart play when I was in Dublin . . . but the rumor slipped to me that he was starting up a new residency this coming Sunday was off by one week, alas. . . . But I am still motivated to return to my Stewart materials and pursue another project that I feel has great promise.

However, the day after I get back to Boston I will get into the mail a slightly re-tuned (as it were) version of another music-centered essay—this one on retro rock-’n’-roll band Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers. I was at the band’s debut performance 32 years ago (hard to believe), and have been following their trajectory since their resurrection (as it were—a lot of as it weres in this blog!) on New Year’s Eve of 2005. I had also hoped to see them perform while I was visiting—but as with Louis Stewart, no such luck. Instead . . . I got to play with Rocky himself (a.k.a. novelist, memoirist, screenwriter . . . and, briefly, long-ago classmate of mine, Ferdia Mac Anna) along with the band’s flashy lead guitarist “the Lizard” (a.k.a. Martin Meagher) and also Rocky’s son Finn on drums! Rocky/Ferdia secured a practice space in the bowels of the Button Factory in Temple Bar, the fashionably hip music and arts center of Dublin, and we spent a couple of fine hours together finding musical common ground and enjoying each other’s guitar-centered company. (I didn’t bring a guitar with me, but Ferdia lent me his beautiful red Gibson ES-335—a clone of “Big Red,” the axe played by guitar-hero Alvin Lee of Ten Years After.) We didn’t play “Taking Care of Business” . . . but we should have: for while this get-together was a real treat and a ton of fun, it also added to my serious critical/scholarly interest in the workings of a band named to satirize arguably the most prominent Irish political figure of the twentieth-century, militant nationalist rebel during the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Irish Civil War, founder of the Fianna Fáil political party, prime minister and president Éamon de Valera. The story of the band is interesting in and of itself . . . but that old question “what’s in a name?” really begs to be answered.

That all happened today—Friday, June 18th—deep in the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis.

CANAL BANK WALK

“O commemorate me where there is water,” poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote in a poem titled “Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin,” continuing: “Canal water, preferably, so stilly / Greeny at the heart of summer.” Well, as the photograph affirms, he got his wish in the form of a statue of himself sitting on a bench situated at the side of Grand Canal. I wonder if I earned my own canal-side commemoration after all my walking along its banks today, perhaps my unintentional affirmation of another of Kavanagh’s well-known poems, “Canal Bank Walk”: “Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal / Pouring redemption for me, that I do / The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal, / Grow with nature again as before I grew.” That long, long walk—from Kilmainham back to Ballsbridge (I don’t even know how many miles)—was what linked the two major events of my day.

The first event was a cuppa java with Mary O’Donoghue, an old poet-friend from Boston who has just had her first novel, Before the House Burns, published by Dublin’s Lilliput Press. It’s a beautiful-looking book which I will sit down with when I get back to Boston. She launched it in Galway a week or so ago. I had hoped that she might be launching in Dublin too while I’m here, but no such luck. Back home in County Clare for the summer, Mary just happened to be in Dublin for the day, coming in by train from Galway. We had a nice catch-up at Bewley’s on Grafton Street. And then we walked a few blocks over to catch up with another Boston-based poet-friend, County Monaghan-born Aidan Rooney. Aidan knew he would be seeing Mary, but he did not expect to see me “out of context”! It was great to spend a few minutes with the two of them . . .

Then I set off to do some wandering around Dublin. I had no specific plan beyond simply absorbing the sights and the sounds (and the smells, too) of the city. But I guess I did more than wander—I just kept on going, following streets rather than a map . . . and eventually I realized that I was headed toward the infamous Kilmainham Gaol. Dating back to the late 18th century, this prison housed not only the full range of criminals—from debtors and petty thieves to ruthless murderers—but also many of the major figures of Ireland’s struggle for political autonomy—from Robert Emmett and Charles Stewart Parnell at either end of the 19th century to the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 (Pádraig Pearse, Éamon de Valera, Countess Markiewicz), fifteen of whom were executed by firing squad in the stone-breaking yard within the prison walls. The prison was decommissioned in 1924 then stood in disrepair until the mid-1980s, when it was restored and opened as a museum of—and a monument to—the Irish nationalist cause. Obviously, the conditions under which the prisoners lived were horrendous. I found my visit to Kilmainham to be very moving and very thought-provoking about what certain individuals will do—and also what they will endure—for love of their country.

Leaving Kilmainham, I followed my nose for water and found the Grand Canal, which I knew would lead me back within a block of my hotel. At least an hour later . . . I got back just in time to freshen up and head into Merrion Square—specifically to O’Connell House, the Dublin home to the University of Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Center for Irish Studies. (In the 19th century, the building was the home of legendary nationalist Daniel O’Connell—the Liberator.) I had gotten wind that Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney would be giving a private reading there this evening, for participants in the Notre Dame Irish Seminar. I am grateful for the warm welcome I received from Center director Kevin Whelan and from ND Irish-language professor Breen Ó Conchubhair when I arrived on their doorstep: I’ve known both of them for years . . . but hadn’t seen either of them for years, so the friendly greeting from each of them was no small part of the evening’s pleasure.

But the larger part of the evening’s pleasure was, of course, Heaney’s reading. I have heard him read perhaps 8 or 10 times, dating back to 1981. This reading was particularly enriching—and enlightening—as he pre-viewed a number of new poems from his collection Human Chain, due out in September. He also read a number of poems that recognized the presence in the audience of his longtime friend and long-ago (early 1950s) classmate at St. Columb’s College in Derry, Professor Seamus Deane. For my money the preeminent scholar of Irish literature, Deane is also a fine poet and the author of the staggeringly powerful novel Reading in the Dark (which I have taught on a couple of occasions). After the reading there was the usual milling about, in the midst of which I managed to have a nice conversation with each of the Seamuses. Like Kevin and Breen, they were very welcoming of my being there.

On my way back to the Burlington Hotel, I walked along the Grand Canal again. Passing Kavanagh’s statue, I wondered if even that notoriously cantankerous man-about-town might have enjoyed some of the company I kept during this long and winding day.